Tunnels were dug by the resistance to smuggle arms, medicine and food etc just like the resistance did in the Warsaw Ghetto.

When Hamas were voted into power i was optimistic. They were powerful and popular. They had the potential to guide the Palestinians toward a prosperous democratic future. Unfortunately Hamas chose death and destruction over peace and growth. There is still a choice. And it's one for Hamas to make. I'm not so optimistic any more though.

There is just no comparison between Warsaw and Gaza.
The Jews were being systematically eliminated in a Nazi anti Jew Holocaust.
Gaza however, was not under endless daily attack, and had been given regional autonomy, by an evacuating occupational army!
These are the historical facts, the Gazans were just not being similarly systematically decimated!
And they simply had no problem getting adequate food, fuel and medicine, through the border with Israel! Moreover, they had plenty of weapons for peaceful policing purposes, and just didn't need any more!
That is, until they decided to suicide bomb/fire rockets at Israel.
What did anyone seriously logically think?
That Israel would not respond with tighter border controls, which are the only reason that the cement, that could have been used to build civilian shelters and facilities, was diverted into tunnel construction, by mad hatter Hamas! And or, not respond to thousands of rockets, financed with a diverted aid budget, being fired daily into Israel?
End of story!
Rhrosty.

hey Adammmm

this is true

'When Hamas were voted into power (in Jan 2006)I was optimistic. They were powerful and popular. They had the potential to guide the Palestinians toward a prosperous democratic future...'

I felt the same but what happened after the election in 2006 when Hamas won?

It wasn't as you said.

Israel, the EU and the USA in 2006 refused to recognise Hamas right to govern. Israel blockaded and attacked Gaza in 2006.

In 2007 Hamas undertook to form a government of national unity with Fatah. Israel, the EU and the USA refused to recognise this government. In 2008 Israel attacked Gaza.

In 2014 Hamas undertook to form a government of national unity with Fatah. The EU and the USA did not respond. The Israelis did. They attacked Gaza.

Throughout this whole period both Israel and Gaza undertook retaliatory attacks on each other with warplanes, bombs, shelling and rockets.

Don't ask the Israeli's and their propagandists, they will lie and not tell you Hamas was ready to accept a peace treaty with Israel based on 1967 borders.

Hamas still want a peace treaty and a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders plus the blockade being lifted. The dirty mongrels.

They other dirty mongrels will tell you Hamas, with their massive cache of rockets and tunnels, intend to erase Israel and the disproportionate Israeli attacks on Gaza are defence attacks that mistakenly kill indiscriminately huge numbers of women and children.

Now watch who are the merchants of hate.

Hamas has one constantly stated aim "Israel shall exist until Hamas completely eradicates it down to the very last Jew!" This is not hidden but freely available for all to read in it's charter. No amount of rationalisation stating that USA and EU and Israel failed to negotiate with it in it's various so called unity government guises, can stand against that central aim of Hamas. A country that negotiates with a terrorist entity soon finds it's citizens being beheaded. Hamas is evil, as much as IS or Boku Haram. Hamas is anti-Israel, anti- Semitic, anti-Western terrorist organisation which continues to target innocent civilians both in Israel and in Gaza. It must be defeated before it's apocalyptic vision of the future for Israel can be realised using Palestinians as fodder for it's war machine. Israel would only be a stepping stone on it's way towards the Great Satan. The world needs to be aware of the danger of Hamas!

Shazz

Fatah was part of that government of national unity and still your mates would not give peace and forgiveness a chance.

Tell me what has being peaceful and not resisting the occupation done for the West Bank Palestinians?

Their legitimate lands have been progressively stolen by illegal settlements.

Your heroes were terrified Hamas would have given the Palestinians on the west bank the resolve to resist your heroes illegal occupation and land stealing.

You are squealing now because you know Hamas has defeated your heroes and you cannot understand how. So you run your heroes propaganda and lie about events to justify and hide the obvious criminality against an enemy that lacks any sort of military might to accomplish your hysterical 'apocalyptic vision'.

Your heroes will just 'turn the region to glass' if that looks like occurring according to one of your genocide supporting olo mates.

That's "a giant sheet of glass", Julianutter.

A million Jews have been expelled, or fled in terror, from Muslim lands since 1949,leaving behind their properties and possessions. Many of them went to Israel. The Jews have just as much right to ethnically cleanse the ethnically cleansing Muslims from their lands as the Muslims have to ethnically cleanse Jews, Christians, Yazadis, and everybody else from theirs.

The Muslims hold the entire Middle East and they want it all. The Jews have their backs to the wall and they are not going anywhere.

