Desperate for food, medicine and electricity, it’s easy to see why Hamas have taken to launching missiles at Israel, says AbdulBari Atwan, editor of Egypt’s Daily Al Ahram. But in doing so, they effectively opened the door to “the Israeli massacre”, which has already claimed over 600 Palestinian lives since the conflict began on 27 December. “If you can’t kill a wolf, don’t pull its tail.”
Since withdrawing from Gaza in September 2005, 8,000 rockets have rained down on Israel from the 40 km stretch of land on the Egyptian border. Hamas claims to represent the Palestinians as a ‘resistance people’, but the Israeli government has clearly had enough. It aims to crush, or at least weaken, Hamas and take out its ability to fire rockets at Israel. That’s understandable enough, says Matthew Sinclair on Conservativehome.com. “If France were firing thousands of rockets and mortars, month after month, across the channel at Sussex, wouldn’t you react the same way?”
But, unlike France, Gaza is not a sovereign country, says Avi Shlain in The Guardian. Israeli settlers withdrew in 2005, “but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison.” And since September, the blockade of its 1.5 million inhabitants has got more severe, says Gideon Rachman in the FT, “putting serious pressure on the supply of food and fuel into Gaza”. So, “yes, the rockets must stop. But so must the siege,” writes Deborah Orr in The Independent.
Unfortunately, this is no longer a dispute just between the Palestinians and Israel, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. Iran has been vying with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to become the regional superpower for several years. It has armed both Hamas and Hezbollah, creating “a rocket-armed force on Israel’s northern and western borders”. This enables Tehran to start and stop the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when it wants, “and to paint itself as the true protector of the Palestinians, as opposed to the weak Arab regimes”. As Mamoun Fandy, director of Middle East programmes at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, comments, “The Gaza that Israel left in 2005 was bordering Egypt. The Gaza that Israel just came back to is now bordering Iran.”
And with America very much on the sidelines, the world could “quickly find itself dealing with an alarming escalation in a conflict that is still predominantly parochial in nature”, says Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph. With just days of his presidency left to go, George Bush lacks the thrust needed to bring about a resolution, while “the performance of the European Union (EU) has been especially lamentable”, says The Times. That leaves the next move very much up to Israel. And although there is little doubt that the country was provoked, “isn’t there a strong risk that, far from making them safer, it will subject them to even greater danger in the long term, by heightening tensions in the region”? asks the Daily Mail. “A few more days of fighting and hundreds more dead on the Palestinian side will not enhance Israeli deterrence; it will only undermine the political and moral basis of the operation,” says Israel’s Haaretz Daily.