Photo: Gaza Strip, 1967 to 1972, from Sir Martin’s Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israel Conflict
450 words / 2 ½ minute read
The Gaza Strip borders Israel to it’s north and east, and shares a border with Egypt to the south. That border with Egypt measures 12 kilometres, 7 1/2 miles. There is only one “crossing point” on the border, at Rafah. But the Israeli Defence Forces (the IDF) in the last few months have discovered more than 300 tunnels underneath that border alone, many leading to the 1500 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza itself. Fifteen hundred miles of tunnels under a geographic area roughly the size of Philadelphia or Detroit.
With that apparent safe refuge of miles and miles of tunnels so close, one wonders why so many Gazan civilians are caught in the crossfire and being killed? Since the deaths of millions of civilians in the Second World War, civilians have become “collateral damage”. But whose responsibility is it to protect them? And what options do they have to find refuge?
Early on in this current war, Israel proposed to Egypt that Gazan civilians be housed in tents in Egyptian controlled Sinai. That suggestion was rejected. Israel’s Arab neighbours have not offered to take in refugees of this war – unlike Poland and her European neighbours and even Canada who took in refugees from the war against Ukraine. Central Israel has given refuge to nearly a hundred thousand Israelis evacuated from the Hezbollah bombing from the Lebanese border to the north of the country, the bombing in the south from the Houthi in Yemen, and the constant barrage from the west from Hamas in Gaza. In Israel, in Europe, the governments take responsibility for protecting the lives of those who live there. But in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 rampage, sees the loss of Palestinian lives as “necessary sacrifices”. To sacrifice one’s own people is appalling. To see those sacrifices as “necessary” is beyond reckoning.
After a Houthi drone attacked Tel Aviv in July and one man was killed in his bed, Benyamin Netanyahu said: “From the beginning of the war, I made it clear that Israel will act against all those who attack us.” He continued: “Do not doubt Israel’s determination to defend itself on every front.” Regardless of what each of us thinks of any political leader – our own or others – don’t we all want to live in a country in which the leadership, the state, protects its people?
Couldn’t fifteen hundred miles of tunnels be used to protect Gazan women and children, the elderly, the young, from the war? Shelter is there beneath the very ground they stand on. Instead they are used as decoys and death statistics to garner sympathy all the while praising martydom. Any loss of life is a tragedy. But who is responsible for this particular tragedy?
