Terror can be hindered by Force
Kindness will Only encourage It!
Saying THE Terror Causes Terror
Is bull – kindness to it creates It!
Palestinians Put Hamas IN Power
BY Election KNOWING Their Terror,
TILL They ADMIT Self-Inflicted Sore,
TO Vote the Hamas Out Once More,
ROCKETS Will Fly IN From The Shore!
January 4, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt 1 from Jerusalem Post
Analysis: Hamas could not be deterred
January 4, 2009
David Horovitz , THE JERUSALEM POST
For years, an untenable reality prevailed in Sderot and the “Gaza envelope” communities.
Israel’s civilians in the area endured a life of terror – families raising their children under constant threat of Kassam attack – on the front line of the battle against Gaza’s rocket crews. And the IDF’s ground forces, duty-bound to protect the citizenry from such terror and violence, were not called into action.
On Saturday night, that changed.
The current Israeli government, its prime minister doubtless bruised by the unhappy consequences of his last major resort to force, against Hizbullah in southern Lebanon in 2006, was not committed to using ground forces in Gaza when it began Operation Cast Lead on December 27. Rather, Defense Minister Ehud Barak explained at the time, the initial air offensive would be expanded and intensified as necessary.
The sense as the cabinet met this weekend, a week into the conflict, was that expansion and intensification were indeed necessary. Ministers Haim Ramon and Eli Yishai, who argue that Israel should be overtly seeking to bring an end to Hamas’s rule in Gaza, abstained from the fateful cabinet vote only because the declared aims of the ground offensive were not wide enough; those abstentions apart, support was unanimous.
There was a certain incoherence to the declared goals of this operation eight days ago: Was the desired “restored security for the South” to be achieved merely by deterring Hamas from firing into Israel, or was Hamas to be deprived of its practical capacity to pose a threat?
In the event, it appears, the cabinet concluded that Hamas – even after eight days of air attacks on its bases, tunnels, missile silos and terror chiefs
– would not be deterred. It was hardly a surprising conclusion, given Hamas’s avowed goal of destroying Israel and its proven indifference to the loss of Palestinian lives. But it was one that Israel reached only reluctantly.
While Israel has made clear that its confrontation is with Hamas, and not with the people of Gaza, there is no denying the extent to which the people of Gaza contributed to the misery Hamas has wrought on both sides of the border.
Hamas seized power in Gaza in a coup in June 2007, but it had been legitimized by the Palestinian citizenry in a series of local election triumphs and, most significantly, in its overwhelming success in the 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas’s rise, indeed, is a rare case of a terrorist organization winning power through quasi-democratic elections.
The Palestinian public understandably saw the Fatah establishment as corrupt, and sought an alternative. But in choosing Hamas, it was plainly not deterred by the Islamists’ commitment to the destruction of neighboring Israel, and their determined use of unthinkable means, including horrific suicide bombings, in pursuit of its goals.
In the 2006 elections, Hamas won over 65 percent of the vote in the Gaza Strip,
including five out of eight PLC seats in Gaza City, three out of five in Khan Yunis and all five seats in Jabalya.
Insistently committed to their bleak, death-cult ideology, and to an interpretation of Islam that brands Israel fundamentally illegitimate, the Hamas leadership may never be deterred from seeking to harm Israel. They may never “get the message.”
Israel can only hope, for their sake and for ours, that the Palestinian public is less obdurate.
But most of all, Israel now hopes and prays for the well-being of its people’s army, reluctantly dispatched to Gaza on Saturday to safeguard the citizens of the South who have lived on the front line for so long.
Begin Excerpt 2 from Jerusalem Post
Another in critical condition after clash with Hamas gunmen
January 3, 2009
YAAKOV KATZ, JPOST.COM STAFF AND AP , THE JERUSALEM POST
One of the two IDF soldiers who were critically wounded in a mortar shell attack near Jabalya in the Gaza Strip late Saturday night died of his wounds on Sunday.
