Tim Black
Almost as soon as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was declared on Sunday, footage of Hamas fighters on Gaza’s streets was being broadcast to the world. We saw masked assailants, armed with Kalashnikovs and sporting green headbands, riding pick-up trucks through crowds of cheering men in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We heard reports of thousands of Hamas-run police in uniform emerging on to rubble-strewn streets. Most striking of all, Hamas fighters were filmed swarming around three Israeli hostages during their handover to the Red Cross in Gaza City. The message being sent around the world was clear: this movement of violent anti-Semites is still a force. It’s still in control of Gaza. And it’s still a threat to the Jewish State.
The sight of Hamas out and about over the past few days should have surprised no one. After all, they’re the reason Israeli forces have been waging a painful, brutal military campaign there for the past 15 months. Yet incredibly, too many in the Western media did indeed seem shocked. It was as if it didn’t compute. ‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.
No comments:
Post a Comment