Editorial
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
""We are very violent," Lieutenant Colonel Amir, commander of an Israeli combat engineers unit, admitted as he explained that he will use any method to prevent casualties among his troops. Meysa a-Samuni would not disagree. She is the 19-year-old survivor of the shelling of a house in the Zeitoun district of Gaza in which 30 people died, six of them members of her family. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs would not disagree either. It told us how Israeli soldiers had rounded up 100 Palestinian evacuees and put them in the house, which then was shelled, although the UN stopped short of saying the shelling was deliberate. But it did accuse soldiers of preventing the Red Cross from evacuating the wounded for three days. A few doors away, four children were found cowering next to the body of their dead mother....
....But the governments who let the Gaza campaign continue by undermining calls for an immediate ceasefire, are just as responsible. They, too, have Palestinian blood on their hands....
...Hamas are still intact as a military organisation. They continue to fire rockets, and have started to attack Israeli fixed positions around Gaza City and the major refugee camps. If Israeli forces retreat, their leaders face awkward questions in an election campaign about what has been achieved. If they press on, they face equally searching issues: what can further military action do to change Hamas's calculation that they are withstanding and enduring? War has its own momentum, and if the endgame is the dismemberment of Hamas, there is only one way to do that - house-to-house fighting and reoccupation.....
...And yet Israeli leaders are as disunited about the goals as they are unclear about how to achieve them. They have tactics but lack strategy. The death toll could triple and they could be in the same position this time next week."
The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009
""We are very violent," Lieutenant Colonel Amir, commander of an Israeli combat engineers unit, admitted as he explained that he will use any method to prevent casualties among his troops. Meysa a-Samuni would not disagree. She is the 19-year-old survivor of the shelling of a house in the Zeitoun district of Gaza in which 30 people died, six of them members of her family. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs would not disagree either. It told us how Israeli soldiers had rounded up 100 Palestinian evacuees and put them in the house, which then was shelled, although the UN stopped short of saying the shelling was deliberate. But it did accuse soldiers of preventing the Red Cross from evacuating the wounded for three days. A few doors away, four children were found cowering next to the body of their dead mother....
....But the governments who let the Gaza campaign continue by undermining calls for an immediate ceasefire, are just as responsible. They, too, have Palestinian blood on their hands....
...Hamas are still intact as a military organisation. They continue to fire rockets, and have started to attack Israeli fixed positions around Gaza City and the major refugee camps. If Israeli forces retreat, their leaders face awkward questions in an election campaign about what has been achieved. If they press on, they face equally searching issues: what can further military action do to change Hamas's calculation that they are withstanding and enduring? War has its own momentum, and if the endgame is the dismemberment of Hamas, there is only one way to do that - house-to-house fighting and reoccupation.....
...And yet Israeli leaders are as disunited about the goals as they are unclear about how to achieve them. They have tactics but lack strategy. The death toll could triple and they could be in the same position this time next week."
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