Secret Hamas-Egypt Cairo talks for Long Term Truce!
Will the U.S., E.U., U.N., and Egypt have a Success
In preventing return of a steady weapon Flow?
Temporarily – Yes————-Permanently – No!
U.S. And E.U. Will Make An HONEST Effort,
Just FORGET ABOUT Egypt and the U.N.
BOTH have JIHAD groups Embedded!
January 25, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt from Israel News.Net
Egypt hosts secret peace meetings
Israel News.Net
Saturday 24th January, 2009
Behind the scene negotiations have been taking place in Cairo between Egyptian mediators and Hamas representatives, to broker a long-term truce with Israel.
Hamas delegations from both Gaza and Damascus are attending the meetings with the Egyptian staged-peace plan for Gaza at the center of negotiations.
Negotiators are hoping to build on the current ceasefire, before moving on to the questions of re-opening border crossings into Gaza and reconciliation between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah.
The Israeli envoy, Amos Gilad, was in Egypt last week to discuss Israel’s position with Egyptian Foreign Ministry officials.
Begin Excerpt 1 from Jerusalem Post
Hamas takes control of all Gaza tunnels
January 22, 2009
Yaakov Katz , THE JERUSALEM POST
Hamas has seized control of all the smuggling tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza and has been moving additional arms into the Strip since Operation Cast Lead ended on Sunday morning.
During the three-week operation, the IDF destroyed 80 percent of the 300 tunnels that Hamas is believed to have dug under the 14-kilometer stretch of land separating Gaza and Egypt.
Some of the tunnels were not destroyed – like the one that was filmed by foreign media on Wednesday – out of humanitarian considerations.
Several tunnels have pipes that transfer fuel from Sinai to Gaza. The concern in the IDF was that if it bombed such a tunnel, a huge explosion would result – possibly also on the Egyptian side – and civilian casualties.
The IDF was also concerned that if a fuel tunnel were bombed, Hamas would respond by attacking the Nahal Oz fuel depot where there
are gas canisters and fuel tankers, which if detonated would cause major collateral damage in Gaza and Israel.
The tunnels in Rafah are usually run by local Palestinian clans, and Hamas’s decision to take control is believed to be part of the group’s attempts to reestablish its regime in Gaza. Hamas can now decide what is smuggled into the Strip and give priority to weapons
and explosives.
On Wednesday night, CBS News reported that the US Navy had intercepted an Iranian ship in the Red Sea carrying arms allegedly on their way to Gaza. Israel is concerned that Iran will try to transfer long-range Fajr missiles to Hamas capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
Also on Wednesday, Hamas commandeered the trucks carrying humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip as part of its effort to show that it is providing for the Palestinian people.
Defense officials told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that Hamas had also taken over a mental hospital in Gaza City and had kicked out the patients to use the facility as a jail for Fatah supporters.
The officials said Hamas was concerned that Fatah would try to take advantage of its weakened state and attempt to take back control over Gaza. During Operation Cast Lead, Hamas imposed curfews on predominantly Fatah neighborhoods and executed any Fatah member seen on the street.
Also on Thursday, Amos Gilad, the head of the Defense Ministry’s Diplomatic-Security Bureau, was in Cairo for talks about Gilad Schalit
and the new anti-smuggling mechanism.
The new mechanism Israel had set up with the Egyptians to counter the smuggling of weaponry and explosives into the Gaza Strip consists of three layers – intelligence cooperation, obstacles in Sinai and the deployment of new tunnel-detection technology along the border. Defense officials said Gilad would likely travel to Egypt every other week to oversee the mechanism’s effectiveness.
Begin Four Chronological Excerpts from DEBKAfile
Iranian experts devise special containers for clandestine delivery of arms to Gaza
Begin DEBKAfile Excerpt 1
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
January 18, 2009, 10:35 AM (GMT+02:00)
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Israel relayed a warning to Hamas through Egypt that any more Iranian or Syrian attempts to smuggle rockets or other heavy weapons into Gaza by land or by sea would be deemed a breach of the ceasefire and generate Israeli military action to stop them.
Iranian marine experts and engineers, after making a study of submerged Mediterranean currents, have designed special containers for the clandestine shipment of arms to Gaza by sea
Begin DEBKAfile Excerpt 2
US-Egyptian Red Sea ships hunt for Iranian ship carrying 60 tons of arms for Hamas
January 20, 2009, 11:23 AM (GMT+02:00)
US and Egyptian warships were scouring the Gulf of Aden
and Red Sea Tuesday, Jan. 20 to waylay an Iranian freighter carrying scores of heavy rockets for delivery to Hamas.
DEBKAfile’s exclusive sources report they were acting on intelligence that a ship loaded with an estimated 60 tons of arms to replenish Hamas’ depleted war stocks had set out from the Iranian Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas on Jan. 17.
The cargo includes 50 Fajr missiles, scores of Grads, armor-piercing missiles and tons of sundry advanced hardware.
Begin DEBKAfile Excerpt 3
US anti-piracy task force to intercept Iran’s Hamas arms ship
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
January 21, 2009, 9:23 AM (GMT+02:00)
The USS San Antonio amphibian warship, heading the Combined Task Force (CTF) 151 patrolling the Gulf of Aden for pirates, has been assigned with hunting down the Iranian cargo vessel carrying 60 tons of rockets and other arms for smuggling into Gaza.
