This is not the evacuation of a city. It's the evacuation of half of Gaza so that Israel can destroy it. The Israeli regime wants there to be nothing left for the million-plus evacuees to go home to. The area has already been largely devastated and that will continue. Hamas can't be eliminated. That's no more than a bogus reason for continuing with the destruction. As we speak, the evil that has descended on two million trapped Palestinians is radicalising a new generation. You don't make millions of refugees without creating new enemies, and enemies without an army will turn to what we call terrorism. There are outside forces in Lebanon and Iran especially that will make sure that Israel can never find peace in the way they're supposedly trying to achieve it. We could hope that this current disaster will eventually spawn a peace movement in Israel as the ordinary people see what their leaders are bringing down on them. Before that, who's to say that there won't be an uprising in the West Bank as the people there see their brethren in Gaza being persecuted and slaughtered. As Bibi said, this is only the beginning, and the blinkered leaders of the west are conniving in the disaster.

When I say we shouldn't ignore history, however badly Hamas are behaving (and their actions are completely disgusting by any standard, no matter how provoked they were), we should remember that every Palestinian citizen in Gaza is either a refugee or the descendant of refugees. Almost a million were thrown out of their towns and villages, in actions aided and abetted by terrorist gangs, to make way for the new state of Israel. Some of those devastated villages are so close to the blockaded Gaza border that the Gaza internees can see them every day through the wire fence. We in the west can pontificate at our safe distance about "how Israel has every right to defend itself" when we could be asking ourselves instead, how would I like to live like that?