The view from Gaza: A bitter resolve
During the past month of fighting in the Gaza Strip — a rectangle of desert and farmland along Israel’s southern coast, home to 1.8 million Palestinians — a small boy with a shy smile lost his big brother.
During the past month of fighting in the Gaza Strip — a rectangle of desert and farmland along Israel’s southern coast, home to 1.8 million Palestinians — a small boy with a shy smile lost his big brother.
On a blistering afternoon in southern Israel on Aug. 4, about eight miles from Gaza at the intersection of Highway 25 and Highway 34, soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took cover in the shade of a makeshift rest stop — one of dozens set up throughout the south during the recent war in Gaza.
Up until last weekend, Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” in the Gaza strip seemed to be just another hard round of fire between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Gaza’s ruling party, Hamas — the latest in a cyclical pattern of violence that repeats itself every two or three years.
When the first air-raid siren of summer 2014 screeched through Tel Aviv, my blood turned to ash.
The shocking kidnap-murder of Israeli teens Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel in the West Bank on June 12, followed by the brutal revenge killing of Palestinian teen Muhammed Abu Khdeir in Jerusalem on July 1, have bred a level of anger and mistrust between Jews and Palestinians that many in Israel say they haven’t felt since the end of the bloody Second Intifada in 2005.
When news broke in Israel at around 7:30 p.m. on June 30 that the dead bodies of the three kidnapped boys had been discovered in a field near to where they disappeared — after 18 days of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) searches, raids and arrests across the West Bank — grief blanketed the nation.