This is revealed by DEBKAfile’s exclusive military sources. Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni flew to Brussels Wednesday, Jan. 21, to discuss adding the European Union to the understanding she signed with the US last Friday for ending the flow of smuggled Iranian weapons to Gaza.
Begin DEBKAfile Excerpt 4
Two US warships escort Iranian ship carrying arms for Hamas out through Suez CanalDEBKAfile Exclusive Report
January 23, 2009, 6:06 PM (GMT+02:00)
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that a US Navy Coast Guard team this week boarded an Iranian arms ship flying a Cypriot flag in the Red Sea and found weapons in its hold.
This was the first time an America warship had ever intercepted an Iranian vessel in international water. The incident activated the Memo of Understanding the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice signed with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni a week ago on actions to halt the flow of Iranian arms to Hamas as part of the Gaza ceasefire.
The Iranian ship’s captain showed the US boarding team documents recording the Syrian port of Latakia as its cargo’s destination. DEBKAfile reports that both US and Israeli intelligence are certain the arms were bound for Hamas. But according to international law, the US Navy’s Combined Task Force (CTF) 151, set up last week to combat piracy, was not authorized to confiscate the cargo or stop the ship because no enforcement mechanism was yet in place.
After a few hours, therefore, the US force released the Iranian vessel and two warships escorted it out of Red Sea waters. The ship and its escort are due to enter the Suez Canal heading north Saturday night, Jan. 23, after being prevented from unloading its arms freight on the coast of Sinai or Gaza.
Tehran has so far not reacted to the incident.
DEBKAfile revealed last week that the new US task force policing the waters of the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and Red Sea, under the command of Rear Adm.
Terry McKnight, had been additionally assigned with intercepting Iranian ships smuggling arms for Hamas, often in conjunction with Somali pirates and Sinai Bedouin militias.
Massed on the lead ship San Antonio is a helicopter detachment, a “surgical team” for dealing with small speedboats trying to hem the ship in and 14 Navy VBSS members, including two Navy boarding officers. The Coast Guard detachment is made up of eight members, all of them qualified as boarding officers.
Begin Excerpt 2 from Jerusalem Post
Egypt halting the arms flow? Forget it!
January 22, 2009
Q and A: GIORA EILAND , THE JERUSALEM POST
Overall, where do you consider that Israel succeeded, and where did it fail, in Operation Cast Lead?
The most important success is that the operation will produce quiet for a long time in the South.
Israel’s deterrence has been reasserted.
Hamas has suffered a blow to its legitimacy in Gaza. Outside help is required to provide economic assistance to the people there. Hamas has had to make commitments to Egypt, and any breach of those commitments will bring it trouble with Egypt and with others.
The IDF was successful, the public has been reassured, the home front functioned well.
What about the issue of arms smuggling into Gaza?
That’s much more problematic.
To be polite, the Egyptians are telling us stories and we are deluding ourselves.
Egypt was not effective in the past. It doesn’t care about weapons in Gaza.
The smuggling tunnel apparatus also features drugs and televisions and mobile phones, and keeps whole tribes in business. So either Egypt has to truly confront this whole industry or pay off the smugglers. And I’m not sure it’s going to do that.
As for the dramatic signing of an agreement between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and the previous secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, intended to stop the smuggling, well, without being rude, it’s not serious and it’s not significant.
The United States has had a profound interest in stopping arms smuggling between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and from Iran to Iraq.
But it hasn’t been able to. So preventing a flow of weapons from, say, Somalia to Sudan to Egypt and then to Gaza? No, it’s not going to happen.
The only truly effective way to prevent the smuggling would be for the Egyptians to build a buffer zone five kilometers from the border, fence it off, and control the only road through the sand.
But they won’t do that.
Where does the cease-fire leave Gilad Schalit?
There is now a better climate in which Israel should link his case, in the context of a prisoner exchange, to the other humanitarian concerns – over food and medicine going into Gaza.
As a first step, Israel should be prepared to ease certain border restrictions if the Red Cross is allowed to visit Schalit – and should not ease that access if the Red Cross is not allowed to visit.
How did Israel’s diplomacy fare?
The gathering of leaders in Jerusalem on Sunday signalled international support for our narrative. But we have paid a heavy price with Turkey, and not only in the context of the indirect talks with Syria it was brokering. We had a good relationship with Prime Minister Erdogan, and now he is as anti-Israeli as possible. It reminds me of France in 1967, when President De Gaulle went from being Israel’s best friend before the war to most aggressive rival after it.
How concerned are you that Hamas will now get stronger and pose a more dangerous threat?
Israel does not fight in order to influence the Palestinian dynamic. Would it be better for Israel if one day, someone other than Hamas governs Gaza
? Maybe. But we don’t need to be disappointed that Mahmoud Abbas is weak. A weak Hamas, a strong Abbas – that’s not our interest.
Seeing Gaza and the West Bank reunited as a one unit – that’s not an Israeli interest either. It’s not our problem. We didn’t create that split and it’s not our interest to fix it.
Our interest is long-term quiet and an end to the smuggling.
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland is a former national security adviser and former head of the IDF’s Planning and Operation branches.
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