Gazans left behind in conflict, while Hamas leaders live in luxury

SALEEM SAMAD

There is no light at the end of the tunnel as the conflict escalates to new heights between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

There is no respite in al Qassem Brigades (Hamas military wing), shooting homemade Qassam rockets in Israel, when Israel Defence Force (IDF) in retaliation for Saturday mayhem and abduction, which sparked chaos in the region, thrusting the nationalist movement firmly into the global spotlight.

The Iran-backed militant Hezbollah in Lebanon, jihadist groups in Syria and of course, Hamas in Gaza, also militarily backed by Iran are pounding homemade rockets in Israel.

The Pentagon moved American aircraft carrier and warships closer to Israel in the Mediterranean Sea to send a harsh message to Hezbollah, the Asad regime in Syria and especially Islamic Iran not to provoke escalation in the Middle East.

The USS Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group includes the USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier, which is the largest warship in the world, in addition to the Ticonderoga – class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy and four Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers — USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt.

Iran’s dreaded Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has long been involved in proxy wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The clergy regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran wants to give a sign warning to Saudi Arabia and Israel of their hegemony in the Middle East.

Iran is one of Hamas’s biggest benefactors. Iran’s top official Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Tehran was not involved in Hamas’ attack over the weekend. He however praised, what he described as Israel’s “irreparable” military and intelligence defeat.

Nevertheless, recent Iranian diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia have thawed relations with the Sheikhdom, but Riyadh is sceptical of Iran’s motives in waging proxy wars in the region. Iran Quds Force had trained and armed the Houthi rebels in Yemen, attacked military installations and fuel depots and refineries.

Iran has long been advocating crushing Israel found strong allies –Hezbollah and Hamas. The militant groups are funded and provided weapons and trained in military technology to build improvised rockets with precision targets and provided satellite images to Hezbollah and Hamas regarding IDF’s deployment and their military machines in the region.

Israel’s retaliatory strikes continue in Gaza by mobilising 360,000 reservists, regaining control over areas attacked by Hamas in the south and along the Gaza border.

Israel escalated its offensive entire districts in the region have been flattened, and houses razed. Hospitals and morgues were overwhelmed, reported an Indian TV journalist Palki Sharma from the Gaza border.

António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations urged warring parties to allow access to deliver urgent humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians trapped and helpless in the Gaza Strip.

The UN boss aptly said that he “recognises the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. But nothing can justify acts of terror and the killing, maiming and abduction of civilians.”

Recognising Israel’s legitimate security concerns, the UN chief calls for an immediate cease to these attacks and the release of all hostages. “Civilians must be respected and protected at all times,” he stressed.

Reminds Israel, that its military operations must be conducted in strict accordance with international humanitarian law.

Responding to UN calls, Egypt and Qatar are reported to have been making moves to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to reduce the death and miseries of people in Gaza. The ceasefire will stop the destruction of Gaza City. Will the Hamas firing rockets and incursion against Israel stop?

On the other hand, Hamas supremo Ismail Haniyeh famously pledged to live on “zeit wa zaatar”— olive oil and dried herbs — after he led the Islamic militant faction to victory on a message of armed struggle and austerity during the 2006 Palestinian elections.

The election ousted a secular Al Fatah, a dominant group in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) founded by Yasser Arafat. Hamas fighters forcibly seized Fatah’s headquarters and claimed control of the 41 km long, 6 to 12 km wide, a total area of 365 sq. km with a population of two million Palestinians.

The group has since maintained political control of the area as a de facto government, and implemented harsh Islamic laws, as defined in strict Shariah laws.

Hamas never recognised the Palestine Authority of PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, West Bank and instead challenged its legitimacy to administer Gaza. Since then Gaza has been ruled by the militant Hamas, which also nurtured Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a fiercest militant outfit.

With Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank, occupied by Israel, there were two de facto governments in the Palestinian territories, each claiming to be the legitimate government of the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a radical Palestinian cleric who became an activist of the Muslim Brotherhood after dedicating his early life to Islamic scholarship in Cairo.

In 1988, Hamas published its charter, calling for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society in historic Palestine.

Since Ismail Haniyeh left the impoverished Gaza in 2019 along with some Hamas leaders, is presently living in luxury as he splits his time between Turkey and Qatar, travelling with a Turkish passport. Haniyeh has yet to return.

The Hamas leaders live in hotels and travel in private jets and their sons are in top positions in sports, and real estate business in Gaza. One son is known as the “Father of Real Estate”.

Akram Atallah, a long-time columnist for the West Bank-based Al-Ayyam newspaper who moved from Gaza to London in 2019, said when faulted for not providing basic services, it claims to be a resistance group; when criticised for imposing taxes, it says it’s a legitimate government, he said.

While Gazans grumble privately, they dare to raise their voice against Hamas, which has a history of locking up critics to severely punish delinquents.

Hamas also represses the Gazan media, civilian activism on social media, the political opposition, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), reports Freedom House.

