The analysis by Federico Punzi, editorial director of the daily Atlantico
A rain of almost a thousand missiles hit Israel in just over 24 hours from the Gaza Strip, controlled for 15 years by a terrorist organization: Hamas. It targeted important and populated cities, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Most of the missiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome defense system, which numerous videos shared on social media show in action over Israeli skies. Only thanks to this system Israel has avoided counting a higher number of victims, but from a military point of view the impressive number of launches has a precise logic: to send Israeli defenses into a tailspin and penetrate the shield.
In the few cases in which this has happened, the missiles of Hamas (and of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) – the least rudimentary of Iranian manufacture and origin – have shown all their destructive power, believing those who insist on considering them little more than toys. They destroyed houses, schools, buses, caused deaths and injuries.
Hamas’ aggression qualifies as doubly criminal. On the one hand, because its missiles are not directed at military targets, but indiscriminately target population centers. Secondly – perhaps even more serious – because Hamas has disseminated launch positions and missile depots in the inhabited centers of Gaza. And we remember that according to the Geneva Convention it is a war crime not only to deliberately target the population and civilian objects without any military or strategic value, but also to launch attacks from residential areas and transform hospitals, schools and places of worship into weapons depots, thus making them military targets.
The difference between a democratic state like Israel and an unscrupulous terrorist organization like Hamas, unfortunately often ignored in the news and in the analysis, is precisely this: Israel defends its citizens and does everything to avoid civilian casualties in its attacks, while Hamas it does everything to kill Israeli civilians and uses Palestinians, even better if children, as human shields, to gain propaganda success by diverting international outrage over civilian victims to Israel. Incidentally, Jack Dorsey kicked Donald Trump off Twitter, but Hamas leader Ismail Haniyyeh is free to celebrate the bombing of Tel Aviv and call for jihad in the streets on his platform…
Not just the launch of hundreds of missiles. Part of Hamas’ strategy seem to be the riots that broke out yesterday evening – in the style of Black Lives Matter and Antifa in the USA – in various Israeli cities (Lod, Rahat, Qalansawe, but also Haifa and Jerusalem). Organized Palestinian militants attacked and set fire to, including using Molotov cocktails and automatic weapons, police stations, synagogues and Jewish neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, as always, in the declarations arriving from Western capitals inviting “both sides” to de-escalate, or in the headlines of the mainstream media reports, an hateful moral equivalence echoes, it is hard to recognize a distinction between the aggressor and the assailed. defends, the causal chain of events is not correctly reconstructed.
The planning of the double offensive – from the outside, missile, and from the inside, jihadist – by Hamas is evident.
When the president of the Palestinian Authority Abbas announced the decision to postpone the elections (the first in 15 years) to a later date, Hamas called the Palestinians, especially in East Jerusalem, to revolt against Israel, in order to show with facts about his leadership and Abbas’ weakness, taking advantage of some favorable circumstances: the ongoing protests for the eviction of some Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the explosive concomitance of three extremely conflicting events on 9 May. Jerusalem Day, a national holiday in which Israel celebrates the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967; the anniversary of the revelation of the Koran for Muslims at the end of Ramadan; and, as if that weren’t enough, Iran’s “Jerusalem Day”,
Not surprisingly, Hamas intended to run for elections which were then postponed with a list called “Jerusalem and our destiny”. He hoped to make Jerusalem the main theme of his electoral campaign, promising to continue the fight against Israel “until the liberation” of the holy city. Once the vote was postponed, she did not give up her resolve and went to great lengths to present herself as the paladin of the Palestinian Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the only group to keep its promise to fight for Jerusalem while the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah proved unable to do so.
Hamas has thus taken center stage, lighting the fuse of hostilities and dictating the timing of the escalation.
The clashes near the Al-Aqsa Mosque between Israeli and Palestinian law enforcement agencies, mostly Hamas militants, as can be seen from the flags visible in the videos, were just a cleverly pre-packaged pretext. The “mostly peaceful” Muslim faithful had arrived, as well as with the flags of Hamas, with stones, bars and Molotov cocktails, they transformed the esplanade into a battlefield and the mosque into a fortress.
But the reading of the events in progress would be incomplete without considering the regional context. Main sponsor and supplier of arms to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iran, which the Biden administration has re-legitimized as an interlocutor, opening without preconditions for the re-entry of the United States into the agreement on the nuclear program. Turkish President Erdogan blowing on the fire and standing up as champion of the Palestinian cause to claim the leadership of the Sunni Muslim world and reassert the centrality of Ankara by leading diplomatic efforts to silence the weapons.
It is unthinkable that behind such a large-scale attack by Hamas (and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) there is no green light from Tehran. Iran uses missiles from Gaza to hit Israel, just as it uses missiles from Yemen to hit Saudi Arabia. What is happening in the region is all too evident: the Biden administration in its early days sent signals of distancing from its allies – Israel and Saudi Arabia – and Iran took advantage of it. It is clear that under the Hamas missiles and the Israeli raids on Gaza, the promising process of the Abrahamic Agreements, favored by the Trump administration and by Riyadh and obviously unwelcome to the Tehran leadership, is also likely to end up undermined, because it shows that peace between Israel and countries Arabs is possible even if the Palestinian question remains open, exploited by the Iranians.
Article published on atlanticoquotidiano.it
