Israel's war in Gaza

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

After 10 days of aerial bombardment, Israel sent tanks and ground troops into Gaza to keep Hamas from pummeling Israeli cities with rockets and carrying out terrorist attacks via underground tunnels. The tragedy is that innocent civilians on both sides of the border are paying the price, once again, and that military action will not guarantee long-term stability or peace.

There was no way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tolerate the Hamas bombardments, which are indiscriminately lobbed at Israeli population centers. Nor should he.

Well more than 1,000 rockets have fallen on Israel since July 8, and they have reached farther than ever, threatening Tel Aviv and beyond. Only two Israelis have died (a civilian was killed by mortar shells from Gaza as he distributed food to soldiers near the border on Tuesday, and an Israeli soldier may have been killed by friendly fire at the start of the ground offensive), but Israeli citizens are running for cover from incoming rockets. Hamas can't defeat Israelis, so it tries to terrorize them.

Innocent Palestinians are being killed and brutalized: four Palestinian boys playing on a beach; four children playing on a rooftop; a rehabilitation hospital, all destroyed by Israeli firepower. The United Nations says that of the more than 260 Palestinians killed, three-quarters were civilians, including more than 50 children.

Hamas leaders deserve condemnation for storing and launching rockets in heavily populated areas, cynically knowing they will draw Israeli fire to places where civilians live and play.

Military action, however, is not a long-term solution, as Israeli operations in 2012 and 2008-9 showed. Israel seized Gaza in 1967 and withdrew in 2005. It is hard to see how re-occupation would serve Israel's interests.

The best solution remains a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, headed by the Fatah faction, which operates in the West Bank. (Hamas runs Gaza, where 1.7 million Palestinians live.) U.S.-mediated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority failed in April. After that, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, reached a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, which has lost support in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. That moment could have been a chance to erode Hamas' political standing further and boost Palestinian moderates like Abbas.

The agreement created a government that had no Hamas members, reaffirmed the Palestinian Authority's long-standing commitment to living in peace with Israel and would have given the authority a foothold in Gaza. But Israel opposed the reconciliation agreement and, according to Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group, the United States and Europe undermined it, which led to the current crisis.

Without a political strategy, another cease-fire may be the most anyone can hope for at this moment. But Hamas leaders have rejected one proposed in the past week by Egypt and are demanding better terms. Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians suffer the consequences.

Editorial on 07/22/2014