Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, cast their ongoing campaign in the Gaza Strip as a war of justice and retribution against the savagery of Islamist group Hamas, which is responsible for the single deadliest assault on Israel since the Jewish state’s founding. In a shock Oct. 7 raid, militants infiltrated across the fortified border and killed some 1,400 Israelis in numerous town and kibbutzim, while abducting more than 230 hostages.
The latest brutal hit took place Tuesday when Israeli forces dropped bombs on the densely populated Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, ostensibly to eliminate a senior Hamas military commander. But the bombs flattened a whole neighborhood — destroying some 20 buildings, according to local accounts — and killing more than 100 people. My colleagues“I was waiting in line to buy bread when suddenly and without any prior warning seven to eight missiles fell,” an eyewitness, Mohammad Ibrahim,.
“The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial settler ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt,”that was widely circulated on social media and panned by some defenders of Israel as effectively calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state. headtopics.com
One of the reasons there may be an Israeli “preference for moving Palestinians into Egypt” as opposed to ushering in PA control of the territory, observed Zaha Hassan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, at the same panel, is that successive Israeli administrations have capitalized on Palestinian disunity to extend control over the occupied territories and expand settlements in the West Bank.
Paradoxically, even as Israel lays waste to swaths of the Gaza Strip, the need for such an arrangement is only growing more urgent. “No one has any utopian illusions that a diplomatic process which failed to yield a solution for over three decades will suddenly succeed after the deep trauma inflicted on Israel by Hamas’ October 7 attack and the destruction being caused in Gaza with Israel’s resulting war to destroy Hamas,”. headtopics.com