No Sign of Israel-Gaza Conflict Ending

NY TIMES

Last Updated :  May 17, 2021, 6:14 a.m. ET  27 minutes ago

A U.N. Security Council meeting made no progress on resolving the conflict, and Israeli warplanes began attacking Gaza again as the conflict moved into its second week.

Netanyahu says there is no clear end in sight, and airstrikes begin again.

Speaking on CBS’ Face The Nation on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said there was no clear end in sight to the violence between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“We’ll do whatever it takes to restore order and quiet,” he said, adding, “It will take some time.”

Hours after he spoke, Israeli warplanes began another round of attacks in the Gaza Strip, attacking a main road, security compounds and an electricity line feeding southern Gaza City, according to The Associated Press and local media reports. The attack was heavier, and lasted longer, than the air raids from the day before, the reports noted.

Also late Sunday, Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, and 27 other Senators called for an immediate cease-fire “to prevent further loss of life.”

Mr. Netanyahu defended his nation’s bombing and shelling of Gaza, which Palestinian authorities say has killed at least 197 people, including 58 children. At least 10 people in Israel have died in rocket attacks fired from Gaza, the territory controlled by the militant group Hamas.

Representatives of the United States, Qatar, Egypt and others have tried to broker a cease-fire, so far to no avail.

“If there will be one it will be reached with our conditions, not Israeli conditions,” Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy leader of Hamas, told the Israeli public broadcaster Kan on Sunday. “If Israel does not want to stop, we will not stop.”

The general in charge of Israel’s Southern Command, Eliezer Toledano, told Kan, “it is important we continue to exhaust the campaign that we have entered and deepen the damage being caused to Hamas.”

The Israel Defense Forces, in a statement on Monday morning, said that it continued to hit targets in Gaza, including nine residences belonging to high-ranking commanders in Hamas. Some of those residence, the statement said, were used to store weapons.

Israel has faced wide condemnation from international press organizations for blowing up a building on Saturday that housed the offices of international media organizations including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera. Israeli forces warned in advance of the attack, and there were no casualties reported.

Israeli officials claimed that the building harbored military assets for Hamas. Speaking on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu provided no clear evidence to support that claim, and also did not confirm whether he presented any evidence of this assertion during a conversation with Mr. Biden.

“It’s a perfectly legitimate target,” he said, adding that Israeli forces “unlike Hamas, take special precautions to tell people ‘Leave the building, leave the premises.’”

On the killings of Palestinian children, Mr. Netanyahu pointed the blame at Hamas, saying the organization uses civilians as human shields.

“We are targeting a terrorist organization that is targeting our civilians and hiding behind their civilians, using them as human shields,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to hit the terrorists themselves, their rockets, their rocket caches and their arms, but we’re not just going to let them get away with it.”

He said Israel does everything it can to avoid civilian casualties. “They’re sending thousands of rockets on our cities with the specific purpose of murdering our civilians from these places,” he said. “What would you do?”

— Will Wright

As Israel and Hamas fight, civilians suffer.

Civilians are paying an especially high price in the latest bout of violence between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, raising urgent questions about how the laws of war apply to the conflagration: which military actions are legal, what war crimes are being committed and who, if anyone, will ever be held to account.

Both sides appear to be violating those laws, experts said: Hamas has fired nearly 3,000 rockets toward Israeli cities and towns, a clear war crime. And Israel, although it says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties, has subjected Gaza to such an intense bombardment, killing families and flattening buildings, that it probably constitutes a disproportionate use of force — also a crime.

No legal adjudication is possible in the heat of battle. But Israeli airstrikes and artillery barrages on Gaza, an impoverished and densely packed enclave of two million people, killed at least 197 Palestinians, including 92 women and children, between last Monday and Sunday evening, according to Palestinian authorities, producing stark images of destruction that have reverberated around the world.

In the other direction, Hamas missiles have rained over Israeli towns and cities, sowing fear and killing at least ten people, including two children — a greater toll than during the last war, in 2014, which lasted more than seven weeks. The latest victim, a 55-year-old man, died on Saturday after missile shrapnel slammed through the door of his home in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.

