Although it was quickly overwhelmed by other events on Wednesday (16/7/14) four children were killed by Israeli naval artillery fire whilst playing on a beach in Gaza.
On hearing of this my first thought was that the Israelis were aiming at a target closer to sea and simply missed. This is the problem with artillery weapons because they are essentially dumb weapons. All you can do to aim them is choose an angle of elevation and hope the shell travels the intended distance before gravity pulls it to the ground. That can be affected by a host of factors including wind speed and direction, the quality of the ammunition being used, air pressure and temperature and even the temperature of the barrel of the weapon. As a result it is incredibly common for artillery shells to over-shoot their targets or fall short which often endangers troops on the side that is doing the shooting. Of course my second thought was that the commander of that specific boat thought he could get away with killing some Palestinians possibly in the hope of inflaming the situation to force a widening of the conflict. Although this highly aggressive Zionist view is most certainly not typical of all Israelis the Israelis who do consider themselves to be waging a sort of holy war tend to be drawn towards careers in the military.
Whatever the cause I was hoping to use the pause in hostilities brought about by Thursday's (17/7/14) UN brokered humanitarian ceasefire to use the incident as an example of how this type of incident fuels the conflict and can cause it to spin out of control. The killing of four children obviously forces Hamas to fire rockets into Israel in retaliation. That rocket fire forces Israel to carry out more air-strikes into Gaza to halt the rocket fire risking more people being killed and then more rocket fire. Unfortunately events later on Thursday meant that I was quickly overtaken. Following the end of the humanitarian ceasefire Hamas rejected a more durable ceasefire brokered by Egypt. This obviously sent the message to Israel that Hamas wanted to continuing fighting forcing Israel to look at the tactics Hamas had used up to that point.
The most troubling of these was a raid on Thursday morning into Israel via tunnel. Although four of the thirteen attackers were almost immediately killed by an Israeli air-strike forcing the other nine to retreat their intended target seemed to be the near-by Sufa kibbutz. As this is a wholly civilian community Hamas' only intention could have been to kidnap or massacre Israeli civilians and most likely a combination of both. Israel - like any other nation - simply cannot tolerate this type of threat to its civilians so on Thursday night launched a ground offensive into Gaza.
This ground force was made up of combat engineers backed by infantry, armoured and artillery units. It's objective is quite simply to demolish tunnels that Hamas use to launch attacks into Israel and bunkers that Hamas use to store weapons. Although there was initial talk of Israel establishing a buffer zone I wouldn't be too surprise if that line actually becomes quite jagged as the Israelis push in deep in certain areas where there are tunnels but stay quite shallow where there aren't. The problem is that while they are doing this complicated and dangerous work engineers really don't like being shot at. So if they come under attack they will simply bomb the position where their attackers are ideally with missiles from fighter jets and drones but failing that artillery fire. This is a completely standard military tactic and the only reason why NATO has attack aircraft in Afghanistan.
As a result I was actually quite comfortable with the way Israeli prosecuted the ground operation on Friday (18/7/14) and Saturday (19/7/14) despite the death toll raising dramatically as always happens when you move from air operations to ground operations. To put the current risk to life in perspective within the first 12 hours of the ground operations 20 civilians had been killed alongside 14 Hamas fighters and 1 Israeli soldier. Almost as soon as the death of the Israeli soldier was announced rumours started going around that they had been killed by friendly fire. In a small nation such as Israel that has a conscript army this is a particularly inflammatory rumour to start. It seems intended to invoke comparisons with the 2008/9 Operation Cast Lead which was so one-sided that Israels only fatalities came from friendly fire. So when two more Israeli soldiers were killed in Israel during another Hamas tunnel raid on Saturday (19/7/14) a counter rumour was quickly started claiming that Hamas fighters were wearing Israeli military uniforms.
Things took a dark turn on Saturday evening when Israel started an artillery barrage against the Shijayia district that lasted for more then 12 hours and killed 72 Palestinians. As far as I can tell this action had no military value and instead seemed like an attempt to demonstrate the tactics being used in Syria and by the Kiev junta against rebels in eastern Ukraine. The intention seemed to be to highlight the poisonous effects that the western backed conflict against Syria has had across the entire Muslim world and has even spread to Europe in Ukraine. After all on Saturday there were worldwide protests against Israel but there never seem be any protests against what it going on in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia or Ukraine giving the impression that Israel gets treated differently.
Later on Sunday morning 13 members of Israels elite Golani Brigades were killed during a Hamas ambush. On Sunday evening Hamas claimed that they had captured alive an Israeli soldier although this has been denied and Hamas have offered no proof to support their claim. The reason why Hamas have been trying to kidnap Israelis is really twofold. In the long term they want to try and use their hostages to negotiate the release of prisoners like they did with Gilad Sahilt. Many of the prisoners who were released under that deal were subsequently re-arrested during the recent operation in the West Bank.
In the more immediate term Hamas are hoping to use the search for any hostages to draw Israel further into Gaza. They are doing this in the full knowledge that a wider Gaza offensive will bring with it more artillery fire and therefore more civilian deaths. Hamas is hope that a high civilian death toll will increase anger at Israel and support for them as the resistance against Israel. With Hamas only having the capacity for another five to six weeks of fighting this looks likely to be a serious mis-calculation. However this mentality that you win by increasing the civilian death toll is something that has really caught on across the middle-east ever since the Saudi and Qatari Kings told Sunni Muslims to rise up against the Shias in Syria and Iraq and western nations appear to have leaped to their aid.
Finally as a bit of an editors note I should point out that I am fully aware that the Gaza operation is officially known as "Protective Edge." Primarily this is to allow the Israeli military to distinguish between an operation going on in Gaza and an operation going on in the West Bank. However I am choosing to continue with the original name because it helps to established the chain of events that led to this point.
16:55 on 21/7/14 (UK date).
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