Expect more trouble in Gaza

From Melanie Phillips

Tunnel vision in Gaza

A new mechanism is apparently now in place, agreed between Israel, America and Egypt, to stop Hamas smuggling weapons through the tunnels on the Egyptian border with Gaza. That is one of the reasons Israel gave for stopping the war. Now we read this:

Hamas has seized control of all the smuggling tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza and has been moving additional arms into the Strip since Operation Cast Lead ended on Sunday morning...The tunnels in Rafah are usually run by local Palestinian clans, and Hamas's decision to take control is believed to be part of the group's attempts to re-establish its regime in Gaza. Hamas can now decide what is smuggled into the Strip and give priority to weapons and explosives. On Wednesday night, CBS News reported that the US Navy had intercepted an Iranian ship in the Red Sea carrying arms allegedly on their way to Gaza. Israel is concerned that Iran will try to transfer long-range Fajr missiles to Hamas capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

Well, waddya know. I am shocked. Meanwhile, the actual number of Gazans killed during Operation Cast Lead remains opaque. The Hamas claim that 1300+ died of whom only 50 were Hamas and the rest were civilians, including 400+ children. These figures have been largely recycled by the UN and NGOs and disseminated by the western media as true. Israel however has vehemently denied them and says the vast majority of those killed in Gaza were Hamas operatives – and it has their records to prove it. The Jerusalem Post reports:

The IDF privately told Israeli reporters Thursday, by contrast, that only 150 of the 900 fatalities it has checked were civilians and that it was likely that the rest were Hamas combatants. But Israel has presented no formal alternative information.

Well they’d better do so fast because the frenzied blood libels of ‘genocide’ and ‘war crimes’ are putting down deep roots, with human wrongs lawyers sharpening their lawsuits even now for the planned legal pogrom designed to deal a mortal blow to the legitimacy of the State of Israel – outlined in this analysis of the monstrous manipulation of international law to that end that is now under way.
At the Corriere della Serra, reporter Lorenzo Cremonesi has been trying to establish the truth. His article (a somewhat idiosyncratic auto-translation from the Italian can be located on Israelly Cool yesterday) has made waves by claiming the true Gazan fatality figure was not 1300 but 500-600 people, of whom the vast majority were Hamas operatives. He appears to have based this figure on a claim by an anonymous doctor at Gaza’s Shifa hospital, who told him:

‘The deaths could not be more than 500 or 600. Mainly boys between 17 and 23 years recruited from the ranks of Hamas that has literally sent to the massacre... It was strange that the non-governmental organizations, including Western ones, repeated the number without checking, but the truth will come to light in the end. It's like what happened in Jenin in 2002. At the beginning they spoke of 500 dead; afterwards it was clear there were only 54 dead, at least 45 of them who were fighters’.

Israel, as noted above, disputes this anecdotal estimate and says its records show 900 were killed. But the real importance of Cremonesi’s article lies in his revelation that some Gazans at least understand exactly what Hamas has done to them, that it was responsible for the disaster – and that it has manipulated information to produce utterly false claims about the situation.

‘Practically all the buildings highest in Gaza that have been hit by Israeli bombs, as Dogmoush, Andalous, Jawarah, Siussi and many others had on the roof ramps rocket launchers, or points of view of Hamas...’

The hospitals had not been overwhelmed by casualties at all. Moreover, the men of Hamas

‘used ambulances and forced ambulanzieri and nurses to remove their uniforms with symbols of paramedics, so they could be confused and better escape Israeli snipers. This has reduced a lot of the number of beds available in health institutions in Gaza. ‘

And as for Shifa hospital (underneath which, Israel has claimed, the Hamas high command hid out for the duration of the war):

‘Hamas had hidden there the cells and the emergency room for interrogation of prisoners of Fatah...’

Now look here at who is bemoaning the fact that Israel stopped the war too soon:

Israel made a ‘big mistake’ by ending Operation Cast Lead without overthrowing the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah said on Thursday...‘It was a big mistake to end the war this way,’ the official said. "The fact that Hamas is still in power is bad for all.’ The PA leadership had decided to take draconian measures to thwart any attempt by Hamas to stir unrest in the West Bank, the official also said. ‘There's no room for these Hamas thugs in the West Bank,’ he said. ‘We won't allow Hamas to turn the West Bank into another Islamic republic.’

Strange kind of ‘genocide’, eh, when the reputed victims complain that it didn’t go far enough?

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