What prompted Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead?

                                                                                         

Since 2000, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations have been perpetrating terrorist attacks against Israel, including suicide bombings in the heart of Israeli cities, shooting attacks on vehicles, murders of families in their homes, and unrelenting rocket and mortar fire on Israeli towns and villages - resulting in the deaths of more than 1,100 Israelis, the wounding of thousands more, and the terrorization of millions. These terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians are meant to disrupt negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and to prevent a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the Middle East. Hamas has sought to promote the political agenda in its Charter: to exterminate the State of Israel and establish a Muslim state over all the territory of historic "Palestine."

In June 2007, Hamas executed a violent and bloody coup d'état in the Gaza Strip, persecuting members of the legitimate Palestinian Authority, neutralizing the Palestinian Authority's military and political power and setting up a radical Muslim entity in its place. Aided and abetted by Iran and Syria, Hamas conducted an ongoing terrorist campaign against Israel, using the Gaza Strip as the launching pad for its terrorist attacks. The frequency and intensity of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel increased dramatically - in 2008, nearly 3,000 rockets and mortars were fired at Israeli homes, schools, kindergartens, shops, clinics, factories and other civilian infrastructure. Israeli civilians were compelled to race to bomb shelters several times a day and lived in constant fear of where the next rockets would hit.

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