Love of the Land: Cast Lead And Contemporary Warfare

Cast Lead And Contemporary Warfare

Eamonn McDonagh
Z Word Blog
29 January '10

Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff have a piece here in which they assess Operation Cast Lead a year after its conclusion. They acknowledge that,

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) penetrated to the heart of the strip — the center of Gaza City, where most of Hamas’s major compounds are located. The organization’s defensive infrastructure, which had been painstakingly built over three years and included hundreds of booby-trapped houses, tunnels, landmines, and smuggled anti-tank rockets, was destroyed.

Hamas fighters had no answer for the IDF’s technological and military edge. Their attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers failed and, though Hamas fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, only a few civilians were killed. More than a year after the fighting, the strip is still under siege by both Israel and Egypt. Most Gazans are forbidden from traveling abroad, while their supply of goods depends primarily on smuggling through tunnels from Egypt.

They go on to describe how, in spite of this, a year later Hamas is celebrating what it feels was a great victory and explain this by saying,

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Love of the Land: Cast Lead And Contemporary Warfare