'Where was the UN?' asks freed Israeli captive. Its staff were busy being killed

Sympathy for Israeli former captive Eli Sharabi must not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to Israel's propaganda campaign for genocide

Israel has found a captive recently released from Gaza willing to regurgitate some of its most nonsensical talking points on the stage of the United Nations. Predictably, those talking points are already being exploited to justify Israel intensifying its slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza – and further bully the United Nations into even greater timidity.

Eli Sharabi has every reason to feel aggrieved. After all, he not only spent 490 days in captivity in terrifying conditions before his release last month, but emerged to find his family had been killed during Hamas’ break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.

Nonetheless, sympathy for his plight should not obscure the bigger picture: he has allowed himself to be recruited to the Israeli government’s propaganda campaign for genocide.

He has echoed Israeli politicians in claiming that Palestinians in Gaza – all 2.3 million of them, apparently – are “involved” in the mistreatment of the Israeli captives. In other words, he has given succour to the Israeli government’s efforts to justify the extermination of Gaza’s entire population, half of whom are children.

He has also claimed that Hamas stole aid that entered Gaza to eat “like kings”, while he and the captives starved. In other words, he is bolstering the argument of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel is justified in blocking food and water to Gaza – a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court.

But perhaps most ludicrously of all, Sharabi asks of the two largest bodies involved in humanitarian operations on behalf of the destitute, decimated people of Gaza: “Where was the Red Cross when we [the Israeli captives] needed them? Where was the UN?”

Sharabi, more than anyone, ought to know the answer to his own question.

Local staff of the UN and Red Cross – or Red Crescent as it is known in Gaza – have spent the past year and a half living under constant and ferocious air strikes, like everyone else in the enclave. Large numbers have been killed and maimed by the US-supplied bombs Israel has been dropping continuously.

They have certainly not been idle, as Sharabi suggests. When they have not been killed themselves, they have been dealing with the many tens of thousands of dead and the hundreds of thousands of wounded.

And all the while, they have been desperately struggling to help feed a population that Israel has spent the past 18 months actively starving through its strict blockade of food and water into the tiny territory.

The job of the UN and Red Cross has been to save life. That is what they have been doing. Their job is not to go on a wild goose chase, trying to find Israeli captives that Israel itself, with all its technological know-how and military might, has been unable to locate.

Where was the UN?

Did Sharabi's Israeli government handlers – led by Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN – forget to explain to him that Israel has formally banned the UN from Gaza? Israel both bars the UN from the enclave, specifically targeting local staff with its weapons, and yet also expects those same staff to track down the Israeli captives held there. How can one even begin to take Israel’s position – or Sharabi’s – seriously?

Where was the Red Cross?

Did Sharabi’s Israeli government handlers forget to mention that, also, the Red Cross has not been able to visit a single one of the thousands of Palestinians who have been abducted by Israel from Gaza, including doctors, women and children?

Unlike the Israeli captives, the location of the Palestinian captives is known. They are being held in what the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem calls “torture camps” inside Israel, where sexual assaults and rapes are commonplace.

Israel has refused the Red Cross access for a simple reason: because it doesn’t want the world to know what it is doing to Palestinians inside those torture camps. And the western media is complying, barely reporting the horrors unearthed by human rights groups and UN investigators.

Yes, the Israeli captives have gone through a horrific experience. And their greatest trauma – though Sharabi, unlike his fellow Israeli captives, fails to mention it – was living under Israel's constant bombs: the equivalent so far of six Hiroshimas. None knew from one day to the next whether they would be vaporised by one of the 2,000lb bombs supplied by the US and dropped all over the enclave.

It is important to hear Sharabi's account of his captivity on a stage as visible as the UN’s. But it is equally important for the UN to hear from the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel and held in even more horrifying conditions, as repeatedly documented by human rights groups.

Yet those Palestinian victims, victims of Israeli barbarism, have not been provided with the platform offered to Sharabi. Why? Because Israel gets to decide who speaks at the UN, for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Unlike Hamas, Israel holds its captives permanently prisoner, even after they have been released from its torture camps. It holds them in a giant open-air concentration camp called Gaza. And they won’t find themselves on a stage at the UN – not unless Israel allows it.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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