AIR “CAST LEAD” Offensive A Success!
An Hour by Hour Account of Israeli Attack
Against Hamas IN Gaza December 27, 2008
As Reported by DEBKAfile 6:15 PM to 11:15 PM
And THEN Jerusalem Post ON December 28, 2008!
December 28, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt 1 from DEBKAfile issued 6:15 PM
Hamas misled, surprised by Israeli air offensive
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis
December 27, 2008, 6:15 PM (GMT+02:00)
In an air offensive dubbed “Cast Lead,” Saturday,
Dec. 27, some 150 Israeli bombers and helicopters struck 100 targets, destroying dozens of Hamas military compounds across the Gaza Strip in reprisal for the Palestinian long-term missile blitz.
The operation had two elements of surprise:
1. Media reports emanating from official sources in Jerusalem Friday, Dec. 25, conveyed the impression that the major military operation approved by the Israeli cabinet had been called off for the time being, at least until the cabinet reconvened for a reassessment.
2. Egypt misled Hamas, reporting reliable information that Israeli would not strike on Saturday, its Sabbath Day.
Some Hamas commanders and operatives felt safe enough to come out of their hideouts in the tunnels and bunkers under Gaza – estimated at 80 km long – and hold a graduation ceremony on the parade ground at their command headquarters in Gaza City. The Israeli air strike there accounted for the largest number of casualties.
The other 40 air raids destroyed Hamas installations across the enclave. The casualty toll Saturday afternoon was 154 dead and 270 injured, some civilians. According to DEBKAfile’s military sources, the bulk of Hamas strength escaped harm.
They played it safe and stayed underground, also guarding their long-range missile and rocket arsenal.
After the first wave of air attacks, the Israeli military spokesman said the operation was just beginning and would be expanded and deepened as needed. Defense minister Ehud Barak warned Israelis that hard times were ahead.
The expected Hamas reprisals came quickly. Before burying their dead, they sent missiles flying to Ashkelon, then Netivot, where an Israeli man was killed and seven people were injured. Kiryat Gat was hit by a missile and Ashdod’s citizens heard sirens. Both are on the outer perimeter of Hamas long-range missiles and have been unscathed until now.
Israel is holding ready the option of a major ground incursion if Palestinian missile attacks remain at a high level.
A big question hangs over whether Iran will send Hizballah to open a second front from Lebanon in response to the Israeli air operation in Gaza. According to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, the Hizballah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, paid a secret visit to Tehran in the third week of November to clarify this very question. A short while later, the al Qods commander, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, arrived in Beirut.
Most probably, they tied up the ends of a possible Hizballah response to the expected Israeli Gaza operation during that visit. Hence the Israeli military spokesman’s warning that the Gaza air operation was just the beginning and could be expanded as needed.
Begin Excerpt 2 from DEBKAfile at 9:04 PM
Israeli killed in Netivot by Gaza missile. Fifty-three fired Saturday night
December 27, 2008, 9:04 PM (GMT+02:00)
Retaliating for Israeli air strikes which destroyed Hamas compounds across Gaza, Saturday, Dec. 27, a Palestinian missile struck a home in Netivot, killing an Israeli man and injuring 7 civilians, three seriously. Another hit Kiryat Gat and Ashkelon sustained a volley of missiles. The Sderot synagogue took a direct hit, injuring two worshippers, one seriously. In Jerusalem, a Palestinian car ran over an Israeli policeman on Mt. Scopus and was arrested after he was slightly injured.
A Qassam missile knocked out the electric current in the Eshkol farm district.
Israelis living within 20 km of the Gaza Strip were ordered to remain in areas protected from missile attack after Hamas and other Palestinian factions threatened revenge. The entire region was placed in a state of emergency and Israeli police forces poured in. The IDF has opened a war emergency room. Magen David Adom’s medical aid service is on its highest alert level.
The Israeli military spokesman said the Gaza operation in the wake of eight consecutive days of missile, mortar and rocket attacks is “just beginning.” It would be expanded and intensified if needed.
