Striking Targets

Israel has instructed its military armed forces to strike at the munitions depots, command posts, and homes of Hamas commanders in an exasperated effort to put a stop to the interminable barrage of rockets fired over the border from Gaza into Israel. The residents of Sderot, a border town that has been particularly vulnerable to attack, and whose residents are given a 16-second warning siren alert to dispatch themselves to bomb shelters, are hoping that their ongoing nightmare will finally come to a halt.

A picture taken from the southern Israeli Gaza border shows a rocket being launched from Gaza into Israel on July 11, 2014/Photo Menahem Kahana/AFP

Israel has launched over 700 aerial sorties over Gaza, attempting to hit back at the launching pads of those rockets, hoping to be able to dispatch to oblivion the commanders in charge of units tasked with lobbing those rockets at Israeli citizens. Hamas considers Israeli citizens legitimate targets since they are citizens of an 'enemy' Jewish State that Hamas is determined to obliterate from the geography of the Middle East.

And there's an odd fear at work here, in attempting to 'persuade' Hamas to cease and desist. They will never cease and desist until their goal has been reached; they will periodically agree to halt their fire and a semblance of peace will result, although their fellow terror group Islamic Jihad will continue to send rockets over to Israel, and Hamas will sit complacently by, awaiting a more auspicious time for another all-out assault of their own.

Israeli authorities look on Hamas as a dire threat to Israel and its citizens. But they have the practical lesson of reality in history unfolding that they observed each time a Middle East dictator was removed, and the anarchic chaos that resulted with the unleashing of ancient enmities between Islamic sects, and invariably another group would be led to power and that alternate would often be worse than the tyrant that was deposed.

This is what Israel thinks of; better the evil they know than one whose atrocious actions would make them long for the return of the departed evil? There is nothing simple about an organized, well trained and armed military facing off against an elusive enemy that installs itself within the midst of a civilian population in effect daring those they attack to counter-attack in the knowledge that the state will be condemned while the terror group will be deplored.

Israel now, as it has done before, alerts households whose structure they consider the family home, albeit of a terrorist commander, so they may escape the building before it is destroyed by them. Most respond by leaving, with huge regret and pain at the loss of their home. Hafez Hamad an Islamic Jihad member, chose somehow not to leave. The love of martyrdom and the honour it brings in that society conspires to persuade some to leave themselves vulnerable.

"I was in the house and ran outside after hearing the explosion and saw his body lying in a pool of blood", said a 22-year-old cousin afterward of this second attempt on the life of his family member, this one successful. Operation Protective Edge, while meant to protect Israel and its citizens, also takes pains to attempt to protect Palestinians from death, by warning them beforehand to leave a target.

Bearing in mind the hundreds of sorties that have taken place with rockets most often precision-directed, finding their target, far more people in Gaza might have found death than the number now approaching 100, had the IDF not been given firm orders to avoid civilian deaths. One strike was videoed as aborted when the pilots of a plane prepared to hit its target saw children at the site to be bombed.

As for Mr. Hamad; one of his relatives claimed the attack had been sudden, while Khaldun Hamad, another relative, stated that a warning shot had been fired at the roof of the house, a typical advance warning. One young Gazan mother said she tries to assure her three children about the frequent explosions from air raids and rocket launches:

"I've told them that it's thunder and flares being fired. But now it's happening so often, it's become hard to convince them."