Israel Creates ‘No Man’s Land’ in Gaza, Shrinking Strip by 40 Percent -- Jesse Rosefeld, Daily Beast
To protect itself from Hamas rockets and tunnels, Israel is forcing tens of thousands of people out of their homes, turning their old neighborhoods into a no-man’s land.
BEIT HANOUN, Gaza — This narrow strip of land that used to be called “the Gaza Strip,” already one of the more densely populated places on Earth, is growing dramatically smaller. The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory.
What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”
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My Comment: I was afraid of this. Absent an agreement .... a buffer zone will be the result. This is the same policy that Israel employed in southern Lebanon in the 1980s .... they created a buffer zone to keep out Palestinian guerrillas and other militants .... but all that it created was even more war and conflict.
1 comment:
It will not create more conflict. Hamas and also Fatah are determined to clear Palistine of jews. There is no "compromise" on that - only different ways to reach the goal.
That's why Israel can give land, money or "reach out" as much as they want. The arabs won't stop.
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