Despite losing his wife, daughter Sham (aged 7), son Mahmoud (aged 15) and a grandson in Israeli airstrike on October 13 (2023), senior Palestinian journalist and Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera News Network in Gaza City Wael Hamdan Ibrahim Al-Dahdouh continues reporting from war-torn areas. Within 24 hours of the attack, he reached the battlefield with a deep wound in his heart, and clicked images of destruction one after another in Gaza. For Al-Dahdouh, service (to the people of Palestine) is more important than personal loss!

At the time of the airstrikes, Al-Dahdouh’s family members were at their Gaza residence in the Nusrat camp area. A missile, fired from an Israeli fighter jet, destroyed their house. The media person took a short break from his duty to perform the last rites of his family members, and then people discovered him, wearing a helmet with the words Press written on it, on television screens. With tearful eves, Al-Dahdouh said: “This will never silence our voices. Journalism is my noble mission.” He stressed: “Israel is targeting civilians and committing massacres against families. This is part of what Palestinian families living in Gaza go through every day.“

Al-Dahdouh’s grief is buried in the rubble, as thousands of Palestinian women and children, like his wife and children, are dying every moment in Israeli attacks. The journalist believes that it is his duty to show those images to the global community and to highlight the Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Al-Dahdouh’s two older children – Mahmoud and his sister Kholoud – have managed to survive the attack. Later, Mahmoud said: “Whole neighbourhoods have been destroyed. In Gaza, there is no safe place.” It may be noted that Al-Dahdouh’s family had taken shelter in the UN-recognised Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza that was called a safe area by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). However, the IDF targeted that camp.

In an article published in Wire web portal on October 29, Vikram Mukka wrote that if Lord Jesus, the most well-known Palestinian Jew, were to be born today, he would have been born on the Palestinian side of the 700km wall built by Israel, passing through Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Amid Israel’s intensifying offensive against Gaza, a pastor in the Indian capital of New Delhi exhorted his church members on October 29, 2023 (Sunday) to pray for peace in Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6) and also for the protection of “God’s chosen people” (Deuteronomy 7:6), referring to the Biblical commandment to Christians. According to Mukka, such calls are all too common whenever skirmishes break out between Israel and Palestine, which occur with chilling regularity.

Evangelical Christians across the globe, including this pastor in India, believe that Jews are “God’s chosen people” who are under attack from their “enemies”, and it is a religious obligation on the part of Christians to extend their unequivocal support to the State of Israel. As a corollary, such a view holds Palestinians as evil (in the binary of good versus evil) and the creation of the State of Israel as the fulfilment of Biblical promises.

What this perspective does is completely block out from public consciousness, either through design or due to lack of awareness, the fact that there are Palestinian Jews and Christians, as all the Palestinians are not followers of Islam. In fact, Lord Jesus Christ himself was a Palestinian Jew, and most of the Biblical holy sites fall under present-day Palestine!

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das