The latest mini-war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas began with the Gaza-based militants eager to strike a blow, but the escalation that followed has left them physically and diplomatically exposed, with no ready way out.
Hamas has sent its rockets streaking into Israel after a month of army raids in the occupied West Bank – in search of three missing Israeli teenagers – that landed more than 900 Palestinians in jail, many of them Hamas members.
The self-styled Islamic Resistance Movement was further prompted to action by widespread anger at the burning alive of a Palestinian youth by suspected Jewish extremists last week, an apparent revenge attack after the missing teens were found shot dead in the West Bank – murders Israel blames on Hamas.
Israel is holding all Palestinians responsible for the killing of the three Israeli youths
Hamas said it hadn’t sought a war, but now hundreds of Israeli bombs continue to pound the coastal strip, killing scores of Gazans. It says the onus for ending the hostilities is on Israel, where the rocket attacks have caused no fatalities and whose missile defence system has intercepted many of the Hamas projectiles.
“Yes, we want calm. We don’t like escalation, and we didn’t make an escalation. Netanyahu imposed this aggression upon us,” Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said in a speech broadcast on Wednesday. “To end his aggression, first end his policy of occupation, settlement, Judaisation, detentions, killings and demolitions. End that first. Our people deserve to live free,” he added.
Previous lopsided battles between Palestinian militants and Israel’s powerful military – most recently an eight-day conflict in 2012 and a month-long tussle that began in late 2008 and included a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip – have left Hamas’s position mostly intact. The group would claim victory, buoyed by some international sympathy, speedily replenish their cache of rockets through Gaza’s porous border with Egypt and maintain its broad presence in the West Bank.
But much has changed since.
In Egypt, the military has ousted the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, a key ally to the Gaza government, which helped mediate a truce in 2012. And it will be harder to restock when hostilities end now that Egypt’s new government has stepped up efforts to demolish the cross-border tunnels that fed not only the blockaded coastal strip’s weapons caches but its entire economy. “Israel is holding all Palestinians responsible for the killing of the three Israelis, and that’s what it’s doing with the campaign of arrests everywhere in the West Bank, and it has extended this policy of collective punishment now to Gaza,” Hamas MP Fathi Qarawi said.