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Day 19 – Israel Accepts, Hamas Rejects Ceasefire Extension; Two More Soldiers Die

The nineteenth day of Operation Protective Edge and the eighth day of the ground war have now concluded.

Two more soldiers died.

Israel accepted an extension of the twelve hour ceasefire but Hamas rejected it.

The New York Times reports:

Under intense diplomatic pressure, Israeli leaders decided late Saturday to extend a halt to hostilities in the Gaza Strip through midnight Sunday, but said their troops would maintain defensive positions and continue to ferret out tunnels from Gaza into Israeli territory.

Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction that dominates Gaza, rejected the extension of the temporary cease-fire requested by the United Nations, after renewing rocket fire on Israel on Saturday evening.

Amos Yadlin, former chief of Israel’s military intelligence and current director of the Institute for National Security Studies, wrote an op-ed published in the New York Times To Save Gaza, Destroy Hamas:

First, Hamas has proved a bad ruler. By placing many of its military assets — tunnels to infiltrate Israel, bunkers for its fighters, rocket launchers to terrorize Israeli civilians — under or among mosques, hospitals and schools, Hamas turned Gaza’s civilians into a shield for its military assets, in effect daring Israel to attack them. Then it cynically turned the predictable casualties that ensued into propaganda, and rejected cease-fire proposals, notably an Egyptian plan accepted by Israel, the Arab League and the international community. Last week, Mohammed al-Arabi, a former Egyptian foreign minister, accused it of “shedding the blood of innocent Palestinians.”

The latest round of warfare showed that Hamas had become more dangerous, and its offensive capacity stronger, than we had known. Its ability to threaten Israeli towns through its tunnels and to rain rockets on Israeli cities raised what had been a nuisance to a challenge of strategic proportions.

For these reasons, Hamas’s rule over Gaza must be brought to an end, its military wing disarmed, and Gaza’s people given the chance to elect new leaders.

In the Volokh Conspiracy blog, David Bernstein wrote a number of observations about Operation Protective Edge. Two of them are:

I’ve heard several friends say, “what’s the big deal about the missiles, only three Israelis have been killed?” First, several dozen have been wounded, and several dozen more have been treated for shock. Kids are sleeping in “safe rooms” (in newer buildings) or bomb shelters (in older neighborhoods) and are afraid to go out during the day. Adults go to work, but have to disrupt their day to go to shelters all the time. With nine thousand missiles, Hamas could have kept this up for many months. Those of you who live in the DC area and remember how “the sniper” disrupted life for weeks” can imagine how much more disruptive constant rocket attacks could be.

All that concrete that worldwide “human rights activists” insisted go to Gaza for construction? Largely diverted to Hamas’s military tunnel network. How many of the tunnels serve as civilian bomb shelters? As best as can be determined, zero. But the Hamas leadership has a tunnel infrastructure for itself to hide in. Those who have sought to undo the Israeli-Egypt blockade of Gaza to allow in items with military use like concrete are either rogues or fools; and Israel still sends in far more humanitarian aid (even now, during the war) than the people of Gaza would ever likely see from Hamas, while Hamas leaders have turned out to be as corrupt as their Fatah predecessors.

Writing at The Telegraph, Alan Johnson, in a critique of journalist, Jon Snow, describes a fallacy behind much of the reporting he’s seen from Gaza.

I interviewed Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism, in 2006 and he told me that this “rationalist naivety” is built into the liberal idea. We liberals make a division in our own minds between the rational and the theological and we divide society as a whole in the same way (church here, state there).
That’s fine. But then we make a terrible error: we imagine everyone else, deep down, thinks like us.
And they really don’t.
And that error makes it impossible for us to grasp the nature of many modern religio-political movements, especially radical political Islam.

[Photo: Israel Defense Forces / YouTube ]