• CAMDEN Palestine Solidarity Campaign members have regularly and unreservedly condemned Hamas’s murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7.

However, what we have also stressed is that the history of the Israel Palestine conflict did not begin on October 7 but that it was preceded by 75 years of expulsion, dispossession, occupation and siege of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel.

It should also be clear that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza’s towns and cities cannot by itself eliminate Hamas, given their propensity to operate in tunnels.

Israel’s carpet bombing seems instead to be designed to kill as many civilians as possible in order to drive them out of their homeland.

We do not defend the regimes of Saddam Hussein or Assad, as Felix White suggests (Is it too much to ask for the existence of one small Jewish state?, March 7), but it is untrue that Hamas want to drive Israeli Jews out of Israel.

Its 2017 charter describes a “nationalist conflict with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion”.

It called for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, a call echoed by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh last November. Again, recognising this in no way diminishes our condemnation of Hamas’s terrorism.

LUCA SALICE & SABBY SAGALL
Co-Chairs, Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign