The air assault (picture) inflicted by Israel on Hamas targets in Gaza was not just a black Sabbath for the Islamist movement. By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem | Published: 3:14PM GMT 27 Dec 2008
For years, the outside world has grown used to a steady drip-drip of violence between Israel and Palestinian militants.
Both sides have often been criticised for targeting civilians - with Israel singled out for using disproportionate force. But despite the undertow of criticism, over the years Israel has "restrained" itself in Gaza (Map beside), confining its attacks to what it perceived to be active military units or Hamas political leaders responsible for ordering attacks on Israeli civilians.I use quotation marks around ‘restrained’ because in the eyes of the vast majority of Gaza’s 1.5 million people, it was often difficult to see restraint in any of Israel’s actions.
In 2006, Israeli artillery fired a dawn barrage of shells, supposedly against militants in the Gazan village of Beit Hanoun.
The guns missed. Seventeen members of a single Palestinian family, the Athamnehs, died in their pyjamas, cut to pieces by fragmenting 155 mm howitzer shells.
Two years earlier, an elderly man in his wheelchair, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed by an Israeli missile as he was pushed out of a mosque after weekly prayers.
Those operations both generated fierce international criticism - but they did at least pass a certain threshold of military logic. The Athamnehs were killed when, as Israel argued, a legitimate artillery attack on a military target went wrong because of a technical error. Sheikh Yassin was not a harmless old man. He was the Hamas leader responsible for ordering suicide bombings against Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada.
That threshold was lowered considerably by yesterday’s operation when, for the first time, Israel targeted groups of Hamas soldiers and policemen not involved in active operations.
Membership alone of the security structures of Hamas was yesterday turned by Israel into grounds for attack. To put on a Hamas police baseball cap is to make oneself a target.
This means that any Hamas traffic cop on a street corner in Gaza - or manning a makeshift ‘border’ checkpoint - can expect to be attacked.
No matter if they are not directly involved in attacks on Israel, they can regard themselves as at risk.
Yesterday’s assaults may have ended what Hamas may come to see as a golden period when it enjoyed unprecedented power in Gaza.
In Jan 2006, the movement stunned Israel, the Middle East and the wider world by winning a general election. But while it won the vote, Hamas did not win power. Rival armed groups and political factions connected to the rival Fatah movement simply refused to hand over.
In June 2007, Hamas moved to win power in Gaza once and for all, unleashing a series of attacks on Fatah-affiliated armed groups. Fatah was routed and Hamas, in Gaza at least, was victorious.
So began the ‘golden period’ for the movement as it sought, once and for all, to sort out the chaotic security situation. Hamas sought to create an image of normality in Gaza and to create a single, united military structure for the first time.
Small groups of Hamas militants continued to fire rockets into Israel. While Hamas managed to control Fatah, there were other factions, notably the Islamic Jihad Party, that it failed to rein in.
But Hamas was getting itself organised, running courses for police officers, even recruiting women into specialist female units. Gaza’s crowded, tatty streets had never really had decent traffic officers, so Hamas set to sorting this out - and the improvements were visible from the start.
All the time it was trying to make itself stronger, sending officers out of Gaza all the way to Iran for training by the same people who made the Lebanese Shia movement, Hizbollah, so effective against Israel.
Throughout this period, Hamas planners assumed their security forces were safe from Israeli strikes, as long as they were not directly involved in running or ordering an attack. All of that changed with yesterday’s raids. Somehow, I no longer expect to see uniformed Hamas officers guiding traffic at Gaza’s junctions.
