India Must Ask Itself, Do We Want to Take a Stand on Atrocities Against Palestinian Children or Not?

The new report by the UN appointed Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has revealed shocking details about Israeli attacks on Gaza and specifically the torture and killings of Palestinian children.

Several instances of children being shot, tortured and sexually abused have been recorded in the report. “This includes a girl who was stripped. So, you know, this public shaming, we call it public nudity. If you subject children to this kind of, it's actually a very deep psychological trauma,” Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, who was the chairman of the Commission said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

“In our report, We say that mental harm has become intergenerational, producing a distinctive occupied psyche in which the freedom to play, imagine, hope and develop an identity has been eroded,” he said.

“No Palestinian child has been able to have a formal education in the last three years. Where a child should be sitting in a classroom, the child is running around looking for firewood. Gaza city had the highest literacy rate even as recently as 2021 and yet you target a place like that, you destroy all its schools. The message is so clear.”

The Israeli government has issued an 18 page rebuttal of the report. “Israel says Hamas is using children as shields and that is something that we have missed. A 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother is not involved in any hostility,” he said.

Justice Muralidhar stated that Israel was sent all the Commission’s reports and asked to comment, but never got a response. “We have absolutely nothing to gain by falsely accusing either the state of Israel or its soldiers.”

Speaking about India, he said, “We can't afford to keep silent. We have been in the forefront of many of the international human rights movements. The values of human dignity, human liberty, which also forms the fundamental constitutional values in our Indian constitution. So, we're not acting contrary to anything at all. When we stand up for the rights of the Palestinian people, particularly Palestinian children."

India has not backtracked from its official stance that it stands with the Palestinian people. And it stands with the two state solution. People should also realize, your viewers should realize that the origin, one origin of all of this is 1947, a UN resolution, which talks of the creation of two states, the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. India should seriously introspect and ask itself, with this level of evidence having come forth on the atrocities against Palestinian children, does India want to take a stand at all or not? This is a moment of reckoning.”