Israeli officers calculate that the missiles Hamas sent crashing into Israel in the past week were a fraction of their capabilities which are estimated at 200 a day, on a par with Hizballah’s blitz against Galilee in the 2006 Lebanon war. They include new missiles with a 42-km range which can reach farther afield from their present limits of Ashkelon in the north and Netivot in the East. Five southern Israeli cities, including the outskirts of Beersheba, are now within Palestinian missile range.
Begin Excerpt 3 from DEBKA at 11:01 PM
Israel air strikes continue in S.
Gaza after 225 killed in earlier raids of Hamas sites
DEBKAfile Special Report
December 27, 2008, 11:01 PM (GMT+02:00)
Israeli bombers hit Hamas’ film center in southern Gaza Saturday night, Dec. 27, after massive air raids destroyed Hamas compounds across the enclave leaving 225 killed, 330 injured and thousands of shock victims.
The operation followed a week in which Hamas fired 200 missiles at Israeli civilian targets.
The Israeli Air Force planes struck Hamas security headquarters in Gaza City and compounds, police stations and ports. Several Hamas commanders were killed in the bombardment of a Hamas military passing-out ceremony. Among them was Hamas police chief Tawfiq Jabber.
The Israeli military spokesman said the Gaza operation is “just beginning” and would be expanded and intensified as necessary.
Hamas and other Palestinian factions ordered its “fighters to avenge Israeli attacks.” A Israeli was killed in Netivot in its first reprisal.
Egypt has condemned Israel for its military attack, but held Hamas responsible for refusing to heed warnings and failing to protect the Palestinian people. It has mobilized its rescue and medical services in Sinai, including hospitals for aid to casualties for the Israeli air bombardment of Gaza. Egyptian ambulances s tood by at the Rafah crossing
to transport wounded Hamas operatives.
The Israeli air attack launching some 40 missiles began 11.30 a.m. local time Saturday, eight days after Hamas terminated the informal Gaza ceasefire by showering missiles and mortar rounds on 250,000 Israeli civilians day after day.
Last week, the Israeli cabinet gave the Israeli military the green light for reprisals as Palestinian missile attacks escalated, 13 mortar rounds fired Friday, when Israel allowed 90 trucks of food and medicines to cross into the Gaza Strip.
Since Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Palestinians have fired 5,000 missiles.
Begin Excerpt from DEBKAfile at 11:15 PM
Next: Israel prepares Gaza ground incursion, Hamas gears for suicide terror
DEBKAfile Special Analysis
December 27, 2008, 11:15 PM (GMT+02:00)
DEBKAfile’s military sources assess the next stage of Israel’s Gaza campaign as being a ground incursion of the Gaza Strip, to follow up the air bombardment of Hamas compounds Saturday, Dec. 27. Hamas estimates that in four minutes, dozens of Israeli bombers and helicopters flattened 30 “high profile” sites. At least 350 Palestinians were killed, 90 percent of them Hamas operatives, and between 700 and 800 more were injured. Some of the casualties are still buried under the rubble. The blow sustained by the Palestinian Islamist terrorist group was massive by any military standards and severely upset its military equilibrium. Its retaliation against Israeli towns and villages was therefore slower and smaller in scope that Israel expected.
The fifty plus missiles fired into Israel included a small number of 42-range Grad Katyusha rockets made in Iran. One Israeli was killed and several injured in Netivot and three more hurt when Sderot synagogue too a direct missile hit.
Nonetheless, Hamas will not show a white flag, even after losing hundreds of its military and police personnel, including top commanders, and will make a supreme effort to retaliate from the Gaza Strip as well as mobilizing its substantial Hizballah-backed command center in Lebanon. Hamas operatives will be pressed into service as suicide terrorists. They remain active after Israeli units and Mahmoud Abbas’ special forces trained by US and British instructors conducted systematic crackdowns to crush them for more than a year. The second blow in the form of a formidable Israeli ground incursion without delay is therefore imperative to prevent Hamas getting its second wind.
While Israel’s air attack is counted a success, its war chiefs are taking care not to be trapped by an early achievement into the sort of blunders which led to the Lebanon war’s unsatisfactory conclusion in 2006. That campaign was commanded by a former airman, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, who saw no point in a ground operation after Hizballah’s command center was razed by air – until it was too late.
