29-Mar-18: Unwanted visitors on Israel's Gaza border

Tuesday's Gazan intruders minus their grenades and knives [Image Source]

As Israel approaches one of the traditionally relaxed annual periods in a locale that's not so notably relaxed, security events in the south are causing rising concern.

Times of Israel reports this morning that two Gazan Palestinian Arabs were intercepted yesterday (Wednesday) immediately after getting through the border fence and despite the heightened security alert that is currently in effect there. They were equipped with a knife and box cutters, and are now "being questioned" as the standard media release formula states it.

The thing is, this was the fourth breach of the security fence around Gaza in a week. What's going on?

Tomorrow, Friday, the eve of Passover and the day practically every Israeli has some Passover-related task to take care of at home or in the workplace ahead of Friday night's family-oriented seder gatherings, the Hamas regime plans - it has been saying for some weeks - to conduct "protests" along the boundary with Israel.

They say this is going to include "masses" of Gazans taking part. Their media advisers have coined the name of this dangerous exercise “March of Return” and it is planned to go on for six weeks until May 15, the day the Palestinian Arabs have come to call Nakba, catastrophe. This "march" will include the constructing of a tent city on the Gazan side of the border and the participation of "tens of thousands of Gaza residents", which there's little doubt Hamas - which rules the Gazans with an iron fist, can arrange.

But have no fear. They're giving assurances that this is going to be a “peaceful protest”:

A member of the Hamas Political Bureau stressed on Tuesday that the proposed “Great March of Return” is intended to be a peaceful activity. Dr Khalil Al-Hayya also warned the Israeli occupation authorities against taking any aggressive steps against the march or those who take part. According to Al-Hayya, this will include Palestinian men, women and children. The return to occupied Palestinian lands is the legitimate and inalienable right of every individual Palestinian refugee, the spokesman pointed out... “Our right to Palestinian land is inalienable and we will not concede it. We are insistent upon our right to return and our right to establish our independent state.” [Middle East Monitor, March 27, 2018]

The background is dire: Gaza's unemployment rate is extremely high with economic activity in a dramatically low state. Long-standing problems with their water, sewerage and electricity are not improving despite multinational efforts and offers of huge sums of capital from Hamas' oil-rich friends; they are in fact worsening. In short, life under Hamas, is a nightmare. Which is evidently just what Hamas intends.

Meanwhile here's what the past few days saw:

• Wednesday, a sole unarmed man crossed from the northern Gaza Strip into Israel near the community of Zikim and was promptly taken into custody. A few hours before that, two Palestinian Arabs were spotted near the discontinued Karni crossing trying to set fire to army engineering equipment close to the security fence [Jerusalem Post].
• Tuesday, three Gazans, all armed with grenades and knives, not only got into Israel but managed to walk more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) unhindered during several hours before being arrested just outside the IDF's Tze'elim army base. Making this so much worse, as Times of Israel reports it, signs of the infiltration were detected only hours after it had happened. And though no injuries or damage resulted, the defense minister Avigdor Liberman called for the incident to get the full investigation treatment. The infiltrators were located and arrested about 90 minutes after those first signs of intrusion were detected [Ynet].
• Saturday, four Palestinian Arab men wearing masks and carrying bottles filled with flammable material [Haaretz] managed to cut their way through the security fence from southern Gaza and ran into Israel near Kibbutz Kissufim (population about 245) where, as a well-publicized Hamas video shows, they tried (like Wednesday's attempted assault) to set fire to heavy engineering equipment that was there because of the barrier construction work now underway (no Israelis were on the scene at that hour. The construction is to prevent tunneling by the Gazan terrorists into Israel but it appears they can get in anyway using standard equipment i.e. cutters and their legs.

As Times of Israel reports, the military are taking pains to assure Israelis that all is essentially under control:

Israel has prepared for the protests by bolstering troop deployments in the border area, including the deployment of more than a hundred snipers to deal anticipated mass attempts to go through the fence, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot said. “If the Palestinians think they will organize a march and it will pass the [border] fence and they will march into our territory, they’re wrong,” Eisenkot told the Israel Hayom daily... “A big portion of the army will be invested there,” Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily... “If there will be a danger to lives, we will authorize live fire,” he declared. “The orders are to use a lot of force.”

