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Hamas attacks on Israeli villages bordering the Gaza Strip and Israel's counter-reaction lead to an increase in migration pressure and increase the threat of terrorism in Europe, writes Erkki Koort, security expert of the Postimees and Estonian Academy of Security Sciences.
The invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces started days ago. Even if the offensive is slow, air attacks on Hamas bases will force the civilian population to move. The situation is strongly reminiscent of 2015, when Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war, which created a migration crisis in Europe and diverted the attention of Western countries from Ukraine.
Israel has warned the population in Gaza and advised them to move south, away from Israel's borders. It should be considered that the Gaza Strip is an area with a very high population density, and 2.3 million people live on its 360 square kilometers, which makes the population density about 4,160 people per square kilometer. For comparison, the area of Vienna is about 415 square kilometers and about a 1,9 million people live there. This proportion should give an idea of the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe that lies ahead in Gaza.
Already with the first attacks on Gaza, it was clear that Israel would largely destroy the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Depriving the area of water, electricity and food may seem like a sensible thing to do in military terms, but it is a violation of international law because most of the 2.3 million people are civilians. Even the fact that they do not look favorably on the state of Israel does not make the behavior consistent with international law. The blockade will not have an immediate effect, but it will push people to look for a safe place and a way to feed themselves. Warfare destroys the infrastructure and makes it difficult to put it back into service.
There is no safe location in Gaza, which means people are trying to get out of the sector. The only conceivable direction would be Egypt. It is one of the few countries in the region that has tried to maintain some kind of balance, but they have no influence over the opposing sides. Moreover, throughout the entire conflict, they have also not wanted to provide a safe place for the Palestinians. They don't want to do it now, and if the Palestinians manage to get out of Gaza, they will probably move to Europe.
The migration caused by the Israel-Hamas war brings many fortune-seekers from other regions in Middle East and Northen Africa that have nothing to do with Gaza or the Palestinians. But because there is an order, there are also smugglers, and the business of organized crime human trafficking can flourish. In other words, the migratory pressure on Europe is more likely to be greater than the number of refugees from Gaza.
On October 17, around 6:30 p.m., an attack hit Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. According to various estimates, 1,000 to 3,000 people took refuge in the hospital, of whom around 500 died. Israel was blamed as the first logical attacker. Sometime later, claims began to appear that it could be a missile fired by the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad, which deviated from the target due to a malfunction. This version was also shared by US President Joe Biden during his visit to Israel. Israel has called the death toll exaggerated and released a wiretapped conversation between two Hamas members talking about a stray rocket.
For many people in the Middle East, words from the US president doesn't change a thing. In the hospital disaster, the Arab world has clearly sided with the Palestinians and cannot be persuaded of any other cause. Terrorist groups generally do not bother to think that the hospital could have been destroyed by someone other than Israel. Of course, if the hospital was destroyed by a stray terrorist group's missile, they will never admit it. Thus, for many people, Israel remains the perpetrator of the attack, and this knowledge in turn leads to the planning of retaliatory actions against both Israel and its supporters. Or rather, it is not so much a question of support for Israel, but anger against a distinct cultural space and the «usual» targets of terrorist groups.
A day before the hospital attack, a terrorist act was committed in Brussels, where two Swedish football fans were killed. The perpetrator of the terrorist attack was shot dead by the Belgian police. According to the information, it was a member of the «Islamic State» ISIS or at least a person who sympathized with them.
The attack by Hamas on Israel and the disaster at Gaza's Al-Ahli hospital will surely invigorate the extremists in Europe. The greater the Israeli pressure on Gaza, the greater will be the interest of potential terrorists to carry out attacks in order to put Israel and its supporters (whether real or apparent) on the defensive.
As harsh as it sounds, the situation in Gaza is for some countries only a means to their ends. Iran, the big supporter of Hamas, is not interested in the well-being of the Palestinians, but in the destruction of Israel, and for this purpose any means are good. Tehran's interests here coincide with those of Moscow, as both want to divert attention from their own activities.
Europe must assume that the situation in the Middle East will lead to migratory pressure on our borders and encourage the radicalized to act, because they think they have found a «holy cause». One of the hidden causes of this crisis is probably what has been feverishly expected or hoped for in the Kremlin - to force Europe to deal with itself.