Ammon News - Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah said that when a country is able to get away with so much, Israel has become emboldened to break more legal and moral boundaries. And impunity never corrects itself. It just grows through complacency. And what we're seeing here is beyond complacency. You know, when a red line is not really a red line, it becomes a green light. It becomes permission, and Palestinians have been paying the highest price for that “permission” to break all norms. And it has really dangerous implications for our world, because we're setting a new standard, a new precedent, a new normal.
In an interview with ABC News’ Linsey Davis, Queen Rania noted that this war has been unprecedented in its scale and brutality. Gaza, which is a third of the size of New York, has been hit with more explosives than Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined throughout World War II. So we have the highest death rate of any conflict this century, and 70% of those killed are women and children.
Gaza is breaking all sorts of records in all the worst ways: The highest rate of starvation… we have the highest cohort of child amputees, the highest level of civilian infrastructure destruction. Two of three buildings have been destroyed, most schools and hospitals, every single university. In this war, there have been more children, journalists, aid workers, and medical personnel killed than any other war. So this is not a defensive war or a normal kind of war, Her Majesty added.
The Queen also said: "It sometimes feels like the world is operating from two different playbooks. Israeli pain is validated, whereas Palestinian pain is normalized, even justified. It sometimes seems that Israel is the exception to every rule that governs our world, and Palestinians are the exception to universal human rights. And the reason why we have gotten to this point is because the world has failed. There has been no global response that withdrew support from Israel, or applied sanctions, or put any costs and consequences to the origin of this problem, which is the illegal occupation."
Are we saying that it is okay to use starvation as a weapon of war? To target aid convoys, to target shelters that house civilians, to use collective punishment? What is this saying about our world today? If we are undermining the rule of law, then can we really hold any other country accountable for its actions? Her Majesty asked.
" I think the expressions of concern or even calls for a ceasefire really are meaningless when you continue to provide arms that kill civilians," the Queen said.
"Now what we're seeing in Lebanon is another dangerous escalation. The risk of a regional escalation is now dangerously high. Yesterday was the deadliest day, where almost 500 Lebanese have been killed. In the past year, we saw 600 being killed," the Queen added.
Nobody wins from such an escalation. Nobody's teaching anybody a lesson. It is time for the global community to act, specifically the United States. The U.S. has military, economic, and diplomatic leverage that it can use with Israel, and it should start exercising that because the dangers of escalation are extremely high right now, Queen Rania said.
Her Majesty pointed out that the root cause of this conflict did not start on October 7. The world community really needs to address the cause of this issue. And in the past, peace talks have failed, because we use the same equation. There were never any costs or consequences to dis-incentivize the occupation, so Israel just felt emboldened to build more settlements, to grab more land. There was never any effort to uphold international law.