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Israel-Palestine Conflict

  • watchdogsjsjc
  • Oct 31, 2023
  • 7 min read

The Israel-Palestine Conflict

29th October 2023 1:45 AM Narela Road, Sonipat

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"They didn’t just bomb my favourite restaurants; they take me from my best memories. They steal my night, my routine, my skin-care routine, my drawings, my paintings. Or even, just sitting down and writing some stories about me, writing plans for the future.”

The 19-year-old college student, Tasneem Ismael Ahel has documented her life under Israeli bombardment in voice messages. They were sent to video journalist, Yousur Al-Hlou of The New York Times.



United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) published a situation report on the situation in the Gaza Strip and The West Bank (Including East Jerusalem) on Friday, October 27, 2023.


· According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, 7,028 people have been killed since 7 October, including 2,913 children, 1,709 women, and 397 elderly. A further 18,484 have been injured, 1650 reported missing, presumably under the rubble of destroyed buildings, including 940 children.

· Nearly 1,400 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed in Israel, according to the Israeli authorities, the vast majority on 7 October. (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)


· Almost 640,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are sheltering in 150 UNRWA installations across the Gaza Strip.

· According to OCHA, 103 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since 7 October, including 32 children.

· The increased levels of settler violence have resulted in the forced displacement of 82 households, comprising 607 people, including 211 children, since 7 October.

· Since 7 October, 53 UNRWA personnel have been killed and at least 22 injured, 18 IDPs sheltering at UNRWA schools have been killed and 282 have been injured.


UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a statement on the 27th of October. Excerpts from the statement followed:

“The supplies that have trickled in do not include fuel for United Nations operations — fuel is also essential to power hospitals,

water desalination plants, food production, and aid distribution. Given the desperate and dramatic situation, the United Nations will not be able to continue to deliver inside Gaza without an immediate and fundamental shift in how aid is going in.”


Team WatchDogs spoke to Dr. Khinviraj Jangid, Assistant Professor and Co-Director at Jindal Centre of Israel Studies(JCIS). He spoke to us from his house in Israel on Sunday morning.


We started off by asking Professor Jangid about his day on the 7th of October, 2023.

“On October 7th, I was in Tel Aviv. However, on October 8th, I was supposed to be in the South where this massacre happened- and I do think it’s a massacre and an act of terror upon the civilian people of Israel”, he said. On October 8th, 2023, Professor Jangid was supposed to be in the South and have Professor Ilan Troen inaugurate an international conference. However, Prof. Troen, who was the keynote speaker for the opening day of the event lost his daughter, Deborah Matias, and son-in-law, Shlomi Matias, in the attack a day prior. Ilan Troen, professor of Israel studies at Brandeis University, visited JGU in March 2017 for a seminar course. Professor Troen's 16-year-old grandson, Rotem Matias, hid himself in the laundry bag and stayed there for more than 12 hours to hide and protect himself. On being asked for his stance on the conflict, Professor Jangid stood by what he said in a prime-time show on October 20th when he addressed the nation “India needs to continue with its principles and support for the Palestinian cause and it has rightly done so. However, India must not support Hamas.” “Hamas’s rise in the political history of the Palestinian National Movement is that it rose as a spoiler to the Oslo Accords during the time of Yasser Arafat. To me, the organization continues to do more harm than good to the Palestinian cause”, he explained.


Professor Jangid talked about the presence of extremists in all conflicts, on both ends. There are extremists in Palestine such as Hamas. Similarly, there is a presence of extremists in Israel as well. These extremists don’t think of the conflict in terms of a legal, political, or national question. They think of it in terms of a religious question.


“The moment you define a conflict in religious terms, it reaches a stage where there is no willingness to compromise. Therefore, it's not a question of right and wrong, it's a question of how there can be peace, and there won’t be peace without accepting both the parties their legit claims, their legit grievances”, he explained. On being asked about the Indian government's stance on the conflict, Professor Jangid maintained that he is usually critical of PM Modi's foreign policies. However, in this specific context, he liked the Centre's stance better than the Indian left. Talking about his own understanding of the conflict, he said, “Unlike many others in India, who think it is a question of who is right and who is wrong, my understanding of the conflict is that there are no such questions, for it’s a fight between two right parties.”


“I have taught the Israel-Palestine conflict at the Jindal School of International Affairs. I have been away from campus for the last 3 years but I used to teach that course, and my conclusion used to be- instead of looking at the conflict to know which party is the greater victim, we should look at it as a complicated case where both parties are right”, he concluded.


We lacked a source to tell us about the on-ground situation in Israel, so we asked Professor Jangid to talk to us about how Israel looked on the 29th of October, 2023.

