"Do You Want Total War?"
Israel escalates in the hope of finally starting an all-out war that it believes will ensure its final victory.
Tragedies seem to blend into each other in Gaza. The massacre at at-Taba’in School in Gaza City on August 10 was not the first Israeli attack on a school in Gaza that month, being part of a campaign of strikes against schools on the basis of practically non-existent evidence of Hamas military usage, ratcheting up in frequency until it reached this point: a strike on a school housing thousands of Palestinians precisely at the time of Fajr prayers, when hundreds of Muslims would be praying side-by-side, packed together in a room where casualties could be maximized.
Every crime serves as cover for the one before and after it, diverting the attention of the outside observer who can only hold so much pain in their heart for long. The massacre at at-Tabi’in blew off the headlines the murder of al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi and the threats against reporter Anas al-Sharif, and their murders were conducted under the shade brought down by strikes that crossed red lines not just in south Beirut but in Tehran as well.
While the endless train of assassinations and wholesale massacres have continued nearly non-stop since the war against Gaza began, the brazenness of Israel’s actions over the past month have arguably exceeded anything before it. It has pushed further into fronts it had refrained from treading into before during this conflict, showing off what Netanyahu has called “Israel’s long hand”, one that can hit both Yemen and now Iran itself with impunity. It is currently on what can only be seen as a warpath, seeking to firmly place itself in the driver’s seat of the war that is rapidly spreading throughout the region, and to place its primary backer, the United States, in a position where it has no hope to ever consider abandoning it, lest it let the entire Middle East unravel even further.
After searching high and low for a catalyzing event that could bring it back into some sort of moral high ground, at least one that would play more easily to Western media and its governments, Israel has finally found what it sees as a clear casus belli in the strike last month on a soccer field in Majdal Shams.
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