» News » Blogs - Sarah Skilton

I live in Spain, and in Spain the papers are calling the latest violence in Gaza for what it is: another Israeli massacre. In the UK the media is terrified to call this monopoly on death by its proper name.

In January alone, the Israeli army killed over 80 people living in Gaza. On Saturday the number of premature dead on this slither of land exceeded 60 people, at least four of them children, most of them civilians. Countless more are cruelly injured, not just on Saturdays, but everyday in this brutally occupied place. And then there’s the appalling conditions and constant fear, like a ticking time bomb, suffered by all Gazans equally.

As always the victims are to blame. Gaza’s residents had, after all, been repeatedly warned against its democratic choice of Hamas. And last week Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, warned that a ‘holocaust’ would be unleashed on Gaza if it did not control its militants.

But as the English learned in Ireland, there are always rogue elements that will seek to fight back by whatever means possible. Some will even target your civilians, as you targeted their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. And even though their means are slight, their rockets are fireworks, and most their bullets are stones, every day the probability they will find their target increases, and maybe one of yours will die or be injured.

In the end nothing can justify the slaughter carried out by the Israeli army, an army of occupation that ensures two people don’t live on one land. For this is the root of the problem, the root of a ‘hostile entity’ that won’t go away.

There was once a land called Palestine. And on that land lived a people, and there they remain beneath the rubble of their villages and a sky that collapsed about them.