Fear of another conflict in Gaza, which is delaying replacement of the head of the IDF’s Southern Command, must be kept constantly before the short-sighted eyes of Israel’s government.
Ha’aretz
The escalation in the Gaza Strip over the weekend, in which nine Palestinians were killed, is liable to drag Israel into a military campaign that will overshadow the string of terror attacks on other fronts over the last two weeks.
More than a year after the last operation in Gaza, known as Protective Edge, the basic conditions that prevailed both before it and since its conclusion haven’t changed. The Palestinian Authority is split in two, both geographically and governmentally. Hamas’ eight years of rule over Gaza hasn’t been good for its residents. President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi’s government in Egypt sees Hamas as an enemy. Gaza residents feel besieged and disappointed over the slow pace of reconstruction, and these feelings are fanning the flames beneath a pressure cooker containing almost two million people in a small, crowded territory.
Now, to this pressure has been added Gazans’ sense of solidarity with their brethren in the West Bank, Jerusalem and inside Israel. Some 3,000 Gazans participated in this weekend’s main demonstration, just across the border from Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
According to the army, many of the demonstrators came dangerously close to the border fence in an effort to cross it. One of them threw a hand grenade, which didn’t explode; this was followed by firebombs, which ignited one of the gates in the fence. At that point, soldiers from the Paratroops Brigade responded with live fire. The results were lethal.
For two decades now, ever since the fence around Gaza was built, the Israel Defense Forces has prepared plans and trained for a conflict scenario that would begin nonviolently, but end in fatalities and escalation: a march by Palestinian civilians northward to Ashkelon and eastward to Nahal Oz, Kissufim and Sderot. Not terror attacks or riots, but protests of despair.
Armies are responsible for protecting a country’s sovereignty and repulsing infiltrators. But as is evident from the sight of the refugees now knocking at Europe’s doors, deploying soldiers or armed policemen against a crowd of civilians is pointless and liable to result in unnecessary tragedies.
During both the Arab riots that took place in northern Israel in October 2000 and the navy’s botched raid on a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza in 2010, Israel discovered how quickly a desire to avoid civilian casualties can go wrong and result in multiple casualties. This weekend, it seems the paratroopers also engaged in a mission that spun out of control.
Now, we need a thorough inquiry into the circumstances of the clashes between the army and these Gaza residents. What were the intelligence assessments regarding the number of demonstrators? How did the troops prepare and deploy? What instructions were they given? And how did the troops actually function on the ground?
The fear of another conflict in Gaza, which is delaying replacement of the head of the IDF’s Southern Command, must be kept constantly before the short-sighted eyes of Israel’s government. We need an immediate security dialogue with Hamas, via any available Arab or European channel, to calm the front and intensify efforts to achieve an armistice more durable than the fragile cease-fire of the past year.
