Jordan's Queen Rania al-Abdullah expressed the Arab world's shock and disappointment with the world's "blatant double standards" and the "deafening silence" in the face of Israel's ongoing war on the Gaza Strip.

In a live interview with CNN journalist Christian Amanpour on Tuesday evening, she stressed that despite the prevailing narrative in the Western media, "this conflict did not start on the seventh of October."

Most networks cover the story under the rubric of "Israel at war," but for Palestinians on the other side of the separation barrier and the other side of barbed wire, the war has never left. This is a 75-year-old story, a story of death and displacement of the Palestinian people.

During the interview, she added that the novel omitted to highlight the nuclear-armed regional superpower that occupies, oppresses and commits documented daily crimes against Palestinians.

She pointed out that Palestinian mothers had to write the names of their children on their hands because of the high probability that they would be bombed to death and their bodies turned into corpses and body parts.

She stressed that the rules of engagement must apply to all, noting that Israel is committing atrocities under the guise of self-defence.

"6,2400 civilians have been killed so far, <>,<> children, how can this be considered self-defense? We see large-scale massacres using high-precision weapons. So over the last two weeks, we've seen indiscriminate shelling of Gaza. Entire families were exterminated, residential neighbourhoods were razed to the ground, and hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, medical workers, journalists and UN aid workers were targeted. How is this considered self-defense?!"


Complicit West

Queen Rania noted that for many in the region, the Western world is complicit in this war through the support and cover it gives to Israel.

"This is the first time in modern history that we have witnessed such human suffering, and the world is not calling for a ceasefire," she said.

"There are more than 500 checkpoints scattered throughout the West Bank," she said, stressing that Israel violates at least 30 UN resolutions that require it alone to work to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967, stop settlements, the separation wall and human rights violations.

She noted that Israel has been classified as an "apartheid regime" by Israeli and international human rights organizations.

Israel's allies are not doing it a service by blindly supporting it, she said: "Accelerating and expanding the provision of lethal weapons to Israel will only widen this conflict. It will only prolong and deepen suffering."


Double standards

In a critique of the media's role in covering the current conflict, Queen Rania pointed to the double standards of Western interlocutors demanding immediate condemnation from those representing the Palestinian side.

She also spoke of the suppression of manifestations of solidarity with Palestinians in Western democracies, noting that "when people rally in support of Israel, they exercise their right to assemble. But when they come together for Palestine, they are considered sympathetic to terrorists or anti-Semitic."

"Freedom of expression is a universal value except when Palestine is mentioned," she said.