Israeli soldiers arrest Palestinian teen Fawzi Muhammad Al-Juneidi in Jerusalem, Dec. 8, 2017. You need an army to get a stone-throwing boy - yet stone throwers keep coming. What to do?
As the world is distracted with the Football World Cup, some observers of the situation in Palestine have been concerned about the possibility of Israel carrying out a major military operation in Gaza. Four years ago, towards the end of the World Cup in Brazil, Israel launched Operation
Protective Edge, which
according to UN figures resulted in the death of 2,256 Palestinians, of which 1,563 were civilians. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
specifies that this included 293 women and 556 children. The extremely high proportion of civilian deaths was a consequence of Israeli soldiers' orders to fire at every person in sight, as the whistleblower organization Breaking the Silence
revealed. It was also consistent with the old unspoken Israeli objective of
ethnically cleansing Palestine.
Israeli media has recently
disclosed that the country has plans for a full-scale invasion which would cut Gaza in half and occupy part of it. So confident are they on their ability to
"create a considerable change on the situation" that the army
"is already considering alternatives to the Hamas government". Earlier on Thursday, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan
told Army Radio:
"I don't want to launch an operation, but there is a good chance that we will have no other option but to go in so that we can create durable deterrence." This was said in reference to the burning kites that Gazan demonstrators fly across the border, pointing out that those responsible should be shot,
"age doesn't matter, they're terrorists and the danger they create must be prevented." Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, also a member of the security cabinet, argued that
"there is no difference between a burning kite and a Qassam rocket, and we should not tolerate the kites." She has a point in that Qassam rockets are about as effective as the kites - both being largely symbolic gestures of defiance than credible weapons of war.
Comment: THIS is why they tried to take the tournament off Russia. This is why they tried to get it cancelled, moved, whatever. This is why they conducted black ops like the Skripal Affair and non-stop fake news about how god-awful Russia and Russians are.
They dreaded what would happen when 2 million foreigners actually visited the place - including around 80,000 Americans - and had a grand old time.
And now Fake News has come crashing head-long into Reality.