Hamas shows indifference to any 'rules' of war. And reportage has failed to keep pace with the Islamists' innovation.
Amid all the international criticism of Israel's fighting tactics in Gaza these past few days, from the gentle to the hysterical, from the supercilious chiding about disproportionate response to the vicious Nazi comparisons, one prominent aspect has curiously escaped marked comment.
Israel is bombing mosques in Gaza. Six of them and counting.
In recent years, the purported disrespect for Islam displayed in the writings of authors such as Salman Rushdie has been sufficient to provoke death sentences and mass rallies. The dissemination of Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, one of which showed the prophet with a bomb in his headdress in an artistic critique of the hijacking of Islam by extremists, prompted violent demonstrations around the world that rather underlined the cartoonists' point.
But today, with Gaza mosque after mosque targeted by the Israel Air Force, this unprecedented assault on Islamic places of worship has passed without particular hysteria.
Part of the reason is that critics and protesters are focusing on Israel's broader "crime" of trying to defend its civilians against ever deeper and more devastating Hamas rocket attacks. But still, the repeated direction of Jewish fire-power into Islam's places of worship, one might have assumed, would inflame the Arab world and its supporters into an orgy of anti-Israel fury.
As of this writing, that hasn't happened.
And it hasn't happened because the Islamists know they've been found out.
In a terrible incident on Tuesday, Israel hit an UNRWA school, and in the subsequent explosions a reported 40-plus people were killed, many of them civilians. An outraged UNRWA emphatically denied an IDF claim that a Hamas mortar battery had been firing from the school, and that secondary blasts indicated the presence of further explosives there; the Associated Press cited eyewitness accounts of "a small group of militants firing mortars near the school and running away." The accusations and counter-accusations will rumble on, and there's little likelihood of a definitive narrative emerging.
As regards the mosques, by contrast, Israel's declaration that it is firing on them because they are hubs of Hamas terrorism has met with no emphatic denials, no aggrieved assertions from Hamas clerics that their buildings are innocent places of humble worship, no pleas to the international community to enter the buildings and document their purity.
Britain's Observer newspaper reported last Sunday, after the IAF struck the Ibrahim al-Maqadma mosque in northern Gaza's Beit Lahiya, that Al-Jazeera's Gaza correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, believed the attacks "could galvanize the Arab world into taking action against Israel." But this doubtless objective correspondent's professional assessment did not prove prophetic.
The name of that mosque rather gives the game away, of course. Maqadma was one of the founders of Hamas and its military chief. He was killed in an Israeli helicopter strike in Gaza in March 2003, soon after a series of Hamas terror attacks, including a suicide bombing on an Egged bus in Haifa that killed 17 people.
Israeli security officials say the mosques that have been struck, long known as centers of Islamist indoctrination and vicious anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish incitement, are being used as weapons stores, command centers, as cover for networks of tunnels - in short, Hamas military positions. Again, there has been no frenzied rush by Gaza's clerics to dispute this devastating accusation.
"We did not easily take the decision to hit mosques," an Israeli security official said this week. But one of those targeted was the entry point to a whole series of tunnels, he said. Another was a storehouse for Grad missiles fired into Israel. (On Wednesday, the IDF released footage of a rocket being launched into Israel from immediately adjacent to the wall of a mosque.) "When you see, day after day, people going back into a mosque for their rocket supplies," the official said, "you have to act."
Along with the absent protestations of innocence, however, there is also a regrettable absence of internal Islamic condemnation of the abuse by Hamas of its holy places. Imagine the intra-Jewish storm were a synagogue's sanctity to be compromised in any remotely comparable manner. So where are the Islamic leaders, in Gaza and beyond, bitterly castigating Hamas for its unholy disrespect? And where are the horrified rank and file worshipers?
The leaders' silence only bolsters the perception of Islam as a religion inexorably being overwhelmed by violent extremists, with its moderates intimidated into silence. The tacit complicity of the worshipers - some of whom have lost their lives in recent days when the IAF struck, even though attacks were timed to avoid prayer services - underlines the extent of support and tolerance for Hamas's brand of Islam in Gaza. No surprise there; some two-thirds of Gazans chose to vote for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections.
THE DESECRATION of the mosques is only one expression of Hamas's egregious indifference to any hitherto accepted "rules" of war.
Civilians are supposed to be off limits. So too, by extension, homes, schools and places of worship. Yet Hamas stores its ammunition and manufacturers its weaponry in precisely such places. On the very first day of Operation Cast Lead - 10 days, that is, before the tragic incident at the UNRWA school - Israeli security sources specified that Hamas was operating at or close to schools in some of Gaza's most dense population centers. The initial air strikes, which hit targets that had been evaluated for many months, eschewed numerous key Hamas positions precisely because they had been so callously established in the heart of civilian areas.
Hamas has for years been diverting Israeli electricity supplies to the Strip for weapons manufacture. This week, it cried humanitarian disaster even as it commandeered some of the food, fuel and medical supplies flowing into Gaza and blocked others.
