• IN none of the recent letters to the CNJ on the Israel Gaza war was there the slightest acknowledgement or appreciation of the unparalleled ferocity and barbarity of the October 7 massacre.

So I regard the calls for a ceasefire now, in the absence of any absolute condemnation of the Hamas attack and acceptance that Israel must have the right to defend itself and prevent future attacks, together with the release of all hostages, as in effect being at best complicit in and encouraging Hamas to rearm, and an acceptance of the wish of Hamas in its charter that it is entitled to eliminate the state of Israel and drive all Jews living there into the sea.

While there seems uproar over what Hamas say are up to 30,000 casualties, ignoring that many of these will be active fighters/terrorists and the propensity of Hamas to hide behind civilians; the double standards are alarming with by comparison hardly any complaints on previous greater slaughter by Saddam and Assad of their own citizens; or the civil wars going on in Yemen, Syria and Sudan where together well over one million have been killed; or the persecution of one million Moslem Uyghurs by the Chinese.

With over 50 Moslem states, is it too much to ask for the existence of one small Jewish state? Having said that, 20 per cent of the population are non Jewish Arabs, including Christians and Druze, and it is quite likely they feel safer in Israel than elsewhere in the Middle East.

Of 750,000 Arab refugees in 1948, 200,000 went to Gaza whose population has now grown to 2.3 million so the Israelis may be blamed for a lot but not extermination or genocidal intent; the tragedy being through the intransigence of Arab countries they were left to fester there.

Similarly 650,000 of the Jews expelled from Middle East and north Africa, where they had lived in some cases for over 2,000 years, settled in Israel; so a more or less equal swap.

FELIX WHITE, NW3