The Israelis have Israel to flee to when the Muslims try to exterminate them, but where are you gong to flee to when the Muslims decide to attack your country from within? Just in case you have not noticed, every western country was stupid enough to allow Muslims to immigrate, and they are all going to end up like Palestine/Israel sooner or later.

Look at Israel and see London, Paris, and Stockholm in fifty years time, and Sydney in 100 years time. The portents are already there. Bombs, mass car burnings, no-go areas, demands for Sharia law, rampant criminal behaviour, Islamic suburbs expanding through population differentials and non Muslims fleeing. Even in Sydney's Lakemba, 30 minutes drive from the CBD, Australia women driving cars through the main street have "whore" screamed at them by Muslims.

I find it incredible that a religion with a stated aim of destroying Israel and then taking over the world by force actually gets defended by people like yourself. If Churchill was alive today he would think you are just as crazy as the Nazi appeasers in his day.

Israel is the front line of the western world against Islam and the only western nation actively shooting back at the Muslims. Good on them. Let 'em have it. Shoot one off for me.

I do hope LEGO watched last night's Q & A. That was an entire panel of sycophants for islam. They are peaceful but wherever they go they bring war. They are love but wherever they go they hate. They arrive because of persecution and then start persecuting the country they land in.
Australia needs to just say no to any sort of religeous extremism which effectively means a burkha free country. Reduce centrelink payments to immigrants and see how many we get then.
I say this as an immigrant myself and what a privilege it is to be an Australian.

Here we see another set of contributors mired in the beliefs of violence and hate of another religion that causes some adherents and their supporters to become just another extremist bunch of merchants of hate. All are becoming cheerleaders for or active participants in the killing of innocents, land stealing and genocide.

Jbowyer,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand ...

No mate. The vast majority of Muslims tend adopt the mores and laws of the countries they settle. If the religion of Islam comes to dominate as it has in Indonesia it is not necessarily a natural progression to sharia law.

What you are suggesting is hateful.

imajulianutter,

<<No mate. The vast majority of Muslims tend adopt the mores and laws of the countries they settle>>

No mate. They *generally* adhere to the local law whilst they are in the minority--but, as soon as they get the numbers they change the law to reflect Sharia.Then it's stuff all infidels-- including previously helpful julianutters

Well Julian someone holding up a severed head comes to mind when I think of hate but then you would think me an islamaphobe.
Malaysia is as corrupt as Indonesia and no advertisement for countries we should emulate. Remember the Burkha clad peace lover in Sydney with her child holding a "Behead the unbelievers" sign?
I stand by what I said.

Oh what a shameful bunch of half truths, misdirections and outright lies Mr Falkenstein has managed to cobble together to lay in front of us for our edification.

Firstly why on earth has the word 'terror tunnels' not be put in quotation marks? There is absolutely no proof that these tunnels into Israel were anything but a means of attacking invading forces.

Here is a video of just such an attack on a walled and fortified, Israeli military post;

http://youtu.be/SdGCtjFxJWU

Five Israeli soldiers were killed and one Hamas fighter lost his life. These men had bravely crawled through hundreds of metres of darkened narrow tunnels risking entombment at any time as many similar tunnels were being destroyed by the invading forces. Once emerging behind enemy lines (an enemy that had so brutally killed a thousand of their fellow Gazans) they did not head toward civilian areas but moved across open ground, at great risk to themselves, to attack a fortified military post. They did so against one of the worlds most weaponised, lethal armies risking death at any moment.

Why shouldn't most people regard this as an extremely courageous operation against a vastly superior enemy. I can only applaud their daring. Compare their courage to those Israeli F16 pilots, flying well above any danger, dropping bombs on families, on hospitals, on schools, on UN shelters.

Now to the next lie;

“But Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in many countries, did not use this cement to build homes, hospitals, schools, community centres or bomb shelters; instead, they used it to protect their stockpile of weapons, artillery and rockets, and to facilitate attacks on Israeli civilian towns.”

This video shows that during the time between this and the previous slaughter by Israel there was a building boom in Gaza with material smuggled in from Egypt. Schools hospitals, homes, apartments were all being constructed at a frenetic rate. So much for it being diverted for tunnels.

http://vimeo.com/101819495

Cont...

Cont...

Then came this crock;

“An estimated 800,000 tonnes of cement were used to construct the tunnels, an amount roughly equivalent to 15 Sydney Harbour Bridges.”

