By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
Well, enforcing that will send Israel into a political turmoil since it was on the verge of a civil war before this war started. Also, interesting to note that 2008 was one of those rare times when Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t at power, but that doesn’t help the situation right now.
I also agree that you can’t remove Hamas with a sledgehammer. You can’t kill ideology with bullets. Israel isn’t claiming to be doing that right now. They declared they’re doing 2 things:
Can’t ignore the last fact here though, that Benjamin Netanyahu wants a military regime once the war is over. You’d have to insane to support that.
Hmm, they managed to rescue 1/240 hostages for a month. Apparently that’s a pretty bad score. Not to mention that they are actively bombing tunnels where those hostages are thought to be held, so potentially they have killed some of them.
And by disabling Hamas ability to strike they killed ten thousand and counting people, destroyed civilian infrastructure, and caused unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe. Committed numerous war crimes and in general they showed to the world that they aren’t any better than Hamas if not worse.
Mind you by the time this all ends up the human cost and suffering inflicted on the regular civilians would be even greater. And I can tell you that’s a recipe for a disaster. You can’t dehumanize people and push them to the edge and then expect them to co-operate. I wonder what would be left of Gaza by the time Israel sate their bloodlust.
And none of those will be accomplished with what Israel is doing. Hamas will need time to recover, but “being unable to strike” isn’t happening. They have enough foreign support and a wealth of recruits.