When
the clear strategy of Hamas is to locate itself within the civilian population,
it is agonising to resolve
DANIEL TAUB 15th July 2014 “The
Independent”
There are two Gazas. The first
is the Gaza of the
Palestinian people; of men, women and children who wish to work, play and live
in peace; the Gaza we see on our TV screens; today a place of genuine pain and
suffering.
But there is a second Gaza, subterranean Gaza. It is
a web of hundreds of fortified tunnels, constructed for smuggling weapons and
cross border attacks. It is a massive complex of thousands of storage basements
and bunkers, below schools and mosques, filled with tens of thousands of
launchers and missiles, whether short-range rockets constructed in Gaza, with
electricity provided by Israel's power plant in Ashkelon, or long-range weapons
shipped in from Iran on boats, like the KLOS-C intercepted by Israel earlier
this year. It is a network of terrorist leaders, many trained alongside
Hezbollah and other terrorists in Iran, now returned, taking up their cowardly
positions in command centres within and below the heart of civilian areas, and
most cynically of all in the basement of Shifa, Gaza's central hospital.
It is from this second Gaza, this Gaza of below, that
over 1000 rockets have been fired on Israel in the past week, over 11,000 since
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. As the number of missiles has risen, so has
their range, so that today more than 3.5 million Israelis are within reach, and
must live their lives within seconds of bomb shelters.
The dilemma that Israel has faced this past week is
simply put. How to confront that Gaza of below, without causing unnecessary
anguish to the Gaza of above? Simple to put but agonising to resolve,
particularly when the clear strategy of Hamas has been not only to locate
itself within the civilian population, but also to force that population to
serve as human shields. As Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Al Aqsa TV, the
official Hamas television channel, last week: “The people oppose the Israeli
fighter planes with their bodies alone... We, the [Hamas] movement, call on our
people to adopt this method in order to protect the Palestinian homes.”
Israel's response to Hamas provocation has been
twofold. First, it sought to avoid confrontation altogether. For years
residents of Israel's south have lived with the threat of terrorist attacks,
while Israel has limited its response to building shelters and developing Iron
Dome, a passive missile defence system which shoots down rockets after they
leave the Gaza Strip. Even over the past three weeks of continued escalation,
Israel's repeated message to Hamas was to step back from the brink. Quiet would
be met with quiet. Yet Hamas was bent on escalation. In the seven days before
Israel reluctantly decided to launch Operation Protective Edge, Hamas fired an
average of seventeen rockets per day.
Second, when it could fail to respond no longer,
Israel made strenuous efforts to focus its attacks on the terrorist
infrastructure, successfully targeting 3000 rockets and 800 missile launchers.
At the same time it took extraordinary measures to limit the damage to the
civilians above and around these targets. One is hard-pressed to find an
example of another conflict in which a military used phone calls, text
messages, leaflets, and warning shots to alert residents to impending strikes.
Where civilians remained in spite of these measures—often under instructions
from Hamas—attacks were frequently aborted.
Notwithstanding these efforts, there has been a heavy
civilian toll on the Palestinian side. Since Israel uses its arms to protect
its civilians, whereas Hamas uses its civilians to protect its weapons, there
has been a predictable asymmetry of casualties. But proportionality is not a
tit-for-tat numbers game. Only perverse logic would deem Israel's actions more
proportionate if Israel allowed more of its civilians to be killed.
Proportionality is measured with regard to the threat one faces. In Israel's
case this threat is a stockpile of thousands of rockets and missiles, threatening
the bulk of Israel's population, in the hands of a terrorist regime committed
to Israel's destruction.
Two Gazas. The Gaza of above is held tragically
hostage to Gaza of below. But there is a third Gaza: the Gaza that could have
been. In 2005 Israel uprooted more than 8000 Israelis and more than twenty
settlements from Gaza, in the hope that Gazans would build a prosperous
society, with tourists flocking to its beautiful beaches and agriculture
flourishing in the greenhouses Israel left behind. Since then the greenhouses
have been smashed and Gazan society brutalised by the Hamas regime.
When this terrorist regime is finally disarmed and
dismantled, this third Gaza may yet become a reality.
Daniel Taub is Israel's
Ambassador to the United Kingdom
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