The IDF claim there destroyed just over 30 tunnels extending into Israel. Let us call it 40 for the sake of argument. That would be 20,000 tonnes of cement for each tunnel. If the tunnel were 2 kilometres long this would be 10 tonne of cement for each metre. Each tonne of cement typically takes another 5 to 6 tonnes of sand and aggregate to make concrete. So that is 60-70 tonne per metre of tunnel length. As a concrete truck typically carries 6 cubic metres of concrete which in turn weighs about 15 tonnes it would take 4 fully loaded concrete trucks per metre to construct these tunnels Nothing we have seen in any footage comes anywhere close to this level of construction. It is pure, made up, pull it out of his arse propaganda.

And the shite just keeps on coming;

“Construction of each tunnel would have taken many months and huge amounts of physical labour, with reports that children were used by Hamas as tunnel-diggers and that 160 children died during the tunnels' construction.”

Crap! The report that talks about 160 children dying during tunnel construction is here;

http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/42605

It was referring to the private tunnels dug between Gaza and Egypt and goes on to note;

“Once in control of the commercial tunnels, the Hamas government set about formalizing the smuggling economy through regulation. In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, the Interior Ministry established the Tunnel Affairs Commission (TAC) to act as the regulatory authority for commercial activities. Among its first acts was to issue a list of blacklisted imports, including weapons, alcohol, and tramadol, a painkiller much used in Gaza. In response to public concern at a rising toll of tunnel casualties, particularly of child workers, the TAC issued guidelines intended to ensure safe working conditions.”

I could go on. Practically every sentence in this article is hyped nonsense and does the writer little credit.

Yeah, but Steeelredux, the Jews have infinitely more credibility than the Muslims. I may concede that the Jews might exaggerate a bit,like the bit about the the Sydney harbour bridge concrete. But I don't believe a word any Muslim says. I am still laughing at the Saddam's "Minister of Information" who claimed that the US was being pushed back while US tanks were resting in the park behind the building he was giving the TV interview in. The best part was when the interview was over and the journos walked across the road to interview the US tankees.

He could get away saying that to Muslims because they are so brainwashed by their evil religion that they accept anything Big Brother says. But western people are a lot smarter than the Muslims. At least the ones who don't have their brains wired backwards after studying for humanities degrees. Even ordinary blokes like JBowyer and me can watch Q&A and figure out that we are being conned. I can't watch Q&A anymore JB, because I put my boot through the screen the last time I watched Q&A.

Here in the west, publications which sprout the pro Palestinain, pro Muslim line are in decline because people do not trust the buggers to tell the truth. The most heartening thing today is the "letters" pages in the newspapers.

I tried to send "letters to the editor" 10 years ago warning of the dangers of Islam, and they were petty mild letters by the standards of today. But they never got printed because in those days even newspaper publishers were sucking up to multiculturalism. But today there has been a sea change in attitudes, if the letters columns in Sydney's "Daily Telegraph" and "The Australian" are anything to go by.

They are so many anti Muslim letters today that I wonder if the people who wrote the letters have ben reading my posts on OLO? People are waking up to Islam, Steelredux, and that is why almost everybody supports Israel. The damned Muslims are just crazy religious psychotics who's countries are all dysfunctional.

History's alchemy is when fiction becomes fact. Imajulianutter and his colleagues are indeed history's alchemists. It is a pity that they miss the point of the article - both Israelis and Gazans deserve better than Hamas. Unfortunately, having elected Hamas to power, ordinary Gazans are now unable to remove them.

What was that about Hamasaki being elected and not facing another election.

Due to the actions of the west and Israel Hamas as a government has been frustrated. Hamas would win any Palestinian election
Their defeat of the Israel has cemented that prospect.

Even the west bank Palestinians would vote for them.

You seem to forget the basic role of democratically elected government. It is to protect the citizens and secure their borders. They did that here against overwhelming military might and tupidity.

Dear LEGO,

Why do Israel's supporters indulge in so many
outright lies. Your claim that most people
support Israel. Do Your research on the web.
Google the headlines from Reuters, and other
news agencies. Israel's global support is now
non-existant. The entire world is disgusted
and ashamed (including Holocaust survivors -
hundreds have signed a petition asking for the
occupation and Israel's actions in Gaza to
cease).

Your claims are abolutely outrageous.
And you dare to criticise people like SteeleRedux
who deal in facts.

Talk about chutzpah!

You do know what chutzpah is don't you -
It's a Yiddish term - and means - "cheek"
(actually its more than just cheek - ita gall
and then some) -
an example would be - if children would murder
their parents then try to throw
themselves on the mercy of the court because
they're orphans.

No one is buying what either you, or other fanatics,
like the author of this
article or Mr Singer is selling.