The first objective of a ground force in the coming hours will be to destroy “Lower Gaza,” the underground city designed by an Iranian general and spread under most of the enclave’s area. This subterranean sanctuary kept the bulk of the Hamas army, 15,000 men, their officers and leaders, out of harm’s way during the Israeli air offensive Saturday. Their resistance must be broken before Hamas can be brought to surrender. Until then they will fight on.
The second Israeli objective must be to sever the Gaza Strip from Egypt by recapturing the Philadelphi border strip.
These missions are formidable indeed and may take weeks of ups and downs, which is why prime minister Ehud Olmert’s goal of restoring normal lives to the people of southern Israel is a lot less simplistic than it sounds. The air operation was indeed just the beginning.
Begin Excerpt 1 from Jerusalem Post on Sunday
Artillery batteries deployed along border with the Gaza Strip
December. 28, 2008
AP, JPost.com staff and Yaakov Katz , THE JERUSALEM POST
The death toll in the Gaza Strip rose to over 280 Sunday, Palestinian sources said, as IAF aircraft continued their bombings of Hamas targets.
IAF jets struck 40 smuggling tunnels connecting the Palestinian and Egyptian sides of Rafah, a Gaza Strip border town which has become a main entry point into Gaza of weapons, dynamite and other smuggled military equipment and consumer goods.
According to reports, the bombing took a total of four minutes.
Also Sunday, IDF artillery batteries were deployed along the Gaza Strip border, indicating that the firepower used by the military in Operation Cast Lead so far might yet still be intensified in coming days.
Earlier, two Palestinians were killed in the Jebalya village in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources said. They were reportedly killed by missiles fired by Israeli aircraft.
Overall the IAF attacked some 30 targets in Gaza on Sunday, bringing the total number of targets hit to approximately 240, in about 250 sorties over the first 24 hours of the operation.
IAF aircraft struck one of Hamas’s main security compounds in Gaza City Sunday morning, including the Seraya compound [a prison] in downtown Gaza on which IAF jets dropped three bombs, according to witnesses. The blast shattered windows nearby, including some at the office of The Associated Press.
At the Seraya compound, rescue teams started digging through the rubble. Hamas police fired in the air to keep away worried relatives of prisoners.
Aircraft on Sunday targeted a Gaza tanker truck carrying smuggled fuel, touching off a blaze that raged out of control and spread
to about a dozen nearby houses, sending acrid plumes of black smoke towering above southern Gaza, witnesses and firefighters reported.
Palestinians said one of the main medicine warehouse supplying local pharmacies in southern Gaza was attacked in another sortie. “This is going to make us unable to supply any of the local families that depend on us,” warehouse owner Dr. Hussam Abu Hashem told local Hamas radio.
“It’s a war against human beings.”
Local residents said the tanker and the warehouse conta ined supplies that had been smuggled
in from Gaza through underground tunnels with Egypt, suggesting that Israel was widening its offensive to go after businesses that are a source of income for Hamas.
Palestinians said aircraft targeted a mosque near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, destroying it. Two bodies were retrieved from the rubble. The army said the mosque was a base for terrorist activities.
Palestinian sources reported early Sunday morning that IAF aircraft had targeted the Al Aqsa TV station used by Hamas.
The studio building was destroyed, but the station remained on the air with a mobile unit, the sources said.
Palestinians counted approximately 20 air-strikes in the first hours of Sunday morning.
On Saturday night, IAF aircraft attacked a Kassam launching crew in Gaza, killing three of its members. Palestinians said four others were wounded in the attack.
IDF tanks were making their way from the Golan Heights to the south of Israel in the morning hours and ground troops massed at the Gaza border. Barak told Sky News that the military would deploy ground troops if necessary but avoided providing additional details.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak allowed crossings into Gaza to be opened on Sunday for humanitarian aid to go through, signaling to the world that Israel was fighting a war against Hamas in Gaza but not against the civilian population.
Thirty humanitarian aid trucks were set to pass into the Gaza Strip Sunday. Defense officials said that the number of trucks was decided upon in coordination with international aid groups.
Israel also planned to allow some Palestinians wounded in Saturday’s offensive on Hamas to enter Israel to receive medical treatment.
