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 captive in some hiding place in the strip.
The images of the massacre released by the Israeli army are repugnant. 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, causing more than 5,000 deaths so far.
Gaza is a hell in which more than two million Palestinians pay the consequences of the disproportionate reaction of the Netanyahu Government, which intends to eliminate Hamas even if it has to destroy many homes and kill Palestinians, the majority of whom are not terrorists, as Biden said on his whirlwind trip to Tel Aviv. The civilian victims are all innocent.
Tomàs Alcoverro argued yesterday in this newspaper that Gaza is one of those places in the world where you arrive crying and leave crying. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the north to nowhere and all those who live trapped in that strip are looking for food, water and medicine, which enter in dribs and drabs through the southern border, which Egypt only opens selectively for trucks loaded with insufficient humanitarian aid. Israel has the keys to the rest of the doors to enter and leave Gaza.
The United States and Europe have sided with Israel to defend itself against Hamas terrorism. Biden, Scholz, Sunak and Macron have personally gone to Jerusalem to show their solidarity with the Jewish people so many times persecuted, expelled and almost eliminated by the Nazis almost a century ago. Pedro Sánchez has spoken by phone with Netanyahu to convey the same message, but a visit to Israel is more complicated because part of his Government, Minister Belarra specifically, has requested neither more nor less than the suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel for the systematic bombings on Gaza.
The toll of the investiture and the legislature will be very high for a PSOE that only has 121 seats and will also depend on the demands of the two Basque nationalist parties and the two factions of the Catalan independence movement. The wars in Ukraine and Israel’s war against Hamas are not among his priorities. Spain, despite coordinating the rotating presidency of the European Union, is on the edge of the major European decisions involving Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy. Our internal problems are not at the core of the European agenda and only appear as a footnote.
The fact is that the war against Hamas continues, waiting for the announced land invasion of Gaza to occur 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 overcrowded in the strip. under a hail of Israeli bombs.
There are many causes for the delay of what was to be an imminent invasion of Gaza. A few days after the massacres of Israelis, Netanhyahu managed to recruit 360,000 reservists, the largest mobilization in the history of Israel. 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 200 hostages of forty nationalities held by Hamas and that Israel wants to release.
But the great concern of Israeli politicians and military personnel is the warning from Western allies that a ground offensive could be the spark of a large-scale regional war, with the participation of Hizbullah and the thousands of militiamen from Lebanon, and with remote control of Iran, could force the powerful North 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 disproportionality 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 taking into account the imponderable unforeseen events of any war.
