It’s actually because the “refugee camp” is a city of 120,000 people that have been there for 76 years in permanent buildings.
It was struck because militants were firing from it. Yes, there will be civilian casualties while Hamas is hiding in civilian structures. That’s what Hamas does.
You’re falling for their playbook, their propaganda machine, so to speak.
Everyone knew this was going to happen the moment Hamas struck.
This. All part of the terrorist’s playbook - invoke persecution to radicalise more people.
It doesn’t make Israel’s behavior ok, but the crocodile tears are a bit sickening.
Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.
In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.
If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.
Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.
Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.
