When Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati said yesterday that his country was going through one of the most dangerous stages in its history, he could easily have extended his fears to cover all of the Middle East.
Israel has been steadily intensifying its hugely aggressive military campaign to a level where a full-blown war extending across most of the region, with appalling casualty rates, is starting to look increasingly likely.
We are approaching the first anniversary of the attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel’s southern territory on October 7, 2023, and it is clear that the Middle East has been facing a disaster of terrifying proportions ever since then.
The wider crisis did not begin on October 7, but that date signalled the start of a sequence of horrific events involving human suffering on an enormous scale and a death toll of unprecedented proportions.
It can be said with certainty that there was no justification for either the brutal initial raid launched by Hamas across the Gaza border or the devastating and still developing Israeli response.
While some of the figures are still disputed, it is generally accepted that Hamas killed around 1,200 people on October 7 before taking some 250 hostages back to Gaza.
Israel then swiftly reduced most of the Palestinian territory to rubble, displacing the majority of its 2.3 million people and leaving more than 41,000 dead, with up to half of them believed to be women and children.
The international community has been repeatedly pressing for an immediate ceasefire by Israel, and the freeing of all the surviving hostages by Hamas, to date without success.
Instead, the conflict has escalated, with intensive fighting between Israel and Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon and deadly Israeli air strikes on targets in both Yemen and Syria.
People around the world are demanding a halt to the slaughter, with more than 1,000 joining a march to the US Consulate in Belfast at the weekend which was organised by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
It is important for ordinary citizens to make their voices heard in this way, but the indications are that Israel will only listen to the firmest of interventions from Washington.
President Joe Biden, with his term of office in its closing months, has sadly failed so far to stand up to the powerful pro-Israeli lobby group in the US and send a blunt message to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If complete catastrophe is to be avoided in the Middle East, Mr Biden needs to directly insist that all sides in the region agree to find a resolution through purely diplomatic means without delay.
