Israel has found a captive recently released from Gaza willing to regurgitate some of its most nonsensical talking points on the stage of the United Nations. Predictably, those talking points are already being exploited to justify Israel intensifying its slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza – and further bully the United Nations into even greater timidity.
Eli Sharabi has every reason to feel aggrieved. After all, he not only spent 490 days in captivity in terrifying conditions before his release last month, but emerged to find his family had been killed during Hamas’ break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.
Nonetheless, sympathy for his plight should not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to the Israeli government’s propaganda campaign for genocide.
He has echoed Israeli politicians in claiming that Palestinians in Gaza – all 2.3 million of them, apparently – are “involved” in the mistreatment of the Israeli captives. In other words, he has given succour to the Israeli government’s efforts to justify the extermination of Gaza’s entire population, half of whom are children.
He has also claimed that Hamas stole aid that entered Gaza to eat “like kings”, while he and the captives starved. In other words, he is bolstering the argument of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel is justified in blocking food and water to Gaza – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court.
But perhaps most ludicrously of all, Sharabi asks of the two largest bodies involved in humanitarian operations on behalf of the destitute, decimated people of Gaza: “Where was the Red Cross when we [the Israeli captives] needed them? Where was the UN?”
Sharabi, more than anyone, ought to know the answer to his own question.
Local staff of the UN and Red Cross – or Red Crescent as it is known in Gaza – have spent the past year and a half living under constant and ferocious air strikes, like everyone else in the enclave. Large numbers have been killed and maimed by the US-supplied bombs Israel has been dropping continuously.
They have certainly not been idle, as Sharabi suggests. When they have not been killed themselves, they have been dealing with the many tens of thousands of dead and the hundreds of thousands of wounded.
And all the while, they have been desperately struggling to help feed a population that Israel has spent the past 18 months actively starving through its strict blockade of food and water into the tiny territory.
The job of the UN and Red Cross has been to save life. That is what they have been doing. Their job is not to go on a wild goose chase, trying to find Israeli captives that Israel itself, with all its technological know-how and military might, has been unable to locate.
Where was the UN?
Hellbound and Down 