Kerry Seeks Cease-fire in Gaza
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry began trying to broker a cease-fire in Gaza this week amid a mounting death toll, as Israel pressed a withering air and ground campaign to wipe out Hamas’s stockpile of rockets and network of tunnels. Kerry met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and was pressing both sides to accept a truce. “We’ve seen too much bloodshed on all sides,’’ Kerry said. More than 650 Palestinians have been killed in 15 days of heavy fighting, and the U.N. estimates that one third of those killed were children. At least 32 Israeli soldiers have died, 130 have been injured, and one was reported missing in action. Hamas has fired more than 2,100 rockets into Israel, but the Israelis say close to 90 percent were intercepted by its Iron Dome missiledefense system. Two Israeli civilians have been killed.
In the offensive, Israeli forces attacked 1,715 rocket-launch sites and other military targets in Gaza, and said they had found and destroyed 23 tunnels, some of them several miles long. The tunnels are used to smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza, to store rockets and weapons, and to hide Hamas leaders. Israel blames Hamas for the civilian deaths, accusing the militants of using women and children as “human shields.” Palestinians say, however, they face Israeli bombs, missiles, and artillery shells wherever they go in Gaza. “Nobody is safe,” said Enas Sisisalem, a mother of two living in Gaza City. “Nobody can flee anywhere, because everywhere is targeted.” Navi Pillay, the U.N.’s top human rights official, said that in deliberately attacking civilian areas, both Israel and Hamas may have violated international law “in a manner that amounts to war crimes.”
“A cease-fire now would help Hamas,” said The Wall Street Journal. Now that it has moved on the ground, Israel must not pull back until it destroys the tunnels and rocket stockpiles used to attack its civilians. “The Israelis are best positioned to judge their progress” in a war Hamas started by raining rockets on Israel.
But what is Israel’s long-term goal? asked The Boston Globe. Netanyahu last week effectively ruled out a two-state solution when he said Israel would never surrender the West Bank, and now seems to lack any real strategy except “retaliation against Palestinian provocations.” Much of the world views Israel’s killing of hundreds of Gazan civilians as “disproportionate” and immoral, and in that sense, “Netanyahu may be giving Hamas exactly what it wants.”
“Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity,” said Charles Krauthammer in NationalReview.com. Since the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas and its supporters have turned the territory “into a massive military base brimming with terror weapons to make ceaseless war on Israel.” In the current conflict, Hamas continues to fire ineffective rockets at civilian targets with the sole purpose of drawing Israeli counterfire. Why? To produce “dead Palestinians for international television.”
Nonetheless, Israelis cannot escape moral responsibility for ruthlessly killing these people, said Martin Longman in Washington Monthly.com. It’s Israel’s policy to inflict “collective punishment” on Gaza for its support of Hamas, and to bomb any home or apartment building deemed to hold even a single Hamas official. “The purpose is to make it clear that belonging to Hamas will cause your family to lose their home and quite possibly their lives.” Calling the civilians “human shields” is a transparent way for Israel to depersonalize them and justify their willful slaughter.
How long can both sides sustain these losses? asked John Cassidy in NewYorker.com. The Israeli Defense Forces are reportedly “surprised and even impressed by the ferocity of the Hamas fighters” opposing Israeli ground forces; no one in Tel Aviv expected to lose dozens of soldiers in this attack. In the face of stiff Hamas resistance, Netanyahu will soon face “the choice of escalating the military campaign or declaring victory and withdrawing.” That gives Kerry a chance to get a cease-fire—though a more meaningful peace deal would require a miracle.
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