Ukraine is embroiled in an internal political squabble over the embarrassing loss of a newly NATO-supplied F-16 jet fighter even as it struggles to sustain its 3-weeks-long surprise raid into Russia. Meanwhile, the world watches Israel’s West-backed expansion of its war against Palestinians just as world health agencies struggle to begin polio vaccinations for over 640,000 newborns in devastated Gaza and the West Bank.
The massive military onslaught by the West-backed Israeli regime on the tiny Gaza Strip today enters its 11th month and, officially accounts for more than 41,200 Palestinian deaths with tens of thousands more lives unaccounted for. The bodies remain under the mass of rubble across the Strip.
Israel’s gruesome bombardment and shooting massacres continue in full view of the world’s news media audiences, with Occupied Jerusalem’s Western backers continuing to ignore both world opinion as well as strictures by all UN bodies and nongovernmental organisations.
With mounting shooting attacks on international medical aid workers in the Gaza Strip, United Nations officials are publicly demanding that the Western power bloc that sustains the Israeli war effort acts to protect the polio vaccination program that is to begin this month.
Even some United States medical personnel serving in the international vaccination program for the millions of displaced Palestinians have reported Israeli Defence Forces’ firings on health workers with several killed recently during preparations for the vaccine roll-out.
The IDF’s latest military operation begun last week against some West Bank towns and refugee camps continue. Hamas, now the leading resisting movement across Israeli-occupied Palestine, yesterday claimed its own successful counter-strike. Hamas said that two of its fighters in the West Bank had attacked two service facilities serving illegal Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank.
The militia suicide bombers had struck at these two Israeli settlements killing at least two Israeli settlers even as the Israel military continued its biggest operation inside the West Bank in two decades (as reported by news agencies). IDF officials acknowledged the attacks and, claimed the latest Israeli operation was targeting Hamas units in the West Bank.
At least two local-level Hamas militia commanders were reported killed when IDF units targeted the Jenin refugee camp – a camp already historically famous as the target of previous Israeli sieges and massacres of refugees.
The latest data released to media by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), the World Health Organization and, the Palestinian Government as of August 25, provide a terrifying picture of the reality of ethnic cleansing and genocide, a reality the belies all the claims of Israeli “self-defence”.
Western power bloc
The ‘self-defence’ claim is also the standard formula by which the Western power bloc justifies its continuous military sustenance of the current war by the Israeli State against the Palestinians and, indeed, against some of the neighbouring West Asian states.
More than half of Gaza’s homes are damaged or destroyed. Some international organisations estimate, in accordance with satellite photography, that the destroyed and, now un-liveable, area could be as much as 80 percent of the built-up area.
With an area of 365 sq.km., the Strip is half the size of our Colombo District (699 sq. km.) but hosts, proportionately, a much bigger population (2.3 million in an area half the size). This population has lived for decades boxed in to this small territory surrounded by Israeli fortifications that controlled all access and exit and all supplies including electricity.
The entire Gazan population is now more or less totally displaced by 11 months of continuous Israeli ground offensives, and artillery and aerial bombardment. People are routinely pushed from one attack zone to another. Our daily TV news as well as countless imagery shared on the Internet, traumatise viewers worldwide with the visuals or terrified whole families running hither and tither, through rubble-covered devastated landscape.
Also damaged or destroyed in Gaza are: 85 percent of school buildings, healthcare facilities, including 16 of 36 hospitals that are only partially functional or completely nonfunctional; 65 percent of the Strip’s road networks and, 65 percent of cropland.
The United States-initiated “ceasefire talks” are yet going-on with various ‘interlocuters’ shuttling between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah (the West Bank administrative centre in lieu of the Israeli-occupied Jerusalem) and, to Qatar which hosts the Hamas political leadership, and also, to Jordan and Egypt which claim to support the Palestinians.
It must be noted that both Qatar and Jordan also host large American military bases (including a whole aircraft carrier task force in Qatar) and, Egypt has very close defence ties with NATO and cooperates with Israeli intelligence. This geopolitical alignment reveals the paradoxically hostile biases of these very same Arab and piously Islamic states which claim to champion the cause of a landless Palestinian nation.
A comparison of the military aid by the West to Israel with the Western military assistance to Ukraine, in its resistance to Russia’s military operations against it, easily shows up the West’s priority given to its sustenance of the Zionist European Jewish colony since it was forcibly set up on Palestinian territory in 1948.
Blamed
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not to be blamed for quietly, but persistently, complaining at this skewed Western geostrategic alignment that prioritises a rogue colony outside the European continent over a long-established, economically important, nation-state on the continent itself.
Last week the complaint from Kyiv got even louder with the reportedly accidental downing of an Ukrainian fighter jet by a US-supplied anti-aircraft missile. The F-16 jet, at one time (20 years ago) hailed as ‘the best’ counter to Russia’s equally impressive fighter jets (of that time), had just been supplied to the Ukrainian Air Force as part of a tranche of 80 F-16s promised to Ukraine by some supportive NATO member states.
Worse, one of the Ukrainian Air Force’s war hero pilots, who was flying the jet at the time was killed in the crashing plane. According to political speculation coming out of Ukraine, there is anger that the supplied F-16s are of an old stock left over in NATO armouries that did not have the capacity to deal with the newer Patriot missile. The F-16, after all, belongs to a generation of air strike design a little before the Patriot anti-aircraft missile was created.
There is a joke inside the Ukraine Air Force that its pilots are all younger than the F-16 planes they are flying!
The Ukrainian Government has launched an investigation into this very costly incident of ‘friendly fire’. Ukraine has few jet fighter pilots and those with skills to handle the sophisticated F-16s (somewhat dated, though, they may be) are even fewer. According to latest reports from Kyiv, the Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force – also a highly experience and capable officer – has been sacked.
None of this helps win wars. All the indications in the war in Eastern Europe are that of a kind of stalemate, but it is a stalemate advantageous to Russia in the long term. Ukraine simply cannot win back lost territory and, neither will the West risk all by entering the war.
These recent developments must indicate to Kyiv that it would be better to negotiate a deal with Moscow rather than continue to suffer at the hands of both an angered neighbouring great power (Russia) reacting to geopolitical pressures, as well as at the hands of a dominant set of (Western) great powers that are using Kyiv as a pawn to exert that geopolitical pressure.
The feint attack launched by Ukraine across the border into the thinly populated and thinly defended Russian region of Kursk is now in its fourth week and, it seems to have run out of steam, mainly due to an exhausted offensive capability. While several hundreds of square kilometres of territory were quickly dominated by the invading Ukrainians, they do not have the logistical or military capacity to push in deeper into hostile Russian countryside. Nor can they hold on to what they have captured.
Ukraine lacks the troops, the supply transport capability. The Ukrainian air force simply cannot provide sustained air cover to the ground forces – even with newly supplied F-16 jets.
Feint attack
According to most analysts (not Western propagandists), the Kursk feint attack has failed to halt the slow but steady forward grind of Russia’s very big frontal offensive against eastern Ukraine. That offensive seems to be inching forward in a classic modern, ‘positional’, ground war on a scale not seen since World War 2.
Global geopolitics today presents a world at war as never before since World War 2. The Gulf War launched by the Western powers in West Asia and north Africa did not include ‘plausible genocide’ and did not involve rival great powers. Neither did the Vietnam War, although both wars saw serious other war crimes.
There is almost no indication that forthcoming political developments in the form of the US presidential elections and the imminent German elections will make any difference to the ongoing human devastation. Of course, the arms industry will laugh all the way to the bank.
