Why Israeli Strategists Call Massacres In Gaza “Mowing The Lawn”

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Jazeera hours after a ceasefire took effect between Israel and the Islamic Jihad resistance movement on Sunday night.

The ceasefire deal ended three days of Israeli attacks on Gaza that left 44 Palestinians, including 15 children, dead and at least 360 people injured.

The death toll rose to 45 on Monday, after it was announced that Mahmoud Ahmad Daoud, a traffic police officer, had died from his injuries.

Islamic Jihad had responded to Israel’s attacks with barrages of rockets. There were no deaths and no reports of serious injuries in Israel.

The truce is a welcome relief for Palestinians in Gaza, but I told Al Jazeera that it can only be temporary and a recurrence of the Israeli violence is inevitable.

The end of the bombing does not restore any sort of normality. Palestinians in Gaza remain under a brutal Israeli siege that is a quiet and lethal form of violence against every man, woman and child there.

Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza, home to more than two million Palestinians who are mostly refugees and half of whom are children, are enabled and encouraged by Western countries – and some Arab regimes that have normalized ties with Israel.

While the United States and European countries are sending billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine and training Ukrainian soldiers, supposedly to resist invasion and occupation, they send Israel weapons in order to help it perpetrate invasion, occupation and colonization of Palestinians.

Israel’s massacres in Gaza, which are intended to cause suffering to civilians, are what Israeli strategists call “mowing the lawn.”

The idea is to regularly terrorize the population into submission in the hope that they will abandon or become unable to resist.

We also discussed what it means that Hamas did not join the military response to Israel’s attacks – although it endorsed Islamic Jihad’s actions.