Battleground Gaza

THE Hamas militant group’s stunning incursion into Israel has triggered a fierce retaliation from Tel Aviv, which was for once caught off guard despite its much-envied intelligence and counter-terror network. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his security cabinet’s decision to destroy Hamas’ ‘ability to govern in a way that posed a threat to Israeli civilians’, while military spokesperson Jonathan Conricus has stated that one of Israel’s goals is to remove the militant group from power in the Gaza Strip, which is now under siege. Meanwhile, Hamas has declared that it wants to liberate all Palestinian prisoners from Israel and end Israeli provocations in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, particularly at Al-Aqsa mosque. The mosque compound, a perennial flashpoint in Jerusalem, had witnessed clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli police in April this year.

Even as the US-led West and India have condemned the ‘terror attack’, the Arab world has largely made a guarded response. Iran’s pronouncement that it will ‘stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem’ has led to intense speculation about its role in the audacious assault. The escalation of hostilities is bad news for West Asia and the world at large, which is already reeling under the upheaval caused by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Israel, which is not known for losing sleep over the international reaction to its high-handedness, is going about its task in a typically ruthless manner. The Hamas strike certainly cannot obscure the larger picture: Israel has kept the conflict alive all these decades with its continued occupation of Palestinian territories. Tel Aviv’s efforts to normalise diplomatic and trade relations with Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are in stark contrast to the excesses it has been perpetrating against Palestinians. Israel has the firepower to come out on top this time, too, but its victory will be a pyrrhic one as long as it does little or nothing for the sake of long-term peace in the troubled region.

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