ISRAEL’S border with the Gaza Strip is tense at the best of times. But tempers are especially frayed after weeks punctuated by sporadic exchanges of fire. Israeli security chiefs are wondering how they can avert another conflict in an area that has seen, on average, a big one every two to three years.
Much of Israel’s introspection has been prompted by the release of a report by the State Comptroller on the decisions leading up to and during the war between Israel and Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which some 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis died. Although much of the report dealt with the mayhem that summer, it also underscored long-standing complaints by senior officials that Israel’s government had failed to seek a long-term solution to the whole Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It noted, for instance, that although military and intelligence officers had been warning for some time that life for the 1.8m Palestinians living in Gaza was getting much worse, the cabinet was presented only with military options for confronting Hamas, a militant Islamist group, without any diplomatic alternatives.
The report has revived talk within...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2m77Zeq
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