Horovitz on ‘an unavoidable war, unfinished’

ToI’s David Horovitz posts an op-ed, ‘An unavoidable war, unfinished,’ looking at both sides’ claims of success in the four weeks of bloody fighting. “But an endgame that leaves Gaza’s Islamist rulers capable of doing all this again, except worse, would be their biggest success of all,” he writes.

He writes:

The families of the bereaved were, without exception, noble in their indescribable pain. Heroic. “I loved him utterly,” said one bereaved father of his dead son, speaking to a TV reporter not long after he had received the worst news a parent can ever hear. “But I will not break,” he said tearfully, defiantly. “Our family will not be broken. Israel will not be broken.”

Relatives seen mourning during the funeral of corporal Meidan Biton at the Netivot Cemetery on July 29, 2014 (photo credit: Flash90)

And he adds:

We wait to see if Gazans will turn on Hamas for exploiting them in the way that it has — for ruining their lives, for getting them killed, while its leaders took shelter. The people of Gaza have been devastated by this war. At the same time, many of the people of Gaza firmly support Hamas. Will most Gazans prove willing accomplices in a renewed galvanizing of effort against Israel? One IDF general, describing a neighborhood in Gaza in which his soldiers were operating, said 19 of 28 homes had been utilized in one way or another by Hamas — booby-trapped, or used to store weapons or to conceal a tunnel opening. Did those 19 families choose to partner with Hamas, were they paid off, left no choice, or a mixture of all that and more?”

— Read the full piece here.