Making Tunnels Not Peace

"It's horrifying to know so many Palestinians are being killed but there is also a terrible misunderstanding."
"When Hamas attacks through tunnels or rockets, we have no choice but to fight back hard."
Omri Yadlin, president, Sapir College, Sderot, Israel

"The occupation's claim that it found tunnels and seized  it by showing pictures is a complete lie. All the occupation found were underground corridors dug into a training facility that belongs to our group near the border."
Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman, Gaza

An Israeli army officer gives journalists a tour, Friday, July 25, 2014, of a tunnel allegedly used by Palestinian militants for cross-border attacks, at the Israel-Gaza Border. Photo by AP

"It takes us a little bit to our childhood fairy tales of demons."
"It's a very pastoral environment I live in, the quiet, the green grass, the trees. It's not a pleasant thought that you sit one day on the patio drinking coffee with your wife and a bunch of terrorists will rise from the ground."
Eyal Brandeis, 50, political scientist, Kibbutz Sufa

A kilometre away from Kibbutz Sufa, thirteen Hamas terrorists emerged from a tunnel on July 17 at dawn.  Dana Bar-On, who works as a counsellor for epileptic youths, and who lives in a one-room cabin near her Nir Am kibbutz, can point to the meadow where she remembers family picnics: "That's where they came through the tunnel", she said of the July 21 incursion where 11 Israeli soldiers were surprised and killed by terrorists.

"It's kind of surreal how beautiful and normal this place is, considering our location", she mused. "I've never felt so personally threatened and scared", the 27-year-old said. "They're just digging their way up into our homes and they want to kill us." And that's the talk in cafes and playgrounds, on social media and in the privacy of hushed talk at home; nightmare scenarios of armed enemies popping up close to a day-care centre.

Terrorists spraying a crowd of people with a machine gun, or exploding a suicide belt, or grabbing captives and hauling them back into the dirt of the tunnel never to be seen again. This isn't feverish imaginations gone wild. This is a community of people that have lived for years under a steady rain of rocket attacks. Alternately, a community in large urban centres that experienced the horrors of suicide-bombers on buses, in dining halls and restaurants, shopping centres and wherever people in their innocence gather.

That was before the erection of the wall so deplored by the international community. And now that Israel is defending itself once again by the ongoing onslaught of rockets and emerging terrorists from tunnels leading from Gaza into Israel, the world is also appalled that the Jewish state is seriously attempting to eradicate the rockets and the tunnels, in an effort to make life more secure for its population.

Leading 95% of the Jewish population of Israel to express their full support of Operation Protective Edge, feeling it justified and where fewer than 4% expressed an opinion that the military was using excessive force, the results of three surveys undertaken by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University in July.