“Things are getting back to normal in Israel. Coffee houses are open, public buses are functioning but the universities continue to remain shut. People go to work, but they are very depressed. There is no free spirit. They are aware they’re not going to win any war after what happened to them. They just feel completely, morally broken.”


Team WatchDogs got in touch with Professor Deepanshu Mohan, professor of Economics at Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, to get his insights on the conflict. Talking about the attack by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, Professor Mohan said, “In the current scenario, as the nature of events unfolds, the retaliatory effort by the Israeli Military to respond to the attack by Hamas, based on the spectrum of information out there one has to understand that it’s difficult to unpack the level of intelligence failure which led to the impact that the attack inflicted." He stated, "Further, this retaliation has, of course, caused a massive civilian humanitarian crisis that is likely to continue.”


Professor Mohan talked about the paradoxical tendencies of industrially advanced nations in conflicts like these. “Many of the industrially advanced nations like the United States, United Kingdoms, and Australia, had strongly advocated on humanitarian concerns of what has happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict over the last two years, which is again a territorial breach and a war mostly on Russia’s end. However, it’s not the same this time." There is a tendency of these countries to take a position that remains paradoxical, and in some ways hypocritical to their own cause. "In the current scenario, with more explicit support to Israel, the United States has lost its moral ground.”, Professor Mohan remarked. On that note, Professor Mohan explained that the United States has had a very clear advocation for its support of Israel. However, India’s stance on the conflict is something to think about.


“It’s known in much of West-Asian and North American history, that American exceptionalism has often taken these positions and it’s historically consistent with the ‘US behavior’. However, India’s stance on the conflict is more troubling”


Professor Mohan went on to explain, “India has historically advocated for a two-state solution, which meant that on one hand, it is providing civilian aid and relief material for the Palestinian population. However, when it got a chance to actually do something about the conflict, as it did in the UN General Assembly on October 27th, it chose not to.”


India on Friday abstained in the UN General Assembly on a Jordanian-drafted resolution titled ‘Protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations’. The resolution proposed on behalf of the Arab League and co-sponsored by about 40 countries, was passed in the UNGA on October 27 with 120 votes in favor, 14 including the United States and the United Kingdoms against, and 45 abstentions, including India.

A note circulated by government sources responding to criticism from Opposition members about the vote said that since India’s concerns over omissions had not been covered by the final text of the resolution, it had decided to abstain. "There can be no equivocation on terror,” the sources said, calling India’s position “steadfast and consistent”, reported The Hindu.



Talking about the impact of the conflict, Professor Mohan explained that the two major externalities of conflict are - its impact on food security and healthcare access for vulnerable populations - women and children, and that’s somehow always understated in trying to understand both, the nature and the impact of the conflict.

“While there are international humanitarian laws, one has to further understand the limitations of the law and know that there is no global state that has an executive to ensure that those laws and norms continue to be respected and safeguarded, no matter how elegantly they may have been outlined in the first place”, he further explained. It becomes important to also keep in mind that these advanced countries that have been pointed out for taking a paradoxical stand on the conflict, have had a dominant role to play in the way International Humanitarian Laws are practiced.


On further being asked about the impact of the conflict in the near future, Prof. Mohan replied, “The Russia-Ukraine crisis had a major impact on the global food supply chain networks, and the current conflict will inevitably impose a larger conflict between the Arab and the Jewish-based country groups."


We will see this have global economic ramifications as well. Therefore, arguing for peace, and for some degree of basic morality that is guided by each nation’s humanity and appeal to humanitarian concerns is also economically feasible.


He further highlighted the lack of economic motivation in a largely market-driven, geopolitical, economic setup and that economic motivation plays a huge role as a motivating factor apart from strategic interests. “It’s because the Palestinian people have not been able to represent any wealth or natural resources, I think their cause has often been understated and subdued and that has been consistent", Professor Mohan concluded.

Photoessays: We can not add pictures to our blog due to copyright issues. That does not mean it won't reach you.








Reading list to understand the conflict:



  1. This reading list has been shared by Professor Scott Long on Social Media. It has been sent to JGU students on Outlook by JSIA Professor Silvia Bottega. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18u9KYo3MvRpyI0SDqD2AzseTvuSn3S8T?fbclid=IwAR0e9_amGOsTifVzkIujwed1qYjJ25umLkMw6A_a3YwvW_C1ymcjqe6gDxE_aem_AbiYHk1UVaUHEK9dwL-Vz4Hk0YQyc9WS4GANnNBfyOMDQm0wEAsEZAlo2SK0FbCJy3s

  2. Rana Ayyub's reading recommendations

3. Foreign Affairs reading list



Team WatchDogs has curated a few articles and reading material to understand the complicated history of the Israel-Palestine war. The links are attached:


Few other reading materials we feel it is our duty to share widely:


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