TWO carrier fleets now provide extra military cover for the US’s “unsinkable” aircraft carrier already established in the eastern Mediterranean.

Dressed up as a bid to prevent the present conflict from consuming the region, this is code for the US strategy to limit the Gaza conflict to an unequal contest between Israel’s extraordinarily powerful military and the tiny militias that the various Palestinian formations deploy.

Israel’s protestation that its mission is to eliminate Hamas is designed both to satisfy a powerful trend in Israeli public opinion for revenge and give cover to a bid to force Palestinians living in Gaza — most of whom are from families already uprooted from their homes in other parts of Palestine — to become refugees.

Attempts to brand the vast global demand for a ceasefire as support for Hamas echo the mendacious campaign to say that solidarity with the Palestinians is anti-semitism and any criticism of Israel is similarly motivated.

Every Palestinian death creates new recruits for Hamas which has support mostly among Palestinians living in the most inhuman conditions in Gaza, the refugee camps and parts of the West Bank, where settler violence amounts to a state-sanctioned pogrom to drive Palestinians to Jordan.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s deep unpopularity is because he redeployed IDF battalions from the Gaza border settlements to protect this pogrom.

Hamas is a reactionary Islamist movement that opposes the more progressive forces in the Palestinian national movement. However, it is political and needs to respond to Palestinian opinion.

Thus, in 2015, it declared: “The establishment of a Palestinian state, sovereign and complete, based on June 4 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital and the provision for all the refugees to return to their homeland is an agreeable form that has won a consensus among all the movement members.”

When Hamas military units attacked settlements on October 7 they saw themselves as temporarily returning to the land on which the Palestinian villages of Simsim, al-Huhrraqa, Huj, al-Zurai’y, Abu Sitta, Wuhaidit and Najd once were.

Since then more than 3,257 children have been reported killed, including at least 3,195 in Gaza, 33 in the West Bank, and 29 in Israel.

To understand the entirely predictable anger felt by Palestinians, fed by half a century and more of humiliation, the alienation of their land and property and the vastly disproportionate casualty rates which accompany this unequal contest is not to condone the atrocities carried out during the October 7 incursion. They are no less war crimes than Israel’s bombardment.

Hamas cannot be understood except in its symbiotic relationship with Netanyahu and his openly expressed strategy.

According to the Times of Israel, Netanyahu’s policy is to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset: “Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

“Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The destruction of Gaza and the fragmentation of the West Bank are consistent with Israel’s aim to maintain the entire historic lands of Palestine as a de facto single state with itself enjoying an effective monopoly of force.

A return to the 1967 borders, an end to the occupation and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state is the road to peace and a two-state solution.