A week after the Gaza ceasefire, Israeli defence officials still believe the border is on a knife edge, and have described the calm as “very unstable.”
It is being reported that the Israeli military is preparing for the possibility that fighting will restart, believing that Hamas may decide at any moment to escalate.
Hamas has continued its fighting talk since the ceasefire started, especially on the subject of Jerusalem, saying that it will unleash violence against Israel if it perceives any slight to Arab rights in the city.
It is also highlighting its militant credentials in Gaza. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar posed for pictures with a child holding a firearm moments after of coming out of hiding at the end of the conflict, and arms have been displayed at at least one Hamas “victory” parade.
The recent violence has increased international focus on the issue of Palestinian grievances in Jerusalem. If an Israeli court upholds judges’ decisions, several Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood will soon be evicted, on the basis that rights belong to a Jewish organisation.
The controversy is receiving unprecedented attention and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken objected to the planned evictions during his Middle East trip this week. On his way back to America he reinforced the message, saying in an interview that evictions of Palestinian families or further unrest on the Temple Mount could spark renewed “tension, conflict and war.”
He stated that the Gaza ceasefire is holding but “it’s also important that we avoid various actions that could, unintentionally or not, spark another round of violence.”
Inside Israel, while authorities hoped that the Arab-Jewish frictions that spiked during the Gaza fighting would quickly ebb away, violence has still not been stamped out. Last night four molotov cocktails were hurled in to the home of a Jewish family in Lod.
Nobody was badly hurt, which “was a huge miracle because the fire had already started to catch in the living room," Avi Cohen, the whose flat was targeted and who was lightly injured, told the Ynet news site.
He elaborated: “Luckily for us, some of the molotov cocktails fell on a rug at the entrance to the house and therefore did not explode. The incident ended miraculously after one of the neighbours brought a fire extinguisher and extinguished the fire.”
Another local resident said: “We did not dream that such a thing would happen to us in the neighbourhood.”
Many Jewish residents in the city say that the end of the Israel-Hamas fighting has not returned harmony to the complicated Arab-Jewish relations in the city, and they fear an explosion of more violence.
A large group of residents last night sent an urgent appeal to police chief Kobi Shabtai, warning of a "renewed shower of disturbances in the city."
They objected to the decision to allow two large Arab demonstrations last weekend. "We have a hard time accepting the irresponsible and life-threatening decision to allow two large demonstrations in the heart of the city of Lod,” they wrote.
