Reasonable people can acknowledge the nature of Hamas but still ask why Israel can’t stoically accept the rocket fire in order to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties.
There are three answers to this question.
First, Iron Dome, Israel’s missile defense system, is not perfect. That matters hugely because more than 15,200 rockets and mortars, an average of more than three rocket attacks every single day, have targeted Israel since 2001. Some get through, and they kill Israelis, such as Aharon Smadga, Itzik Amsalem, and Mira Sharf in Kiryat Malachi in 2012.
Barack Obama’s July 2008 remark struck a chord with many: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”
The second reason that Israel can’t just ignore the Hamas rockets is that after 13 years of falling rockets, wailing sirens, and running to bomb shelters, the children of Israel are being slowly traumatized. This is often ignored by the international media, but the fact is that ending the trauma of both Israel and Gaza’s children is now inseparable from silencing the rockets of Hamas and closing the tunnels of Hamas.
The city of Sderot, in southern Israel, is less than two kilometers from the Gaza Strip. It first came under Palestinian rocket fire in 2001; Hamas would time the rockets to hit the school run. Between April 2001 and December 2008, more than a thousand alarms were sounded in or near Sderot. By then, according to NATAL, the Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, between 75 percent and 94 percent of Sderot children ages 4 to 18 were exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
In short, the Sderot kids were being terrified. And their traumatic stress could never become post-traumatic stress because the sirens have never stopped screaming and the Hamas rockets have never stopped falling. The director of the Sderot Mental Health Center, Dr. Adrianna Katz, has noted that young patients in recovery often experience the Red Color siren as a trigger that makes them re-experience their PTSD symptoms.
The personal stories of those under the rockets are at odds with the Western perception of the rockets as a mild irritant that can be tolerated. David Wolfson, who assists trauma victims after rocket strikes in Ashkelon, told Human Rights Watch, “We’ve been under rocket fire now for so long that some people have been near rocket hits two times, and have been re-traumatized to the point where they cannot take care of themselves.”
Now put the fact that the Hamas rockets traumatize together with the fact of the ever-greater reach and ever-greater potency of those rockets. By 2009, Amnesty International was reporting that 1 million Israelis now lived in fear of rockets as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired on “homes, businesses, schools, other public buildings, and vehicles in and around towns and villages in southern Israel.” By 2012, Iranian-supplied Fajr 5 missiles were reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. An M-302 reached 100 miles into Israel this summer. In short, to simply accept the Hamas rockets is to simply accept the traumatization of Israeli childhood.
Third, it’s not just rockets. The threat from Hamas comes also in the form of terror tunnels: over 30 of them, 14 reached inside Israel, some over one kilometer long and electrified, and built with the concrete that Israel had agreed to allow in after receiving promises that it would be used for civilian reconstruction projects.
The tunnels formed an interconnected network, enabling a force to move into Israel to mount a mass casualty terrorist attack before retreating.
Little wonder 300,000 Israelis fled. But these internally displaced Israelis from the south were also mostly ignored by the international media.
And Hamas is clearly trying to develop a SEAL team. Amphibious assault teams swam 2–3 kilometers with light arms and RPGs and emerged on a beach near an Israeli military installation. And Hamas is also trying to develop drones. And if another reason were needed, Hamas rockets led to various national air traffic authorities refusing to fly to Ben-Gurion Airport from July 22–24.
No, Israel can’t just sit back and ignore Hamas.
[Post edited by JMHoo at 10/26/2023 9:57PM]