Why is Israel condemned while far greater horrors go unseen?

The battering that Israel received from UN agencies, the human rights claque and other non-governmental groups during the long and difficult Gaza campaign still rankles. Charges of human rights abuses, starvation as a weapon of war and genocide, glibly accepted by a generally hostile broadcast media, still resonate.

‘Gaza is the worst humanitarian crisis I have seen in 50 years,’ the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, pronounced in February last year. He described it as worse than ‘awful scenes’ during the civil war in Syria and worse than the ‘horrors’ that were the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s.

Wild, unchallenged accusations such as these ignited the hate marches, violent anti-Zionism and the Jew hatred which led to the Yom Kippur tragedy in Manchester. No one with an ounce of humanity could not be disturbed by the scenes of destruction and the anguish in Gaza.

But Israel was responding to an attack on its sovereign territory of unparalleled brutality and pillage since the Shoah. It faced a potential existential war from Iranian-supported terror groups arrayed around its border, from Hezbollah in the north to the Houthis in Yemen, bringing shipping through the Red Sea to a standstill. This has been a neglected part of the narrative. It was impossible to buy into the superlatives of the UN and others in terms of hardship, hunger and famine used by people who should know better.

My thoughts turned to all of this as the eyes of the world briefly have returned to Sudan and Syria. The media coverage has been inconsistent and intermittent in contrast to the relentless focus on Israel-Gaza. In Sudan the withdrawal of the country’s official forces from the city of El Fasher in Darfur left behind a ghastly legacy.

An 18-month war between Sudan’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has been disastrous for the already downtrodden and hungry people of the region. The civil war which began in April 2023, more than six months before the 7 October attacks, has left behind a terrible legacy. Some 460,000 people have been killed and millions forced from their homes across Darfur. Both the RSF and the Sudanese army have been accused of war crimes. The US is demanding that the paramilitaries pay for the carnage they have wreaked.

Some 460,000 people have been killed and millions forced from their homes across Darfur

The UN Human Rights Office has received multiple reports of atrocities and summary killings of civilians seeking to flee the city. It has been a proxy war with the UAE backing Rapid Support Forces with artillery, drones and other weapon systems. Turkey, Iran and Russia have been supplying the military – in exchange for gold. ‘The road is full of dead,’ reported witnesses escaping from El Fasher.

Meanwhile, in Syria any thought that the end of the country’s 14-year civil war with the ouster of Bashar al-Assad would usher in a new era of peace and national unity has proved a false narrative. The regime of his successor, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has failed to prevent sectarian massacres and the displacement of 430,000 people, according to UN monitors. The Druze population has been targeted by al-Sharaa-supporting militias, and some 1300 people have been killed, many of them civilians. Bloody revenge has been visited on the Alawite minority from which Assad is drawn.

The death toll, the trail of refugees, starvation and famine in Darfur dwarfs anything which took place in Gaza. Playing numbers of games with the number of deaths, injuries and starvation in war zones is futile. Yet it is hard not to be outraged as to why Israel has attracted so much opprobrium from international agencies when so much violence can be seen across the region.

Some will argue that the IDF brought the broadcast and public hostility upon itself with claims of moral superiority. Israel and its security forces are held to a higher standard. That is no excuse for the hyperbole used by international bodies, the harsh rhetoric of Labour’s deputy prime minister, David Lammy, or the hostility directed at Jewish students on campus in the US and UK.

Protests over sectarian murders in Syria are virtually non-existent. The ongoing violence, killings and potential genocide in Darfur are largely ignored. The marches are invisible. Israel and its friends in the Diaspora have reason for a burning anger over public insouciance towards an ongoing catastrophe when their own has been so atrociously misrepresented.

• Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail