Israeli troops are re-entering Gaza, according to the Washington Post. This passage, though, illustrates an important point:
Mariam el-Selgawi, a neighbor who fled her home with her eight children and elderly in-laws, said she knows why the Israelis are back.
“Because of the rockets, everyone is launching rockets” from the agricultural areas inside the Gaza Strip over the border at Israeli towns, she said. “Days before, there was a group trying to shoot a rocket, and they were hit by a missile from a drone, and all of them died.
“All the time I get in fights with them when they come. They know it will bring Israel back to the area,” she complained of the Palestinians firing the projectiles. “The last time I said: ‘The Israelis are going to come and kill us. Aren’t you afraid you’re going to make us orphans?’ And one of them said: ‘We will launch the rockets from your house. You deserve it,'” and they fired it from outside her fence, she said.
Her father-in-law, Ali el-Selgawi, 76, sat forlornly on the linoleum schoolroom floor that is the family’s latest bed, sipping juice and shaking his head. “You can’t talk to them, or they just hit you,” he said.
Perhaps someone can prove me wrong, but I doubt they’re the only people in Gaza who feel this way, or are trapped by the situation, and it certainly lays bare the sheer immorality of Israel’s practice of collectively punishing all residents of Gaza by knocking out their electricity, sewage treatment plants, and water wells.
