HAMAS IN GAZA

Some History

In an act of mass terrorism, Hamas has attacked Israel in the most brutal way possible, killing 250 people, and as shocking as it may be, almost impossible to imagine, kidnapping as many as 100 innocent Israeli civilians.

As one Israeli woman said, “they took babies, 2 yr olds, 5 yr olds, mothers, just innocent citizens sleeping in their beds, even war has rules”.

Hamas has ignited a new war, and it’s extremists won’t regret any of it. Hamas wants war and achieving it with Israel has always been it’s only goal.

When I was based full time as a Canadian Correspondent in Jerusalem, I would go to Gaza on a weekly basis, because it was the base of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and even then the dangers of extremist Hamas were quickly becoming apparent.

While Fatah was largely secular and willing to embrace land for peace with Israel, Hamas refused to recognize the state of Israel, and literally tried and succeeded blowing up the OSLO peace accords, by setting off bus bombs inside Israel and killing Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Israel had a chance to stop Hamas, but according to Israeli officials, it secretly allowed Hamas to flourish, believing it would weaken the PLO and Fatah, a critical error.

In fact Arafat had not appeared in Gaza until 1994, or until the OSLO Accords, but his Fatah Party ran Palestinians in Gaza. Overall Israel still had troops inside Gaza, and controlled life there.

During that time, Hamas was a minority faction in Gaza but growing. And Israel allowed it’s founder, Sheikh Yassin and his Mujama al-Islamiya, to run charities across The Gaza Strip including the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza. (The university was one of the first targets hit by Israeli warplanes in the 2008-2009).

Yassin's Mujama would become Hamas, which it can be argued, was Israel's Taliban. And it’s links to Iran would become clearer in the ensuing years including weapons transfers and rocket technologies.

The brutality, the hatred, the embrace of bloodshed by Hamas was shocking even for me as a reporter who had witnesses many conflicts and Israeli Palestinian fighting.

In one attack in 1994 in Tel Aviv, Hamas set off a bomb on bus number 5 on Israel’s Dizengoff Street killing 21 Israels and wounding many more. Dizengoff is like New York’s Broadway and as I arrived at the scene of the bombing, I could see human remains blown up into trees along the bus route.

My cameraman and I managed (with personal regret) to negotiate our way into a womans 2nd floor apartment overlooking the bus, believing we needed to get a better view of the aftermath.

I will never forget entering her apartment and seeing blood spattered across all her walls, her front glass windows blown to bits from the blast and body parts on her small front balcony.

The bus below was twisted metal, blood and torn bodies. And as I walked away from that scene, the horrific smell of burned bodies still in the air, human flesh on the bottom of my shoes, and Hamas was celebrating back in Gaza the killing of women, and children, and elderly.

Hamas worked to kill the peace process, and by blowing up those buses, and killing innocent Israel’s, what also began to die was the belief by most Israeli’s in peace.

Palestinians in Gaza will justify violence in endless hopeless discussions, ranging from Israel has killed our people so we kill Israeli’s and that’s fair, to larger historical perspectives, driven by deep beliefs Hamas wants Israel pushed into the sea.

But inside Hamas there is no pity, no humanity, no love of innocence, just a stark and black hatred driven by extremist islamic beliefs, that fuel young men to strap on bomb belts and blow everyone to bits, or in the case of this monstrous act of terrorism to kill and kidnap by the dozens innocent Israeli’s.

Israel left the Gaza strip in 2005, believing less in peace with Palestinian’s at that point, and trusting more in some kind of disengagement. A fence, tanks and armed check points surrounded 2.3 million Palestinians.

In 2007 Hamas was left to carry out an armed coup against Fatah, which resulted in dozens and dozens of deaths of their own people and plunged the Palestinian leadership into complete chaos.

Leaving some kind of impoverished prison behind them, Israel also closed themselves off to intelligence and the ability to disrupt rocket factories and Hamas training bases inside Gaza.

Hamas now holds hundreds of Israeli’s as human shields, and even while Israel can target at will any building in Gaza, it can’t enter the area with ground forces without regard to it’s own citizens held in brutal and inhuman conditions. But at the same time Israel has to try to rescue or negotiate the freedom of children and mothers and men young and old held hostage there.

Thousands of Palestinians will be caught in the cross fire of war in Gaza as Israeli F-16’s and attack helicopters rain fire down on urban areas.

It’s an impossible situation, that was decades in the making.