7th post, enough!
ARTICLE
The Only Way for Israel to Truly Defeat Hamas
Why the Zionist Dream Depends on a Two-State Solution
Foreign AffairsBy Ami Ayalon
April 11, 2024
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/way-israel-truly-defeat-hamas-ayalon
The war Israel launched on Hamas after the group’s horrific October 7 attacks is a righteous mission. Hamas fighters massacred hundreds of innocent people, deliberately killed children and the elderly, and raped and mutilated women. They abducted hundreds of civilians—including women, infants, and octogenarians—and held them captive in dismal conditions, subject to abuse and starvation. Their actions contravened any sense of law and humanitarian principles. The slaughterers, still spattered with blood, made gleeful boasts about their atrocities that were broadcast in horrific videos and quoted in news articles. In response, Israel has waged a just war of self-defense.
But Israelis are not the only ones suffering. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Gaza, many of them civilians, including thousands of women and children. The war is especially cruel because the fighting is taking place in congested population centers and because the enemy has turned schools, mosques, and hospitals—places where civilians seek shelter—into military command centers, communications hubs, and weapons factories and caches. Hamas, which governs Gaza, has turned the people it is obligated to protect into human shields. While Hamas’s leaders and fighters hide in Gaza’s hundreds of miles of underground tunnels, civilians are defenseless in the line of fire. (excerpt)