If we had any doubt about why conflicts in faraway lands matter to us, the news coming from Israel should wake us up. On Saturday, as the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel in what is considered the first major brutal offensive by the group in decades, at least 10 Nepali students living in Kibbutz Alumim in southern Israel have been killed, while one is missing and four have sustained injuries. As per reports, there are around 4,500 Nepali caregivers and 265 students in Israel at the moment. Nepali students in the country, speaking with the Post, have shared their trauma of living in cities under siege.

As of Sunday evening, Southern Israeli towns near Gaza continued to be under attack as Hamas militants breached Israel’s sea, land and air defences. Over 300 Israelis are reported to have been killed. As expected, Israel began a brutal fightback, killing over 400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly warned of devastating consequences, asking Palestinian citizens to leave Gaza immediately as he launches a counter-attack. As expected, it is the civilians that are going to be casual victims, as is the case in indiscriminate rocket attacks anywhere.

But what he fails to recognise is that the Palestinians have nowhere to go. As the name Gaza Strip itself makes it clear, the Palestinians live on the edge, being pushed continuously for the past seven decades as their homeland continues to shrink. The Nepal government has been quick to condemn the attack by Hamas, which has killed innocent civilians, perhaps including our own citizens. Apart from its emulation of Western powers in enthusiastically recognising the emergence and continuous expansion of Israel, Nepal has a genuine reason this time to speak in defence of the Middle-Eastern country, for the lives of Nepalis are at stake. However, the goings-on between Israel and Palestine resulted from a protracted conflict between the two nations and not a one-off incident.

Beyond the initial shock at the ongoing death and destruction on both sides of the border, states worldwide, especially the mighty and the influential, need a deep soul-searching to recognise what they have done in the conflict with their complicity. Human Rights Watch has said that for over five decades, Israel has occupied Gaza and the West Bank, forcibly confiscating Palestinian land and displacing Palestinians, causing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. As a result, large swathes of Palestinian land have been occupied, and the Palestinians have had to live precariously in a narrow strip of land. Militant organisations like Hamas have used the fury of the Palestinians in their own political fight against Israel, thereby leaving the aggrieved people in even greater precarity.

The seeds sown through the bifurcation of Palestine in 1949—Israel for the Jews and Palestine for the Palestinians—continue to yield in the form of a seemingly never-ending conflict. Enough wrongs have been done in history to preempt a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, but there is no alternative, including for Nepal, to continue pushing for a reconciliation. And for this, the global superpowers, especially the Western ones, have a big role—not to forget responsibility—to play.