But not every use of force involves fire-power. As Khaled Abu Toameh, writing for Times of Israel last night reports:

Israel has warned owners of bus companies in the Gaza Strip not to ferry Palestinians to mass demonstrations that Hamas and other Palestinian groups are planning near the border with Israel on Friday. Hamas said on Wednesday that several owners of bus companies had received the phone calls in the past few days warning them not to assist in the organization of the protests. The terror group added that Israeli security officers had threatened to take punitive measures against the owners and their companies, including banning them from operating at border crossings with Israel...

What's certain in the wake of all this Hamas grandstanding and provocation is that at tens of thousands of Israeli homes on Friday night, the traditional retelling of the exodus narrative and the pleasures of the once-a-year seder meal will be conducted with empty chairs at the table as ordinary Israelis pay the price of constant vigilance.

17-Jul-14: Enough! With rockets still flying into Israel, Israeli forces now operating within Gaza

[Image Source]

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya’alon have ordered IDF ground troops into the Gaza Strip to destroy Hamas’s terror tunnels. The announcement appears throughout the media [here, for instance].

On Israel's television stations, the live images of the skies over Gaza are being viewed in most homes at this hour.

Our overwhelming sense of public opinion here is (a) a great pity that this had to be done (b) virtually the entire spectrum of political views within Israel accept the inevitability of what is now underway.

Thursday has been a day of drama and danger for all Israelis. It began with the discovery - and then elimination - of a large scale infiltration attempt near Kibbutz Sufa close to the Gaza border. This time (after two previous efforts, one from the sea near Kibbutz Zikim, the other a tunnel near the Kerem Shalom crossing) some 13 armed terrorists emerged from a tunnel around dawn [video here], and were spotted and then bombed. The thwarted goals of the terrorists can be guessed at.

UNRWA, evidently under considerable pressure from certain sources, owned up earlier today to the fact that one of its school buildings in Gaza had become a store for some 20 Hamas rockets [UNRWA announcement]. To anyone following the work of UNRWA this is no great surprise, other than for the admission. Hamas routinely, for years, has stored its weapons inside UNRWA facilities. And beyond mere storage it has placed its rocket launchers inside mosques, schools, hospitals - an extension of its tried and proven strategy of deploying human shields.

Meanwhile those rockets have kept coming, Tzeva Adom sirens have been heard in cities all over Israel all day, and Israel has finally declared enough, no more. In the IDF's words:

A large IDF force of infantry, tanks, artillery, combat engineers, and field intelligence is entering the Gaza Strip. The force is supported by the Israel Air Force, Navy, and other Israeli security agencies. Their mission is to target Hamas’ tunnels that cross under the Israel-Gaza border and enable terrorists to infiltrate Israel and carry out attacks. Such a goal requires intensive and precise operations inside Gaza. Hamas terrorists are operating underground, and that is where the IDF will meet them. The IDF intends to impair Hamas’ capability to attack Israel. Hamas fires rockets at Israelis around the clock – 1,500 since July 8. The IDF is operating in order to counter this threat.

We pray that the efforts of the IDF's service men and women in and on Gaza be executed with great effect, at minimum cost and quickly.

8-Jul-14: A look back at the day so far

Tel Aviv [Image Source: Wikipedia]

Israel's formal counter to the missile war waged against us by the terrorists of Hamas now has a name as of midnight this past night: Operation Tzuk Eitan [Hebrew: מִבְצָע צוּק אֵיתָן] which the IDF is translating as Protective Edge.

It's been a violent and dangerous day, and there's no reason to think the acts of terror from Hamas and the other jihad-minded grouplets in its domain are about to taper off. Quite the contrary.

