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Hamas-Led Clashes at Gaza-Israel Border Are Not a Peaceful Civil Rights Protest
(The Hill) Gregory J. Wallance - Human rights groups critical of Israel's use of force to stop Palestinians from breaching the fence along the Gaza-Israel border fundamentally mischaracterize what is happening there. What the Palestinians call the "March of Return" is not the March on Selma, Alabama. This is a violent confrontation encouraged and led by Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls Gaza and is bent on Israel's destruction. Since the end of March, tens of thousands of Palestinians have gathered weekly at the border. The majority stayed several hundred yards back, but hundreds approached the border fence, hurling stones, rolling burning tires towards the fence, throwing Molotov cocktails, grenades and pipe bombs, and planting explosives. Demonstrators tried to tear down the fence so that tens of thousands of Palestinians could pour through, a nightmare scenario for Israel. Simply put, the human rights groups are willfully blind to the fact that Hamas has no interest in living at peace with Israel and instead wants to destroy it by whatever means it can, including the confrontation at the Gaza-Israel border. The writer, a former board member of Human Rights Watch, was a federal prosecutor during the Carter and Reagan administrations.