What on earth was HRH the Prince of Wales thinking when he released his statement about the war in Gaza? It is an iron rule that the Royal Family doesn’t make political or controversial interventions. The institution of the British monarchy draws its strength and unique value as a source of national unity from the fact that it is resolutely above such things.
Yet Prince William today waded into Israel’s war in Gaza. On the eve of tomorrow’s deeply contentious vote on a call for an immediate ceasefire by Israel, Prince William said the following:
I remain deeply concerned about the terrible human cost of the conflict in the Middle East since the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct 7. Too many have been killed.
I, like so many others, want to see an end to the fighting as soon as possible. There is a desperate need for increased humanitarian support to Gaza. It’s critical that aid gets in and the hostages are released.
Sometimes it is only when faced with the sheer scale of human suffering that the importance of permanent peace is brought home. Even in the darkest hour, we must not succumb to the counsel of despair. I continue to cling to the hope that a brighter future can be found, and I refuse to give up on that.
This statement has been widely headlined as “Prince William calls for an end to the war in Gaza”. In other words, the heir to the British throne has told Israel how to behave in a crisis that has nothing to do with him.
In fact, he didn’t call for an end to the war in so many words, saying merely that he wanted the fighting to end as soon as possible. But in the context of the enormous pressure being piled on Israel to stop the war, and particularly in the context of tomorrow’s Commons vote on the call for an immediate ceasefire, the Prince must have realised that his remarks would be interpreted as a call for Israel to stop the war.
This call, being made by so many in the British establishment and “progressive” (ie Israel-hating) circles, is deeply, shockingly, brutally amoral. For if Israel were to stop the war, Hamas would be able to reassemble its genocide force. Just as it did, of course, after the last ceasefire, the one that ended on October 7 when it murdered more than 1200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 240 into Gaza and fired thousands of rockets aimed at murdering yet more Israelis, all with weaponry and materials it had smuggled into Gaza during the ceasefire not to mention through the west’s “humanitarian” aid convoys.
If Israel stopped its operation to dismantle Hamas, many more Israelis would be slaughtered, raped, beheaded and kidnapped and the rockets would continue to rain down on Israeli towns and cities.
We know this because Hamas itself has told us. It has stated that it intends to perpetrate October 7 type atrocities “again and again” until Israel is destroyed. That is what all those calling for an immediate ceasefire are actually supporting and would enable — the genocidal slaughter of yet more Israeli Jews. It is that infernal outcome to which Prince William has now lent his name — and that of the monarchy too.
If he really wants to end the fighting, he might have a word with his family’s beloved chums in the royal family of Qatar — the state that runs Hamas, shelters its leader Ismail Haniyeh and could therefore end this war tomorrow. Yes, the prince said the hostages should be released — but he uttered not one word on the need to protect the Israeli people from further slaughter. And he also seemed to link releasing the hostages to more aid getting into Gaza. The fact that much or most of the aid that’s gone in has been stolen by Hamas to enable them to continue not just to try to murder more Israeli Jews but to hold hostage and use as cannon fodder the people of Gaza — who are mown down by Hamas if they try to flee — would of course be unknown to him, since the Hamas echo-chamber in the British media won’t have told him.
The really venomous sting in Prince William’s remarks, however, the five words that remove any lingering thought that maybe he was just issuing pious bromides for peace, were these: “Too many have been killed”.
Really? How many is that? And who is he talking about? Israel says it has killed thousands of Hamas terrorists. Does Prince William think too many Hamas terrorists have been killed? It sounds as if he has swallowed the Hamas propaganda line, pumped out by the BBC, Sky and just about every mainstream media outlet, that all those killed in Gaza by the Israel Defence Forces are women and children, with astoundingly not one man or terrorist among them.
Moreover, the ratio of civilians to terrorists killed by the IDF is running at between 1:1 and 3:1 — a far smaller proportion of civilians killed in warfare than Prince William’s own country’s armed forces or any other country have ever achieved in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.
So what exactly does he mean by “too many”? Is he merely parroting the view expressed by Labour’s Wes Streeting that Israel has gone “beyond reasonable self-defence” in its attack on Gaza — a view for which those who are very ignorant and very conformist would find ample ammunition in the twisted and disgusting distortions and incitement against Israel promulgated day in, day out by the BBC and mainstream media — and which we are about to hear far too many members of parliament voice in tomorrow’s debate? Exactly what do Wes Streeting and all the others think constitutes “reasonable self-defence” against genocide?
Apparently, Prince William decided that “the sight of innocent children caught up in conflict was worth the risk of speaking out”. Really? Has he similarly spoken out about the need to end the war in Ukraine because of the killing of innocent children there? Or the war in Syria because of the “sheer scale of human suffering”?
Moreover, the majority of Gazans support Hamas. On October 7, hundreds of Gazan civilians poured across the shattered Israel border in the wake of the Hamas stormtroopers and took part in the raping, murdering and looting. Survivors of the pogrom report that those civilian Gazan marauders included women and children. Israeli soldiers report that, among the houses they have entered during this war, there is not one that is not affiliated to Hamas or doesn’t contains stashes of weapons.
Neither Prince William nor those MPs who will tomorrow be attacking Israel for defending itself against genocide will allow any of these facts to get in the way of the narrative created by more than four months of lies, distortion, selective reporting and incitement pumped out by the mainstream media and the Hamas patsies in the UN, Red Cross and the rest of the international “humanitarian” circus.
MPs calling for an immediate ceasefire tomorrow will bring shame to Britain. Prince William has brought shame to the monarchy, and done it real damage.
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