For days and days, Hamas had been threatening to hold a peaceful demonstration on the Gaza frontier with Israel. What's more, it had warned the Israelis that maybe 50,000 unarmed Gaza Palestinians, maybe even 200,000 of them would cross the international boundary to protest...Well, to protest exactly what? That Israel had stopped supplying gasoline and diesel fuel to an entity that, day-in, day-out, was rocketing its towns, villages and kibbutzim? Tens of thousands of Palestinians, even peaceful ones, violating its perimeter was fraught with peril.
But brave Hamas can't really mobilize a peaceful demo, and it didn't today, the day for which it was scheduled. Read the dispatch in Ha'artez, reporting on the sparse 5,000 Palestinians, many of them children, who formed a pathetic human chain six kilometers inwards from Gaza's fringe. No march, no confrontation. A flop.
A peaceful mobilization is just not Hamas' thing. And the thought occurs that it's not the Palestinians' either.