“Toledo City Council Should Join the Ceasefire Chorus”
The Toledo Blade is on a streak of writing misplaced editorials. On January 14th, 2024, it dissuaded Toledo City Council from passing a Gaza ceasefire resolution.
Yet Toledo City Council represents our Toledo community, which was classified as a Compassionate Community in 2014. How can our representatives be silent when they witness genocide?
There were 32 hospitals in Gaza; Israel has destroyed most of them and, most importantly, provided the world no evidence for the claim that the tunnels underneath the hospitals harbored Hamas.
Israel has killed approximately 27,270 civilians and has provided no evidence of having captured or killed Hamas fighters, or that they were using the those civilians as human shields. Besides this massive death toll by incessant bombardment of civilian sites, Israel has stopped and restricted food and water supply to Gaza, threatening 2.3 million Palestinians with famine. This is an active and passive decimation, following Israel’s ethnic cleansing agenda, publicly verbalized by its ministers.
As though the death toll was not heart-rending enough, human rights groups report that Israeli soldiers have looted $25 million of Gaza’s cash, gold, laptops and mobile phones. Hebrew language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth has acknowledged these crimes, publishing news reports on the so-called “loot unit” in the Israeli army’s technology and logistics branch. It confirmed that, since the ground incursion began, the Israeli army had seized the shekel equivalent of $1,320,000 and called it “the systematic theft of money of Gazans.”
Pillage is prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and amounts to a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. More disturbingly, human rights groups report the theft of body parts of Palestinians as well as the desecration of graves.
As a Compassionate Community, Toledo City Council should join the growing number of city councils across the nation that have, mostly unanimously, passed Gaza ceasefire resolutions. Richmond, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, Oakland, Akron, Providence, Minneapolis, Iowa City, Seattle, Cudahy, Chicago, Albany, Long Beach and Hastings are just some of the names. Wilmington, Delaware, President’s Biden’s hometown, has passed the resolution as well.
We are so grieved at the daily, grisly massacre of children, and years from now, we will all face the question about what it was that we did to stop it. And Toledo City Council in passing the ceasefire resolution will be remembered for being on the right side of history. And sending a nationally orchestrated message: ceasefire now!
*Thoughts and opinions expressed by authors of these letter are that of the author alone.