ISRAEL’S MORAL DILEMMA
New, sinister security challenge in Gaza strains rules of engagement
At least 60 Palestinians were killed. Another 2,700 were reportedly injured. Among the dead: a double amputee throwing stones from a wheelchair, a 14-year-old girl — her mother said she had longed for martyrdom — and an eight-month-old infant, dead from inhaling tear gas.
Among the wounded was a Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, shot in the legs.
What happened on Monday is as appalling and as horrible as Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s office says it was: “Civilians, members of the media, first responders and children have been among the victims.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau settled on the same, perfectly reasonable tone: “My concern today and the thoughts of the world are on the victims of the terrible violence. Children, journalists, innocents.”
It was the bloodiest day in Gaza since 2014. It appears to be quite true that most of the dead and wounded from Monday’s protests, involving perhaps 40,000 people at 13 locations along the Gaza border, were unarmed Palestinian civilians. Hamas, the bloodthirsty terrorist group that seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a 2007 coup, identified 10 of the dead as members of its feared internal security unit. Another Hamas official said in a media interview that perhaps as many as 50 of the dead were among its members. Saraya al- Quds, the armed wing of the Khomeinist proxy Palestinian Islamic Jihad, identified another three as its own militants.
It appears to be true that only a small minority of the Gazans who flocked to the protests on Monday participated directly in any violent activity. Still, among those who did were hundreds of rioters, some of whom climbed the Gaza security fence at various points along its 60-kilometre course. Some threw rocks or crude explosive devices at Israeli positions. Some burned tires to create billows of black smoke in an effort to obscure efforts to breach the fence and others flew kites containing burning fuel to set fire to farm fields on the Israeli side. More than 400 hectares of agricultural land have been burned in this way in recent weeks.
Around noon on Monday, an Israeli Special Forces unit caught eight men who had managed to breach the security fence. The group opened fire on two approaching Israeli Defense Forces vehicles and threw grenades in their direction. The eight were shot dead. Three more of Monday’s dead were shot and killed while they were trying to cut through the security fence. They were armed with knives and grenades. It is quite true, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, that “every nation has the right to defend its borders.”
It is also rather beside the point now.
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed since the first major “March of Return” protest on March 30. The protests began with Ahmad Abu Artema, a 33-year-old Gazan poet and social-media personality. Artema appears to have genuinely imagined some sort of wholly nonviolent uprising that might lead the poor of Gaza out of their misery and eventually into the welcoming arms of Israelis.
That, too, is beside the point now.
With its Iron Dome technology, Israel has largely succeeded in defending itself against what had been a constant terror of Hamas rockets. With Israel’s $1.1-billion investment in a sophisticated and nearly completed “underground wall” of concrete and sensors, the enormous effort Hamas has expended in building tunnels under the Gaza fence, paid for with funds pilfered from international aid allotments, has been squandered.
What Israel is now facing is a different and far more sinister security challenge. Hamas exists for the sole purpose of doing violence to Israel and to Israelis. By its various blood-curdling pronouncements and exhortations, Hamas had made it clear that what it failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans, piled in heaps along the Gaza security fence.
Until now, the IDF’s rules of engagement in coping with intrusions along the Gaza security fence have been coldly rational, justifiable and quite straightforward. First, shoot to warn. Then shoot to wound. As a last resort, shoot to kill.
Suicidal provocations along the Gaza fence did not begin on March 30, when Artema’s starry-eyed notions of a non-violent uprising went sideways. They have been frequent occurrences ever since Hamas threw out its Fatah rivals more than a decade ago. Back then, Israel established a deadly security zone along the fence.
Since 2005 — until the recent encounters — more than 80 Palestinians had been killed in that zone. Last December, the IDF shot and killed eight Palestinians at a single raucous demonstration at the security fence and over a two-week period nearly 300 Gazans were injured in encounters with the IDF along the fence. It is a messy, bloody business. Sometimes innocents get killed.
Several weeks before the deaths of 15 Palestinians during the March 30 demonstration, Brig.- Gen. Yehuda Fox, commander of the IDF’s Gaza division, warned that if there was a breakdown in the “reconciliation” talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, controlled by the decrepit Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah organization in the West Bank, “they’ll say Israel is the problem. ‘Let’s go to jihad and start a war.’”
In those talks, Hamas made it clear and plain that it had no interest in governing. It was willing to surrender almost all of its authority in Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, but it refused to relinquish its military wing or swear off terror attacks on Israel. Fatah, meanwhile, has played a callous game of brinksmanship, using the suffering of Gazans as its trump cards. By February, roughly 40,000 Hamas employees had already gone months without paycheques. In Ramallah, Abbas stopped paying Israel for the electricity it sends into Gaza by transmission line and also stopped payment for the fuel that runs Gaza’s electrical power station.
Following the attempted assassination of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and the PA’s spy chief Majid Faraj during their April visit to Gaza, the talks have gone nowhere. With all the Arab states except Qatar closing its doors on Hamas, Egypt’s closure of the Rafah border crossing and Hamas losing $20 million a month in revenues from the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, Gaza’s coffers are empty and Palestinians are at their wits’ end. Already struggling from Israel’s decade-long blockade, by March 30 the desperation of Gaza’s 1.8 million people had become unbearable and, as Fox warned, Hamas had found a new way to “go to jihad” and start a war.
That is the predicament Israel is facing. If Hamas persists in luring Palestinians to martyrdom at the Gaza fence, the IDF’s rules of engagement — first shoot to warn, then shoot to wound, then shoot to kill — become morally untenable. An abomination.
It is not right or fair, but this is the dilemma and it is Israel’s dilemma to resolve.
Hamas had made it clear that what it failed to accomplish with its rockets and tunnels, it is now prepared to attempt with the corpses of young, desperate and deluded young Gazans.