First published in the Northeast News, Guwahati, Assam, India on 12 October 2023

Saleem Samad is an award-winning independent journalist based in Bangladesh. A media rights defender with the Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter). Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter: @saleemsamad

Hamas surprise raid duped Israel’s “overconfident” intelligence

SALEEM SAMAD

As the conflict escalates after Hamas militant’s surprise incursion in the South Israel settlements and Israel declares “war” against Hamas, the worrisome world leaders hurriedly make an effort to de-escalate to protect lives in the war zone.

United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed had phone calls with the King of Jordan, Presidents of Egypt, Syria, and Israel and the Prime Ministers of Canada discussing the need to de-escalate and exercise maximum restraint to protect the lives of civilians.

Abu Dhabi has recently established diplomatic ties with Israel, has expressed sincere condolences to all the victims of the recent crisis and invoked an immediate ceasefire to avoid serious repercussions.

The Gulf nation UAE, as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, urges the international community to immediately reactivate the international Quartet to revive the path process of Arab-Israeli peace and increase all efforts to achieve a just and comprehensive peace and prevent the region from experiencing further violence, tension, and instability.

The deadly assault came on Simchat Torah, a normally joyous day when Jews complete the annual cycle of reading the Torah scroll. In addition, many people returned home to spend Shabbat with their families on Saturday, 7th October.

Hamas on a weekend launched a highly-coordinated surprise multiple attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, land, air and sea. The blitzkrieg operation began with pounding barrage of home-made rockets and Jihadist combatants penetrated Israel at multiple locations infiltrating through the barrier separating the two, using para-gliders and motorboats to reach interior areas.

During the rampage by Hamas militants, the gunmen opened fire on a crowd of thousands of young people attending a dance and Sukot music festival in the southern Israeli Kibbutz near the Gaza Strip.

Simultaneously thousands of locally produced Quasem rockets were fired followed by militants bursting automatic weapons into the crowd as hundreds tried to flee, which turned into a scene of massacre.

Videos showed Israelis racing across vast open fields and taking cover in orchards. The number of fatalities and injuries from the massacre is unclear.

Hamas operation was named, “Al-Aqsa Storm” Hamas military commander Muhammad Al-Deif claimed that the group had “targeted the enemy positions, airports and military positions with 5,000 rockets” and that the assault was a response to attacks on women, the desecration of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and the ongoing siege of Gaza.

Israel has long prided itself on its ability to infiltrate and monitor Islamist groups. As a consequence, a crucial part of the plan of Hamas was to avoid leaks.

As the Jewish nation reels, it must be admitted that the radicalised Islamist group Hamas surprise attack was indeed a ‘historic failure’ for Israeli intelligence services.

Multiple failures occurred before Hamas’s unprecedented assault, Peter Lerner, a former Lieutenant Colonel, and former Israel Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson told Euronews.

This is not the first, the Yom Kippur war – when Israel was blindsided by a lack of intelligence ahead of a 1973 attack from Egyptian and Syrian-lead forces – was a psychologically significant date to launch another major salvo in this decades-long conflict.

IDF’s “overconfidence” in the military’s defence mechanisms like the barrier around Gaza, and the Iron Dome missile defence shield which was overwhelmed by thousands of Hamas rockets and proved fallible.

In IDF’s military training course, the officers are reminded of bloody Yom Kippur as a teaching point to take warnings seriously, underscoring how intelligence is supposed to influence actions on the ground.

Israel arguably has the most sophisticated human intelligence and electronic intelligence gathering networks in the region, but the IDF’s HQ in Kirya, Tel Aviv failed to see it coming.

The ‘storm’ campaign was meticulously designed to ensure Israel was caught off guard. Hamas has planned the lighting strike for less than a year without the knowledge of top Hamas officials.

With a thousand Hamas foot soldiers deployed in the assault had no inkling of the exact purpose of the exercises. The fighters in a mock Israeli settlement in Gaza where secretly practised a military landing and trained to storm it and they even made videos of the manoeuvres.

Israel intelligence hawks have seen the video but they were convinced that Hamas wasn’t keen on getting into a major conflict.

Hundreds of migrant labourers from Gaza crossed the border for work in construction, agriculture or service jobs which had lucrative paychecks.

Since the 11-day war in 2021 with Hamas, Israel has sought to provide a basic level of economic stability in Gaza by offering incentives including thousands of permits so Gazans can work in Israel or the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Hamas sought to convince Israel it cared more about ensuring that workers in Gaza, a narrow strip of land with more than two million residents, had access to jobs across the border and had no interest in starting a new war.

The workers for months carefully took photographs with mobile phones and drew maps with hands of the settlements along the border of Gaza and Israel.

As part of its subterfuge in the past two years, Hamas refrained from military operations against Israel, even as another Gaza-based Islamist armed group known as Islamic Jihad launched a series of its own assaults or rocket attacks, reports Reuters news agency.

When the day came, the operation was divided into four parts, the Hamas source said, describing the various elements.

