By Shakir Husain
HYDERABAD, India: India’s Congress party leader, Sonia Gandhi, has urged the government to speak for Gaza’s brutalised people, citing a United Nations (UN) report that says Palestinians are facing a genocide under Israeli military occupation.
“The spirit of Indian nationhood demands that we speak up for our Palestinian brothers and sisters whose children have been so brutally targeted,” Sonia wrote in an opinion piece in the Indian Express newspaper toon Saturday.
“The calculus of national interest demands that we respond to the global public opinion against the Israeli regime’s genocidal actions in Gaza and its brutal displacement and dispossession of lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank,” she said.
Sonia in her official position as chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party leads Congress lawmakers in the Indian parliament’s upper and lower houses.
She expressed concern that India has alienated itself “from our historical allies” in Palestine, Iran, and the larger West Asia, and the country is “slipping further into Israel’s strategic orbit” at a time of its global condemnation.
“Amidst the growing public backlash against Israel and the international community’s cognisance of the unjustifiable brutality unleashed on Gaza, India remains a lone voice of silence,” Sonia said.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, has accused the Zionist regime of involvement in wanton destruction, genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces, commission chief Srinivasan Muralidhar said on June 23.
Children have been arrested and subjected to torture and other severe forms of mistreatment, including sexual violence, in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, with no information on their whereabouts, the report said.
It noted that Israel has destroyed “the essence of childhood” through its violent campaign in Palestine. – BERNAMA
