All four members of U2 issued statements on Sunday (Aug. 10) expressing their fears that the nearly two-year war between Israel and Hamas has sent the region into “uncharted territory.” In a joint statement from Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton, the group wrote, “Everyone has long been horrified by what is unfolding in Gaza – but the blocking of humanitarian aid and now plans for a military takeover of Gaza City has taken the conflict into uncharted territory. We are not experts in the politics of the region, but we want our audience to know where we each stand.”
The statements from the band came as experts are warning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for a renewed offensive in the Gaza Strip in which forces would take over Gaza City could further exacerbate a malnutrition and starvation crisis that has taken center stage on the eve of the two-year mark of the war.
In his letter, singer and career-long activist Bono said that he has generally tried to avoid speaking on the politics of the Middle East — with the exception of marking the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on the Nova music festival on the day when Hamas killed more than 1,200 and took more than 250 hostages from Israel — not out of humility, but “more uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity.”
But as co-founder of the Arfrica-centered global anti-poverty, HIV/AIDS charity ONE, he felt his focus should be on the lives lost in the war in Sudan and Ethiopia, not to mention the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and the U.S.’s life-saving PEPFAR initiative focusing on fighting HIV/AIDS.
But, he wrote, “The images of starving children on the Gaza Strip brought me back to a working trip to a food station in Ethiopia my wife Ali and I made 40 years ago next month following U2’s participation in Live Aid 1985. Another man-made famine. To witness chronic malnutrition up close would make it personal for any family, especially as it affects children. Because when the loss of non-combatant life en masse appears so calculated… especially the deaths of children, then ‘evil’ is not a hyperbolic adjective… in the sacred text of Jew, Christian, and Muslim it is an evil that must be resisted.”
Bono acknowledged that the rape, murder and abduction of Israelis a the Nova Festival was “evil” and that when he heard about the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas militants on Israel he didn’t think of politics. Reacting in real time to the news from the stage of the Sphere where the band were in the midst of their venue-opening residency, he said he couldn’t help but “express the pain everyone in the room was feeling and is still feeling for other music lovers and fans like us — hiding under a stage in Kibbutz Re’im then butchered to set a diabolical trap for Israel and to get a war going that might just redraw the map from ‘The river to the sea’… a gamble Hamas’ leadership were willing to play with the lives of two million Palestinians… to sow the seeds for a global intifada that U2 had glimpsed at work in Paris during the Bataclan attack in 2015… but only if Israel’s leaders fell for this trap that Hamas set for them.”
The singer had pointed words for Israeli PM Netanyahu, as well as late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, lashing the latter for what he said was Hamas’ deliberate positioning of soldiers amid civilian targets, while also asking when a “just war to defend the country turn[ed] into an unjust land grab? I hoped Israel would return to reason. I was making excuses for a people seared and shaped by the experience of Holocaust… who understood the threat of extermination is not simply a fear but a fact… I re-read Hamas’ charter of 1988[3]… it’s an evil read (Article Seven!)”
To date, Gaza’s Health Ministry has said that more than 61,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, with experts warning that the Palestinian territories under attack could tip into widespread famine soon if food aid is not dramatically increased.
Bono said he understands that Hamas doesn’t speak for the Palestinian people as a whole, acknowledging their decades of “marginalization, oppression, occupation, and the systematic stealing of the land that is rightfully theirs. Given our own historic experience of oppression and occupation, it’s little wonder so many here in Ireland have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people”; Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap has spoken out loudly and frequently in support of the Palestinian people, drawing a series of festival bans and police investigations over the past six months for statements they’ve made on stage.
“We know Hamas are using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel and I feel revulsion for the moral failure,” Bono continued. “The Government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the Government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation. There is no justification for the brutality he and his far right government have inflicted on the Palestinian people… in Gaza… in the West Bank. And not just since October 7, well before it too… though the level of depravity and lawlessness we are seeing now feels like uncharted territory.”
Citing a number of instances in which he said the Israeli government has reportedly acknowledged using starvation as a tactic and made their desire to take over the territory plain, the singer wondered how the world had gotten to this point, again. “Is the world not done with this far, far right thinking? We know where it ends… world war… millenarianism,” Bono asked. “Might the world deserve to know where this once promising bright-minded democratic nation is headed unless there is a dramatic change of course? Is what was once an oasis of innovation and free-thinking now in hock to a fundamentalism as blunt as a machete? Are Israelis really ready to let Benjamin Netanyahu do to Israel what its enemies failed to achieve over the last 77 years? And disappear it from membership in a community of nations built around even a flawed decency?”
A longtime believer in Israel’s right to exist, and supporter of a long-sought two-state solution, Bono made clear the band’s condemnation of Netanyahu’s “immoral actions” and their call for an immediate cease fire. “Our band stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine who truly seek a path to peace and coexistence with Israel and with their rightful and legitimate demand for statehood,” said Bono, who provided a list of article citations in the notes of his message. “We stand in solidarity with the remaining hostages and plead that someone rational negotiate their release.”
He said the band urges Israelis to demand unfettered access for professionals to help those in need in Gaza and let the correct amount of aid trucks through while pledging to support and donate to the group Medical Aid For Palestinians.
Guitarist the Edge also expressed their shock and profound grief at watching the destruction and starvation in Gaza. He posited three questions to Netanyahu: 1) Does he believe that such devastation can happen without “heaping generational shame upon those responsible?” 2) If the end goal is to remove Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to make way for a “Greater Israel” is that not “ethnic cleansing” or “colonial genocide?” 3) And, if Netanyahu’s government rejects a two-state solution, what is their vision for ending the conflict?
“Simply perpetual conflict? A future of walls, blockades, military occupation?” Edge asked. “A state of permanent inequality? And if this apartheid state transpires don’t you destroy the very argument for Israel’s existence as a moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust? For if Israel comes to be seen as a state that systematically denies another people their rights, then the world will inevitably ask whether the only just and sustainable future, the only tolerable future, is a shared state — one where Jews and Palestinians live together as equals under the law.”
Taking the long-running, bloody Troubles in Ireland from the 1960s through the late 1990s as an example of what happens when one side tries to force peace through dominance, Edge said history has taught that “peace is made when people sit down with their opponents — when they recognize the equal dignity of all, even those they once feared or despised. There can be no peace without justice. No reconciliation without recognition.”
The message from Clayton echoed the collective feeling that the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza “looks like revenge on a civilian population who are not responsible for Hamas’ murderous attack,” warning that if Israel moves forward with colonizing Gaza it will, “permanently undo any possibility of lasting peace or solution for hostilities.”
Mullen Jr. wondered what Hamas was thinking when they undertook their bloody incursion, noting that a ground war and aerial bombardment from the militarily superior Israeli forces was a given, though what he described as the “indiscriminate decimation of most homes and hospitals in Gaza, with a majority of those killed being women and children” was not expected. Nor, he writes, was “imposing famine.”
The Netanyahu government has repeatedly denied that a famine is taking place or that Israel is attempting to starve Palestinians by choking off food aid into the territories — often claiming that, despite scant evidence, Hamas is looting the supplies. Mullen said that it was difficult to comprehend how “any civilized society can think starving children is going to further any cause and be justified as an acceptable response to another horror. To state the obvious, starving innocent civilians as a weapon of war is inhumane and criminal.”
He wondered where the outrage was from within, and without, Israel about the reported famine, noting that “the power to change this obscenity is in the hands of Israel.”
