Beginning of third intifada?

Members of the Islamist militant group, Hamas, carried out surprise attack in southern Israel amid a barrage of rocket fires from the Gaza strip. According to reports, the Hamas militants killed about hundred Israelis and injured 500 more. They also captured Israeli military vehicles including a tank and held some Israeli soldiers hostage. Needless to say, Israel, as it always does, responded by air raids into Gaza killing close to 200 people. Obviously, it is the beginning of yet another cycle of deadly conflicts to punish the 2.3 million Gazans in their small coastal enclave under seize by Israel since 2007 when the Hamas took control of the territory. Earlier in 2006, the Hamas militant group won the Palestinian parliamentary elections. But later, it was engaged in an armed battle with the nationalist Fatah movement and took control of the Gaza strip. The Fatah party, on the other hand, remained in charge of the partially autonomous territories in the West bank. Since then the Israeli army and the Hamas group fought four wars. And the uneven wars caused deaths of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children and destruction of their homes, health facilities, schools and utility services. The last such war between the Hamas fighters and Israeli army was fought in 2021.
The surprise Hamas attack was launched on a major Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, half a century after a similar surprise attack in 1973 that Egypt and Syria carried out during another Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. And on both occasions, the Israeli security establishment was taken by surprise exposing the myth of its invincibility.
But why has Hamas started this surprise attack, which one of the Palestinian militant groups' shadowy commander, Mohammed Deif, termed 'Operation Al-Aqsa Storm' in retaliation of what he said, 'continued blockade of Gaza, Israeli raids on West Bank cities over the past year, violence at Al Aqsa, increased attack on Palestinians by settlers and continued growth of settlements'. No doubt, from previous experience, the Palestinians know what would be the scale of the Israeli retaliation in terms of its destructive power. The way the Gaza residents came out on the street of Gaza in exultation over the capture of an Israeli tank, reminds one of the desperation of a people who know death and destruction as part of their existence. So, they did not want to miss the opportunity to celebrate a moment of victory, though they know it would be short-lived. Squeezed between Israel in the East and North and Egypt in the Southwest, both hostile to the Hamas-controlled Gaza, the Gazans seem to have forgotten to fear, a vital evolutionary biological response to danger whether real or perceived, physical or emotional. What can Israel do? The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his reaction to the Hamas's incursion into southern Israel has already declared, 'Not an operation, not a round, but a war'. 'The enemy will pay an unprecedented price'. But what price is costlier than death, which the Gazans already know of with their back to the wall? The entire Western world instantly condemned the attack by Hamas on Israel. But there has been no condemnation ever of the deadly Israeli attacks being carried out day in, day out on the stone-throwing Palestinian youths including children with disproportionate force in the occupied West Bank killing scores of them. No sympathy for these hapless Palestinian men, women and children who are nothing but 'terrorists' to them! They have no right to self-defence, though Israel has. The Gazans and all other Palestinians know the world has abandoned them. Their Arab neighbours, too, have become practically silent about their cause of a free Palestine. As a result, the far-right Israeli government has been getting more and more aggressive in trampling the rights of the Palestinians. The amount of support and sympathy the Palestinians received from the rest of the world in the Cold War era is now a thing of the past. The Palestinians themselves are now divided. Many Arab countries are now drawing closer to Israel.
The Oslo peace accords started in the early 1990s brokered by the United States of America and representatives of the then-Israeli government and leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) have, meanwhile, also been forgotten. With it has, perhaps, also further faded the prospect of the two-state solution to the Palestinian question into oblivion. The present attitude of the far-right Israeli governments is to grab as much land of the occupied West Bank as possible and build Jewish settlements there. At a stage, there will be no land left for the Palestinians to build their free Palestinian state.
In this context, the international community has failed in its commitment to do justice to the Palestinian people who have been forced out of their ancestral land for over seven decades. How long will the Palestinians live the lives of refugees in their own land? Even if the present far-right Israeli government succeeds in its design to settle Jews in all Palestinian lands, will that end the Palestinians' dream of a free Palestine?
The eruption of the ongoing conflicts between the Hamas group and the Israeli state, to all appearances, is the beginning of the third intifada by the Palestinians. No one knows how and when it is going to end.

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