Live blog: Gaza under attack
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Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry on Sunday suggested that 1,7000-plus civilians who had died in Gaza -- including children -- were legitimate targets for Israel because Hamas was using them as "human shields."
Retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland wrote in an op-ed that there is no such thing as an innocent civilian in Gaza.
The former head of the National Security Council argued that Palestinian citizens in Gaza are to blame for their own suffering, but comparing them to Germans under Nazi Germany.
"[T]hey are to blame for this situation just like Germany's residents were to blame for electing Hitler as their leader and paid a heavy price for that, and rightfully so," Eiland wrote.
"The United States and EU should recognize that Hamas is not just a military but also a political force. Hamas cannot be wished away, nor will it cooperate in its own demise. Only by recognizing its legitimacy as a political actor -- one that represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people -- can the West begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons. Ever since the internationally monitored 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power in Palestine, the West's approach has manifestly contributed to the opposite result." – wrote former US president Jimmy Carter and former Irish president Mary Robinson in Foreign Policy magazine.
"Thanks to flimsy copyright laws in the region, Israeli and Palestinian television stations routinely tap into each other’s transmissions and broadcast them to their viewers. Since Gazans and Israelis are barred from entering each other’s territories, this swap of feeds often stands in for reporters on the ground. The news broadcasts—a fun-house mirror of Israeli television showing Palestinian television showing Israeli television—sometimes offer the only window into the reality of life on the other side." – wrote Debra Kamin at The Atlantic.
Senior Hamas political leader Mousa Abu Marzook told the New York Times that "we don’t like to see any fighting", but "we know how to make our resistance each time better than the previous time."
For agreeing to the cease-fire, he said that Gaza should receive relief from the blockade.
Palestinians "want the siege to end; they want all the gates to open," he said.
During a speech at Haaretz’s international conference, White House Coordinator for the Middle East, Philip Gordon, said:
"Israel confronts an undeniable reality: it cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely. Doing so is not only wrong but a recipe for resentment and recurring instability. It will embolden extremists on both sides, tear at Israel’s democratic fabric, and feed mutual dehumanization.
"As [US President Barack Obama] has said, neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a sovereign, free, and secure people in their own land."
The website Arabi21.com is reporting that Egypt is refusing to back a Palestinian call for the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, as part of a ceasefire agreement with Israel.
Unnamed sources told the website that Egyptians have not yet handed the Palestinian side the response of the Israelis.
Hamas’s leader in the West Bank, was indicted on terrorism charges on Thursday, following his arrest back in May.
Riad Natzer, who has headed the group’s West Bank operations since 2010, stands accused of raising 1.5 m shekels ($430,000) for terror operations, as well arming and training Hamas members to carry out attacks on Israeli settlements. His case is being dealt with by the Israeli military’s special courts in the West Bank, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Read David Hearst's piece on how Netanyahu assumed the Gaza offensive would break Hamas militarily and turn the people against them, as well as sabotage Palestine unity and shore up regional alliances – it achieved none of the above
An Al Jazeera video shown on the Haaretz website shows Hamas fighters in an 'undiscovered tunnel' that the fighters say were not discovered by the IDF. The contents of the video have not been independently verified.