The ringtone triggered by the app is alarmingly high-pitched: impossible to ignore. I check it for the tenth time that day - two white rockets about to hit a red skyscraper city.
The ringtone triggered by the app is alarmingly high-pitched: impossible to ignore. I check it for the 10th time that day - two white rockets about to hit a red skyscraper city.
What is unnerving them is that Hamas still has the capacity to fire rockets every day, despite the heaviest bombardment ever undertaken by the Israeli air force. To understand the stated reasoning behind Israel’s relentless onslaught on the Gaza Strip, it’s necessary to realise how the Hamas attack on 7 October is viewed. I was told repeatedly:"This has changed everything." Prime Minister Netanyahu described it as the country's 9/11.
That’s because many Israelis believe there is an objective - the elimination of Hamas - and everything else is secondary. On the beach in Tel Aviv swimmers and strollers told me that they weren’t blind to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, but… How could such a military target be achieved anyway? Is the IDF really going to go down every single tunnel under the Gaza Strip to hunt for every weapon and every insurgent?
Politicians such as Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, and former general turned war-cabinet member, Benny Gantz, have both talked tough about this war possibly running for more than a year. They don’t say what format such a war will take or Israel’s capability to wage it. Should Israel order in its troops, it will be in the full knowledge that it will further lose international support as civilian casualties mount. This is a risk that Israel seems fully prepared to take.
And then there’s the question everyone in the wider region is asking - what will the response be from the Iranian-backed militia, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon? Iran, which backs Hezbollah with finance and training, claims it is up to the militia to take its own operational decisions. But it’s notable that the Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, was meeting the Hezbollah leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah only a few days ago.
Yet while more than 40 Hezbollah members have been killed, the exchanges have been contained - until now at least. As the war games are mapped out, and argued over, a further complication is the plight of the 220+ hostages held by Hamas. The Israeli government says it has twin objectives: smashing Hamas and releasing the hostages. It says it accepts there’s a tension between the two of them. It adds it won’t discuss in public how such tensions are resolved.
The dream of two states, in which Palestinians finally have a country of their own and Israel lives securely, seems as distant and illusory as ever.
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