On Saturday, Hamas, a Palestinian militant group based in the Gaza Strip, launched a daring assault across the Gaza-Israel border and attacked numerous Israeli towns and military installations on the far side, killing hundreds of soldiers and civilians and taking dozens back to Gaza as captives. Concurrent with the operation was a massive rocket bombardment targeting half a dozen Israeli cities that overwhelmed Israel’s air defense systems, including the vaunted Iron Dome.
As of Tuesday evening, the death toll on the Israeli side had reached more than 1,000. A massive air assault on Gaza, aimed at destroying Hamas for good, had killed at least 830 people, according to Palestinian authorities, and Israel had severed all electricity, water, and gas connections to the territory with a population of 1.9 million.
Eylon Levy, the former international spokesperson for former Israeli President Isaac Hertzog, told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Tuesday that the shocking nature of Hamas’ attack had managed to accomplish what seemed impossible just a week ago: to unite all of Israeli society behind the Netanyahu government.
“The scale of this is quite inconceivable and difficult to get one's head around. I mean, just by way of comparison, everyone will remember, for example, the attack in Mumbai back in 2008. The death toll at the moment is at five-and-a-half, six Mumbais, and we haven't even finished finding all the dead, let alone counting them.
“We're talking about an attack that is simply by the death toll of the people we’ve found seven times worse than the 2015 attacks in Paris, 41 times the death toll of the attack at the Manchester Arena in the UK. And as I say, we haven't found the dead yet. The scale of this is simply incomprehensible. There are still bodies that haven't been collected, much less identified or even buried.”
“The question of how Hamas was able to get away with this is one that has left people scratching their heads,” Levy said. “And I'm sure that when the war ends, there will be a commission of inquiry that will ask how it was possible that the country was caught by surprise. It appears that Hamas had been very successful in trying to convince Israel that it had an interest in governing the Gaza Strip, that it wanted economic improvements in the Gaza Strip. And Israel believed that if it allowed more Palestinian workers into Israel, then Hamas, as the government - the elected government I should add - of the Gaza Strip would be interested in improving the situation in the Gaza Strip.”
“Instead, what Israel found is, that was a ruse. It was a deception. Hamas had no interest in improving the humanitarian conditions in the economy for the poor people of the Gaza Strip. It simply wanted to distract Israel while it could plan what is not only one of the worst terror attacks in world history, but for your listeners, it's important to understand the single worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Now Hamas is going to rain destruction on the Gaza Strip because Israel has decided the gloves are off, Israel is going to take all the action that it needs to eradicate Hamas.”
Levy compared Hamas to Daesh*, saying that Israel “is going to destroy Hamas in exactly the same way” as the international coalition that joined forces against the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2015 through 2018. He said the impending destruction in the Gaza Strip was “entirely the fault of the jihadist organization that decided to use it as a base to commit crimes against humanity and atrocities.”
Much of the last year, following the election of a right-wing coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has seen political divisions widen inside of Israeli society. Mass demonstrations against judicial reforms that critics said would weaken the government’s checks-and-balances system rocked Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities, and a criminal case against Netanyahu for alleged corruption has continued to slowly proceed.
However, Levy told Sputnik that following the Hamas attacks over the weekend, “at the moment, Israel is not in a civil war at all - Israeli society is united.”
“We've seen an astonishing turnaround from the division inside Israeli society only last week, incredible mobilization on the home front,” he said. "Let me be clear. Since slightly after 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip - people forget that in 2005, Israel pulled its soldiers out of the Gaza Strip. It pulled 8,000 settlers out of the Gaza Strip. And Israel said, ‘the Palestinians say they want a state, well, let's see how they run the Gaza Strip for starts.’ And it ended up becoming a terror nest filled with ISIS*-style terror just an hour's drive away from Tel Aviv."
“Israel's goal is that by the end of this war, Hamas will exist no longer as a military organization capable of posing any threat to Israel,” Levy added.
“Israel is very grateful for the huge American aircraft carrier that is on its way to Israel right now to send a very clear message to Hezbollah, to Iran, to all of their supporters that nobody messes with Israel. And it's been very reassuring that so much of the enlightened world has clearly recognized that and come to Israel's defense. We've seen the houses of parliament in the UK, the Eiffel Tower in France, the White House, the Empire State Building, Sydney Opera House, all lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag,” he said, noting that on Monday, there had been “a very important joint statement from the UK, the US, Italy, Germany and France committing themselves to supporting Israel's acts of self-defense.”
*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other states.