This evening, there's an indication of how dangerous this can be, with the report an hour ago of a failed infiltration by Palestinian Arab terrorists in the vicinity of Kibbutz Zikim (main outputs: mangos, avocados. dairy products, polyurethane) on the Mediterranean sea shore a few kilometers north of the northwestern end of the Gaza Strip. Israel Radio's news report says they came by sea and were met with fire from an IDF force: an IDF soldier was lightly injured in the exchange. Police, according to Times of Israel

have been deployed in great numbers to the area to prevent additional infiltration attempts from the Gaza Strip into Israel. [Times of Israel tonight]

At Israel National News, they say four infiltrators were killed but the authorities are taking no chances that there might be others as yet undetected. So the roads to and around Zikim are now closed.

There's quite dramatic surveillance camera video footage here, showing the terrorists emerging from the sea and being eliminated by IDF action.

Tzeva Adom incoming rocket warning sirens were heard throughout Israel's central metropolis earlier this evening: Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Kfar Shmaryahu, Rishon Letzion, Nes Tziona, Beit Shemesh, Rehovot, Gadera, the Gezer region, Yavne and other communities. Israel National News says there was a barrage of "several rockets", and that the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system made one or more mid-flight hits. No damage has yet been reported. That report says these were M75 rockets, "a domestic creation produced by Hamas in Gaza which features a long range", launched from Beit Hanoun in Gaza. At Times of Israel, they say Palestinian Islamic Jihad

has taken responsibility for the rocket fire on Tel Aviv. The rocket was most likely an M-75, which is made in Gaza and based on the Iranian Fajr rocket.

Over at the Jerusalem Post, they write that

It was the first Gaza rocket that reached Tel Aviv since Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012. Following the attack over central Israel, the Home Front Command instructed the Tel Aviv Municipality to open public bomb shelters in the city. The Home Front Command had earlier instructed Tel Aviv residents to prepare for utilizing protected rooms and shelters in their private homes. Under the same instruction, the division responsible for civil security ordered for bomb shelters in Tel Aviv schools to be opened.
[During Tuesday] the IDF begun actively calling up 40,000 reserves approved to it by the cabinet. Since midnight Tuesday, some 120 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip have exploded in Israel.

As the world's news media focus attention on the rockets emanating from the Gaza Strip and Israel's counter to them, we wonder how often news consumers are going to be reminded that Gaza is no longer just a Hamas-controlled terrorism haven but one that has been under the jurisdiction, since June 2, 2014 of the newly-created Palestinian unity government.

That government resulted from the widely-hailed "reconciliation" agreement between Hamas and Fatah, which makes the head of Fatah and of the PA also the head of whatever legal structure there is in Gaza today. That person is Mahmoud Abbas. As pointed by BBC Watch today, "that aspect of the current Gaza Strip story is being consistently erased from public view by the BBC." And not only by the BBC.

As for why Israel now finds itself again at war, David Horovitz writing in his fine and direct style at Times of Israel ["Why are we fighting with Gaza, again?"] puts it far better than we could:

If there was no rocket fire from this non-disputed enclave, there would be no Israeli response, and nobody would be dying. The sorry fact is that both before and after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, terrorists in the coastal enclave have been firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel, gloating when they maim Israelis and crying foul to the international community when Israel hits back and, inadvertently, hurts the Gaza civilians whom the terror groups have placed in harm’s way.
That Israelis do not die in greater numbers has nothing to do with Hamas and the other terror groups. They’re doing their absolute best to kill us. They’ve been assiduously smuggling in and manufacturing weaponry so that they now have hundreds of missiles that can reach Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and beyond, while imploring the international community to end Israel’s security blockade so that they can import even more potent means to murder us.
We’ve not been dying in greater numbers only because Israel has maintained that blockade, at terrible cost to its international standing, and because rather than putting its citizens in the line of fire, Hamas-style, to win international sympathy, Israel has built alarm systems, and bomb shelters, and protected areas, and the world’s most sophisticated missile defense systems, to try to keep its people safe.
...Recent days have seen the Israeli leadership clearly seeking not to get embroiled in another major offensive with Hamas — but its offer, its plea, of “quiet for quiet,” was ignored. We brace now for missile fire on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and agonize about the implications of a ground offensive.
Analysts posit that Hamas is firing some of its 100,000-rocket arsenal because it has nothing much to lose anymore — that it has lost the support of Egypt; that it can’t get the money to pay salaries; that it is retaliating for the deaths of several of its terror operatives in a tunnel that collapsed upon them after Israel had the temerity to attack it; that it is seeking to reassert itself as the only credible “resistance” to Israel…
But really, again, why the need to “resist” an Israel that has no presence in Gaza, and that has long since internalized the imperative to seek an accommodation with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank if this can only be achieved without imperiling Israel’s own existence? Why? Because, for Hamas, hostility to the very fact of Israel’s existence still far outweighs any and all other interests. [Times of Israel]

