As Israel reels from a shock Hamas assault that claimed 1,200 lives, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has vowed to wipe the Palestinian militant group “off the face of the Earth.”
A wartime cabinet has been formed to lead the Jewish state through a widely expected ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, and uproot Hamas from the isolated Palestinian enclave it’s ruled for 16 years.
Already, Israel has unleashed thousands of airstrikes and imposed a siege, cutting off power and water.
Public pressure to avenge slain Israelis, many of them unsuspecting civilians including children and elderly people snatched from their homes, as well as partygoers ambushed at a music festival, is immense.
The carnage has Israelis thinking primarily about how to restore their sense of safety. Officials say they’ve moved from a policy of managing Hamas to destroying the group, which is designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union, so it can never attack Israel again. Yet, history suggests that approach will not bring peace.
Hamas didn’t exist when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and its late leader Yasser Arafat, who’d used the country as a springboard for cross-border operations.
The PLO left but from that war was born the Lebanese militant group now known as Hezbollah. Hamas itself was founded in 1987, around the start of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli occupation.
Gaza is among the most densely populated places in the world, with some 2 million people living in a 140-square-mile strip. Egypt and Israel control its borders. Whether or not they support Hamas, Gazans have nowhere to go.
Repeated aerial wars on Gaza have killed thousands over the years but failed to crush Hamas or the Palestinian quest for statehood. A ground invasion, with Israeli soldiers going house to house on Hamas’s home turf, risks turning into a bloody quagmire.
It’s a tragic cycle familiar to Middle East observers.
“If they just go in and kill the Hamas operatives of today,” said Seth Moulton, a US Congressman who served four tours as a US Marine in Iraq, “you could well have twice as many tomorrow.” — Lin Noueihed