Hamas claims end of Gaza’s siege is in sight
AFTER CLASHES with Israeli forces that claimed the lives of 62 Palestinians, Hamas leaders gave the order at the end of last week to end the violence.
By last Friday, the marches no longer resulted in fatalities.
Hamas was quick to claim victory, with senior leader Ismail Haniyeh saying that “the blood shed during the March of Return achieved its goal” and that, due to international pressure, “the siege on Gaza is beginning to be truly lifted”.
There was at least some truth to this. For the first time in years, Egypt allowed the Rafah border crossing into Sinai from Gaza to remain open for longer than a week — although this had been planned in advance, before last week’s clashes.
There are other reasons for the end, at least for the moment, of the violence on the border.
The large number of wounded — assessed by the Palestinian Ministry of Health at 13,000, most of these from A Palestinian man readying a kite for dispatch over the border
tear-gas but about a quarter from live fire — has placed a great strain on Gaza’s hospitals. It led to criticism of Hamas for instigating the clashes with the Israeli army.
A heat wave in the region and the beginning of the month of Ramadan
have also helped end the violence for now.
And there are reports that the Israeli government warned Hamas, in a message directed via Egypt, that if the violence on the border continued, Israel would return to its policy of “targeted assassinations” of Hamas leaders.
In a rare interview with Al Jazeera, Hamas’s prime minister in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar said that, while it “will continue in the path of popular resistance… we will do everything possible to prevent these demonstrations from spilling into armed action”.
Mr Sinwar is a hardliner, but Israeli analysts believe that in recent months he has taken the pragmatic decision to prevent a further violent escalation with Israel.
However, the lull does not mean that calm has been restored. Palestinians on the border continued taking advantage of the wind and the hot, dry weather to launch flaming kites which set fire to fields on the Israeli side.
On Tuesday, a group of Palestinians managed to cross the border fence from Gaza’s southern region, near Rafah, and set fire to an empty Israeli military position.
Israeli tanks responded by shelling nearby Hamas outposts and, on Wednesday morning, the Israeli air force bombed a Hamas tunnel in northern Gaza and two boats belonging to its naval force in Gaza City’s small harbour.