New Delhi: The Congress is “strongly opposed” to India’s abstention on the recent UN resolution on the Israel-Hamas conflict, former party chief Sonia Gandhi said on Monday, adding the tragedy is compounded with the Israeli state focused on exacting revenge from a population that is largely as helpless as it is blameless.
According to Kashmir Media Service, in an article in the leading Indian English newspaper, The Hindu, she also said her party’s longstanding position has been to support direct negotiations for a sovereign independent, viable and secure state of Palestine coexisting in peace with Israel.
Gandhi said “humanity is on trial now”, as she called for the loudest and most powerful voices to be for a cessation of military activity. “We are now all diminished by Israel’s disproportionate and equally brutal response. How many more lives will have to be taken before our collective conscience is stirred and awakened,” she asked.
“The Indian National Congress strongly believes that violence has no place in a decent world,” Gandhi further said that this tragedy is, however, being compounded by the Israeli military’s “indiscriminate operations” in and around Gaza that have led to thousands of deaths, including large numbers of innocent children, women and men.
“The power of the Israeli state is now focused on exacting revenge from a population that is largely as helpless as it is blameless. The destructive might of one of the world’s most potent military arsenals is being unleashed upon children, women and men who have no part in the Hamas assault; they, instead, for the most part, have been at the heart of decades of discrimination and suffering,” she said.
Articulating the Congress’s stand on the Israel-Palestine issue, she said there can be no peace without justice. Israel’s unremitting blockade for over a decade and a half has reduced Gaza to an “open-air prison” for its two million inhabitants packed into dense cities and refugee camps, she said.
“In Jerusalem and the West Bank, Israeli settlers backed by Israeli state have continued to push out Palestinians from their own land in a seeming effort to destroy the vision of a two-state solution. Peace will come only if the world can restart the process of restoring the two-state vision,” she said.
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