Why Is Israel Bombing Gaza Again?

"We will continue as long as it takes in order to restore calm for all of Israel's citizens."

"One other thing: I"m sure that all of our enemies around us see the price we are exacting for the aggression against us and I am certain that they will have absorbed that lesson."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

 

"Tensions Rise in Middle East As One Side Wants To Kill Jews And The Other Side Are Jews Who Don't Want To Die And Neither Will Compromise."

The Babylon Bee

Rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip toward Israel on Wednesday. (Hatem Moussa/The Associated Press)

 

This is a determination and an attitude born of no longer wanting to accept a ticking time bomb perched on Israel's border prepared to explode at any time. This is a nation of a people that has been tried and tested far too often by malevolent forces believing it has no human right to exist, bolstered by the silent support of countless others whose visceral hatred of Jews leads them to criticize Israel when it responds to violent provocations threatening the lives of its citizens. Those critics who deny bias against Jewish survival cannot really expect a state constantly attacked by missiles, rockets, suicide bombers, car rammings, knife attacks and violent riots along with incendiary events to do nothing to defend itself.

None of the countries that see fit to urge Israel to curb its response to ongoing rocket barrages that have only one purpose, to kill as many Israelis -- preferably Jews, since a hefty minority of the population is non-Jewish, belying the apartheid label -- as possible, would themselves sit calmly by not bothering to react when missiles fly by and hit random targets like schools and synagogues and apartment buildings in their own countries. Israel has up to the present after over a week of attacks from Gaza, sustained a relatively low rate of deaths and injuries, in comparison to the numbers of deaths and injuries sustained in Gaza. The low-death rate of Jews appears to mystify and bother onlookers from abroad.

And that owes largely to the fact that bomb shelters have been built everywhere in Israel to protect the population from the never-ending grip of Palestinian terrorist attacks. These are terrorists who enjoy their games of delivering death to Jews. All costs related to the weapons used, the rockets and other military equipment, courtesy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in Lebanon, all fostered by, trained and equipped by the Iranian theocracy. If Israel were to wait until "the Arabs love their children more than they hate us", to paraphrase former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, it would be an endless wait.

 

An Israeli bomb squad unit inspects the site where a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit a sidewalk, in Ashdod, Israel, on Wednesday. (Heidi Levine/The Associated Press)

 

For Palestinians who hate Jews and the presence of Israel, are accustomed to teaching their impressionable children from a young age through school curricula, television, songs and family tradition, that Jews are their enemy, and there is nothing finer than to aspire to become a martyr in defence of Palestinian intentions to annihilate Israel so Palestine can be free 'from the river to the sea'. Mothers praise their children who die as 'martyrs' while attempting to or succeeding in killing Jews. They don't speak for the countless others who would prefer to live in peace with their neighbours but fear speaking out and revealing themselves.

Western media appear to exult in framing their reportage around Israeli responses to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad efforts to destroy Jewish lives, as though it is Israel that is the aggressor and Palestinians in Gaza the helpless victims. Gaza Palestinians are indeed victims, but of the ruling Hamas in Gaza who deliberately inflict danger on the population for the greater goal of luring the Israel Defence Forces to bomb civilian enclaves which Hamas uses as shields and props for their missile and rocket launches.

The Palestinians have no bomb shelters to head to. There are only underground tunnels laced below the towns and cities in Gaza, affording protection for Hamas terrorists, their commanders and their foot 'soldiers', where undisturbed, they can produce new rockets and maintain a sizeable inventory of munitions. Civilians can look to their own devices; they are there as fodder for the Hamas public relations machinery that can point out to the international community and the media hungry for sensational 'news', the number of Palestinian women and children that Israel 'targets'.

 

Smoke billows after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City targeted the Ansar compound, linked to Hamas, in the Gaza Strip on Friday.  Mahmud Hams / AFP - Getty Images

 

While Hamas denies bomb shelters for the people they govern even as they use them as human shields, drawing fire toward crowded urban settings like hospitals, schools and mosques, the IDF makes every effort to alert people living in areas where Hamas-linked buildings are located, to advise them to leave before a bomb is dropped. Hamas deliberately targets crowded civilian venues like border towns, as a war crime. Its goal is to terrorize and to kill; that it succeeds in the first instance and less so in the second seems to give Israel an 'unfair advantage' in the minds of its critics; the Israeli death toll is too low to satisfy those who point to the greater number of Palestinian deaths in the carnage that Hamas has brought to Gaza.

When the IDF portrayed itself earlier last week as being on the cusp of an invasion into Gaza, Hamas quickly ordered its commanders and 'fighters' to assemble in the underground tunnel system popularly referred to as "the Metro" by the IDF, where weapons manufacturing, storage, launch sites are installed in a voluminous underground network. From there, they were prepared to launch an attack on IDF troops supposedly entering Gaza.  IDF intelligence is such that it was able to determine these anticipated responses where key tunnel entrances and exits are located, then bombed them to trap those inside, along with their weapons.

Zealously and endlessly digging miles and miles of underground tunnels beneath urban centers and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip may seem at first glance to be a tactical winner, but what it does is destabilize the integrity of large buildings built above ground with an unstable foundation supporting them as a result of the wide-ranging, deep and extensive excavations. The buildings 'destroy' themselves as the ground they're on and the streets nearby collapse when bombed.

 

Thanks to a naive and gullible international population reading spurious headlines reporting on Israel's 'uneven' response to Gaza rockets, people ask: "Why is Israel attacking Gaza again?"

Journalists work near the destroyed Al-Jala'a building, which housed international press offices, and Hamas security offices, following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Saturday, May 15   CNN