The fact is Hamas is outgunned. They are militarily inferior by orders of magnitude. The only way they can keep it up is by hiding behind their mother's skirts and relying on Israel keeping the moral high ground.

They actually want the Palestinian casualties, because that is what keeps the Muslims angry and supporting Hamas (Abu actually explained his support for this line of thinking in one of his more chilling moments). [...] It takes an elaborate exercise in ignoring reality to analyse it any other way.

Palestinians elected Hamas because they implemented programs for healthcare, education and other basic essentials, even with their limited resources.

The overwhelming majority of their budget was used for these. That's why Palestinians supported Hamas.

In an open letter to US President Barack Obama, Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon working at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, writes of "the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. Humans!

"Ashy grey faces – Oh no! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding. We still have lakes of blood on the floor in the emergency room, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear out ... the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death – all taken away... to be prepared again, to be repeated all over."

The onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion: Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. In defiance of the laws of war and the norms of civilised behaviour, it is waging its own war of terror on the entire Gaza population of about 1.7 million people. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs.

As none other than Malcolm Fraser tweeted this week: "If any other country went to war killing as many civilians, women and children, it would be named a war crime." But it is not, although the UN is asking the question of both sides.

Yes, Hamas is also trying to kill Israeli civilians, with a barrage of rockets and guerilla border attacks. It, too, is guilty of terror and grave war crimes. But Israeli citizens and their homes and towns have been effectively shielded by the nation's Iron Dome defence system, and so far only three of its civilians have died in this latest conflict.

The Israeli response has been out of all proportion, a monstrous distortion of the much-vaunted right of self defence.

It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory. But this is a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hardline, right-wing Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. As one observer puts it: "All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word 'fascism', which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse."

Fascism in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus. As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it's been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.


http://www.smh.com.au/comment/israels-rank-and-rotten-fruit-is-being-called-fasc...

But Israel has a record of punitive, disproportionate punishment.

We have Israeli leaders calling for the murder of Palestinian mothers.

Other leaders suggesting that only through the rape of Palestinian woman can terrorists be beaten. Not weird one off psychopaths - members of parliament and scholars.

The onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion: Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. In defiance of the laws of war and the norms of civilised behaviour, it is waging its own war of terror on the entire Gaza population of about 1.7 million people. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs

The human shields argument is bullshit. There is nowhere in Gaza that isn't densely populated, which is why there are such high civilian casualties.

And this proves Hamas is not using densely populated areas?

Gandalf, you yourself recently claimed that a 2 year old casualty of Israel was in fact killed by a Palestinian rocket fired from within a densely populated urban area that misfired and went into the house in front. The child topped the list of civilian casualties being blamed on Israel at the time and being posted widely on this forum.

The fact is Hamas is outgunned. They are militarily inferior by orders of magnitude. The only way they can keep it up is by hiding behind their mother's skirts and relying on Israel keeping the moral high ground. They actually want the Palestinian casualties, because that is what keeps the Muslims angry and supporting Hamas

It takes an elaborate exercise in ignoring reality to analyse it any other way.

freediver wrote on Jul 27^th, 2014 at 8:57am:


No, I am not proving anything. The point is about what Israel is claiming ad-nauseum (that hamas uses human shields) - which they have no evidence for.