Hamas Ignores Ceasefire; Israel Warn Gazans of More Airstrikes

After Hamas on Tuesday ignored a ceasefire treaty by provoking renewed Israeli airstrikes, peace administrators are planning new ways to broker peace in the region.

At the east of the center of Gaza City, a neighborhood, Shuja’iya, looked like a ghost town after many people abandoned the place in the night.

Businesses were also shut down while ambulances stationed around wait for the attacks Israel has warned about.

Meanwhile, Gazan civilians are bearing the heat of the conflict most, which has reportedly annihilated over 200 Palestinians and one Israeli in just one week alone.

On Tuesday, Israel accepted an Egyptian proposal for a truce, putting a pause on airstrikes for six hours. However, Hamas refused the plan and kept launching rockets into Israeli region.

“Hamas have decided to continue, and will pay the price for that decision,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

Hamas’ political wing stated that the Palestinians want the end of the Israeli blockade on Gaza which suffocates the daily lives of 1.8 million Palestinians resident there.

Israel was also accused of not freeing Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, as was agreed in an earlier truce.

As long as both sides continue to fight, there is no hope of any kind of peace deal.

Israelis have warned Gazans to take refuge elsewhere as they continue their airstrikes. They also use a technique known as ‘Knock on the Roof’ developed by the Israeli Air Force in 2009.

“The “knock on the roof” is the Israeli military’s warning for civilians before it fires on a building and is being used extensively as Israeli airstrikes target Hamas sites in Operation Protective Edge.” according to CNN

The procedure generally begins with a phone call to the occupants to leave a building, according to Relik Shafir, a retired brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a former fighter pilot.

Such places, he says, are often under constant surveillance, and the IDF has a sense of how many people live there, and how many leave.

If it is still unclear whether a building is occupied, a missile that carries little or no explosive load is aimed at the roof of a building. The impact is felt, but it rarely causes casualties.

“It’s meant to get people to take us seriously,” says Shafir.

There is no standard gap between the delivery of the “dummy” missile and fully armed missiles, says Shafir. It can be minutes or even hours. It depends on how important the target is. But there are hundreds or even thousands of such places in Gaza, chosen by Hamas precisely because they complicate targeting.

Source: Cnn.com