Senior researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection(MISTRA), Na’eem Jeenah, says that yesterday’s surprise attack by Hamas on Israel was something that should have been expected.
This after the militant group launched a wave of rocket attacks and sent fighters into Israel in the biggest escalation in decades.
The violence continued in the evening with Tel Aviv and other central Israeli cities hit by a new barrage of rockets with more than 300 Israelis reportedly dead.
Jeenah says the attack was a response to decades of repression.
“I think the fact of such a response from the Palestinian side to almost eight decades of occupation, and oppression is something that we should all have expected. When it might happen and exactly how, of course, was the surprise yesterday. But after 75- years of living under military rule, military occupation, colonialism and apartheid what we saw yesterday I think, that’s why we saw the kind of global Palestinian jubilation in a sense that finally Palestinians are saying that enough is enough.”
Israeli journalist Jonathan Schwartz and senior researcher with the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) Naeem Jeenah spoke to SABC earlier today:
