Defending Lives, Dispensing Death

"What is coming will be worse. We need to be ready for a prolonged campaign. We will continue to act aggressively and responsibly until the mission is completed to protect our citizens, soldiers and children."
"Israeli citizens cannot live with the threat from rockets and from death tunnels -- death from above and from below."
"[Israelis would not] end this operation without neutralizing the tunnels, whose sole purpose is killing our citizens. [The demilitarization of Gaza must be] part of any solution, and the international community must demand that."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer inside a Hamas built tunnel with Israeli soldier Lt. Col. Oshik Azouli

"If the terrorist organizations in Gaza think they can break Israel and its citizens, they will come to understand in the next few days that this is not the case."
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon

The Israeli military authorities continue to advance warnings to Gaza's civilian populations to vacate the areas where the IDF next intends to respond to Hamas's ongoing rocket attacks. When rockets are shot off from dense and vulnerable civilian areas that any other militant group other than those in the Middle East and North Africa would seek to protect, like schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings, it is done with the full knowledge that a military response to the attack will strike where people are likely to be hit.

Instead of deliberately keeping their population safe from the harm they inflict upon them, Hamas orders Palestinians to remain where they are, as a direct rebuke to their 'oppressors' seeking to protect their own populations from ongoing attacks; defying them, as would-be martyrs, to send their artillery strikes at people assembled on rooftops where Hamas has ordered them to assemble to demonstrate the level of their courageous loyalty to the cause.

That the cause, the end-cause, is the obliteration of another people's right to live in peace and security in a state of their own, is a mere incidental. While the international community responds just as Hamas has bargained on the basis of similar past situations, in horror at the plight of civilians, looking to Israel as a civilized society to refrain from responding to violent belligerence from an Islamist group bent on its destruction, Israel, often uber-sensitive to blame, does pull back. Not this time.

With Hamas accelerating both its rhetoric and propaganda and its rocketry assaults and attempts at incursions by its terrorist militias into Israel, Israel actually has little option but to continue its efforts to destroy the serpent's fangs' poisonous intentions. Methodically striking to destroy rocket caches, and to blow up the infiltrating tunnels, Israel forges ahead in its dogged pursuit of emasculating Hamas. Even as Hamas religiously seeks out the 'traitors' in their midst to destroy the lives of 30 Palestinians they claim have given vital information to Israel.

Ruling by terror; a double terror, one imposed upon a population that has little choice under a brutal theocratic tyranny, and imposing terror upon the population of a neighbouring country. There would be no self-protective 'occupation' by a country that would far prefer to focus its attention, its treasury and its peoples' innovative skills on peaceful pursuits in advancing the fortunes of the country, had there not been a pressing need to secure security in the reality of a raging hatred seeking to destroy the nation.

"His threats do not scare Hamas or the Palestinian people and the occupation will pay the price for the massacres against civilians and children", responded Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri defiantly.  The text messages and telephoned calls to residents of northern Gaza including Shijaiyah, site of the war's worst battles last week, urges people to leave their homes, moving closer within Gaza City. This is the Palestinian version of bomb shelters; to pack more densely into areas not being shelled.

Israeli soldiers discover the entrance to a tunnel believed to belong to Hamas in southern Israel near the border with Gaza, on July 23, 2014. Photograph: Xinhua/JINI/IDF via Zuma Press

And it is a deliberate choice; rather than build shelters to protect the population whom they incessantly place in harm's way by attacking another country, the attention, time and funding along with scarce construction materials is all invested in tunnels in which to store munitions, sieve through ammunition and munitions and fighters, and give haven under fire to those members of Hamas who consider themselves not quite as expendable as those they cite with pride as their honoured martyrs.

Hamas has its principles; absent, however, logic and morality, two generally profoundly integral parts of the very notion of principle. Before it will consider the cessation of rocket attacks and attempts to infiltrate Israel to destroy lives there, it must see that its members who were re-arrested by Israeli authorities be released, and above all, the blockade of Gaza must be lifted. How else will Hamas be enabled to rebuild its rocket arsenal restore its recruiting power and its concrete-lined tunnels?

Israel's demands for a cessation of response to the rocket attacks is equally simple, and it is based on self-preservation as well. As the entity that attacks, Hamas's idea of self-preservation is the need to acquire more weapons. As the object of Hamas's attacks, Israel envisions that its safety and that of all its citizens lies in de-weaponizing Hamas. Which makes more sense?

To a psychopathic mind immersed in the venomous pathology of hate, Hamas claims victory.