Originally posted by LePaul
Today it looks like the Israelis stepped it up a bit and started whacking these guys with the big hammer. But of course, the Palestianians decry how this will hurt the peace process.
And lobbing rockets at Israel 24/7 for weeks wont?
Let me update you on this a bit. Israel's retaliation is what Hamas wanted. They were practically begging for it.
The situation is that Hamas leadership is getting desperate. They took over the Gaza strip from the Palestinian authority (PLO affiliated) by force and got stuck. The momentum did not carry to the west bank and so they became an isolated island of an extremist islamic regime. Nobody, not even the neighboring arab nations recognize them as a Palestinian leadership and most of the world refused to deal with them. On their side, they still refuse to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, giving Israel every excuse not to deal with them as well. They are holding a kidnapped Israeli soldier and asking for ridiculous deals for his release - which they actually believed they will get, but so far only received 'get bent' replies. Last week they tried to organize a large popular march toward the Israeli border. It failed miserably - too few people showed up and the foreign camera crews left without taking any 'palestinian suffering and Israeli cruelty' footage.
The 'peace talks' (as idle as they are) scares the crap out of them. They know that if Abas (Abu Mazen) reaches any deal with Israel this is the end of their islamic state and a critical blow to Hamas. What they do now is creating a humanitarian crisis on purpose. Once the number of their dead is high enough, the EU will start demanding 'talks' with Hamas, recognizing them as the true palestinian leaders instead of dealing with Abu Mazen and the PLO guys. In addition, they will appear as the heroes in the eyes of palestinian people, for shooting rockets into Israel and not being destroyed for it (they learned that from Hizballa). They are shooting rockets into Israel, but actually aim for Abas. If you listen closely to their rhetorics, they talk against Israel's brutality, but try to throw mud at Abas as Israel's puppet. They describe Abas as attempting to return to Gaza riding on Israeli tanks.
In addition, their leaders are now scared of being targeted, especially after Imad Mornia, Hizballa #2 man lost his head two weeks ago in Damascus, in "mysterious circumstances". One of their demands for cease fire is that Israel will stop all targeted killings and arrests in the west bank as well (and let them take over that region well).
The Hamas logic is 'the worse the situation is, the better off we are'. This is a classical palestinian tactic of banging their heads against the wall and then crying for help from the world when it hurts. They have "perfected" the use of this method is the past 60 years and still have not learned.
