Three weeks after illegally invading, Israel has begun to pull out of Gaza, leaving behind a humanitarian disaster and a very happy Hamas.
Israel says that it has achieved what it wanted to achieve but this is only partly true. What Israel wanted to achieve was to terrorise Palestinians into withdrawing support for Hamas, to destroy infrastructure so the Palestinians can’t support themselves and to cause as much “collateral damage” as they could get away with.
Israel managed to destroy Palestinian infrastructure – half a million Palestinians in Gaza are without water, 4,000 homes have been destroyed, tens of thousands of people are homeless and schools and hospitals have been destroyed. They managed to cause “collateral damage” – over 1,300 dead Palestinians so far and bodies are still being found. But what they failed to achieve – and this was their stated aim – was to defeat Hamas, to take away Hamas’ ability to attack Israel and to turn people away from Hamas.
Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire, Hamas responded with a temporary ceasefire for a week to let Israel withdraw its troops. Does that sound like the actions of a defeated Hamas or a Hamas that is taking the piss, rubbing the IDF’s noses in it? Hamas is far from defeated and the indiscriminate attacks on Gaza and the deliberate targeting of civilians have done nothing to terrorise people into abandoning support for Hamas.
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