The fighting between Israel and Hamas could begin again at a moment’s notice even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government approved a ceasefire following 11 days of deadly conflict with the Palestinian militants.
“Now, what’s going to happen is a few very crucial hours,” an Israeli security official told the Washington Examiner. “We’ll see if Hamas can withstand the temptation of doing a big salvo, a big final barrage of rockets. If they do so, I’m sure there will be a very firm Israeli response. So, we’ll see how the night unfolds.”
Netanyahu halted military operations under growing pressure from the United States and other Western powers, although President Joe Biden and other U.S. officials provided some political cover in the initial days of the clashes. Israel raced to destroy as much of the militants’ military capabilities as possible.
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“We would have wanted more time to strike additional rocket launchers, because at the end of the day, that is what threatens Israeli civilians,” the Israeli security official said. “I think we’ve dealt a severe blow to the support system of the rockets and the manufacturing system, but not enough, in terms of the rocket launchers themselves. And that’s important.”
Hamas claimed victory in the public relations war in the lead-up to the ceasefire. “We’ve seen an unprecedented level of sympathy for our nation,” Hamas Political Bureau member Moussa Abu Marzouk told a Lebanese media outlet on Thursday, according to a Times of Israel translation. “They have now discovered the lie of Israeli ‘victimhood.’”
The conflict erupted in early May amid Israeli efforts to evict several Palestinian families from an east Jerusalem neighborhood, a controversy that Hamas and a second militant group, Islamic Jihad, took as an occasion to launch an unprecedented rocket attack against Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“This round is not like previous rounds,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said earlier Thursday. “The Hamas missile attack on Israel broke out because of a brutal attempt by Hamas to strengthen its political position and to take over the Palestinian agenda and the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.”
Netanyahu responded with an assiduous effort to destroy as much of Hamas’s military capability as possible, but the conflict in densely populated Gaza left Israeli forces vulnerable to international condemnation over civilian casualties.
“I am deeply shocked by the continued air and artillery bombardment by the Israeli defense forces in Gaza,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday. “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza.”
Netanyahu maintained that the Israeli Defense Forces went to great lengths to “minimize civilian casualties” in the conflict. “There has to be a measure of reasonableness in projecting this kind of criticism against the Israeli army that is second to none in seeking to minimize civilian casualties while protecting our own civilians,” he told CBS on Sunday. “If Hamas would simply move these rockets out of the civilian areas, if they moved their command posts out of these homes and offices, then there wouldn’t be any problem.”
Still, Israel’s bombing of an office building that housed the Associated Press and other media organizations, a strike that Israeli officials justified on the grounds that Hamas was also in the building, stoked international outrage, and international aid groups reported that dozens of schools likewise were destroyed in the dueling fusillades.
“Now 61 children have been killed in Gaza, and two in Israel — and the number is increasing every day,” Save the Children’s Jason Lee said Thursday. “The destruction of schools is an abomination. Sites of learning, opportunity, play, and fun for children have swiftly transformed into refuges from the bombing as homes have been destroyed and families ripped apart — and sadly, the numbers of schools being destroyed show that even here, there is nowhere to hide.”
Iranian leaders, who have pledged themselves to the destruction of Israel through their support for Hamas and other “resistance” groups, said this week that Israel faces an intractable dilemma.
“The Americans and the Israelis are stuck between two defeats; if they retreat, they have failed, and if they stand, they have failed, too,” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hossein Salami said, per Iranian state media.
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Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz touted the IDF’s “unprecedented military achievements in terms of forcefulness, precision and strategic importance in the fight against terror groups in the Gaza Strip,” but he acknowledged that the rocket sirens could sound again.
“The reality on the ground will determine the continuation of the operation,” Gantz said, per the Times of Israel.