The first move was a barrage of 3,000 rockets fired from Gaza that coincided with incursions by fighters who flew hang gliders, or motorised paragliders, over the border, several videos have confirmed the brazen attack.

Once the fighters on hang-gliders were on the ground, they secured the terrain so an elite commando unit could storm the fortified electronic and cement wall built by Israel to prevent infiltration.

The fighters used explosives to breach the barriers and then sped across on motorbikes. Bulldozers widened the gaps and more fighters entered in four-wheel drives, scenes that witnesses described.

The Islamist commandos attacked the Israeli border troops, and their jihadist commanders jammed the communications, preventing the beleaguered soldiers from calling IDF commanders.

The final part involved moving hostages to Gaza, mostly achieved early in the attack.

An unspecified number of hostages were abducted from Israel. Amid the elderly persons, young women and children’s presence in the crowded slums of Gaza is likely to be a deterrent to large-scale military action.

First published in Northeast News, Guwahati, India

Saleem Samad is an award-winning independent journalist based in Bangladesh. A media rights defender with the Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter). Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter: @saleemsamad

Hawara Rampage Has A Hallmark Of Sabra And Shatila Massacres

SALEEM SAMAD

The night of the riots in Hawara by Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank last week has a trail of destruction sown by Israelis in the village by masked men to avenge the murder of the Jewish brothers by unidentified radicalised Palestinians – who are on the run after the elite Israel police are on a countrywide manhunt.

Hundreds of Jewish settlers descended on the northern West Bank town, killing 37-year-old Sameh Aqtash and wounding 98 other Palestinians after two Israeli brothers were gunned down by a Palestinian affiliated with the Nablus-based Lion’s Den militant group on 26 February.

The day after on 27 February, hundreds of settlers set fire to homes and cars and threw stones, it was obvious to anyone on the road leading into the West Bank Palestinian town that the rioters were still in control, the Haaretz newspaper describes the situation.

Scores of young Jewish vigilantes, many of them masked, gathered there in the morning checking vehicles in search of Palestinians. The Israeli soldiers kept a distance, but the vigilante was doing as they pleased, laments an Israeli newspaper.

The reports of a large Israeli army presence in the town existed only on paper. Many rebuked the armed forces for their incompetence.

Top Israel General Yehuda Fuchs, said the settler extremists are sowing terror. The vigilante settlers who rampaged through a Palestinian town in the West Bank had carried out a “pogrom” that caught the military off-guard, he remarked.

The general who is Head of the IDF (Israel Defence Force) Central Command and oversees the West Bank told Hebrew-language media that he was worried about clashes between soldiers and settlers and accused the Jewish extremists of “spreading terror.”

Meanwhile, the Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank didn’t dare wander around their village, which looked like a ghost town. The shops were shuttered, the streets strewn with rocks, and the smell of smoke was still in the air.

The army accused the rioters while civil society and human rights organisations blame intelligence failure.

On the other hand, Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, Israel’s army chief denounces the attack by hundreds of Jewish settlers and laments that the army should have prevented the rampage by Jewish settlers in Hawara.

Israel’s army chief remarked that Israelis should halt the “internecine struggle” that has plagued the country since Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government took over two months ago.

Many attribute the chaos in Hawara as a hallmark of the massacre nearly forty years ago at Sabra and Shatila Palestine refugee camps by Israeli-backed right-wing Phalange militia killed between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians between September 16 and 18, 1982.

However, the IDF commanders immediately scoffed off the allegation of Israel’s involvement in the bloody atrocities in the two refugee camps in Lebanon.

Shatila camp southwest of Lebanon’s capital city Beirut housed refugees who were victims of the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, fleeing the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias as Israel was formed.

The Hawara riot has invited global condemnation of Israel’s handling of the situation. Hady Amr, the U.S. special representative for Palestinian affairs, visited the scene of occurrence and condemned “the unacceptable wide-scale, indiscriminate violence by settlers” and wants “to see full accountability and legal prosecution of those responsible for these heinous attacks and compensation for those who lost property or were otherwise affected,” echoing calls by State Department spokesperson Ned Price.

European Union calls for protection of civilians, de-escalation amid rising West Bank violence and urges all perpetrators must be brought to justice.

The European Union in a statement expressed its concern over recent deadly violence in the West Bank, calling for the protection of civilians and immediate de-escalator steps.

The EU statement also commended Jordan, Egypt, and the US for convening Sunday’s summit in Aqaba, Jordan which brought Israeli and Palestine Authority officials together in an attempt to tamp down on the violence ahead of the month of Ramadan.

The Israel media claims several ministers are demanding more aggressive actions, despite the looming holy Muslim month of Ramadan, which in recent years has become a time of heightened tensions and violence.

Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians have been high for the past year, with the IDF conducting near-nightly raids in the West Bank amid a series of deadly Palestinian terror attacks, writes Times of Israel.

First appeared in the The News Times, Dhaka, Bangladesh on 3 March 2023

Saleem Samad, is an award-winning independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at <saleemsamad@hotmail.com>; Twitter @saleemsamad