Does The “Arab World” Want Israel To Defeat Hamas?
I am seeing something interesting over at Powerline, and comparing and contrasting it to stories in the news.
Here is the article cited in Powerline:
Posted: 18-12-2008
â€ÂArab states urge Israel to kill Gaza leadersâ€Â
Israel has recently received messages from “senior Arab official” urging the Hebrew state to resume its assassinations attacks in the Gaza Strip, the Tel Aviv-based Maariv reported. According to the newspaper, one of the messages even said “take their heads off”, in reference to the Hamas leadership in the coastal territory.
The Arab officials, according to the daily, urged Israel to hit Hamas if the latter decides not to resume the calm with Israel.
The Israeli hit-list includes top figures from Hamas military and political wings. On the top of the list are Hamas commanders Ahmed Jabari, Ibrahim Ghandour and Mohammed Deif, who has been on Israel’s most wanted list for over a decade and was wounded several times in the past in Israeli strikes.
The Israel targets include also senior political leaders such as former Palestinian premier, Ismail Haniyeh, the former foreign minister Mahmoud a Zahar and the former interior minister, Saeed Siyam. Maariv reports that another name on the Israeli list is of Palestinian Legislative Council member and Chairperson of the Popular Committee against the Siege, Jamal Al Khudari. Israeli security sources have been claiming he is close aide to Haniyeh and “deeply involved in terror activities.”
It should be mentioned that Israeli transport minister Shaul Mofaz was quoted recently as saying that Israel should “cut off the heads” of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip. He publicly declared his backing to the return of policy of assassination against the Hamas leaders.
A Powerline reader translated the “message” in question here:
Message from Arab States: Eliminate the Heads of Hamas
Ben Kaspit & Amir Bouchbout
18/12/2008 7:27
A moment before the end of the tahdiyya [lit. "calming"] Israel received a green light from senior Arab officials for the elimination of senior Hamas figures: “If they won’t extend the tahdiyya - eliminate them.”
Israel recently received messages from senior figures in Arab states encouraging the resumption of targeted eliminations in Gaza. In one of the messages it was even said “Take off their heads”, referring to the Hamas leadership in Gaza. The Arab officials referred to the possibility that Hamas will implement its threat[s], won’t lengthen the tahdiyya and will enable the resumption of firing Qassam rocks into the Western Negev.
And who are the seniormost targets for elimination? Hamas’s organization in Gaza is divided into a Military leadership and Political leadership. Among the leaders of the first type, who are likely to become targets for elimination, are three people: Ahmad Ja’bari, head of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza; Ibrahim Ghandour, a senior official in the military wing; and Muhammad Daf, another senior official in the military wing, who has already been injured in a number of IDF removal operations.
Among the characters who compose Hamas’s political leadership are Isma’il Haniyyah, Prime Minister of the Palestinian government, Sa’id Siyam, Minister of the Interior in Haniyyah’s government, and Mahmoud Az-Zahar, one of the organization’s leaders.
An additional individual likely to become another IDF target for elimination is Dr. Jamaal al-Houdari, a member of the Palestinian parliament in Gaza. Houdari claims that he is a humanitarian unaffiliated with Hamas, yet [when discussing him] one is dealing with a Haniyyah confidant involved in a great deal of anti-Israeli propaganda.
Among other things he’s connected to Gaza’s blackout campaign and sea borne [blockade running] transports from Cyprus. It is further claimed concerning [al-Houdari] that he has substantial involvement in the field of terror.
Not Eliminating Senior Officials
To these names one must add the commanders of the regional brigades that travel under the authority of Ja’bari, as they too are targets for elimination. Despite this, the [Israeli] Security Apparatus’s assessment is that if Israel will return to [the policy of] targeted eliminations, it will begin from the bottom rank of rocket launchers and manufacturers, and only afterwards will it return to eliminating senior officials.
One way or another the Tahdiyya agreement is supposed to expire, and already yesterday Hamas sent a message to Israel concerning the expected [future]: 24 Qassams were fired on the settlements of the Western Negev, causing a great deal of anxiety among the residents. A barrage of Qassams also aroused sharp criticism towards the [Israeli] political leadership’s policy of restraint thus far.
Officers in the Gaza Division (Ugdat ‘Aza) said on the subject that “in the month of November of this year, in the framework of the Tahdiyya agreement, Hamas has launched more rockets than in all of last year, when we were not under this agreement.” Those officers were fiercely critical of the Security Apparatus’s policy concerning the launching of rockets from the Gaza strip.
At the moment, despite this, they refrained from drawing direct criticism on the policy of the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak. Thus, for example, a senior officer in the Gaza Division said yesterday in a private conversation: “What’s happening today in the Gaza strip is incomprehensible. We must respond.”
“Frustration on the Ground Following Indecision”
According to him “Since the Tahdiyya was broken, Tzahal hasn’t reacted in the depth of the Palestinian territory, save only for defensive attacks against [rocket] launchers. We’ve arrived at an unprecedented position in which we identify the location of the launchings from the very [Palestinian] houses and don’t do anything in response. The tanks don’t move. No one takes any decisions.”
