'Stage five of this catastrophe has begun: Starvation.'
"Indians have always been generous and humane to help us, but for anything to put in place, we need the war to stop immediately," Palestinian Ambassador to India Abdullah M Abu Shawesh tells Rediff Senior Contributor Neeta Kolhatkar about Israel's genocide in Gaza in the concluding segment of a two-part interview.
Israel and its supporting countries have called this a religious war. Is it a religious war?
Those fighting for the cause of Gaza are not only Muslims, but also Christians and Jews.
Just like in India, it is a society of mixed ethnicity. Since 1948, when the first cleansing began, it was not a war between Christians or Jews against Muslims.
It has been the patriots against the occupiers. It is a fight for independence like your country launched in 1857, against the British who colonised.
It was not just the Hindus against the British occupiers, it was your entire countrymen.
My boss was Ilan Halevi, a Jew. He served in the ministry of foreign affairs for the Palestinian government and the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council.
Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, who was accused of smuggling arms to (the late Palestinian leader Yasser) Arafat, George Habash, a Christian politician and physician who was the founder and first general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, they all put up a tough resistance against the Israeli military occupation.
There was also Fatima Bernawi, the first woman to be imprisoned by Israel, who died a few years ago.
When it came to the question of Palestine, let me assure you it has touched the conscience of many people across our society.
It is the American and Zionist Israeli government who are controlling the narrative giving it a religious tone.
As an economist, can you tell what will be the impact of rebuilding and rehousing your people?
Also, with so many maimed and handicapped people, would your economy have the sustaining power to rebuild?
First and foremost, there has to be an end to this war and there needs to be a lot of pressure put on Israel and America to put an end to it.
The killing of our people has to stop. We need humanitarian aid to reach the people of Gaza. Stage five of this catastrophe has begun: Starvation.
Again, I draw parallels to your country, which faced starvation, the Bengal famine, during the independence war.
The policies of the British occupiers of destruction of food is exactly what we are seeing happening in Gaza.
The next obvious step is to allow aid into Gaza. As an economist we need to calculate what has happened.
How many have been killed, how many amputations, how many have disappeared, all these events need to translate into accurate numbers so that we are able to estimate and plan for action.
So first stop the war, second, make sure the people are no longer made to suffer, calculate the amount of destruction and then calculate the tonnes of rubble we have in Gaza.
We will need a plan in place to remove this rubble.
How many trucks we will need, the amount of water that will be required.
There are also thousands of tonnes of material hidden under the rubble. 10 to 12 percent of explosive material that is hidden and not yet detonated needs to be removed.
This will require a lot of resources and work. Then we need to assess how many schools, colleges, universities we will need.
Along with this, how many hospitals we will need, also research work that will be needed to put in place.
The thing we need to do immediately after the hunger is addressed is to send our children to school immediately.
Then we can look at sustainable development. We need all the humanitarian aid and help from governments, but more so from people.
Indians have shown interest, the people and organisations who want to help.
Indians have always been generous and humane to help us, but for anything to put in place, we need the war to stop immediately.
Like you said, with so many handicapped and injured, we still don't know the exact number, we need you all to go there as independent journalists to see what has happened till now and report from there.
We want a collective effort. The Indian government has told us from day one, they are willing to train and help our people for this particular problem.
Those with prosthetic limbs and handicapped, those people can be given occupational training.
This is necessary, but not sufficient because the capacity is larger.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revoked the visas of 80 Palestinian Authority officials including Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestine, just before the UN General Assembly session.
This is not the first time they have done it. In 1988, the US did not allow Yasser Arafat to attend the UN session.
The General Assembly session was then shifted to Geneva as the international community had the will to counter and resist American pressure, so that Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian delegation could attend.
It is unfair that they have again revoked the visas of President Abbas and 80 members of our delegation.
We are once again looking to the international community to raise their voice against this move and call for shifting the venue for the General Assembly meeting out of America.
America has violated the host country agreement yet again.
It is now time for a collective action by the international community to demand shifting all offices of the United Nations out of America.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff