Hamas remained largely on the sidelines in the fighting in Gaza on Saturday, raising the prospect that the current round of cross-border violence will be limited in both scope and duration. Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh made noncommittal statements, saying Israel bears full responsibility for the latest escalation, without specifying Hamas’s own intentions. One reason could be jobs. Since the last major conflict in Gaza in May last year, Israel has shifted its policy towards Gaza to what officials have described as an effort to keep the peace, offering financial incentives to the 2 million civilians in the coastal enclave and raising the stakes for Hamas if it decides to join the hostilities. Israeli security officials have issued thousands of permits to Gazans allowing them to enter Israel daily to work in agriculture and construction. About 14,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza have been working in Israel in recent months, the largest number since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, and Israel has promised to increase the number to 20,000. Beyond this economic incentive, the Israeli military has also warned of the dire consequences of another major round of fighting in Gaza. Military officials have released what they describe as intelligence reports showing Hamas tunnels and other military infrastructure built in the heart of Gaza’s residential areas, suggesting civilian casualties would be almost inevitable in a military campaign. In addition to work permits, Israel has also allowed improvements in recent months that have expanded water and electricity supplies to Gaza and expanded capacity for imports and exports. More medical equipment has been imported and Gaza’s exports of agricultural products and its fishing, textile and furniture industries have nearly doubled in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year, military officials said. But in recent days, as Islamic Jihad threatened to retaliate from Gaza over Israel’s arrest of one of the group’s senior commanders in the West Bank, Israel has closed border crossings, preventing the movement of people and goods in and out of the Gauze. Israeli residents living near the border were effectively put under curfew, with all roads closed in the areas near Gaza. Lt. Gen. Ghasan Alyan, the head of the military service in charge of political contacts in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, delivered a stark message to Hamas on Friday, outlining the choice it faces about supporting Islamic Jihad or stay in it. battle round. “The responsibility lies with Hamas,” he said, in a video posted on the agency’s Arabic Facebook page. “Is he more concerned with helping the people of Gaza or helping dissident organizations?” Hamas’s decision to stay on the sidelines so far has been reminiscent of a brief round of cross-border fighting in 2019. That round also opened with an Israeli airstrike that killed a senior Islamic Jihad commander, Baha Abu al-Ata, along with her husband. , Asmaa Abu al-Ata, and prompted Islamic Jihad to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel. Over the next two days, Israel killed 34 people in Gaza, including about a dozen militants and several children. But Hamas chose not to participate, including the scope of the hostilities. Instead, it was Hamas that started the last major conflagration in Gaza in May 2021, when it fired a barrage of rockets toward Jerusalem after weeks of rising Israeli-Palestinian tensions and clashes in the disputed city.