The senior figure added, furthermore that “What dictates the order of the day is the alarm of [incoming] mortars, shouting to us to enter protected shelters. Our deterrence ability is being eroded and sometimes it’s difficult to explain the complicated reality of it to the soldiers.”
An additional senior officer in the division said last night the following: “We are rotting in buildings. Standing around and take the hits. I personally feel the frustration in every level from the fact that nobody takes a position. This is the [official] instruction. To sit and get hit [by rockets] and be ready to prevent penetration [of the separation wall, by Palestinian terrorists] on foot or by means of a tunnel.
In his words, “to whom does it seem logical that [in exchange] for 24 rocket attacks into Israel, the IDF will respond with a strike on the launcher? It reminds the officers of 1999-2000, when we sat in the defense posts of Gush Katif and were [primarily] occupied in defending ourselves.”
One of the officers even told his subordinates yesterday that this week a reporter from a foreign agency who had worked this week in the Gaza Strip and said to him: “They’re spitting on you in there, and you don’t answer. You’ve lost even minimal respect. Why don’t you respond to Hamas’s bombings?” That officer added and explained: “I didn’t answer, and it seems to me that he said it in order to provoke me, but there is no small truth in his words.”
Now, here are two news stories from today:
Israel threatens major offensive against Gaza
Israel threatened on Sunday to launch a major offensive against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as violence simmered around the impoverished territory days after the end of a truce with the Islamists.
The two frontrunners in the race to become prime minister after a snap election in February both vowed to topple Hamas, which has run Gaza since violently seizing power there in June 2007.
Militant rocket and mortar fire continued on Sunday, the Israeli army said, reporting that one person was slightly wounded. A Palestinian medic said a woman had been injured in northern Gaza by shrapnel from a tank shell but the military denied firing in the area.
“Israel must topple the Hamas rule in Gaza and a government under my command will do just that,” Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, leader of the governing Kadima party, was quoted as saying by Israeli media.
“Israel must react when it is fired upon, must re-establish its force of dissuasion and stop the rockets.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party which is leading in opinion polls, echoed the sentiment.
“In the long run, we have no choice but to topple Hamas rule,” he was quoted as saying by the Ynet news website as he toured the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which has borne the brunt of militant rocket attacks from Gaza.
“Right now we have to go from passive response to active assault.”
Senior defence officials said after the weekly cabinet meeting that Israel was preparing to take action to halt the rocket strikes.
“We are preparing our response to the Hamas threat, with the decision yet to be taken on the timing and the scale,” Amos Gilad, a senior adviser to Defence Minister Ehud Barak, told public radio.
A senior Israeli defence official told AFP that a major military confrontation in the besieged territory was unavoidable.
“It is obvious where we are heading in Gaza. The situation is intolerable but clear. The army’s considerations are the only thing that is deciding when events will unfold,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
In Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian woman in her 40s was wounded by shrapnel from a tank shell on Sunday, a Palestinian medic said, but the Israeli army denied opening fire in the area.
The army spokesman said militants had fired 19 rockets and mortar shells at Israel, wounding one person slightly and causing some damage.
The armed wing of the radical Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is loosely linked to the Fatah movement of president Mahmud Abbas, claimed it was behind the rockets.
Tensions around Gaza have risen steadily since Friday, when Hamas said it would not renew a six-month truce with Israel that came into effect in June after months of Egyptian mediation.
Since then, Gaza militants have launched several dozen rockets, causing some damage and slightly wounding a handful of civilians, and Israel has retaliated with air strikes, killing one militant and several other Palestinians.
Although several Israeli ministers have for weeks been calling for the army to oust the Islamist masters of Gaza, observers say the government is wary of launching a major offensive less than two months before the election for fear it would not be able to score a decisive victory.
“The politicians aren’t in any rush to reach election day with an incomplete military operation and only partial results hanging around their necks,” wrote military analyst Alex Fishman in top-selling daily Yediot Aharonot.
“And worse than that, to be accused of having ordered a military operation just to improve their chances at the ballot box,” he said.
Israel responded to violence that erupted around Gaza in early November by tightening its blockade of the territory and halting deliveries of humanitarian aid and other basic supplies.
The over-crowded and aid-dependent land of some 1.5 million people has been subject to an Israeli blockade and repeated raids since 2006, when Hamas won Palestinian elections and later joined in a deadly cross-border raid which saw militants capture an Israeli soldier who remains hostage to this day. (AFP)
Egypt warns Israel against ‘devastating’ assault on Gaza
By YAAKOV KATZ AND BRENDA GAZZAR
Egypt warned Israel on Sunday against launching a massive military operation in Gaza, but Israeli defense officials said Cairo was angry with Hamas leaders for ending the six-month period of relative calm.
“Egypt is very upset at Hamas, and understands that the leadership there needs to be replaced,” one official told The Jerusalem Post.
