Sandra Chapman: ​Even babies are not safe from the horrors of war

Children don’t start wars, adults do without thinking of the consequences for the innocent. We may live in idealistic times when most things we want we can have. But there is something inherently evil in people who regard babies as enemies and should not be spared.

Our Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, himself a father of young children said this week: ‘We must be unequivocal in making sure the types of horrific scenes we have seen this week will not be repeated’. So why hide the evil that does not spare the innocent?

He said ‘our military and diplomatic teams across the region will support diplomatic teams across the region to re-establish security and ensure humanitarian aid reaches the thousands of innocent victims of this barbaric attack from Hamas terrorists’.

These are fine words but how can these two warring states ever be reconciled with the other to prevent such evil being perpetrated ever again? When I first saw the picture of that unfortunate infant it brought to my mind the Omagh bombing event where twins died before they were even born. Terrorism is an evil the world has never really got under control. It is generally followed up with promises that can’t be kept.

In reality it appears –at least initially – that there is little that can be done to prevent such evil being repeated. What good will American President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel on Wednesday have done?

Last week on these pages I wrote how my early childhood was lived in a house beside a Second World War British military base. The war was over in 1945 but when we were old enough to ask questions about it my mother told us how the injured soldiers had been flown to the hospital at the base, well away from the enemy.

When the war was over the locals were able to fill their own first-aid boxes with the medical

accoutrements they found in the disused wards in the building. I suspect they came in handy since the IRA, which had been around from the 1920s, hadn’t ‘gone away’.

At various places in the province including south Derry, an area of mixed religions, they were gearing up for their next big effort at achieving a united Ireland. That began again in the 1950s and it’s still going on.

Modern warfare is altogether different so the deaths being perpetrated today by the Hamas thugs ,as one newspaper described them, will be merciless and evil beyond comprehension. They are in greater numbers too making our own issues here seem little by comparison.

Would it be too much to hope for that the killing of innocent infants and children this week should not be a feature of war in any corner of the world?