Israeli tanks and troops entered Rafah May 6, taking control over the border crossing on the Gaza side of the Egyptian border, attacking other military targets and taking out 20 Hamas troops.
Israeli forces dropped tens of thousands of leaflets and sent other alerts instructing the 100,000 civilians in eastern Rafah to evacuate ahead of time to minimize casualties. Israel Defense Forces spokespeople said most people heeded their call.
The day before, Hamas launched mortars from Rafah on Kerem Shalom in Israel, about 2 miles away, near the crossing there into Gaza. Four Israeli soldiers were killed.
Following the deadly Iran-organized and financed Hamas pogrom last Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people — mostly Jews — and wounded 5,000 more on farms and at a music party, along with dozens of rapes and abuse of women, Israel has moved to eliminate Hamas as a threat. Hamas leaders openly say they intend to continue their attacks until all Jews there are either killed or driven away.
The fight against Jew-hatred and defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews is a key battle today for working people everywhere.
Israeli officials said they were carrying out a “limited operation,” at least for now.
For the first time since the start of the war in Gaza, Israeli troops now control much of the corridor along the border with Egypt, striking another major blow to Hamas. They discovered three “significant” tunnel shafts that could have been used by the four Hamas brigades in Gaza stationed in Rafah.
The Joseph Biden administration has been pushing Israel to back off and stop further efforts to cripple Hamas. Biden called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu May 6 and “reiterated his clear position on Rafah.” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said, “The U.S. will not support the Rafah offensive currently envisioned by Israel.”
Ratcheting up the pressure and widening their rift, Washington has also delayed the $1 billion sale of thousands of precision weapons to Israel to show its opposition to continuing the war against Hamas.
The “Americans want the war to end,” one Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post. “We want to win the war.”
Washington’s only interest in the Middle East is defending U.S. imperialist economic and political interests, not in ensuring Jews are safe from pogroms; nor alleviating the suffering Palestinians face in Gaza, a result of the conscious intentions of Hamas.
Just before the Rafah operation began, headlines in the liberal capitalist media reported as fact Hamas propaganda that the Jew-hating group had just agreed to a “cease-fire proposal,” implying Hamas had signed on to a deal that Israel had also accepted.
But that wasn’t true. Hamas’ push was a “counterproposal,” another version of Hamas’ longstanding demand that Israel permanently pull all its troops out of Gaza and allow Hamas to immediately begin redeploying its remaining forces throughout the territory, including taking control over the flow of humanitarian aid.
The Hamas proposal is so cynical that it says that in the first stage of the cease-fire, they would release only 33 hostages of the 128 it still holds — or their “bodies” if they’re dead — in exchange for 30 times that number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons accused of terrorist acts. Israeli officials believe at least 35 of the hostages are dead.
The Biden administration knew about Hamas’ “new” counterproposal, but didn’t inform Israeli officials.
Netanyahu spoke at the opening ceremony for International Holocaust Memorial Day May 5 at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. The annual event commemorates the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II, highlighting why the creation of the state of Israel became inevitable. The Oct. 7 Hamas slaughter was the worst pogrom since the Holocaust.
Imperialist powers from Washington to London and Ottawa turned away Jews trying to flee the Nazi terror, sending tens of thousands to their deaths. After the Nazis were defeated, Jews languished in European “displaced person” camps, still denied entry abroad. That’s why hundreds of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust fought to make their way to Israel.
Hamas intent is genocide
Netanyahu said Hamas failed in turning the Oct. 7 pogrom into a Holocaust despite its “intent of genocide” only because Israel exists and Jews were able to fight back.
“We are fighting on two fronts,” he said, “first, the fanatical regime in Iran and its terror proxies, who act with the clear intention to destroy us; the second, the antisemitic volcano eruption that spits burning lava of lies against us, all around the world.”
“I say to the leaders of the world, no amount of pressure, no decision by any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself,” he said. “But we know we are not alone because countless decent people around the world support our just cause.”