Israel’s technological and military superiority has proven vulnerable. Hundreds of Hamas terrorists managed to jump the security fences from Gaza, occupied several towns, murdered 1,400 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages who are being held captive in some hideout in the strip.
The images of the slaughter released by the Israeli army are disgusting. They show an incomprehensible hatred towards the Jews, who have every right to defend themselves. The Netanyahu Government declared a state of war and has been bombing Gaza non-stop for more than two weeks, where it has so far caused more than five thousand deaths.
Gaza is a hell where more than two million Palestinians pay the consequences of the disproportionate reaction of the Netanyahu Government, which aims to eliminate Hamas even if it has to destroy many homes and kill Palestinians, most of whom are not terrorists, as Biden said in his lightning trip to Tel-Aviv. The civilian victims are all innocent regardless of the country they belong to.
Tomàs Alcoverro stated yesterday in these pages that Gaza is one of those places in the world where you arrive crying and leave crying. Hundreds of thousands have fled from the north to nowhere, and all those who live in that strip are looking for food, water and medicine, which trickle in through the southern border, which Egypt only selectively opens to allow trucks loaded with insufficient humanitarian aid to pass through . Israel holds the keys to the remaining gates to enter and exit Gaza and to supply food, energy, water, gas and medicine.
The United States and Europe have sided with Israel to defend itself against the terrorism of Hamas. Biden, Scholz, Sunak and Macron have personally come to Jerusalem to show their solidarity with the Jewish people so often persecuted, expelled and almost eliminated by the Nazis now almost a century ago. Pedro Sánchez has spoken to Netanyahu by phone to convey the same message, but his visit to Israel is more complicated because part of his Government, Minister Belarra in particular, has asked for nothing less than the suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel for the systematic bombing of Gaza.
The toll of the investiture and the legislature will be very high for a PSOE that only has 121 seats and that will also depend on the demands of the two Basque nationalist parties and the two factions of Catalan independence. Ukraine’s war and Israel’s war against Hamas are not among their priorities. Spain, despite coordinating the rotating presidency of the European Union, is on the brink of major European decisions starring Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy. Our internal problems are not at the core of the European agenda and are only a footnote in the global picture.
The fact is that the war against Hamas continues pending the announced ground invasion of Gaza with the risks it entails for an escalation of the conflict and for the lives of many Israeli soldiers and for the Palestinians who live crowded in the strip under a hail of Israeli bombs.
There are many causes for the delay of what was supposed to be an imminent invasion of Gaza. Within days of the massacres of Israelis, Netanyahu succeeded in recruiting 360,000 reservists, the largest mobilization in Israel’s history. Many of them have been sent home so as not to keep so many civilians turned soldiers on permanent alert. There is also the situation of the more than two hundred hostages of forty nationalities held by Hamas and whom Israel wants to release.
But the major concern of Israeli politicians and military is the warning of Western allies that a ground offensive could be the spark of a large-scale regional war with the participation of Hezbollah and the thousands of militiamen that from Lebanon and with Iran’s remote control they could force the powerful American fleet to intervene.
The military occupation of Gaza would be a strategic error of unknown dimensions. Israel has the right to defend itself, but the disproportionateness of its response would increase the instability of the weakened Netanyahu government and create unbearable protests for the governments of Israel’s allied countries. And all this without counting the imponderable contingencies of any war.
