There Is No Equivalence to Terror

"What we were targeting is an elaborate system of tunnels that spans underneath Gaza, mostly in the north but not limited to, and is a network that the operatives of Hamas use in order to move, in order to hide, for cover."

Lt.-Col. Jonathan Conricus, IDF spokesman

"The talks have taken a real and serious path on Friday."

"The mediators from Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations are stepping up their contacts with all sides in a bid to restore calm, but a deal hasn't yet been reached."

Palestinian official

"[The al-Aqsa Mosque's] sanctity has been violated several times during the holy month of Ramadan [in violations] unprecedented [since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war]."

Sheik Ikrima Sabri, Palestinian cleric

A house was damaged by a rocket in the Israeli town of Sderot on Saturday, May 15    Reuters

It was not the presence of Israeli police whose job it is to maintain order and security on the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary that desecrated the al-Aqsa mosque, but rather the worshipers who piled rocks in the sanctuary, to use to pelt the police as a sign of their respect for peace, law and order. As an alternative to throwing rocks at police, any Jew who would wish to surreptitiously pray on this most sacred of Judaic sites would also be pelted, as might Jews in prayer below the Mount, at the Wailing Wall.

In Israel, as far as international news when clashes between Palestinian and Jews take place as they often do, the aggressors are transformed into the role of victims, and those who are attacked are viewed as the aggressors when they take necessary military measures to protect the safety of all citizens, whether Jew or Arab or any of the other minority groups who live in peace as citizens of Israel. Arabs constitute close to 21 percent of Israeli citizens; a sizeable minority in a country with a total population of 9 million souls.

Most Jews and Arabs are accustomed to living in Israel in recognition that as a democracy it has accommodated itself to multi-religions, customs, social situations and ethnicity and heritage, under a sole system of government and justice. Israel was established as a Jewish state, but unlike the surrounding Arab nations it never mass-exiled those who lived in the area before Partition. Most of the Arab Palestinians who left in 1948 did so with the intention of returning as soon as the combined armies of the Arab states destroyed the nascent Jewish state.

They lost, Israel remained and grew and prospered, taking in an equal number of Jews who were summarily exiled from their ancient domicile in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and other Arab states, their properties confiscated. While citizens of Israel, Palestinian Arabs enjoy equal rights as citizens, yet among them are those who continue to agitate for Israel's destruction, led by incitement by Fatah's Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.

The violence that emanates from the West Bank is not of an organized type similar to that of Hamas-ruled Gaza, however, where Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, as well as other smaller terrorist groups actively pursue a military-strategic assault-type conflict with Israel. As they did on the pretext of caring whether a handful of Palestinian families had a disagreement over squatter-rights on property owned by Jews in an Arab quarter of Jerusalem, or the presence of Israeli police on the Temple Mount.

Hamas ordered Israel to remove Israeli Police from the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary for their presence as PA President Mahmoud Abbas once stated 'polluted' the sacred territory, and to stop proceedings to evacuate the Palestinian families in a strictly neighbourhood issue to be settled by the courts. When Israel predictably ignored the Hamas order, last Monday saw the beginning of thousands of rockets and missiles fired into Israel by the terrorist groups.

Whose convention is to fire those missiles from within crowded civilian urban sites, inviting retaliatory responses from the Israeli military, with no regard for the human life on both sides placed in danger of death. In its response, the IDF messages Palestinians to vacate buildings and areas that are marked for bombing, pausing operations until it is gauged that sufficient time has elapsed for residents to evacuate before levelling the buildings involved; chosen because there is a direct Hamas connection.

 

The remains of the multi-storey Al-Jalaa tower, which was home to various media organizations   EPA

 

News has it that 122 people have died in the violence in Gaza since Monday, with 900 wounded. Israelis are warned by sirens when incoming missiles are detected and they rush toward bomb shelters for safety, though not all apartment buildings have them. Palestinians have no such shelters; their rulers' imperative is not to shelter the population, but to build miles of tunnels for Hamas terrorists to pass through, to store ammunition, and to take refuge from aerial bombardments; civilians are left to their own devices, thus the disparity of deaths between Gaza and Israel. 

 

In comparison, 8 Israelis have so far died in the bombardments. All of those lives lost to an early death by hate-driven violence represent a dreadful human toll irrespective of whose side the deaths are on. Gaza's Palestinian population mourns its dead, a loss from which those who loved them will never recover. Hamas and Islamic Jihad use those deaths for public relations propaganda purposes to elicit sympathy from the world community under the guise of caring for their own while portraying the IDF as the perpetrators, not a military tasked to protect civilians while disarming attackers.

 

About 2,300 rockets have been fired from Gaza at Israel since Monday, while some 1,000 of the missiles were intercepted by missile defences, and 380 fell short, dropping into Gaza itself, sometimes causing casualties among Palestinians. Israel uses its anti-missile defence system when it judges that missiles will fall on urban areas; those missiles seen to fall elsewhere are allowed to fall as long as no human life is in jeopardy.

Image caption Israeli police officers detain a young Palestinian man at the Damascus Gate Image copyright by Getty Images

Clashes erupt in East Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israeli police.

Palestinians are angry over barriers which had been placed outside the Damascus Gate entrance to the Jerusalem‘s Old City preventing them from gathering there after prayers at the Old City’s al-Aqsa Mosque on what is the first night of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Palestinian discontent had been stoked earlier in the day when President Mahmoud Abbas called off planned elections, implicitly blaming Israel over voting arrangements for Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

Hamas - Mr Abbas' Islamist rivals who control Gaza and were running in the elections - react angrily to the postponement.

Violence around Damascus Gate and elsewhere in East Jerusalem continues nightly.

Timeline: BBC