As the carnage continues to pile up in Gaza, the propagandists for Israel have stuck to their script: "We are not attacking the Palestinian people; we are at war with Hamas." What a load of bull. Israel is and has always been at war with the Palestinians.

Israel says "we don't target civilians," but Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, half the size of the Salt Lake Valley with 1.5 million residents. There is no place to bomb without killing civilians.

Why is it so crowded? Gaza is a giant ghetto/refugee camp for Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from their historic homeland when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

When the Palestinians were burned out of their towns and villages by Jewish terrorist organizations (Irgun and the Stern gang) and by the regular Israeli army, Hamas didn't exist. When Israel occupied Gaza in 1967 and expropriated what little water and arable land the refugee population had for Israeli settlements and commercial agriculture, there was no Hamas.

Tomorrow Hamas may be gone, but as long as Palestinians have something Israel wants, there will be war.

Mahan Singh Khalsa

Salt Lake City