Hamas Terrorist Redoubt in Gaza
"There is a strong international consensus that Israel's prosecution of the war against Hamas should permit civilians to safely evacuate Gaza City and northern Gaza. where Israeli forces have surrounded the territory where Hamas is dug in -- or dug under, better to say, in the tunnels.""This is an acknowledgement that Hamas embeds its fighters and weaponry amid the civilian population, making high civilian casualties inevitable."Father Raymond J. de Souza, journalist, National Post
Palestinians fleeing Gaza city by heading south. AFP |
Gaza
as a region in what the Romans named 'Palestine' denoting the Jewish
province they occupied under Roman domination, is named often in ancient
texts. It was part of Egypt in a period long predating the Christian
era. Most Gazan Palestinians migrated from modern Egypt into a part of
the Middle East that was sparsely inhabited, but where Jews lived and
which began to distinguish itself as a desert that could be made arable
with adequate care and irrigation.
In
the relatively modern era before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when the
combined Middle East armies of the Arab/Muslim countries surrounding the
fledgling Jewish state marched in to destroy it, Egypt had control of
the Gaza Strip; it has a partly contiguous border into the Sinai. In
1967 another war saw Israel take both the Sinai and Gaza. When a peace
accord was signed between Egypt and Israel in 1978, Israel relinquished
the Sinai back to Egypt, but Egypt was not interested in regaining Gaza.
In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.
What followed was a war between Fatah (the governing party in the West Bank)
and Hamas for control of Gaza, and Hamas, waging a brutal war against
the mostly secular Fatah, won the battle, after a majority democratic
vote in 2007, the last one ever held in either the West Bank or Gaza.
With Islamist Gaza and its charter mission to destroy Israel governing
the Gaza Strip, Israel closed its border by blocking Gaza, and Egypt for
its own reasons, followed suit.
In
the wake of terrorist Hamas's latest violent outrage against Israel in
its October 7 invasion of southern Israel at the Gaza border where it
slaughtered 1,400 Jewish children, their parents, raped girls and women,
and took 240 hostages back to Gaza, unleashing an Israeli response that
saw the Israel Defense Forces pounding Hamas positions in Gaza and Gaza
City, the world awakened both to more of Hamas atrocities committed
against Israel, and the resulting plight of Gaza's Palestinian
population under fire.
The
crowded enclave has a population of over 2 million people, and it has
always been Hamas's modus operandi to install its rocket launch sites
and weapons depots in or close to hospitals, multiple dwellings, schools
and mosques. Israel sent out copious messages by cellphone, pamphlets
and other means to persuade civilians to leave areas where Hamas forces
are concentrated. The result is a huge population of internally
displaced people in a tight geography.
The
creation of a humanitarian situation of grave order. One that could be
handily solved if any of its neighbours were to open their borders to
absorb the Palestinians. Egypt's huge population of over 100M could
readily absorb a million Palestinians. Jordan, already comprised of a
population 2/3 Palestinian, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq and Syria could
absorb the rest. Oh, right, Syria has slaughtered tens of thousands of
Palestinians in its civil war. Oh, right, Jordan too slaughtered
Palestinians during Black September.
The
original 'refugees', numbering about 850,000 in 1948 at the creation of
the State of Israel, could have been absorbed by neighbouring Arab
nations without much trouble at all. They weren't for several reasons;
one, because no other country wanted them; they meant trouble as a
restive, angry, 'victimized' vengeance-wrought people, and two, keeping
them in the position of 'refugees' and encouraging them to vent their
violent spleen at the Jewish State served the Arab states well in their
rage over a non-Muslim nation within a Muslim Middle East.
Elsewhere
in the world ongoing wars in Africa, in Latin America, continue to
create refugees. Whom neighbouring countries tend to absorb.
Alternately, under the auspices of the United Nations, they are
eventually absorbed by other UN nations willing to accept them. Millions
of Syrians, displaced by the civil war engaged by the Syrian regime
against its own, have been absorbed worldwide. As have been Ukrainians,
fleeing the onslaught brought to their country by Russia.
The
United Nations preferred to become complicit with the Arab/Muslim
countries that refused to absorb the Palestinians, and created a
permanent UN force to focus on the plight of Palestinian refugees,
providing endless financial aid as well as administrative. At the same
time as 850,000 Palestinian Arabs fled, a like number of Arabized Jews
who had lived for millennia in Arab countries were summarily expelled
from Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Libya and
other Middle East and North African countries.
Iraqi Jews flee as refugees to Israel |
Most
of them fled to Israel, others migrated elsewhere, penniless, without
possessions, their properties confiscated by the Arab nations expelling
them in anger over the creation of the State of Israel. No United
Nations mission was created to tend to their needs; their struggle to
survive and to make new lives for themselves was theirs alone, excepting
the aid given them in Israel.
Labels: Hamas Governing Gaza, Israel Defense Forces Reaction, Palestinian 'refugees', State of Israel, Terrorist Hamas Invasion of Israel
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