A coalition against Netanyahu's forever war is growing in Israel
It is too early to say whether the loss of 21 Israeli soldiers in one day in central Gaza's Maghazi refugee camp will turn out to be a pivotal moment of the war in Gaza.
There are, certainly, precedents. One is the loss of 73 soldiers when two helicopters collided over Northern Galilee in 1997. That was the starting point of a protest movement which led to the withdrawal from Lebanon three years later.
But the loss at Maghazi of soldiers who were mostly reservists could certainly add to the growing war fatigue of the Israeli public, who are increasingly at a loss to understand what the war on Gaza is achieving.
While a majority continue to back the war, they are not buying the army’s claims that 17 out of Hamas’s 24 battalions have “collapsed”, that one-third of the Palestinian movement’s fighters have been killed, and that the Israeli military controls 60 percent of the territory in the Gaza Strip.
The soldiers at Magazi were mining houses for demolition in an area under army control. “Control” is becoming a relative concept, as Hamas’s hit-and-run strikes prove only too clearly.