It has to be stated bluntly: Israel’s land and air attacks on Gaza, which began July 8 ostensibly in “self-defense” against Hamas rocket launches into Israel, have clearly gone too far. Israel’s lopsided advantage in military firepower used against the tiny, densely-populated, overwhelmingly civilian Palestinian enclave of Gaza, accompanied with an also lopsided number of Palestinian civilian casualties compared to the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rocket fire, make a mockery of any Israeli pretense of acting solely in self-defense, operating solely because it was provoked by Hamas. Numbers do not lie, and the numbers tell quite another story. According to the New York Times Daily Tally of attacks and death attributable to both sides, as of July 25, 2014, Israel had attacked 3,209 targets in Gaza and killed 856 Palestinians, most of them civilians; by contrast, Hamas had fired 2,233 rockets into Israel, many of them crude, inaccurate and easily intercepted by Israel’s Iron Shield missile intercept system. As a result, only 40 Israeli civilians had been killed by such rockets, and the total number launched as of the 25th were nearly 1,000 fewer than the number of Gaza targets attacked by Israeli forces. Such is not “self-defense” by any reasonable definition of the term.
Nor is the Israeli claim that Hamas is holding the 1.8 million inhabitants of Gaza essentially hostage and using them as “human shields” any more credible than that of “self-defense.” In the one election held to determine the Palestinian government of Gaza, Hamas won, although it was not allowed to govern. Hamas holds Gaza “hostage” because members of Hamas themselves are Gazans, they also live there, same as the non-Hamas population. Essentially they are akin to a guerilla force—and moreover, a guerilla force whose predecessors were financed and encouraged by Israel itself as a religious foil against the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, PLO, and Israel’s then arch-terrorist of the day, Yasser Arafat. Now the PLO’s successor, the Palestinian Authority, or PA, are the “good guys” to the Israelis, while Hamas has become the arch-terrorist of the current day. As Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery mentioned recently in CounterPunch, “If Hamas did not exist, Israel would have to invent it.”
An update on Palestinian casualties a little before 5:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time July 26 from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation put the number dead as at least 1,030, mostly civilians. A hundred bodies alone had been pulled from rubble. By contrast, the number of Israeli military deaths was only 42.
Read More