Officially, though, the Egyptians cautioned Israel against an escalation of violence.
“We say such a move would have devastating consequences, devastating humanitarian consequences,” Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki told the Post in a telephone interview. “This is something we cannot accept or condone under any terms.”
Meanwhile, defense officials revealed that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak met privately on Thursday and decided that Israel would respond militarily to rocket attacks against the western Negev. The timing of the operation will be determined at a later date, likely following a security cabinet meeting later this week.
The government has, meanwhile, decided to embark on an international hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign ahead of a possible major operation in the Gaza Strip.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni convened a special meeting with heads of her ministry in Jerusalem Sunday night to discuss the situation in the South.
Following the meeting, the ministry announced that Livni had ordered that several diplomatic steps be taken with the objective of broadening international legitimacy for any military steps in Gaza.
The foreign minister also instructed her staff to file an official complaint with the UN Security Council over rocket fire from the Strip.
She reportedly briefed Israeli representatives abroad to open a massive diplomatic campaign in world capitals to convey the gravity with which Israel viewed the massive increase in attacks on its citizens in the South.
The campaign will also stress Hamas’s responsibility for the plight of Gaza’s residents.
Livni herself will also reportedly meet with international counterparts in the coming days to promote the idea of tougher military action against Hamas.
Hamas leaders went underground in Gaza on Thursday out of fear of being targeted by Israel as the movement announced that it would not extend its unofficial six-month cease-fire with Israel. Hamas also evacuated many of its institutions and security installations in anticipation of an escalation with the IDF, Palestinian sources said.
The Post learned Sunday that the IDF Home Front Command had drawn up plans to evacuate children and elderly from Israeli towns that could come under heavy barrages of rockets in the event of a large-scale operation in Gaza.
Defense officials said that Hamas was likely capable of firing more than 100 rockets a day into Israel throughout such an operation. On Sunday, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin told the cabinet that Hamas had rockets capable of reaching the outskirts of Beersheba.
Nineteen rockets struck the Negev Sunday, in addition to at least three mortar shells. One person was lightly wounded and a rocket scored a direct hit on the home of Sderot resident Maya Iber, causing extensive damage. Another rocket struck near Ashkelon.
Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a rocket launcher in northern Gaza. There were no reports of Palestinian casualties.
“Nothing’s changing, no one’s doing anything - not the government, no one,” Iber told Israel Radio.
“Before 8 a.m. there was an alarm, a red alert. I was just about to go to work, and I turned back,” she said. She added that she didn’t have a safe room in her house, so when the alarm sounded she had taken shelter downstairs in the safest place she could find.
She said that she heard the rocket struck, and “thought it had landed somewhere next to the house. I opened my eyes, and saw it had hit my house… I heard the explosion.”
Her children no longer lived in Sderot, said Iber, and she had been alone in the house. “The Kassams started falling in 2000, and one by one the children left Sderot.”
They had tried to convince her to leave too, she said. “I always tell them ‘it’ll be okay.’ I love Sderot, and I have a nice house here.”
Though Kassams had struck close to her before, she said that now, after a Kassam actually hit her house, she would consider leaving.
Zaki, the Egyptian spokesman, said that while Hamas used means that Cairo doesn’t support or condone, “they are part and parcel of the Palestinian public.”
He said late Sunday that no progress had been made in trying to get the parties to renew the truce, and called Friday’s expiration of the truce “a dangerous situation” that could escalate into confrontation.
He added that Israel’s closure policy, which he described as indiscriminate collective punishment, was “wrong and counterproductive.”
The policy “needs to be seriously reviewed and halted,” he said.
“We don’t want anything from Hamas. They know what they are supposed to do: halt their rockets and that’s it,” Zaki said.
Earlier this month, however, a top Egyptian parliamentarian from the ruling party warned that his country would not allow Hamas to establish an Islamist state in Gaza.
Egypt has recently been subject to criticism because of Israel’s strict closure on the Gaza Strip, he said. “It is giving us a lot of problems because it is causing the Palestinians, the civilians, severe hardship,” he said.
While some critics have suggested that Egypt open up the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Sinai to allow goods and persons to enter and exit freely, this was unacceptable to Egypt, Zaki said. “This would be very easy, for Israel to shut down its crossings and completely disconnect from the Gaza Strip and ask Egypt to take over,” he said.
In a press statement put on the Foreign Ministry’s Web site on Sunday, Zaki said Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 had not resulted in the Strip’s liberation from occupation as some believe or claim.
Evidence of Israel’s occupation is that it is still in control of Gaza’s airspace, seas, most of the Strip’s borders and most ports of entry and exit of goods and individuals,” he said in the statement. The West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem formed a single geographic unit and should not be dealt with on a piecemeal basis, the statement said.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian Red Crescent Society said it would send five trucks carrying food and medical aid to the Gaza Strip on Monday, according to Reuters. An Egyptian official told the wire service that Egyptian authorities had agreed with Israel to allow the trucks into the coastal strip.
So … what do you think?
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