As I write, I can also see what is happening on an ordinary Saturday in Malta. There is a concert of sorts in Palace Square. People are walking to the Valletta Waterfront on their way to dinner. People are also taking a walk in the new, and beautiful, SmartCity. As I write, I can hear the festa bombs going off in nearby San Gwann. There is also the August Moon Ball at Verdala Castle and Facebook is full of selfies of couples dressed up to the nines.

Indeed, an ordinary August Saturday evening, in Malta where the living is pleasant.

You would not think that just over the water an undeclared war is being waged. Nor a bigger one in the Middle East.

Except, that is, for the revellers at the San Duminku festa band march earlier who were calling themselves Tal-Palestina. Why they keep saying that is lost in the mist of times. Earlier, a rather small group had demonstrated on the new stairs near the new Parliament in favour of the Palestinians under siege at Gaza.

There is a universe between the festa march and the events in Gaza, a whole universe.

Down at the Waterfront, a Virtu Ferries catamaran brought 251 people who have been rescued from Libya, thanks to their employer, Hyundai, also including 25 Maltese who were contacted by the government and offered a free trip by the catamaran owners and Hyundai.

Again, there is this dichotomy between the pleasant dining at the Waterfront and the events in Libya.

This week has also been marked by the case of Martin Galea, the former soldier who was abducted outside Tripoli and held captive for many days until he was freed. As is usual in Malta, the whole issue soon got wrapped up in party politics. I still cannot see why there was this insistence from both government sources and pro-government media that the situation in Libya is not alarming, that Mr Galea was not held captive and not even touched only then for Mr Galea to break this myth in an interview which made history.

Mr Galea’s case seems to have been the only one relating to a Maltese person, but in his account there are many more people suffering under duress like he did.

The situation is a very confused one and very difficult for us to understand since we do not have the proper key to what is going on. It would seem that, overall, there is a huge clash between the moderates, if we can call them so, and the fundamental Islamists who are mainly found in the east around Benghazi where a Caliphate was proclaimed last week after the collapse of the general who wanted to overcome the Islamists but failed.

As much as people got crushed and killed trying to get out of Libya in the west, more people seem to have flowed into the east, coming from other hotspots of Islamic fundamentalism such as Yemen and Somalia.

Things are not so clear cut, of course, because there are many tribal alliances on either side, and also rivalry between the various cities.

Libya is being dragged back to the Middle Ages, especially with the destruction of the Tripoli airport and its planes. It has become a country where travel is very dangerous, and anyway there is no petrol to enable travel. This in a country which is oil-rich.

This time, there are no outside forces from the West helping things along as they did in the last days of Gaddafi. Unless one counts the outside help coming from the Islamist side.

The moderates, if one can call them so, seem confused and disorganised and the vast majority of people seem to hanker for peace and an end to the killing but impotent to do anything about it.

The situation in Libya, vicious, dangerous and seemingly intractable bears no comparison to the situation in Gaza even though in the past hours it began to appear as if Israel will pull out.

World opinion has fallen into the pro-Palestinians or pro-Israel rut, people instinctively leaning towards their preferred side. There has been an overkill of photos from Gaza especially with children, the innocent victims of Israeli bombing.

This crisis, without any doubt, was precipitated by Hamas with their innumerable rockets aimed at Israel which only Israeli ingenuity (and US funds) blunted with the Iron Dome.

For all their cleverness, the Israeli Defence Force missed out on the danger posed by the network of tunnels dug by the Hamas, many times with cement donated by Israel for them to build schools, through which Hamas planned, and could, come up behind Israeli lines and kidnap an entire kibbutz.

When this was discovered, IDF had no alternative but to plunge further in, which was when its soldiers started to get killed. As happened in other times, when the body bags start coming back, the pressure to withdraw becomes immense.

But the Hamas strategy was to get something tangible for a negotiated ceasefire, such as opening the frontiers with Egypt, regaining fishing rights and a tangible step towards statehood. The Israeli government, which resisted intense pressure from President Obama to stop its bombing since any bombing in such restricted areas could only mean civilian deaths, then plumped for a unilateral ceasefire.

IDF tried to justify its bombings by pointing out that it was Hamas who first sited missile launchers in the midst of residential areas, in schools and even, it seems, in a mosque. However, the sight of so many children dead, including three boys playing football on a beach, shocked world public opinion. Israel was always warned that if it pushed Hamas too much, it could radicalise not just that remaining population but most of the Arab nation.

So far, one must say, not too many of its brothers have come to the aid of Hamas, not Fatah from the West Bank, not Egypt under Sissi, and not the mainline Arab countries who are facing the terrible threat of Isis.

Still, each death is the untimely curbing of a life which should have panned better, especially children nipped before they knew what hit them.

These human tragedies, added to that of Libya, and the immense tragedy that is Syria, should sober us in our headlong pursuit of a Sybarite lifestyle.