Operation Breaking Dawn and Israeli elections
On August 5th, Israel launched a three-day operation in the besieged Gaza Strip. They dubbed it “Operation Breaking Dawn.”
Israel’s acting Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, promoted the operation as a preemptive strike to quash what he said were concrete threats by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement in Gaza. Over the course of three days 49 Palestinians were killed, including 17 children. According to Mondoweiss documentation, while many PIJ members and affiliates were indeed targeted, the majority of those that were killed were civilian noncombatants.
The operation was the second major Israeli offensive on Gaza since last year. It also happened to fall just a few months before Israel’s upcoming elections at a time when Israel’s current prime minister and his party are struggling in the polls. In the wake of the attack many accused Israeli officials of using Palestinian in Gaza as sacrificial pawns in their political games, while Lapid, and others in his government, hailed it as a success.
Amjad Iraqi joins Yumna Patel to discuss Israel’s political motivations behind the Gaza attack. Amjad is an editor and writer at +972 Magazine, based in Haifa. He’s also a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka and was previously an advocacy coordinator at the legal center Adalah.
