Think about the children

Editor of the Reformer:

There are some points in your editorial ("Blood on our hands," Aug. 2) with which we can agree. Hamas is despicable for hiding behind children while lobbing rockets at Israel and it is time for this to end.

Iran, Qatar and Turkey are the only countries actively supporting Hamas in this conflict. Egypt, the Arab League and most of the other Arab countries have kept a low profile. They acknowledge that the loss of Palestinian civilian life is largely due to Hamas and its tactics.

The deaths of children are firmly in the spotlight -- and rightly so. It pains all reasonable people to hear of children dying as the consequence of war. Hamas and its supporters display gruesome pictures of dead and wounded children in order to gain sympathy for their portrait of Israel as the villain intent on killing Palestinians.

Israel cites the need to stop Hamas from firing thousands of rockets at its own children, who are being forced to live in bomb shelters, as well as the need to eliminate the tunnels that Hamas dug into Israel in order to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. Hamas built these tunnels using some of the same children who are now trapped under fire in Gaza. In 2012, the Institute forPalestine Studies reported that at least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials. The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, "much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies."

Not only has Hamas misappropriated much of the humanitarian aid supplied to Gaza -- 800,000 tons of cement that could have been used for building homes, shopping malls, parks, schools, hospitals and libraries were used to construct the terror tunnels into Israel -- they are also directly exploiting and endangering Gaza’s youth in their construction and operation.

Hamas, while digging bunkers for their leaders and tunnels to attack Israel at a huge cost, gave their civilian population no shelters. And, Hamas fires missiles from populated areas and stores their missiles in schools (including UNRWA schools) and mosques. The network of tunnels indicates that Hamas had been preparing for an ongoing conflict for at least a year.

Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in a recent opinion piece, "When Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, it left behind farm equipment and other material capable of feeding the population. But instead the leaders of Gaza enriched themselves and used the remaining resources to build rockets instead of plowshares."

According to British Colonel Richard Kemp, "Hamas’ sickening exploitation of their own people’s suffering, and media’s complicity in it, is demonstrated in the operating theaters of the Gaza Strip. Without the slightest regard for life-saving hygiene, or for the care, privacy or dignity of the wounded, Palestinian officials enthusiastically hustle camera crews in to the emergency room as desperate surgeons battle for a bleeding and broken child’s life."

Only after Hamas recognizes Israel can there be peace.