Peeing on my leg and trying to tell me its raining
doesn't work anymore. Try honesty and truth
and real evidence, just for a change.
You might enjoy the experience - if you learn to
identify these ethics. I won't hold my breath though.

Foxy, the reason why so many foreign political leaders make mild criticisms of Israel is because the Arabs control 60% of the world's oil. So they make token efforts to make the Arabs happy because they do not want an oil embargo on them.

When you say that people around the world are disgusted with Israel, what you really mean is that those people like yourself who have left wing, ABC mindsets are disgusted with Israel. Normal people who understand the concept of self defence and who consider the Arab Muslims for what they really are, extremely violent religious nutcases with an ideology for world domination, could not care less how many bombs the Jews drop on the Arabs. I know a lot of ex Bankstown working class men who fled the Muslim invasion of their suburbs with their families, because of the Muslim intimidation towards Australians. They would all be very happy for the IDF to bomb Bankstown, Canterbury, Lakemba, and Auburn.

Put on a nice dress and a tight blouse and walk down the streets of Lakemba next Saturday morning and you will be lucky if the local Muslims only shout "whore" at you. In France, French women who still live in Muslim enclaves are wearing long dresses because the local Muslims spit on them. I'll be t those French women are cheering on the IDF's bombers also.

Until the Arabs recognise Israel right to exist, then everything the Jews do is self defence. And if the Arabs will not recognise Israel right to exist, then the Jews should ethnically cleanse the Arabs through the creation of settlements and squeeze their enemies out of their country. Which is a lot more humane that the way Arabs usually ethnically cleanse Christians, Jews, Hindu's and Buddhists. Or, for that matter, each other. Click on Youtube and "ISIL execution of three truck drivers" to figure out what is in store for the Jews if those Muslim nutters ever get control of Israel.

How you are a female can stick up for Muslims who have a religion where females are little more than sex slaves and floor mats for men is beyond me. If you ever bothered to read up on Islam, it is not just a religion created by Arab males to justify world conquest, it is a religion which demands absolute obedience from females to males. Where is your femimnist credentials now? Did you once run around with Germaine Greer demanding that women burn their bras? Why the hell are you not demanding that Muslim women burn the burquas?

I think I know the answer to that.

People who publically criticise Islam get murdered.

Most people in the world could not support the Palestinians. Because if most people in the world supported the Palestinians, you as a card carrying member of the pseudo aristocracy, would be supporting Israel. The reason why, is because people like yourself always oppose what the majority thinks. It is an identifying feature of your educated caste to always be at odds with majority views. You can't think of yourselves as anything special unless you distance yourselves from the Great Unwashed and the despised bourgeoisie, who are usually your parents.

Not only are you a liar, but also a bully and a disgrace Lego.

Of course that would be natural behaviour to someone who defends the slaughter of women and children, ethnic cleansing and a religion where a mysognist God doles out land titles.

Mate read the Wisdom of the Keepers of the Book. You would have to level the same criticisms at Jewish religious people. Or would that be all Jews, since you make no distinctions about Muslims?

The more you open your mouth the more disgusting your bile becomes.

I agree with the right of Israelis to defend themselves. And certainly no sensible person could support Hamas if they knew the true facts on the ground. They are a terrorist organisation which cares nothing for human rights or even their own civilian population.

But also remember that the world's largest Muslim country just democratically elected a new administration without violence in a free and fair poll. And the largest Muslim city in the world (ie. Jakarta) is now run by a democratically elected Christian ethnic Chinese. So go figure!

Dear rogindon,

You said;

"I agree with the right of Israelis to defend themselves"

As do I. I also agree with the right for the Gazans to defend themselves against Israeli aggression. Do you? Or do you only confer that right on the occupying power?

Please also reflect on the fact that the Gazan population, in fact the entire Palestinian population 'democratically elected a new administration' in the form of Hamas but was met with violence from Israel and sanction from the US. Or do you only confer the right of democracy on the occupying power?

Sticks & stones, nutter. I am sorry if the truth hurts your ears.

".... a religion where a mysognist God doles out land titles."

What the hell does that mean? Stop smoking that stuff, nutter. It definitely affects your brain.

SteeleRudux,

True, Hamas was elected by Gazans in 2005 I believe. But would you call it a functional democracy? If as a Gazan I publicly supported peace with Israel and rights for all minority groups in Gaza and demanded that Hamas stop rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, would I be allowed that right to speak?

Isrealis CAN make similar advocacy without fear of arrest. But somehow I doubt Gazans can. Am I wrong?

If Hamas stopped the rocket attacks there would be peace. If Israel stopped its defensive actions there would eventually be no Israel. And no democracy in the Middle East!