Beneath the Veneer of Outrage

"We were supposed to be safe there. Instead, I saw people torn apart, martyred before my eyes. It was a scene from hell."
Dalal al Adhab, Palestinian, Gaza City

"Obviously no one likes to see the suffering and loss of life that has occurred. That said, we hold the terrorist organization Hamas responsible for this. They have initiated and continue this conflict and continue to seek the destruction of the state of Israel."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada

"Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents. Children killed in their sleep -- this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced."
Pierre Krahenbuhl, commissioner-general, UN agency for Palestinian refugees

A Palestinian man, wrapped in his national flag, inspects the rubble of destroyed buildings and houses in the Shejaiya residential district of Gaza City, on July 28, 2014. (photo credit: AFP/MAHMUD HAMS)

Over 100,000 civilians are being sheltered at UN schools across Gaza after they were urged by the IDF to evacuate their homes, situated in areas the Israeli military was scouring for tunnels, for stores of rockets and other munitions cached by Hamas in schools, mosques, community centres, apartment blocks. Under orders from the Israeli military half the territory of Gaza is now under evacuation.

With its notification by leaflets, cellphone messages and other devices, Israel's is the sole military in the world that has ever attempted to defray the loss of civilian life by forewarning civilians of their imminent danger and the need to remove themselves from the target field of combat. And Hamas has distinguished itself by being the Islamist terror group that conspires to produce just such high casualty rates as are occurring through its deliberate placement of launchers and weapons in dense civilian areas.

It is not the sole terrorist group of jihadists or Muslim national military to place their own citizens and co-religionists directly in harm's way, with the intention of slaughtering them en masse to solve the irritating problem of their dissatisfaction with the state of their fortunes under the influence and command of their political masters, however. The world sits mute while Syria's President al-Assad slaughters Syrian Sunnis in their tens of thousands, and raises an outraged protest when Israel defends itself.

To defend itself from the ongoing attacks mounted by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Israel has been forced over the years to enact a blockade to halt the movement of jihadists, weapons and building materials diverted to lining tunnels in the terror war against the Jewish state. It has been forced by murderous suicide bombers to erect a restraining wall. It has been repeatedly forced to enter the hostile environs of a bordering geography to quell incessant rocket attacks against Israeli border communities.

And it has been forced to protect its citizens and its right to exist as a Jewish state, by once again acting out the oppressive aggressor choreographed by Hamas for world attention in the deaths of Palestinian civilians desperately living in conditions that the Islamist terrorists have forced upon them lest they forget their mandated refugee status and harbour stray desires to escape the martyrdom that Hamas has planned for them in the larger interests of international sympathy to their mutual cause.

Moshe Yaalon, Israel's defence minister has vowed, on behalf of his country that the offensive will continue at "full throttle", that Israeli forces were prepared to "deepen our presence into areas we haven't yet entered". If no place in the Gaza Strip, that overcrowded enclave that Hamas has made a virtual prison for Palestinians living there is exempt from Israeli forces' incursion attempting to neutralize jihadis' entry into Israel and rockets firing over its citizens it is because there is little other choice.

It is because Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been so busy focusing on building an immense network of tunnels, of acquiring and storing munitions and rockets, and expending vast sums of international funding to enable all of this, rather than concentrating on building a viable state infrastructure and using the funds and materials to benefit Palestinians' lifestyles and future that there is no place left that hasn't been used for war, not peace.

Gaza City itself is entirely undercut by a vast maze of underground tunnels. Tunnels which in some instances have been devised as a town centre, a command centre, a haven for Hamas members when Israel has been provoked to defend itself, and which lie under hospitals, mosques, schools and neighbourhoods where Gazans live to the best of their ability, hating Israel for making their lives a living misery while expressing gratitude to Hamas for defying their oppressor.

UNRWA, a special creation of the United Nations meant to give succor and support to the suffering Palestinians who have been encouraged to remain refugees awaiting the opportunity to flood back into a geography they remain convinced was wrenched from their possession, has maintained this festering sore of delusion.

Tediously, doggedly, the IDF counters the claims of those whose first instinct is to blame Israel for atrocities. "A short while ago, terrorists in Gaza fired rockets at Israel. One of them hit Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. The other hit Al-Shati refugee camp", reported the IDF. Attempting to correct the initial AFP report that seven children were killed when an Israeli missile slammed the playground, citing a Palestinian doctor at the city's main hospital.

Was there ever a war conducted anywhere in the world where civilians, women and children did not die in numbers greater than the combatants waging that war?