The IDF said that the death was the first fatality in the
IDF ground operation in Gaza, which was launched Saturday
28 other IDF soldiers were wounded in the same attack, three moderately and the rest lightly.
Troops had encountered fierce resistance from Hamas forces entrenched in fortifications just over the border.
On Sunday afternoon, three IDF soldiers were lightly wounded in clashes with Hamas gunmen, bringing the total number of
IDF casualties to 33.
Most of the wounded were taken to Soroka Hospital in Beersheba for treatment.
By Sunday afternoon, the IDF had divided the Gaza Strip into two segments, in a move apparently aimed at cutting off the flow of arms, supplies and fighters to the northern Strip, as tanks were seen in the area of former Israeli settlement Netzarim and troops reportedly reached the outskirts of Gaza City.
Eye witnesses told Arab media that IDF tanks and bulldozers were seen in the area between Gaza City and Netzarim.
The British Sky News channel also reported that some 150 IDF tanks had arrived in the Netzarim area.
Also Sunday afternoon, Senior Hamas terrorist Hussam Hamdan, who was in charge of Grad-type rocket launches into Beersheba and Ofakim, was killed in an IAF strike on Khan Yunis.
Another senior Hamas terrorist, Muhammad Hilo, was also killed in the same airstrike. Hilo was in charge of the Hamas special forces in Khan Yunis.
Dozens of Hamas gunmen have been killed by IDF troops. Gaza health officials said around 20 civilians had also died in airstrikes and shelling, including a 12-year-old girl, five members of the same family, and another eight civilians killed by a tank shell in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. The new deaths brought the death toll in the Gaza Strip since last Saturday to more than 500.
Residents of the small northern Gaza community of al-Attatra said soldiers moved from house to house by blowing holes through walls.
Most of the houses were unoccupied, their residents already having fled.
The IAF bombed some 45 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight, including seven tunnels, several mortar firing cells and Kassam rocket launching cells.
IDF sources said that the immediate goal was to conquer territory in northern Gaza, including rocket launch sites. Soldiers from the Armored Corps, Engineering Corps, and Paratroopers, Givati, Golani brigades were participating in the fighting, with at least four brigades’ worth of troops inside the Gaza Strip.
The sources said that a majority of the rockets fired into Beersheba and Ashdod were launched from the northern Gaza Strip.
One of the major aims of the operation was also to deliver a serious blow to the Hamas military wing, which the IDF estimated had not been severely weakened under the air campaign.
The IDF would not enter Gaza City or the refugee camps, defense officials said, and it was likely that on Monday – when French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrives in the region and international pressure is expected to escalate – Israel would begin scaling back the operation.
“We know there will be dangers, difficulties and victims… It must be said that the ground operation entails dangers to the lives of soldiers,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv Saturday night. “We must end the hostile actions against Israel… We will not abandon our citizens.”
“This will be a lengthy operation and there will likely be casualties on our side,” a senior defense official said. “But our mission is to defend the home front. The purpose is to destroy Hamas’s infrastructure and impair its ability to fire rockets into Israel.”
Before the ground incursion began, IDF artillery, for the first time in several years, began pounding open areas in northern Gaza to “soften up” the area and destroy land mines and Hamas fortifications.
Terrorists using civilians as human shields would bear full responsibility for their fate, the army warned.
“Anyone who hides a terrorist or weapons in his house is considered a terrorist,” but “the residents of Gaza are not the target of the operation,” the IDF Spokesman’s Office said.
The army reiterated that the operation was in line with the “decisions of the security cabinet,” saying that this new stage was “part of the IDF’s overall operational plan, and would continue on the basis of ongoing situational assessments by the IDF General Staff.”
The cabinet also approved the call-up of tens of thousands of reservists, mostly from combat units, but also from the Home Front Command, with several thousand emergency orders issued already on Saturday night.
Earlier, the army dropped leaflets in downtown Gaza City ordering people off the streets.
The warnings were followed by the air strikes.
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