Daily Telegraph: 'Fragile ceasefire still could provide the mould for a longer peace'

A surprisingly good article in the Telegraph today. Most of its coverage of Ukraine and other foreign wars is simplistic, one-sided and, to be honest, propaganda, but occasionally they publish something incisive.

Israel, too, must face reality, military and political. At the start of the conflict, it estimated there were 30,000-40,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza.

It has since killed an estimated 14,000 people in its stated military objective of “ending” the organisation and its infrastructure in Gaza but, of those, just 4,300 were adult males, according to the Hamas controlled Gazan health authority.

The hard truth Israeli military strategists now face is this: for the most part, Hamas, like legions of terrorist insurgents before them, have stashed their grab-bags and vanished into the general population in the south of the Gaza strip.

Most will go unnoticed for what the vast majority of combatants the world over really are: poor and uneducated boys led by cultish thugs and grasping psychopaths.

Trying to kill them within a zone that Israel itself has asked civilians to move risks collateral damage on a scale that even the cold legal logic of proportionality in war would struggle to justify. The incremental military gain will be too slight to justify the likely civilian carnage.

Israel also has a unique humanitarian crisis on its hands, and one that could yet prove its undoing.

In most wars of the type being fought in Gaza, much of the potential humanitarian fallout is mitigated by people fleeing. But in Gaza, mass migration is not possible. Some 2.3 million people are sealed into a crowded hellhole into which only a trickle of food, water and power is currently flowing.

Israel’s hardmen like to say they don’t care what the world thinks when it comes to protecting the Jewish homeland. But if Gaza’s ragged millions start to starve or succumb to infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid this winter it won’t be long before commentators like me start to recall the ghettos of Poland and Ukraine that our great grandparents died in.