THE MOUNTAINEER

Edison L. Baddal

Defending territorial integrity
(First of two parts)

The Gaza-Israeli war has already caused a lot of damage in Gaza city with the hapless civilians taking most of the brunt since December 27,2008.Casualties increased and destruction worsened when the Israeli Defense Forces launched its punitive ground offensive on January 3, 2009.

As of the latest count, several hundred Gazan lives, including women and children, have been lost. As Hamas gunmen are operating mostly in crowded areas and insidiously using people as shields, civilian casualties and properties reduced to smithereens could not be avoided.

For the Israelis, the war was inevitable even before the blow-up owing to the fact that Hamas militants have been provocatively firing Qassam rockets, mortar shells and bombs into southern Israel without let-up ever since the middle of 2007. Ashkelon City is the prime target of the bombs.

For 2008 alone, about 3,200 rockets have been fired by Hamas into Israel which could reach more than 4,000 if those fired from June,2007 up to January,2008 are included. Nonetheless, the truce between Hamas and Israel from June,2008 up to December 19,2008 following a small-scale fighting in February-March,2008 failed to stop Hamas militants from firing rockets into Israel.

It is on account of the unwarranted provocations that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a journalist on November 11,2008 this: “The question is not whether there will be a confrontation, but when it will take place, under what circumstances, and who will control these circumstances, who will dictate them, who will know how to exploit the time from beginning of the ceasefire until the moment of confrontation in the best possible way.”

He intimated this after Israel ’s incursion into southern Gaza on November 4,2008 wherein Israel destroyed many tunnels through which arms are smuggled into Gaza . These tunnels are subtly hidden beside the Gazan southwest border with Egypt, notably along the Philadelphi route and in several coastal towns along the Meditterranean sea on the North and Northeast borders of Gaza .

Ehud’s statement was well-grounded as Hamas obviously exploited the six-month ceasefire as evidenced by a lot of arms that have been smuggled into Gaza during the period. In fact, some 20,000 gunmen have been secretly armed by Hamas during the ceasefire.

Meanwhile, when Hamas first fired rockets into Israel in mid-2007, it was in the midst of a violent internecine conflict with its rival Fatah faction. The fighting between the two anti-Israeli rivals within Gaza started in January, 2007 and extended up to the middle of that year when a power-sharing scheme between them broke down due to irreconcilable ideological differences following a Hamas major electoral victory on January 25,2006.

Subsequently, the retaliatory strike fired by the Israelis against that initial Hamas salvos started the intermittent tit-for-tat skirmishes between Hamas and Israel. These skirmishes, which sometimes involved cross border raids and punishing incursions, intensified after Hamas took complete control of Gaza during the elections of June 14,2007 which it won easily.

At this point, perhaps the primary goal of the IDF is not to punish the whole Gaza population but to stop once and for all the Hamas militants and other militant organizations in Gaza from firing rockets or mortar bombs into Israel. Attendant thereto is the complete destruction of all covert Hamas military installations and structures which the latter is using to store arms and ammunitions.

Another goal might be to neutralize any attempt by the Hamas to prejudice a plan by the Israeli authorities to forge a permanent peace agreement with the moderate Fatah group led by Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas. Incidentally, Israelis desire a peaceful elections on February 10,2009 and a spoiler role of the Hamas and other Gaza militant groups on the significant national occasion is out of the question.

At the moment, the increasing casualties among the civilians are being deceitfully used by the Hamas to get the sympathy of the western media and western nations. It seems to be succeeding in this as the western media and several western leaders, including enlightened Arab leaders, are earnestly calling for a ceasefire with the support of the UN. Hamas is hoping that increasing international pressure on Israel may yet persuade it to halt its punishing ground offensive.

If this happens, the war will result in a strategic stalemate just like the 34-day Hezbollah-Israeli war in mid-2006.Surprisingly,Israelis are being blamed for the widespread shortage of food supply in Gaza which, on the whole, is part of the machinations by the Hamas to court world sympathy. What is baffling is that tendentious as the western media and leaders are, they are only focused on the grim consequences of the turmoil in Gaza without considering who started the war, how it started and why the war came about in the first place.