The terrible suffering of the Palestinians, dying in their thousands in the war in Gaza, has shocked the world. But the deaths and devastation have had no effect on the adversaries. The Israelis continue to bomb and strafe Gaza while Hamas expresses no qualms about the murderous attack it launched on October 7 last year, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, provoking the even bloodier Israeli retaliation.
One year after the attack on Israel, Hamas continues to justify its gory incursion. It was an “act of defence”, said Hamas’ head of political relations, Basem Naim, in an interview with the Al Arabiya television channel. Naim argued that Hamas had no choice but to fight, accusing Israel of sabotaging diplomatic solutions to the conflict. He accused Israel of “genocide”.
Casualties
At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
Hamas, which had a well-trained 35,000-strong military wing, has been battered too, losing an estimated 15,000 fighters, says the Washington Post, citing intelligence officials.
Some 2.4 million Palestinians have been displaced in the war.
Some 60 per cent of Gaza’s buildings and 65% of its farmland has been damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.
Nation divided
Israel, even as it carries on the fight, is a divided nation, with friends and relatives of the hostages held by Hamas clamouring for a truce to get them back. Ninety-seven of the 251 hostages remain in captivity. Even Hamas’ head of political relations, Basem Naim, professes not to know their condition.
Israel has its share of displaced people, too, some 70,000 of them forced to leave their homes in northern Israel because of constant shelling by Hezbollah, Hamas’ allies in southern Lebanon.
However, it’s clear where the world’s sympathies lie.
Support for Israel has gone down in 42 of the 43 countries surveyed daily by Morning Consult, a California business intelligence company. The U.S. is the only wealthy nation polled where Israel still has a positive score, it says.
There is bitterness in Israel.
“Do you know why I hate Hamas?” says Hai Bar-El, a human rights lawyer based in Tel Aviv. “I hate Hamas because it forces my children to kill Palestinian children,” he told the Financial Times.
Hamas attacked Israel after careful planning.
Its leader, Yahya Sinwar, told Palestinian business leaders six months before the attack that he was planning a “surprise”.
Multimillion-dollar underground tunnel system
Hamas built an underground tunnel system costing hundreds of millions of dollars, diverting tax revenue collected from Gazans and aid money from Qatar – with the tacit approval of Israeli leaders — to keep the enclave’s economy from collapsing, reports the Washington Post. The Hamas payroll contains 50,000 workers, including teachers, doctors, and sanitation crews; it also pays its fighters, but still, it could afford to build a nearly 500 km-long underground tunnel system that extended nearly 500 km and an arsenal of homemade weapons, says the Post.
Hamas was able to carry out the assault thanks to its patron, Iran, writes Ari Shavet in Foreign Affairs magazine. Iran’s influence, in turn, rests on its links to China, North Korea, and Russia, he adds.
“In the past, Israel’s leaders knew how to shrewdly confront existential threats,” Shavet writes. In 1947, the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion accepted a UN partition plan before launching a war that eventually yielded a Jewish state. In 1967, Israel briefed the White House, 10 Downing Street, and the Élysée Palace before the Six-Day War. In 2000, the then prime minister Ehud Barak initiated the Camp David peace summit.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a war in Gaza without any diplomatic initiative or even a comprehensive strategy, says Shavet.
Israel should have committed itself to a diplomatic process for a just solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he adds.
End of an era
The war in Gaza marks the end of an eight-decade Jewish golden age, during which collective guilt regarding the Holocaust restrained and suppressed anti-Semitism, says Shavet.
It also marks the end of an eight-decade American golden age of Pax Americana that gave the world relative stability, prosperity, liberty and calm, he adds.
Even the upcoming November 6 US presidential election is expected to be affected by the war. Palestinian and other Muslim Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 are reported to be upset by his support for Israel and, therefore, they may not turn up to vote for his deputy, Kamala Harrris.
Though Israel was caught unawares by the Hamas attack, others saw it coming.
“This war won’t end because nobody is willing to blink,” said Thomas R. Nides, the United States ambassador to Israel until shortly before the Oct. 7 attack, reports the New York Times. “In the meantime, everyone is losing — hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians. And it’s truly tragic.”