22 July 2014

Eyeless in Gaza


David Stout has a Time article about the latest from Gaza:
Israeli warplanes struck more than seventy targets in the Gaza Strip, including a stadium, five mosques, and the home of a late Hamas military chief, reports The Associated Press.
The attacks came as UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Secretary of State John Kerry accelerated diplomatic efforts for an immediate cease-fire.
Israeli Defense Forces said that it had killed 183 “terrorists” and struck at more than thirteen hundred “terror sites” in Gaza during the two-week-old Operation Protective Edge. However, according to Human Rights Watch, many of the attacks have been made on civilian structures, including a refugee camp and hundreds of homes, leading to thousands of displacements.
Some 584 Palestinians and 29 Israelis have been killed during the conflict. The UN estimates that 75% of Palestinian deaths are of civilians, with scores of women and children among them.
“We must find a way to stop the violence,” said Ban at a joint press conference in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, with Kerry. “So many people have died. As Secretary Kerry just said, it’s mostly the civilian population, women and children. It’s very sad, it’s tragic.”
Kerry called on Hamas to accept a cease-fire framework tabled by Egyptian authorities earlier this month. “Israel has accepted that cease-fire proposal,” said Kerry, who landed in Egypt after being dispatched to the region by President Barack Obama. “So only Hamas now needs to make the decision to spare innocent civilians from this violence.”
Despite the heavy loss of Palestinian lives in the fighting, Kerry described Israel’s military operation in Gaza as “appropriate” and a “legitimate effort to defend itself.”
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities acknowledged to local media that they could not account for the whereabouts of one of their soldiers, but that he may have been killed after an attack on an armored vehicle over the weekend.
The admission comes a day after Israel’s envoy to the UN dismissed claims made by Hamas that they had kidnapped an Israeli soldier.
Rico says he's still voting for his D-9 bulldozer solution, but nobody's listening...

In a related story in TimeIlene Prusher tells of the reason behind all this:
Sometime around 5 a.m. Monday, 10 men set out quietly on a predawn mission, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and boots. They were not, however, members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). They were members of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, and they had just emerged from one of the many tunnels the militants have dug between the Gaza Strip and Israel. That much, however, was not clear until the Israeli forces nearby noticed that the men who looked like their own were actually carrying Kalashnikovs and not Tavors, Israel’s standard-issue automatic rifles.
In the gunfight that ensued, Israeli soldiers killed ten Hamas militants, the IDF says, but also lost four of its own when they were hit by an antitank rocket fired at them by the gunmen. The dramatic gun battle unfolded only about two hundred meters from Kibbutz Nir Am, an agricultural commune founded by immigrants from Eastern Europe in 1943. Residents were ordered to remain indoors and roads were closed for the next five hours as the Israeli military officials were unsure if some of the Palestinian militants might have succeeded in breaking away from the group.
The incident is being seen in Israel as a narrowly averted nightmare. That militants could pop out of the ground just feet from a residential area shows just how far Hamas’ military wing has progressed toward being within arm’s reach of the Israeli population. One militant who was killed in a similar incident a few days ago had tranquilizers and handcuffs with him, suggesting one of his goals had been kidnapping.
Destroying as many tunnels as possible is the goal of the IDF’s Operation Defensive Edge, launched two weeks ago. The IDF says it has discovered close to fifty entrances to fourteen tunnels since its ground invasion of Gaza began, and that it took fire while it worked on destroying a tunnel in Shujaiyeh, the same neighborhood in which the IDF engaged in a late-night offensive a day earlier that left at least sixty civilians dead, as well as thirteen Israeli soldiers.
“Only today do we understand the meaning of the danger of these tunnels when terrorists, wearing IDF uniforms, came out of the belly of the earth and were threatening our communities around Gaza,” Major General Sami Turgeman, head of the IDF's Southern Command, told reporters after the incident at Nir Am. “A huge disaster was avoided. This proves that we’re right to focus on the tunnels. They now know that the efforts they have invested, years of time and a great amount of money and hours of work, can be taken in a day of work by us, plus paying with the death of the militants who tried to infiltrate Israel.”
Gazans interviewed recently were divided over the effectiveness of the tunnel campaign. Some residents said that the tunnel strategy was forcing Israel to suffer, and was perhaps even more effective than rockets. Others said the tunnels’ use would only increase the loss of life on both sides.
Hamas began building tunnels as a method of economic sustenance. As Israel tightened its borders with Gaza, first during the second intifadeh and more severely when Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah in 2007, Hamas started building tunnels in Gaza to smuggle goods in from Egypt. Hamas taxed the various tunnels and was also able to use each tunnel’s creation and operation as a kind of job-works program for desperate Gazans, at one point employing up to seven thousand people, according to an al-Jazeera report. (Doron Peskin, an analyst at the Israeli market-research firm Info-Prod Research, estimates that tunnels coming from Gaza into Israel cost two hundred dollars per meter to construct.) Israel and Egypt— fearing militancy in Gaza was spilling over into the Sinai— have been acting for several years to shut these down.
But tunnels weren’t just a way to break the blockade. Palestinians realized they could also be used as a way to attack Israel. In 2006, militants used a tunnel to attack an Israeli army post and kidnap a nineteen-year-old soldier, Gilad Shalit. He was exchanged after more than five years in captivity for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, a success Hamas would like to repeat. The possibility of an additional kidnapping like this has motivated Hamas to invest in an unknown number of tunnels, although Israeli army officials estimate there are likely twenty tunnels today.
“It is a very dangerous period, because I think Hamas understands that their ability to use these tunnels is a window that is closing very quickly, and the time to gain some achievements with what they have built is limited,” says Shlomo Brom, a retired general and former director of the Strategic Planning Division of the IDF.
Had the militants managed to emerge in the middle of the Nir Am kibbutz, they would have found Israeli soldiers who have been camping out in the community’s courtyards since many residents have fled to safer parts of the country. Of the four hundred original residents, approximately sixty remain; those too old to move, their helpers, and members of the local emergency committee.
“This morning we woke up from this dream that such a thing could never happen. We haven’t had something like this since 1956, ahead of the Sinai campaign,” said Shlomo Maizlitz, head of the regional emergency committee, who was a twelve-year-old boy during that war involving Israel, Gaza, and Egypt. “We didn’t dream that the tunnels would get to our area. We thought it was too difficult to drill anywhere near it. Now, everything looks different.”
Rico says it's back to the bulldozer solution...


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