We plan to track the other events of the day and of this evening in a separate post.

25-Dec-10: 30 rockets this week... so far

Far, far from the attentions of the analysts and the reporters and the photographers and the editors and sub-editors, some 30 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza in this past week. 

The intentions of the jihad-minded terrorists are to wreak injury and damage, and very fortunately those intentions were barely fulfilled: a teenage girl was injured Tuesday in a Qassam rocket attack on Kibbutz Zikim in the Ashkelon Beach area (don't feel bad if you were not aware - almost no one is, thanks to the minimalistic reportage). That missile exploded in an open field near a kindergarten, causing two other people to be treated for shock and damaging a number of buildings in the area.

The outcome could easily have been unthinkably worse. The jihadists aim to sow fear and insecurity. And in this they succeeded this week, as they always do.


Traveling outside of Israel this has meant we have not been updating this blog as often as circumstances justify. Hope to get back on track in the next day or two.

9-Nov-08: Rockets and reactions

There's a report this morning that last night, Saturday night, Israeli forces struck a Qassam-launch device in northern Gaza Saturday evening.

This is evidently connected to the fifty or sixty Qassams that have been fired into civilian parts of Israel during the past five days. Shortly after the IDF action, another Palestinian-Arab rocket fired from Gaza hit Israel, this time near Zikim, south of Ashkelon.

Without quoting sources, YNet says the IDF forces in the area "are now authorized to open fire at Palestinian rocket launching cells prior to, during or shortly after their attempt to fire Qassams" into Israel.

Leaving us to wonder why an army of national defence would ever hesitate to do these things in the first place. To be instructed to hold fire when their equipment and people catch terrorists caught in the act of preparing? That's beyond our understanding.

Meanwhile the goods crossings that allow food and other vitals to pass from Israel into Gaza were closed on Israeli order as soon as the Gazan barrages began this past Wednesday. 

It would be nice to think that critics of this aspect of Israel's policy will mention the rocket attacks on Israeli towns. But past experience (see below) suggests they won't.

9-Jan-08: Preparing for a major media event

Image Source: New York Times

By no coincidence at all, the increased heat on our northern front is matched this morning with lethal weapon attacks on our southern front. Bush is coming to town, and the media are here. 

Nine Qassams and at least 2 mortars have crashed into Israel's western Negev so far this morning (Wednesday) hours before President Bush's arrival at Ben Gurion airport. Three landed around in the grounds of Kibbutz Zikim. 

Another two hit outside the beleagured Israeli city of Sderot. (Today's NY Times has some of the background to life in that sad place: At Gaza's Edge 

And according to YNet, a short while later another Qassam fired from northern Gaza landed near a kibbutz in the Sha'ar Hanegev regional council, two mortars landed near the security fence separating Israel from the Strip, and three more Qassams hit Sderot about half an hour ago (around 10:00am). 

Fortunately no injuries or property damage are reported so far. 

In our part of the world, where jihadists treat the lives of their families, neighbors and enemies with approximately equal contempt, this is what is sometimes meant by show business. They're showing just how hatred trumps every other consideration. 

The expectations here are that so long as the Bush caravan - with its myriad officials and reporters - is in town, the danger will remain especially elevated. 

And if the terrorists manage to provoke some nice photo-op defensive measures by Israeli forces, then so much the better for them.