Israel

Local experts speak on Hamas attacks on Israel

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As the fighting in Israel continues, the attacks are raising concerns about the impact the conflict will have on the country and people who live there.

As rockets pound Israel from Gaza after the militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack, questions are swirling about how the Israeli military was caught off guard.

“The Israelis have a major intelligence failure on their side. They’re going to investigate that when this is all over,” said Howard Stoffer.

Stoffer is a professor of national security at the University of New Haven and says this conflict could take weeks or months before it’s resolved, especially when Hamas has taken hostages into Gaza with the Israeli military likely entering the territory.

“They’re going to try to find those people and they’re going to get them back. They’re not going to negotiate over them,” he said.

The latest attack bringing a sense of shock and unease to the region.

“It is a real point of change in the way we’re going to think about it, act in the near future and afterwards.”

Anat Biletzki, an Israeli philosophy professor at Quinnipiac University says there has been discourse domestically about where the country’s military was positioned in the first place.

“We now have a very religious, very right-wing government that has made its point that the West Bank and settlements are going to be our future and they have taken up all of the army’s resources,” she said.

She says the military will fight for the state, but believes there will be debates about the current government’s policies towards Palestinians.

“They will come back and support the state. That’s for sure, but I think there will be such lack of support for the government as it is,” she said.

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