In what might appear surprising coming from a longstanding mouthpiece for the City of London’s interests, the editorial board of the Financial Times on Oct. 30 called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza in its “FT View” entitled “The Catastrophe Unfolding in Gaza.” This is now urgent, the FT editors said, “to ease the suffering of Palestinians and cool regional tensions.”
It recounts the horrors that Gazans have suffered as a result of Israel’s military offensive begun after Oct. 7, detailing mass deaths, children being pulled from the rubble, residential districts “flattened,” as well as the crippling shortages of food, water, and fuel. Basic services that were already meager before Netanyahu began his retaliatory attacks, have collapsed—and “it will only get worse,” the editorial warns.
They acknowledge that Israel has the right to defend itself and respond to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the atrocities it committed against women, children, and the elderly in the “deadliest attack on Israeli soil since the State was founded,” but “Israel’s collective punishment of the 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza—almost half of them children—must stop.” The FT also responds to Joe Biden’s vicious Oct. 25 statements that he has “no confidence” in the Gaza Health Ministry’s statistics on the number of deaths. That was Biden’s way of putting aside any actions to stop the mass murder of civilians. FT noted that in past Israeli-Hamas conflicts, “when the dust settled and UN agencies did their own tallies, no huge discrepancies appeared with those put out by Gaza health officials.”
