Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The pot is boiling despite restraint
Trump’s move could have very serious effects
THE worst fighting on the Gaza Strip front since 2014 is being calibrated by Hamas, which wants to signal defiance of Israel and the US while being careful not to trigger a new war for the enclave’s penned-in Palestinians.
Since President Donald Trump reversed decades of US policy by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Palestinians in Gaza have launched 18 cross-border rockets or mortars.
For Israel’s part, though, residents in the south have raised a clamour for harsh retaliation, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has counselled caution and targeted mostly unmanned Hamas facilities in night-time airstrikes.
The careful moves reflect the balancing act maintained both by Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, and the Israeli government, old foes who share a reluctance to go to war again.
Gaza’s neighbourhoods still bear the scars of the destruction caused by Israeli attacks during a seven-week conflict in 2014. In Israel, there is little eagerness to endure the daily sirens warning of rocket strikes.
But ordinary Israelis and Palestinians are keenly aware that even a single incident – a rocket causing multiple fatalities in Israel or Israeli forces killing a militant leader – could set off a conflagration that would be beyond their leaders’ control.
Two Hamas gunmen have died in retaliatory Israeli air strikes and 15 protesters from Israeli gunfire.
“The recent weeks of rockets and Israeli bombardment proved an explosion is possible,” said Gaza political analyst Akram Attalla. “How long will Hamas continue to take Israeli strikes to its positions without a response? And how long will Israel’s Netanyahu tolerate internal criticism? There is no guarantee.”
While there have been no Israeli fatalities or serious injuries in the rocket strikes, farmers in communities close to the Gaza border think twice about tilling fields where they might be exposed and children practise duck-and-cover drills should air raid sirens sound.
“Lately we do feel that there is more presence of the army. We have been told to be more careful, to clear the bomb shelter just in case. You never know when the next rocket will come,” said Hila Fenlon, resident of the farm collective Nativ Haasara.
Hamas has responded to Trump’s move by mobilising mass protests at the border and turning a blind eye to other factions firing into Israel in two weeks of daily attacks, which have tailed off recently.
“This saves face for Hamas, as it appears to be the one that stands behind these protests without the need to go to war,” said Attalla.
A more violent response was tamped down in debate among Palestinian factions who agreed that an armed confrontation could erode the international support Palestinians have won diplomatically and shift attention from the political process.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said no one should underestimate the potential for hostilities to resume under what he called an Israeli occupation, however.
Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the territory in 2005 but remains the conduit for the passage of goods and supplies most of its electricity. Israel and Egypt, citing security concerns, maintain tight restrictions on the passage of Palestinians through their borders with the enclave.
“The situation in Gaza is very difficult and is not tolerable and is doomed to explode,” he told Reuters.
Israel sees an outside catalyst for the violence – Iran, which both Hamas and its sometime ally Islamic Jihad say has pledged unlimited assistance for them as the Syrian civil war winds down. – Reuters