OPINION:The United Nations has a unique moral obligation to protect the Palestinian people, writes Hikmat Ajjuri.
THE GRUESOME images of the most brutal aggression ever conducted by a "democratic" state which are coming from Gaza and shown daily on our TV screens - which have resulted so far in the killing of 680 and injuring of 2,950, half of them women and children - should induce all those with a sense of humanity to raise their voices calling not merely for an end to this aggression but also for a change in the rules of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
This savage assault on Gaza proves beyond doubt that Israel is not fighting terror but, on the contrary, is itself waging a war of terror. Killing one of the Hamas commanders, Nizar Rayyan, which was considered one of the great achievements of this war, came after all of his family was killed, including 11 of his children. The eldest was 16 years old.
The Israeli attacking forces give the Palestinians, who have nowhere to go, five minutes to evacuate their homes before they bombard them. In a blatant breach of international law and the Geneva Convention, the Israeli army failed even to protect those who evacuated their homes and took refuge in the schools of the UN.
On Tuesday, the Israeli army shelled Alfakhora UN school in Jabalia in spite of prior information given to the army by the UN agency regarding the nature of all its schools being used as shelters for civilians. The UN also gave the Israeli army GPS co-ordinates for all its installations. This savage attack by the army on the mentioned school resulted in the killing of at least 43 and injuring of more than 100 innocent civilians, many of them children.
During the first two hours of its ground offensive, Israel pounded Gaza with 700 shells, to lethal effect. The shameful and unacceptable silence of world leaders is, indeed, to a certain extent, responsible for the pain the inhabitants of the Holy Land, Jews and Palestinians, have endured for decades.
This silence blatantly reflects their impotence and failure to face the Israeli political leadership's intransigence and irresponsibility. Consequently, world leaders distance themselves and call on both sides to settle their differences on their own, as if this were a fight between equal contenders rather than a struggle between occupation and resistance forces.
This is in spite of the fact that these leaders know full well that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle constitutes a real threat to world peace and stability.
Everyone knows by now that the best we could have achieved via bilateral negotiations was the Oslo agreement.
Oslo reflected the political decency of those who designed and signed it, yet its guarantors - world leaders - know it has been in a coma since the assassination of its Israeli instigator, the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
In August 2005, Israel redeployed its forces from the Gaza Strip and declared it a "non-occupied Palestinian territory", while in fact retaining its grip on all the border crossings, the sky and the sea of Gaza. Furthermore, Israel insisted on conducting this step unilaterally and without consultation with the Palestinian Authority, thus depriving it of any strategic value as a lasting peace initiative.
Instead Gaza has become a virtual prison, cut off from the world completely, with massive economic consequences amounting to humanitarian disaster. These conditions created a suitable environment for inter-Palestinian factional fighting.
The entire sequence of events in Gaza since August 2005 was anticipated by the planner of that move, Ariel Sharon. The undeserved international praise for Sharon's unilateral pull-out from Gaza marked a huge propaganda success for the occupying force. Sharon's trick was intended to deceive the world into believing that another unilateral pull-out from the West Bank was possible.
In reality, these unilateral actions allowed Sharon to evade obligations towards a bilateral peace agreement, while allowing Israel to define the borders of any future Palestinian entity on Israel's terms.
Six months before December 19th last, Egypt brokered a ceasefire between Hamas/Gaza and Israel. The first four months marked the most peaceful period for years between Gaza and Israel.
One expected the Israelis to benefit from that ceasefire and intensify peace negotiations with their moderate Palestinian interlocutor, President Mahmoud Abbas, in the hope of transforming President George Bush's vision of a two-state solution into reality. Instead, profiting from the world's concentration on the US elections, Israel launched a cross-border raid on November 4th, deliberately killing six Palestinians and provoking the Palestinian factions to end the ceasefire.
On the other front, the Israelis conduct daily incursions in the West Bank, killing, arresting and injuring Palestinian activists. Furthermore, Israel has continued to expand its illegal settlements and construct its apartheid wall, deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in July 2004.
Israel once again ignored an opportunity and dealt another blow to the cause of peace when it decided to replace diplomacy with military aggression in Gaza.
Since Oslo, the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have achieved little tangible progress because of Israel's bullying tactics and its determination to impose its terms unilaterally on the region. Consequently, the rules of the game need to be finally changed.
The Israeli occupation is the only belligerent occupation remaining on the face of the globe. It is unacceptable that any country should be granted a status above and beyond international law.
Israel came into being not by divine decree but by UN General Assembly resolution 181. This resolution was only half implemented, because the other half called for the creation of a Palestinian state. The UN, rather than world leaders, is obliged morally and constitutionally to protect the Palestinians against Israeli atrocities.
Furthermore, it is also the moral and historic duty of the UN to create a Palestinian state side by side with the state of Israel, by enforcing all of its relevant resolutions as it has done with such resolutions elsewhere. The creation of a Palestinian state would be much-needed proof that the UN preserves a vital function in the modern world.
• Hikmat Ajjuri is the delegate-general of Palestine to Ireland