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Until last weekend, Israeli officials seemed to believe that the delicate balance with Hamas could last forever. The government’s strategy was to periodically “mow the grass” to repress Hamas’s militant efforts through regular ground invasions and bombing campaigns that have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians over the years.
“On the one hand, yes, Hamas, and Hamas’s governance of the Gaza Strip specifically, has been a great asset, mainly because it allowed Israel to believe that it can put two million Palestinians in a cage,” said Baconi. “There would be escalations of violence every now and then, but fundamentally, [Israel] would have successfully severed the Gaza Strip from the rest of Palestine. And it could have done that only by having Hamas in power because it can claim that there’s this bloodthirsty terrorist organization that’s bent on its destruction that justifies the blockade and make the world forget that the blockade and efforts to strangulate Gaza started well before Hamas was even established.”🔗 View Highlight
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