War in Gaza, anger in the West Bank
Tensions in the occupied Palestinian territories remained high on Friday after clashes between protesters and Israeli authorities erupted in the West Bank on Thursday night.
The protest erupted after allies of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement marched from the West Bank city of Ramallah to the edges of Jerusalem in protest against Israel's war against Hamas militants in Gaza where the Palestinian death toll has reached more than 800.
The protest is said to be the largest since the end of a 2000-2005 Palestinian uprising.
Protests in the West Bank Turn Violent
In what evolved into the largest demonstration in a decade, tens of thousands of Palestinians from throughout the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem protested on Thursday against Israel’s assault on Gaza, launching demonstrations that evolved into clashes with police.
Organized around the hashtag #48kmarch, activists gathered at al-Am’ari Refugee Camp outside Ramallah — the de facto capital of the West Bank — before marching to Qalandia Checkpoint, a major point of entry in the separation wall that divides the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Israel rejects US truce proposal for Gaza
Israel TV reported on Friday that the country's security cabinet had rejected a US-initiated proposal in its current form, as it would end an ongoing effort to destroy Hamas tunnels under the Gaza-Israel border.
It was later reported by news agencies and Israeli media that Israel was however considering a 12-hour humanitarian ceasefire on Saturday, which would end bombardment at 4am GMT on Saturday, but not operations against the tunnels.
At a news conference in Egypt, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, confirmed the rejection but said diplomats were still trying to agree a deal.
Meanwhile, the Israeli offensive on Gaza has continued on Friday on its 18th day, with dozens of Palestinians reported dead.
The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah group, promised to support Palestinian fighters. In a live television appearance on Friday, Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel that it was "suicide'' to continue waging war in the Gaza Strip.
"We are true partners with this resistance ... their victory is all our victory, and their defeat is all our defeat," he said.
Old story, new twists in Gaza war
The third Gaza war is playing out much like the first one more than five years ago: The harrowing civilian toll in Gaza is now at the center of the discourse, eclipsing the rocket attacks by Hamas militants that were the stated reason for the Israeli assault.
Then as now, a question persists: Beyond the carnage, are Israel's airstrikes achieving anything at all?
It ended messily for Israel in 2009. A U.N. commission investigated, Israel refused to cooperate, and the resulting report — since then partly disavowed by its own author, former South African judge Richard Goldstone — said Israel deliberately targeted civilians and might have committed war crimes, along with Hamas.
About 1,400 Palestinians, including many hundreds of civilians, were killed in the operation dubbed "Cast Lead," along with 13 Israelis. After 18 days this year, the civilian death toll of operation "Protective Edge" is at similar levels — and the proportion is higher.
Navi Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said Wednesday that some of the recent Israeli attacks, including those on homes and on a care center for the disabled, raise "a strong possibility that international law has been violated in a manner that could amount to war crimes."
She also condemned indiscriminate Hamas attacks — including 3,000 rockets fired since July 8 that have killed several civilians in Israel — and said storing military equipment in civilian areas or launching attacks from there is unacceptable. But "the actions of one party do not absolve the other party of the need to respect its obligations under international law," she added.
There are two kinds of governments in Israel when it comes to the heart of the matter, which is peace with the Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state.
One kind was in power during "Cast Lead." Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was clearly committed to pulling out of the West Bank one way or another and was making rather far-reaching offers to Abbas: a state in all of Gaza and the vast majority of the West Bank, and a share in Jerusalem. For a variety of reasons no deal was struck, but Olmert was perceived as serious on the Palestinian issue. This opens doors and spreads positivity, and Israel enjoyed some space as a result.
It's a very different story under Netanyahu. He dropped his lifelong opposition to a Palestinian state in recent years — but his terms are very far from those of the Palestinians. Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank is roaring ahead, and nine months of peace talks got scarcely beyond quibbles and procedure. Netanyahu's own party continues to oppose a Palestinian state, and there is a sense of a wink about his moves in this regard. And so the region and the world view him with considerable suspicion.
During the 2008-9 campaign, it was not exactly clear what the outcome would be. Would Hamas break under the assault? Would the people of Gaza blame Hamas for their suffering and overthrow the group? Is victory possible? It was not even clear whether Israel ruled out reoccupying the strip, from which it had withdrawn four years earlier.
The answers to those questions are clearer now.
In both campaigns, as well as another one in late 2012, Hamas has shown that it will simply continue firing rockets no matter what the outcome to the people of Gaza.
It's also clear that Israel's various efforts to minimize the deaths with a variety of warnings aren't working well. For the third time, the world sees images of whole families buried under rubble, of children in a morgue. And for all its claims of precision, Israel's military is having trouble producing detailed explanations of why any particular building was hit.
It lends a sense of predictable futility to the proceedings, and raises questions in Israel itself about the strategy. The answer tends to be that doing nothing in response to rocket fire on cities is not an option. That logic dominates the Israeli discourse for now. But to many, it is starting to feel uncomfortable nonetheless.
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