With neither side apparently capable of outright victory, the conflict seems locked in an endless loop of bloodshed. So the focus on civilian casualties has become more intense than ever as a proxy for the moral high ground in a seemingly unwinnable war.

In one of the deadliest episodes of the week, an Israeli missile slammed into an apartment on Friday, killing eight children and two women as they celebrated a major Muslim holiday. Israel said a senior Hamas commander was the target.

Graphic video footage showed Palestinian medics stepping over rubble that included children’s toys and a Monopoly board game as they evacuated the bloodied victims from the pulverized building. The only survivor was an infant boy.

“They weren’t holding weapons, they weren’t firing rockets and they weren’t harming anyone,” said the boy’s father, Mohammed al-Hadidi, who was later seen on television holding his son’s small hand in a hospital.

Although Hamas fires unguided missiles at Israeli cities at a blistering rate, sometimes over 100 at once, the vast majority are either intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system or miss their targets, resulting in a relatively low death toll.

Israel sometimes warns Gaza residents to evacuate before an airstrike, and it says it has called off strikes to avoid civilian casualties. But its use of artillery and airstrikes to pound such a confined area, packed with poorly protected people, has led to a death toll 20 times as high as that caused by Hamas, and wounded 1,235 more.

Under international treaties and unwritten rules, combatants are supposed to take all reasonable precautions to limit any civilian damage. But applying those principles in a place like Gaza is a highly contentious affair.

— Declan Walsh

The U.N. Security Council held its first open meeting on the crisis but took no action.

International pressure to bring an end to the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas militants has intensified, with the United States stepping up its diplomatic engagement and the United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the conflict in public for the first time. But the council took no action even as member after member decried the death and devastation.

Secretary-General António Guterres was the first of nearly two dozen speakers on the agenda of the meeting on Sunday, led by China, which holds the council’s rotating presidency for the month of May.

“This latest round of violence only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair, and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace,” Mr. Guterres said. “Fighting must stop. It must stop immediately.”

Palestinian and Israeli diplomats, who were also invited to speak, used the meeting as a high-profile forum to vent longstanding grievances, in effect talking past each other with no sign of any softening in an intractable conflict nearly as old as the United Nations itself.

Riyad al-Maliki, the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, implicitly rebuked the United States and other powers that have defended Israel’s right to protect itself from Hamas rocket attacks, asserting that such arguments makes Israel “further emboldened to continue to murder entire families in their sleep.”

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, who spoke after Mr. Maliki, rejected any attempt to portray the actions of Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents. “Israel uses missiles to protect its children,” Mr. Erdan said. “Hamas uses children to protect its missiles.”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said President Biden had spoken with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also been engaging with his counterparts in the region.

She called on Hamas to stop its rockets barrage against Israel, expressed concerns about inter-communal violence, warned against incitement on both sides and said the United States was “prepared to lend our support and good offices should the parties seek a cease-fire.”

While envoys from all of the council’s 15 members urged an immediate de-escalation, there was no indication of what next steps the council was prepared to take. Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador, told reporters after the meeting had adjourned that he was continuing to work with other members “to take prompt action and speak in one voice.”

Mr. Netanyahu of Israel vowed late Saturday to continue striking Gaza “until we reach our targets,” suggesting a prolonged assault on the coastal territory even as casualties rose on both sides.

In separate calls on Saturday, Mr. Biden conferred with Mr. Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, about efforts to broker a cease-fire. While supporting Israel’s right to defend itself from rocket attacks by Hamas militants, Mr. Biden urged Mr. Netanyahu to protect civilians and journalists.

Over the past week, the 15-member U.N. Security Council met privately at least twice to discuss ways of reducing tensions. But efforts to agree a statement or to hold an open meeting had faced resistance from the United States, Israel’s biggest defender on the council.

American officials said they wanted to give mediators sent to the region from the United States, Egypt and Qatar an opportunity to defuse the crisis.

But with violence worsening, a compromise was reached for a meeting on Sunday.

Security Council meetings on the Israeli-Palestinian issue have often ended inconclusively. But they have also demonstrated the widespread view among United Nations members that Israel’s actions as an occupying power are illegal and that its use of deadly force is disproportionately harsh.

— Rick Gladstone, Shashank Bengali, Marc Santora and Dan Bilefsky