Commentators appear mystified: surely everyone knows that Hamas fighters have no chance, ultimately, against the country with the fifth largest military in the world.  Why would they risk every Palestinian's future by such an act?

The reality — censored by our media and ignored by our governments — is that Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip have no future to look forward to.  

No one is pointing out the slow genocide that Israel is imposing on the millions of Palestinians literally caged in Gaza and the total lack of hope for any future that differs from Israel's periodic slaughtering of their families and devastation of their homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, and civic buildings.  Along with constant attacks on fishermen, farmers and anyone thought to be in the resistance, Israel ensures that Gazans have limited electricity and little fuel. When I visited Gaza in 2006, (before the Israeli attack), it already looked apocalyptic, with people reduced to traveling on donkeys amid ruined buildings and traffic lights that no longer worked.

No one is pointing out that millions of Gazans have been facing a humanitarian siege — clearly patterned after the notorious two-year Nazi siege of the Warsaw Ghetto — that is now in its eighteenth year. This siege limits food to barely above starvation calories, blocks necessities of life including medicine and medical supplies, building materials, textbooks, and at one point even soap and detergents: a clearly genocidal act in the world's most densely-populated enclave.

No one is pointing out that the occupied Gaza Strip is virtually uninhabitable, with its land declared by the United Nations to be too contaminated to sustain life, and with virtually no potable water in Gaza (thanks to Israel's use of the aquifer so that sea water is pulled into Gaza's taps).  Israel ensures that there is little fishing by limiting the agreed-upon territorial limit of 20 nautical miles to 3 and shooting on fishing boats anyway. Israel has declared a "buffer zone" taking in a third of Gaza's agricultural land, but shoots at those farming, as well.