The Hamas attack is an Israeli nightmare. Not so much the perhaps 5000 rockets – though the numbers are disputed – the terrorist group launched against Israel, but the terrorists roaming through southern Israeli towns, where women and children take shelter in “safe rooms” while the towns’ men try to fight the terrorists off. And civilians are gunned down.
The implications of this will reverberate for years, decades, in the Middle East, as did the Yom Kippur war on this date 50 years ago when Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel.
“Citizens of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “we are at war, and we will win.”
The Israeli response will be fearsome. But the immediate course of this conflict is deeply unclear.
This was a terrible intelligence failure by Israel. That Hamas could coordinate such a big operation, with not only huge numbers of rockets but also countless Hamas terrorists flooding in to southern Israel, without Israeli intelligence hearing a whisper of it in advance, is shocking.
Israel withdrew from all of Gaza in 2005. The hope was that it could withdraw from most of the West Bank and a Palestinian state at peace with Israel follow.
This has insistently refused to happen. Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks will almost certainly involve a ground offensive. It will be costly and bloody. Hamas appears to have taken living Israelis as hostages. This will complicate Israel’s response.
Read the article by Greg Sheridan in The Australian.