Tel Aviv Tribune Net correspondents
GazaWhile observers point out that Israel fell into a strategic failure during its ground war on the Gaza Strip, it is at the same time looking for a tactical success achieved by air by targeting members and leaders of the Palestinian resistance, and after being unable in 264 days to reach the first row of them, its hand reaches out to their families en masse. .
Israel was the first country to legalize “assassination operations” in 2002, with the condition that “the liquidation process does not cause collateral damage.” Today, it deliberately bends the arm of the resistance leaders by assassinating the circle closest to them in an old and new policy that the occupation has followed since the 1970s until today, the latest of which is targeting the family of the head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh.
The occupation not only destroyed his house, nor killed 30 first-degree relatives, nor arrested dozens of others from the family, but also intensified its attempts to blackmail him, the most recent of which was the bombing of the house of his sister, Zahr Haniyeh, who was martyred with 10 members of her family, most of whom were women.
Civil defense crews recovered 5 of them, while 6 others remained under the rubble of their destroyed house in the Beach refugee camp, west of Gaza City.
Fixed position
Commenting on the martyrdom of her aunt, Enas Haniyeh says, “The occupation deliberately targeted Ismail Haniyeh’s eldest sister, who was like his mother and closest to him, and who, along with her eldest son, embraced his family during the years of his deportation to Marj al-Zuhur and filled the void of his absence.”
She continued in an interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “These repeated attacks reveal the stupidity of the occupation, which thinks that it is punishing the leaders and their families, and does not know that it increases our intransigence and determination to take our rights from it.”
She pointed out that her uncle, Ismail Haniyeh, “is the first to console the family and steadfastly support them after every crime committed by the occupation against his relatives, and that his position is firm every time, as the world sees him as peaceful and patient with their harm.”
Haniyeh had commented on the targeting of his family by saying, “The blood of the martyrs demands that we not compromise, that we should not compromise, that we should not change or alter, that we should not weaken, or despair, but rather we should continue on our path with all determination.”
The writer on political and military affairs, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that Haniyeh’s comment “dismisses all of Israel’s attempts to push him to concede or break.”
He added, “The appearance of Abu al-Abd Haniyeh with such consistency after every Israeli retaliation indicates that these systematic attacks will not achieve the purpose for which they were created or achieve their desired goal.”
Abdul Rahman believes that “the occupation seeks, through killing the leaders’ families, to target their soft underbelly, in an attempt to influence their political decisions and to make concessions regarding the course of negotiations related to the exchange deal.”
The Palestinian writer adds that the occupation army is “an army without morals that does not respect the honor of rivalry, and adopts its cheap method that contradicts the Fourth Geneva Convention, the rights of civilians in wars, and international conventions.”
Plant fear
As for the researcher Ali Mansour, he believes that the most important thing that the occupation is trying to achieve through this is to create a state of social isolation from the resistance leaders, “so they plant fear in the hearts of the public about them and their families and push them to stay away from what brings retaliatory Israeli reactions, so they do not shelter them, marry them, or deal with them.” “.
He stated in an interview with Tel Aviv Tribune Net that Haniyeh is one of dozens of resistance leaders whose families were targeted, including the family of Hamas Political Bureau member Kamal Abu Aoun, whose sons, their wives, daughters and their husbands were targeted by the occupation.
While observers agree that the families of the leaders were the first to shed their blood in the Israeli aggression, it was also noteworthy that during this war the occupation targeted the children and wives of martyr leaders who were killed during previous wars, such as the families of the martyrs Dhafer Al-Shawa and Awad Abu Salamiya, who were martyred in 2021 in Operation Saif Al-Quds.
This targeting coincides with public encouragement by Israeli rabbis who came out in full view of the world calling for the extermination of Gazan women “because they only give birth to terrorists,” as they described it, in a war in which Israel claimed the lives of more than 10 Palestinian women and nearly 16,000 children, in addition to thousands of missing people. Some of them were trapped under the rubble.
