Gaza: Australian politicians duped by dud declaration

The Canberra Declaration on Gaza signed by 77 current and former Federal and State parliamentarians displays their total factual ignorance and political naiveté concerning the war raging for the last six weeks between Hamas and Israel .

The Declaration has been "Published courtesy of Kohram".

Kohram is a 24/7 online Hindi and English News and Views website based in Delhi, India. It offers real information relating News Analysis, World Wide News, Politics, Entertainment, Technology, Sports, Industry and Feature Articles on Education.

Australian politicians acknowledging assistance from an Indian media website seems a strange circumstance indeed.

The Declaration was created by Maiy Azize, a Canberra based health and social policy analyst. She is a parliamentary advisor in health and community services and campaigner for @GreensMPs. 21 of the Declaration's signatories are parliamentarians representing the Greens Party.

The header image is attributed to Nakshab Khan and was featured in an article written by him for Kohram on 13 July headlined "Will Israeli Offensive Achieve Anything In Gaza?"

Khan wrote:

Israel always justifies its aggression on the Gaza strip by blaming Hamas militants for firing crude rockets on the Jewish nation's southern territories.

Khan was apparently unaware that in the five weeks preceding 8 July 234 rockets had been launched from Gaza into Israel reaching as far as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Hadera sending hundreds of thousands of civilians scurrying into air raid shelters and disrupting normal life in Israel as well as threatening its tourist industry in the peak summer season.

Long range rockets such as the M-302 were employed – the same missiles confiscated from the KLOS-C weapons seizure.

Israel's inherent entitlement to self-defence under article 51 of the United Nations Charter to prevent the indiscriminate firing of these rockets into Israeli population centres, each rocket an internationally acknowledged war crime, was not worth a mention in Khan's article.

Australian politicians need to be very careful about their names being identified with a document whose origins are so murky, a Declaration that itself is deceptive and misleading in the following respects: