The morning bulletins are factual and sober, number- and goal-oriented: “More than 250 military targets of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip” have been bombed in the past 24 hours, according to the Israeli army’s communication channels on Friday. The targets were command centers, rocket launch pads and tunnel systems. The official statements are often enriched with videos showing precise air strikes. From this perspective – from high above from the fighter plane or from the command centers – this war is a craft. Down on the ground he’s a disaster.
Three weeks after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel that left 1,400 dead, the war has become entrenched around Gaza. The Israeli Air Force has been bombing the Palestinian coastal strip with incomparable force for 21 days now. Israeli media speak of up to 10,000 attacks so far. Hamas has so far fired around 8,000 rockets in the opposite direction, far into the Israeli heartland. On Friday, another house in Tel Aviv was hit, leaving people injured.
There are already far more Israeli air strikes and Hamas rockets than in the 2014 war, which lasted 50 days. But this time it’s no longer about teaching Hamas a chilling lesson. This time it’s about everything: “Us or them” – that’s how Israel’s Defense Minister Joav Gallant put it in a televised speech on Thursday evening.
It is impossible to protect civilians
The destruction of Hamas is the declared aim of the war, and that requires uncompromising severity in attacks from the air and, in all likelihood, on the ground in the near future. Israel’s army leadership repeatedly emphasizes that this harshness is aimed solely at the infrastructure of the terrorist organization ruling in Gaza. The civilian population should be spared as much as possible. Evidence of this intention is seen in the call to the 1.1 million residents of the northern Gaza Strip to seek safety in the southern part before the threatened ground offensive begins.
But this evacuation request alone shows how impossible it is to protect the civilian population in the face of attacks of this magnitude under the conditions in the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of thousands of people are said to have made their way south. But the bombing continues there too, and many have had to leave their homes. According to the UN, a total of 1.4 of the 2.2 million residents within the Gaza Strip are now on the run. All reasonably protected places, for example in schools, are hopelessly overcrowded. “We are not safe anywhere,” says one of the refugees, whose name should not be mentioned, on the phone to SZ.
A separation between military and civilian targets is also almost impossible because Hamas’s 30,000 to 40,000 fighters deliberately hide behind the civilian population. In previous wars they have also placed their weapons depots and rocket launchers near hospitals, kindergartens and mosques. The extensive tunnel systems run under extremely densely populated areas. Given its war goals, Israel is now likely to pay even less attention to this than before.
This explains the already enormous number of victims and the extent of the destruction in the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health speaks of more than 7,300 deaths, two thirds of them women and children. This cannot be verified; US President Joe Biden personally has cast doubt on the numbers. But as in previous wars, in which no major discrepancies later emerged, the Palestinian information is also taken over by the UN due to the lack of other sources. This also applies to estimating damage. Almost 18,000 houses in the Gaza Strip were completely destroyed or are uninhabitable, and another 150,000 were damaged.
These are just numbers behind which lie tens of thousands of fates, like that of the Palestinian woman from the southern Gaza Strip who was staying with her friends in a small room with her two daughters and her elderly parents. “We’re all sick with fear, I have a fever of 40 degrees,” she says on the phone. There is still water, but bread is scarce. “We bake flat cakes and everyone gets a small piece.”
According to the UN, around 500 trucks with food and medicine have crossed the border with Egypt into the Gaza Strip since the war began. This is only a fraction of what is needed. The calls from the EU and the USA for ceasefires and protected corridors for aid deliveries have not yet found an echo in Israel.