THE GAZA GENOCIDE: NEUTRALITY IS COMPLICITY

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At a press conference on September 24 the Ranking Member on the Foreign Affairs Committee of parliament, Hon. Abu Jinapor, took issue with the Hon. Minister of Foreign Affairs, Okudzeto Ablakwa labelling Israeli war crimes in Gaza as genocide. The Ranking Member claims that ‘by describing
the events in Gaza in absolute terms and aligning the country explicitly with
one side’, the NDC government ‘risks
compromising the delicate balance that has long safeguarded Ghana’s credibility … as a neutral actor in global diplomacy’.

Any reader with a conscience will gnash his teeth in rage at the astonishing lack of moral scruple in the suggestion that Ghana should sit on the fence in the face of
Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza. The point must be made that Hon. Ablakwa is not alone in calling the Israeli genocide out for what it is. International organisations
of impeccable repute have done the same.

Amnesty International, in its December 2024 report, stated clearly that ‘there is sufficient evidence to believe that Israel’s conduct in Gaza … amounts to genocide.’ Likewise, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation in Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has reported that
there are ‘reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.’

Even Israeli human rights organisations namely, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights,
say their country is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and that Israel’s Western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.

Equally important, hundreds of scholars of Holocaust, including Jewish professors, have signed public statements arguing that the situation in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide and that what Gaza is experiencing is a ‘textbook case of genocide‘.

In its September 2025 report, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Enquiry
on the Occupied Palestinian Territory stated that ‘Israel has committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the
1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.’
It urged Israel and all states to fulfil their legal obligations under
international law to end the genocide and punish those responsible for it.

States are thus urged to help stop the massacres and the medieval siege imposed on Gaza in which water and electricity supplies have been cut, and food as well as medicines have been blocked from entering the enclave. When the Israeli objective is the total annihilation of the Palestinians,
neutrality is tantamount to complicity.

The Israeli mindset regarding Palestinians is kill, kill and kill. According to Lancet, a medical journal and one of the world’s highest-impact academic journals, hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians have been killed, over 70 percent of whom are women and children. With an average of 420 Palestinian children being killed or injured every day, the UN has described Gaza as a ‘graveyard
for thousands of children’ and ‘a
living hell for everyone else.’

As the mass slaughter was unfolding, South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice and has since been joined by some fourteen countries.
These include Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, Ireland, Spain,
Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Nicaragua, Turkiye, and Palestine.

In the wake of this international outrage against the mass extermination in Gaza, the NPP should understand that silence is not an option because ‘when the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

Unfortunately, reminiscent of its political forebears, the NPP is once again on the wrong side of history. At the height of apartheid in South Africa when the White minority regime had imposed life sentences on Nelson Mandela and several of his ANC comrades, when Black protesters including children were being massacred in Sharpeville in the then Transvaal, when the racist regime was routinely bombing the frontline African states and was cooperating with Israel to build an atom bomb to intimidate and blackmail its Black population and the African continent at large, then Prime Minister Busia went against the collective position of the OAU (now AU) and advocated dialogue with the apartheid regime, almost extending to it a hand of
friendship.

More recently, Akufo Addo, during his presidency, openly sided with the forces of counterrevolution in the Sahel region and made disparaging remarks about the events in those
counties during an interaction with then US Secretary of States, Anthony
Blinken. Nana Addo would later express his full support for Israel and its actions in Gaza.

Clearly, the NDC has taken the moral high ground in this matter. In his address at the 80^th UN General Assembly meeting, President Mahama exhorted the world not to shy away from calling the Gaza genocide by its name saying that ‘if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, well then… It must be a duck.’ A genocide it is indeed.

Gamel Nasser Adam is a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign