My Brother's Keeper: Week 4, Day 6.

On June 12th 2014 (12/6/14) three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped as they made their way back from a religious school (Yeshiva) in the Palestinian West Bank to their homes in the illegal Jewish settlement of Talmon. Although they were likely killed immediately it took 18 days for their bodies to be recovered. This is simply indefensible. However when Hamas have kidnapped Israelis in the past - for example the soldier Gilad Shalit - it has been done as part of a highly professional and pre-planned operation with great focus being placed on keeping the hostage(s) alive so they can be used to negotiate concessions from the Israelis. As a result I have always looked at these murders as a particularly nasty hate crime rather then a terrorist tactic carried out by an organised group.

This makes the way the Israeli government reacted to the kidnappings particularly disturbing. They immediately blamed Hamas despite having absolutely no evidence to support that theory. The one suspect they have arrested in relation to the crime - Husam Dofsh - had once been a low level member of Hamas but had long since left the organisation probably to pursue a more militant path. The other two suspects that the Israelis are pursuing are not known to have any links to Hamas but are believed to be closely linked to the Qawasmeh family who although have worked closely with Hamas in the past are very much more sometime allies rather than part of the Hamas command structure.

This little detail seemed to be of no interest to the Israeli government though who immediately sent the police and military to tear apart the Palestinian West Bank. This operation did not find the missing teenagers nor did it catch any suspects in the disappearance. It did though see more then 1000 Palestinian homes searched, five Palestinians killed and over 350 Palestinians placed under "administrative detention" on unrelated allegations. As the vast majority of those detained - including children - are unlikely to ever to face trial it is perhaps more reasonable to descibe their detention as kidnappings. Of the 350 people detained 150 of their homes were immediately demolished as a form of extra-judicial punishment that's no been seen since the end of the second Palestinian intifada in 2005. Added to a ban on travel outside of the West Bank that prevented more then 23,000 Palestinians travelling to and from work it is very easy to understand why Israel's response has been described as a form of collective punishment which is banned under the 4th Geneva Convention although officially no state of war exists between Israel and Palestine for the simple reason that Palestine is not considered a state.

Legal technicalities aside what was most disturbing about the Israelis government's response is that it took the understandable public outrage at the murders and directed it firmly towards Hamas. It also made vigilante violence and hatred against Palestinians acceptable. So when the bodies of the teenagers were discovered on land owned by the Qawasmeh family on June 30th (30/6/14) a wave of violent unrest was unleashed with gangs of Jewish civilians running riot through Palestinian areas chanting "Death to Arabs" attacking Palestinians and Palestinian owned property. It also sparked a wave of revenge attacks including a series of murders in which Palestinians were mown down by Jewish motorists and Palestinians were kidnapped and beaten. The most high profile of these was the kidnapping and murder Mohammed Abu Khdeir a US dual national who was kidnapped and forced to drink petrol before being burned to death. That incident was further made worse when the Israeli authorites seemed to delay releasing Khdeir's body forcing his funeral to be held on the first Friday of Ramadan when it was most likely to provoke rioting. The Israeli police then beat and arrested Khdeir's cousin in what seemed to be an attempt to punish the entire family for complaining about the murder.

Obviously faced with this level of provocation which has seen residents of the West Bank pleading with the exclusively Fatah Palestinian Authority to protect them from the Israeli security forces Hamas could not simply stand by without taking action. As a result they almost immediately began firing small Qassam rockets into areas of southern Israel that are used to this type of ineffective rocket attack. However as the brutality of Israel and particularly its Jewish citizens intensified Hamas response intensified with ever more and more effective, military grade rockets being fired ever further into Israel. These have included M-302/Khaibar-1 rockets that have been looted from Libyan and Syrian arsenals which have a far longer range and are more effective then either the Grad rockets that Hamas used during Operation Cast Lead in 2008/9 or even the Katyusha rockets Hezbollah used during the 2006 Lebanon war.

Being placed under this type of threat Israel had no option other than to launch an air campaign into Gaza to prevent these rocket launches from taking place. Although the Israelis have so far conducted this campaign very much with a focus on pinpoint strikes that minimise the risk of civilian casualties it has caused the confrontation to quickly escalate into a cycle of intensifying violence where both sides end up retaliating simply for the sake or retaliation. So for example the Israelis warned residents to leave a building in Gaza that was about to be bombed prompting local residents to rush to the building to act as human shields only for the Israelis to bomb it anyway. In turn that prompted Hamas to target the Ben Gurion civilian airport in Tel Aviv. That prompted Israel to target the Hamas commander so Hamas responded by targeting the nuclear research reactor at Negev.

This type of tit for tat escalation is exactly why I am so worried about this current confrontation because unlike in Cast Lead or even in 2012's Pillars of Defence neither side is working to some great master plan with clearly defined objectives. As a result there is no way to tell how far things would go and Hamas seem to be one rocket strike on a school or a passenger jet away from a massive Israeli ground invasion that will utterly destroy their power structures in Gaza and could well destroy Gaza itself.

To make matters worse unlike on previous occasion there seems to be no intermediary to help broker a ceasefire. Due to the terrorist designation both the US and the EU are prevented from talking to Hamas and due to its conduct on Syria and to a lesser extent Rihanna the US is simply not an acceptable negotiating partner for the Israelis who are unlikely to view the EU as much better. For their part Hamas have almost entirely broken off ties with Iran in favour of their parent organisation the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This has put them in direct confrontation with the Egyptian government and their recent rejection of an Egyptian ceasefire seemed done more out of spite rather then any understanding of the realities of their situation.

15:05 on 16/7/14 (UK date).