Meeting the Challenge

"The fanatics who rule over Gaza with an iron fist cannot resist the opportunity to stir up anti-Jewish violence for their own political gain."

"If innocent Jews and Muslims die in the process, all the better for them."

"The pretext for the latest missile barrage is the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem, where a long-running legal dispute was scheduled for a court hearing."

"It is the kind of situation that would be handled by a local municipal court in any other country and there would be no public interest."

Bassem Eid, Palestinian human rights activist, Jerusalem

"In the last 24 hours, we have attacked underground targets. Hamas thought that it could hide there but it cannot hide there [in their underground tunnel system]."

"Hamas senior officials think that they can flee from our strikes — they cannot flee. They are paying, and will pay, a very heavy price for this."

"This is not yet over. We will do everything to restore security to our cities and our people."

"The IDF have already attacked hundreds of targets and we will soon pass 1,000. We are continuing to strike Hamas while defending our citizens." 

"We have no bigger threat now than these [internal] pogroms [where Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews in roaming gangs in mixed-residential cities threaten, stalk and commit violence], and we have no choice but to restore law and order via determined use of force."

"Nothing can justify an Arab mob assaulting Jews, and nothing can justify a Jewish mob assaulting Arabs."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Israeli soldiers walk around tanks in a field near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, on its Israeli side May 14, 2021. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad began to target Israel on Monday, claiming they were reacting to Israeli police presence on what is called by Muslims the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews the Temple Mount. Long before Muslims built their places of worship on the Temple Mount, it housed two iterations of the Temple of Solomon, the first destroyed by Babylonians (the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar) in 598 BCE, the second in the year 70 AD by the Roman Emperor (to-be)Titus.

 

Israeli police are there to maintain order and security. The Jordanian Islamic waqf administers the affairs of the Noble Sanctuary and its Islamic religious site, by agreement with Israel, as a courtesy to the third holiest site in the Islamic tradition where the Prophet Mohammed was said to have mounted to heaven on his winged horse, but nowhere in the Koran is Jerusalem ever mentioned as having any standing in Islam whatever. Although the Temple Mount is the most sacred site in Judaism, located in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state, Muslims will not permit Jews to worship or to pray on the Mount.

Yet praying below the Mount, on the rampart remnants of the ancient Temple, named the Wailing Wall (in memory of the catastrophic destruction of the Temple and the slaughter of Jews of the era in an uprising against Roman rule) will not be permitted. The very presence of Jews walking about on the Mount where Muslims gather to pray creates riots and stone-throwing at Jews should they make any gestures that appear as though they are praying. In the latest controversy, Muslims carried stones and rocks into the al-Aqsa mosque, weaponizing it against the police presence.

Hamas ordered Israel to remove the police, otherwise they would send rockets into Israel. And they did, an estimated two thousand rockets hitting border communities and reaching into central Israel and its coastline communities. Barrages of 130 rockets at a time in a space of mere minutes kept the IDF's missile defence  Iron Dome system busy, even as an estimated one-quarter of the Hamas rockets misfired and fell back into Gaza. More recently, Israel massed troops on the border between Israel and Gaza and began destroying tunnels.

On Thursday night the IDF flew roughly160 aircraft from12 squadrons in 150 operations to hit the underground tunnels in the northern Gaza Strip. Ground forces, artillery and armoured troops of the Israeli army were deployed along the Gaza fence, firing hundreds of artillery shells and dozens of tank shells on targets in the Strip. Miles of the Hamas underground tunnels were partially destroyed. The tunnels serve many functions, from smuggling weapons into Gaza, giving Hamas terrorists furtive ingress to Israel, and providing shelter on such occasions when Israel retaliates against Hamas bombardments.

 

Tellingly, one of the tunnels was found to contain servers and military equipment. "The tunnel shaft was located adjacent to a kindergarten and a mosque, proving once again how the Hamas terror organization deliberately places its military assets in the heart of densely populated civilian areas. The IDF takes all possible precautions to avoid harming civilians during its operational activities", the IDF declared in a public statement.

 

The violence in the occupied West Bank marked a widening-out of the conflict following days of hostilities   Getty Images