Mission revealed: destroy Hamas

Paul McGeough reported extensively from Iraq after the invasion of that country and also from Jerusalem and the Middle East generally. He is experienced in the area and its often "difficult" politics.

He writes in the SMH in a piece "Mission revealed: destroy Hamas":

"The revelation of the daring objective at the heart of Operation Cast Lead calls for Israel's air-and-ground assault on Gaza to be given a new name. As the rhetorical layers are peeled back, what we are hearing makes Mission Impossible a more worthy contender.

Tel Aviv's early insistence that this massive military exercise was about putting a halt to Palestinian rockets being fired into or near communities in the south of Israel never rang true.

Measure it by the number of rockets - 8000-plus over eight years - and indeed it sounds like a genuine existential threat. Consider the toll - 20 Israeli deaths spread over eight years, which is about half the number of deaths in just a month of Israeli traffic accidents - and it all loses its oomph as a casus belli.

Israel does not want to deal with Hamas - it wants to annihilate the Islamist movement."

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