If you’ll recall, in my last blog I mentioned I was going to give a specific recommendation as to what we might do to put some “teeth” into the current request that has been made by Egypt to terminate hostilities currently existing between Israel and Hamas.

In order to understand my recommendation we must review what has happened since Egypt urged Israel and Hamas to immediately cease firing at one another.

As you’ll recall, on July 15, 2014, Bill Chappell, writing for W LRN, NPR website, wlrn.org wrote a blog entitled: Israel Resumes Airstrikes On Gaza, As Cease-fire Chance Slips Away.

Chappell reports: “after Hamas rejected a proposed cease-fire that would have ended eight days of fighting, Israel has resumed its airstrikes on Gaza.”

Israel is a perfect example of the consequences that Hamas has brought on themselves as a result of not cooperating with Egypt’s cease- fire request. Specifically, Israel now says it will not stop the hostilities until several criteria are met, one of which is for Israel to have satisfactorily destroyed Hamas’s intricate underground tunnel systems that it has constructed in order to penetrate  Israel’s blockade that currently prevents Hamas and the Palestinians from breaching Israel’s territory.

Hamas and their fellow militants use the tunnels to bring in themselves, as well as weaponry, and whatever else they need to fight the Israelis with.

The other condition that needs to be met before Israel will stop its air and ground attack on Hamas is when Hamas’s militants stop firing rockets into Israel from Gaza.

Hamas counters by stating that Israel’s air bomb attacks are aimed at heavily civilian populated areas, therefore, collateral damage occurs where many civilians – men, women, and children are killed as a result of Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombings.

In response, Israel states that many of the tunnels exist in populated areas, underneath homes, mosques and other civilian constructions which prevent Israel from destroying the tunnels if they were to avoid such areas. Israel claims that Hamas has purposely built the tunnels under or near those constructions for the sole purpose of preventing Israel from bombing those civilian populated areas. As a result, what they’re doing is using their own citizenry as human shields, in hopes that the public outcry against Israel using this inhumane tactic to fight the war by bombing such areas will stop for humanitarian reasons.

From my perspective, I believe as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feels, that he must do whatever he can do to protect his Israeli citizenry from rocket attacks and from Hamas using their tunnels to pursue their aggressive and destructive attempts to destroy Israelis. The fact that innocent Palestinian civilians, men women and children, are caught in the “crossfire” of the war going on between Hamas and Israel is indeed very tragic; on the other hand, it’s barbaric that Hamas uses the Palestinian civilians as defensive shield in hopes that will prevent Israel from doing what they feel is necessary to protect their citizenry from destruction.

The “teeth” I’m proposing is for President Obama’s administration to overtly, forthrightly, and non-apologetically support Prime Minister Netanyahu rationale for continuing his military’s  aggressive stance to quell Hamas’s efforts to gain the upper hand militarily. President Obama should feel free to reiterate what Prime Minister t Netanyahu states, that being when a sufficient number of tunnels have been destroyed so that Hamas can no longer gain ready access to them in a way that has been the case in the past, and they stop shooting rockets at Israel, then, and only then, will Israel terminate their current military activity.

From what I stated earlier, and what the Prime Minister of Israel has implied as well, is that Hamas has escalated the conflict to such an extent that it would be pure folly to comply with any of Hamas’s rationale at the expense of Israel’s autonomy and efforts to protect its homeland.