How Did the “Cease-fire” End?
On 19 June, a “state of calm” began between Israel and Hamas. The goal of this arrangement was to end Hamas’s rocket fire on Sderot and to gradually open up the border crossings into Gaza for civilian goods. You can see details of the arrangement in our previous post. This arrangement was due to last for 6 months, with possible renewal thereafter.
As you can see from the following graphs, while rocket and mortar fire from Gaza slowed during the “lull,” it never fully stopped. (The graphs are taken from a report published last month.)
In addition, rather than use the “state of calm” to promote peace and to build a civilian infrastructure in Gaza, Hamas took advantage of the situation to expand its terrorist capabilities. In addition to continuing to fire rockets and mortars, Hamas also smuggled weapons and other materiel from Egypt, and expanded its tunnel network, going so far as to dig a tunnel under Israeli territory to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
When Israeli forces acted on intelligence reports and went to investigate the tunnel on 04 November, they came under fire from “Palestinian gunmen” (see news item). The firefight resulted in the death of 1 gunman and the wounding of several others, and the wounding of 4 Israeli soldiers. During the following two days, Hamas launched 47 rockets and 10 mortar shells against civilian areas in Israel. Hamas declared that it had responded to Israel’s actions, and leaders of Israel and Hamas maintained their desire to prevent further escalation of the situation. However, Hamas continued to attack Israel–mostly by rocket and mortar fire–throughout the next few weeks. In order to protect its civilian population, Israel took occasional action against these Hamas terrorists (see the list of Palestinian casualties in November 2008 from B’Tselem–all were killed while carrying out hostilities).
In fact, as the “lull” was due to expire on 19 December, Israel still held out hope that Hamas would renew the agreement. Instead, Hamas declared its unwillingness to renew any agreement and commenced firing rockets and mortars at a higher rate than previously.
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