Falcon29
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How the Gaza war changed perceptions
Israel’s 50-day assault on the Gaza Strip last summer stands out, even in the annals of 66 years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. “War is probably the wrong word to describe this staggeringly unequal conflict, given the huge asymmetry of power between them,” says the revisionist Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
“This was not a war in the conventional sense,” Shlaim says. “It was a one-sided massacre.” Amnesty International says that 2,192 Palestinians were killed, more than two-thirds of them civilians. In Israel, six civilians were killed, including one Thai national. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers were killed.
The UN estimates that 108,000 Gazans were made homeless by the war. The seven-year-old Israeli blockade prevents sufficient quantities of cement and building materials entering the enclave. The residents of Shejaia and Khuza’a, districts that were pulverised by Israeli bombardment, were briefly housed in locally manufactured caravans that flooded with the first autumn rain.
UN plans for reconstruction “read more like security plans, carefully laying out Israeli concerns”, the Harvard expert Sarah Roy reports. “Israel will have to approve all projects and their locations and will be able to veto any part of the process on security grounds . . . Not only will the blockade of Gaza be strengthened, but responsibility for maintaining the blockade is in effect being transferred to the UN.”
“Brutal occupation”
The easing of the blockade was a key Hamas demand in the 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 wars. “All these wars were instigated by Israel,” Avi Shlaim says. “All were directed against civilians, and all involved war crimes. They are a direct product of Israeli colonialism, of the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times.”
The war turned Gazans into boat people for the first time since 1948. They escape through tunnels beneath the Egyptian border, then pay traffickers up to $3,500 (€2,800) to board rickety boats across the Mediterranean.
Most of the 500 migrants who drowned on a boat that left Damietta in early September and sank near Malta are believed to have been Gazans. The Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration says that about 2,900 Palestinians reached Italy this year, most during the war.
Israel claims Hamas started the war, because two rogue Hamas militants from Hebron, in the West Bank, kidnapped and killed three Jewish teenagers. Israeli authorities mounted a three-week search operation during which nine Palestinian civilians were killed and dozens wounded. Four hundred Hamas sympathisers were arrested.
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Israel’s 50-day assault on the Gaza Strip last summer stands out, even in the annals of 66 years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. “War is probably the wrong word to describe this staggeringly unequal conflict, given the huge asymmetry of power between them,” says the revisionist Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
“This was not a war in the conventional sense,” Shlaim says. “It was a one-sided massacre.” Amnesty International says that 2,192 Palestinians were killed, more than two-thirds of them civilians. In Israel, six civilians were killed, including one Thai national. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers were killed.
The UN estimates that 108,000 Gazans were made homeless by the war. The seven-year-old Israeli blockade prevents sufficient quantities of cement and building materials entering the enclave. The residents of Shejaia and Khuza’a, districts that were pulverised by Israeli bombardment, were briefly housed in locally manufactured caravans that flooded with the first autumn rain.
UN plans for reconstruction “read more like security plans, carefully laying out Israeli concerns”, the Harvard expert Sarah Roy reports. “Israel will have to approve all projects and their locations and will be able to veto any part of the process on security grounds . . . Not only will the blockade of Gaza be strengthened, but responsibility for maintaining the blockade is in effect being transferred to the UN.”
“Brutal occupation”
The easing of the blockade was a key Hamas demand in the 2008-9, 2012 and 2014 wars. “All these wars were instigated by Israel,” Avi Shlaim says. “All were directed against civilians, and all involved war crimes. They are a direct product of Israeli colonialism, of the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times.”
The war turned Gazans into boat people for the first time since 1948. They escape through tunnels beneath the Egyptian border, then pay traffickers up to $3,500 (€2,800) to board rickety boats across the Mediterranean.
Most of the 500 migrants who drowned on a boat that left Damietta in early September and sank near Malta are believed to have been Gazans. The Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration says that about 2,900 Palestinians reached Italy this year, most during the war.
Israel claims Hamas started the war, because two rogue Hamas militants from Hebron, in the West Bank, kidnapped and killed three Jewish teenagers. Israeli authorities mounted a three-week search operation during which nine Palestinian civilians were killed and dozens wounded. Four hundred Hamas sympathisers were arrested.
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