Irish band U2 has released a statement about Israel and Gazasays the conflict has now reached “Uncharted Territory.”
In a joint message published on U2’s website And social media on Sunday wrote the band: “Everyone has long been frightened by what is developing in Gaza – but the blockage of humanitarian aid and is now planning for a military takeover of Gaza City has taken the conflict in unknown territory. We are not experts in the region’s policy, but we want our audience to know where we were.”
Each member of the iconic band-bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.-then cuddled their own individual statements that express complex feelings about the long-term conflict in the Middle East. In addition, the band has promised to donate medical help for Palestinians.
In his statement, Frontman and activist Bono first acknowledged the Hamas attacks against Israel, who killed about 1,200 people with 251 hostages who were taken and wrote that “rape, murder and abduction of Israelis at the Nova Music Festival was evil.” But he added that when the time passed, “Israel’s revenge for the Hamas attack seemed more and more disproportionate and uninterested in the equally innocent civilian lives in Gaza.”
According to the UN, which quotes Gaza’s Hamas-powered health ministry, over 61,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict from August 6. On Friday, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah’s government approved a plan to take over Gaza City, the capital of the Gaza strip, which the leading UN officials have fought against.
“When Did A Just War to Defend The Country Turn Into An Unjust Land Grab? I Hoped Israel Would Return to Reason. I Was Making Excuses For A People Seared and Shaped by the Experience of Holocaust… Who Understood the Threat of 1988 (3)… It’s an Evil Read (Article Seven!), ”Bono Continued. “But I also realized that Hamas is not the Palestinian people … a people who have endured for decades and continue to endure marginalization, oppression, occupation and systematic stealing the country that is rightly. Given our own historical experience of oppression and occupation, there is a bit of so many here in Ireland.
Bono then beat Netanyahu and wrote: “The government of Israel is not the Nation of Israel, but the Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves our categorical and unambiguous condemnation … in the Western Bank, so that it is because it is occurring in October.”
The edge directed his statement to Netanyahu and asked him several questions “in the hope of engaging conscience and reason for the people of Israel.”
“Do you really think that such a devastation – which is so intentional and relentless on a civilian population – can happen without raising generational comb on those responsible?” The edge wrote partly and ended his statement with: “We know from our own experience in Ireland that peace is not made through dominance. Peace is made when people sit down with their opponents – when they realize equal dignity for all, even those they once feared or despised.”
Bassist Clayton Said, “If Israel Moves to Colonize the Gaza Strip, it will permanently undo any possibility of loading Peace or Solution for Hostilities. Forgetting the Morality of the Situation for a Moment, Doesn’t not the Technical Superiity of Israel’s modern From Thousands of Miles Away? And If So Why The IDF Bombarding A Civilian Population From The Skies Indiscrimathely Destroying Any Bit of Shelter and infrastructure?
Mullen Jr. Added that Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks October 7 was “expected”, as well as a “ground war” and “Air bombing and destruction.” The drummer, however, said that what was not expected was “the blur decimation of most homes and hospitals in Gaza, with a majority of the killed as women and children” and “impressive famine.”
“The power to change this obscenity is in the hands of Israel,” he added. “I undoubtedly support Israel’s right to exist and I also believe that Palestinians deserve the same right and a condition of their own. Silence does none of us serve.”
Read each member of U2’s Full statements here.