Israeli citizens said on Wednesday the army should not back off its unrelenting offensive to crush Hamas, despite the UN General Assembly’s ceasefire call, the growing list of troop casualties and a spiralling Palestinian death toll in Gaza.
Israel’s military suffered one of the deadliest days in the two-month-old Gaza war on Tuesday, with a colonel among 10 soldiers killed, bringing the toll to 115 — almost double the number killed during clashes in the coastal enclave nine years ago.
And with much of the enclave laid to waste, conditions dire and more than 18,500 Palestinians killed in the Israeli army’s air and ground assault, US President Joe Biden said the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gazan civilians was costing Israel international support.
Polls in recent weeks show overwhelming backing for the war despite the rising human costs. Six Israelis who spoke to Reuters on Wednesday said now was not the time to back down, regardless of fading global sympathy reflected in Tuesday’s UN resolution.
Hamas’ killing of about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, on October 7 revived something Israel previously felt when Arabs staged a surprise attack in 1973 — fears that its neighbours and enemies could do away with the Jewish nation altogether, said political scientist Tamar Hermann.
“The sense of the people is that this is a threat to the very existence of Israel,” said Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducts regular opinion polls on the war. She said that people were prepared for more deaths of soldiers.
Speaking in Jerusalem, retiree Ben Zion Levinger said Israel’s enemies would view any slowdown in fighting Hamas as a sign of weakness.
“If we don’t take this fight to the end, then tomorrow morning we’ll have battles in the north and in the east and the south and maybe Iran. Therefore, we have no choice,” said Levinger, a former IT worker. Although the cost was “terrible,” the goal of the military operation was the total destruction of Hamas infrastructure in Gaza, Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee chair Yuli Edelstein said in an interview.
