Why did Israel launch a military operation in the Gaza Strip at the end of 2008, and was the conflict legal?
Israel acted to defend its citizens in the south of the country after seven years of indiscriminate rocket attacks by militants in the Gaza Strip, which make life for ordinary civilians untenable. Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005. In the first four months of 2008, a rocket or mortar was fired at Israel every three and a half hours on average. In June 2008, a temporary ceasefire was negotiated. In November 2008, after an Israeli operation to destroy a tunnel being dug by militants under the Gaza-Israel border, Hamas abandoned its ceasefire and resumed regular rocket attacks on Israeli towns. Hamas unilaterally declared an end to the ceasefire on 19 December 2008, even though Israel was willing for it to continue. Hamas had used the ceasefire to upgrade its military threat, by smuggling in more dangerous weapons and extending the range of its rockets to 40 kilometres, putting close to a million Israelis under threat. Not to have acted to stop the rockets would have left an ever
