Lorna Fitzsimons- 22/02/2008

Lorna Fitzsimons, (Spectator)

"This is not the way things were meant to happen. When Ariel Sharon ordered the removal of all Israelis from the Gaza Strip in 2005, leaders from around the world applauded. It was a clear message that Israel was willing to do almost everything it could to resolve the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians - including returning land without any assurances of peace and security. However, the initial optimism was quickly curbed by the grim reality on the ground: Hamas's election victory in January 2006 and the sharp rise of rockets fired at communities inside Israel showed that unilateral withdrawal would not provide a better future for Israelis and Palestinians.

Today the number of rocket attacks on Israel is soaring. Senior Israeli diplomatic and military sources have indicated that there will soon be a large military ground invasion, reluctantly mounted by the Israelis, and a possible reoccupation of some of Gaza. If there is an invasion, Israel will have tacitly admitted that the experiment of unilateral disengagement has failed, leaving it at square one in its quest for peace with the Palestinians in Gaza.

It is hard to imagine how any sovereign state could tolerate the situation that Israel finds herself in today. Approximately 190,000 Israelis - the population of Brighton - living in southern Israel have been under attack for seven years. The 23,000 residents in the Israeli town of Sderot have been going through hell on earth: 30 per cent of them now suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, 90 per cent have experienced a Qassam rocket falling on their street; and over the past 18 months more than 1,600 cases of trauma have been recorded. An alarm system gives residents 15 seconds to seek shelter. Sometimes there are 20 attacks a day. Those who can afford to are moving further inside Israel, leaving the poor and elderly to remain. In a country of just six million people, the impact of all this is the equivalent of Newcastle, Preston or Derby being attacked daily.

And the attacks have intensified. In 2005, 401 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip; in 2006, there were 1,722. The belief that territorial concessions alone would provide greater security has collapsed as the rockets keep on coming. In the two and a half years that followed Israel's total withdrawal, more than 3,700 rockets were fired at Israel - and that figure will be reached this year alone if rockets continue to be fired at the same rate as they have been in the first weeks of 2008. Since 2001, 24 Israelis have been killed and 620 wounded in rocket attacks launched from Gaza. The equivalent attacks on the UK in the same period would have seen 240 people killed and 6,200.

The situation is now even more precarious for Israel following the breach of the Sinai/Gaza border last month. From conversations I've had with intelligence sources, we know that Gazan terror organisations used the breach to upgrade their military capacity, bringing in arms and ammunition - and even operatives. Hamas and other groups now have rockets that are able to reach further inside Israel, placing even more people under the threat of attack.

A growing number of government sources now say privately that under the current conditions a major ground operation in Gaza is only a matter of time. Dr Zvi Shtauber, director of the Institute for National Security Studies, believes it is no longer a question of ‘if' but ‘when' such an operation will take place. Dr Mark Heller, Israeli-Palestinian policy analyst, agrees, calling it ‘almost a statistical certainty' that Israel will be ‘compelled to re-enter Gaza'. Last week defence minister Ehud Barak called for ‘a calm and calculated management' of the ongoing crisis, but revealed that he had ‘instructed the IDF to complete preparations for the possibility of a ground invasion in Gaza'. Chief of Staff Lt-Gen Gabi Ashkenazi went further declaring the IDF were ‘ready to deepen and widen any offensive in the Gaza Strip'."

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