Officials said the decision to open the crossings and offer assistance to the wounded was part of Israel’s effort to create international legitimacy for its continued operations against Hamas.
As the first day of the operation neared its end the military reported a very low percentage of civilian deaths in a difficult theater which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The army cited only about 15 deaths out of more than 275 Palestinian casualties were civilian.
Nevertheless, defense officials said Sunday that Israel would not hesitate to target the homes of civilians who protected Hamas terrorists throughout the operation.
“We will go after every Hamas operative, no matter where he is,” they said. “We call on Palestinians not to cooperate with terrorists.”
More than 210 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout Saturday. At least 275 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded, according to Palestinian sources.
110 Kassam rockets and mortar shells hit Israel on Saturday, the furthest of which landed 27 kilometers from its launcher inside Gaza. Rocket attacks were on a relative lull but the army said it was still expecting Hamas to recuperate from the initial shock and fire up to 200 rockets a day on Israel.
Begin Excerpt 2 from Jerusalem Post on Sunday
Cabinet approves call-up of reservists
December 28, 2008
HERB KEINON and jpost.com staff , THE JERUSALEM POST
The cabinet on Sunday approved the mobilization of thousands of reservists to support Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.
Ministers okayed defense officials’ request to call-up of 4,500 reserve troops, in addition to 2,000 who were mobilized on Saturday.
The additional troops were to be allocated to the home front as well as the reinforcement of ground forces.
During the meeting ministers heard briefings from defense officials, and were told that some 50 percent of Hamas’s underground rocket firing potential was destroyed in the second wave of the attack. This was given as one of the reasons that the Hamas reaction has so far been limited.
It was also mentioned that Israel has not received any requests from Hamas to negotiate, and neither has it been offered mediation by the international community.
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin told the cabinet that many in Gaza were pleased with the Israeli attack, because of the suffering that Hamas has brought upon them.
The cabinet also approved a continued “special situation” in the Gaza periphery, which Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared on Saturday. A “special situation” allows the Home Front Command to instruct local authorities to act to close down factories, keep people in their homes and so on.
In addition, ministers okayed initiation of Melah (Economy in Time of Emergency) in the Gaza periphery, a plan which would mobilize civilians, along with government and security service infrastructure, to aid in times of crisis.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said at the meeting that while world leaders were pressing for restoration of the calm, they were placing the blame for the current violence on Hamas. This is an important message, she said.
However, she added, “If civilians are hurt and as the operation goes on, international attempts to bring about quiet will become greater.”
But Livni said that Israel would stand firm on its demands, and would not be satisfied with superficial solutions and would accept only a true answer to the problem.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet that “the perseverance, resolution and patience of Israelis in the home front will determine our ability to attain our goals as we defined them.”
“Israel has opened a military campaign in order to restore quiet to the citizens of the South, who have suffered restive times and disruptions to the normalcy needed by any sane person. The home front has become in recent years a target of attacks which overshadow the lives of hundreds of thousands of people,” Olmert said.
“The government has invested many resources in the home front in the past few years. I take this opportunity to call on members of the government to make the utmost effort to meet the vital needs of citizens of the South, as this situation may last for longer than what might be expected at the moment,” the prime minister added.
Olmert added that he was hoping all government ministries would maintain hot-lines with offices in the South.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. -Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi met before the cabinet convened. Barak said following his briefing with Israel’s top general that “so far we have achieved good operative results. We should know this is not going to be fast nor easy, and we will have to withstand what lies ahead.”
Science, Culture and Sports Minister Ghaleb Majadle, of Barak’s Labor party, notified the government’s secretariat that he would not be sitting in during the weekly cabinet meeting.
He called on the government to halt escalation in the South and on Hamas to cease rocket fire against Israel. According to Majadle, “extending the operation might bring about a collapse of the diplomatic process with the Palestinians and the Arab world.”
Deputy Prime Minister and Shas chairman Eli Yishai reacted to Majadle’s statement, saying it was “a pity that he did not embargo the cabinet and Knesset meetings during the eight years when Palestinians fired rockets and mortar shells. If this is what he thinks, he should not run for the next Knesset.”
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