Op-Ed video: 'Netanyahu's war is a year old, Sinwar's has only just started'
For more than a year, Israel has indiscriminately bombed Gaza, with Palestinians losing loved ones, their homes, and their own lives.
Most of the enclave's already fragile infrastructure - water and electricity, as well as schools, hospitals, and farmland - have either been completely or partially destroyed.
No one would have predicted - myself included - that the war would still be being fought with the same ferociousness a year on.
But despite the devastation, no one is raising the white flag.
Nor are there significant signs of revolt from a population - now living in tents - that has lost over 41,000 people directly from bombing, and three or four times more in indirect deaths.
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"Today, Hamas has changed the course of events, because the peaceful path to a viable Palestinian state was blocked. All talk of a peace process was a Potemkin-size mirage," said David Hearst, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye.
"Oslo not only failed to deliver a Palestinian state. It created the conditions for the Israeli state to expand and thrive as never before in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
"This has been the biggest single factor in persuading a new generation of Palestinian youth to sell their taxis and shops for guns.
According to Hearst, since Israel luanched its devastating war, it has been stripped "of its liberal Zionist image, the image of the new kid on the block trying to defend itself in a "tough neighbourhood'."
"This has been replaced by the image of a regional ogre, a genocidal state, with no moral compass, using terror to survive. Such a state cannot live in peace with its neighbours. It crushes and dominates to survive," he said.
"Netanyahu's war is short-term and tactical. Sinwar's war is long-term. It is to make Israel realise it can never keep the lands it has occupied if it wants peace," he added.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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