Operation Protective Edge

July 8, 2014 in Montana

by lizard

Israel is getting what it wants, a new military offensive titled Operation Protective Edge:

Israel launched what its military indicated could be a long-term offensive against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Tuesday, striking at least 50 sites in Gaza by air and sea and mobilising troops for a possible ground invasion in order to quell rocket attacks on Israel.

The army said its offensive, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, was aimed at striking Hamas and ending the rocket fire that has intensified in recent weeks amid tensions over the killing of three Israeli teenagers and the apparent revenge murder of a Palestinian teenager.

Nearly 300 rockets and mortars had been fired at Israel in recent weeks, including a barrage of about 80 projectiles on Monday alone, the army said. Israel has responded with dozens of air strikes and eight Palestinian militants were killed on Monday. Israel had signalled it would not launch a larger offensive if the militant group Hamas ceased the rocket fire.

“They chose the direction of escalation,” said army spokesman Lieutenant Peter Lerner. “So the mission will go on as long as we feel it is necessary to carry it out. We don’t expect it to be a short mission on our behalf.”

Hamas “chose the direction of escalation” says an army tool. Bullshit. For context, I wrote this post last year which shows how Israel undermined a 6 month truce before launching Operation Cast Lead at the end of 2008.

This new operation was pushed into existence by the murder of three Israeli teens. The Netanyahu regime, instead of being forthright with information about these murders, decided to exploit the tragedy for maximum racist incitement:

From the moment three Israeli teens were reported missing last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military-intelligence apparatus suppressed the flow of information to the general public. Through a toxic blend of propaganda, subterfuge and incitement, they inflamed a precarious situation, manipulating Israelis into supporting their agenda until they made an utterly avoidable nightmare inevitable.

Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.

Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.

The result of this manipulative deceit is racist-fueled violence:

As most of the media have focused on the three Israeli youths, there has been almost no mention of the collective punishment that has been unleashed on the overwhelmingly civilian Palestinian population. The Israeli occupation forces have gone on a rampage that has included: arbitrarily destroying Palestinian homes; burning down two farms and destroying a Mosque; abducting over 600 Palestinians including over 50 children, and bombing the people of Gaza with 34 air strikes in one night.

The attacks by the state appear to have given license to mobs of Israeli settlers to hunt down Palestinian youths. For example, on Tuesday, July 1, 2014, 16-year-old Yousef Abu Zagh was shot dead near his home in Jenin refugee camp. A nine-year-old Palestinian girl, Sanabel Mohammed Tus, was hunted down in a car and run over by settlers in the village of Jaba.

The apartheid state of Israel is out of control. It sickens me to think that my tax dollars support this nation saturated with violent racists helping the Netanyahu regime impose collective punishment on Palestinians.