Ten IDF brigades grind Hamas down, but no trace of kidnapped boys after six days - http://www.debka.com/article/24017/Ten-IDF-brigades-grind-Hamas-down-but-no-trace-of-kidnapped-boys-after-six-days
As the massive search for the three kidnapped teenagers Gil-Ad Sha'ar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach, went into its sixth day Wednesday, June 8, Israelis were getting impatient and skeptical about the prospects of finding them. Ten IDF brigades plus special operations units have been mobilized to scour the Hebron district, where the boys disappeared on June 12, and are keeping its population of 300,000 under curfew. So why, people are asking, has the army expanded the hunt to the northern West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin?
Another 65 mostly Hamas activists were detained Tuesday overnight across the West Bank. Of that number, 51 were former prisoners released by Israel in the 2011 trade for the Israel soldier Gilead Shalit.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stressed that the special message conveyed by these arrests is part of the all-out military effort to recover the three boys and break up the Hamas organization in Judea and Samaria.
At this late date, Netanyahu was implying that he made a strategic blunder in 2011 when he signed the deal for the release of 1,027 convicted Palestinian terrorists, including multiple murderers, in exchange for the freedom of a single Israeli soldier.
Early Wednesday, the IDF was ordered to start reversing that deal and putting the freed Palestinians back in prison.
But reversing the hard military core of a radical ideological movement dedicated to violence is a lengthy, painstaking and costly process. One of debkafile's military intelligence sources reports that, even after nearly 300 Hamas activists were detained this week, many thousands of activists, some of the highest rank, remain in Israeli and Palestinian Authority prisons.
As for the missing boys, the liaison officers permanently attached to their families may be more forthcoming to them than they are to the media, which are kept totally in the dark. But whatever they may have been told, the fact remains that the massive search has produced no tangible progress or concrete data on the boys' whereabouts thus far.
Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz never tires of repeating that the IDF will never give up until they are back home.
The entire Israeli operation is designed to show Hamas in the strongest language that the old game is over. Kidnapping Israelis will never again yield the release of Palestinian terrorists from prison, only intensify Israel's determination to smash Hamas' political, terror, military and financial infrastructures. This piecemeal destruction of the organization's institutions and underground presence in Judea and Samaria will go on and, if it fails to produce results, the operation will extend to Hamas' home ground in the Gaza Strip.
Our military sources report that the IDF has deployed almost as much military strength for this operation as it fielded for the April 2002 Defensive Wall operation, that broke the back of the second intifada.
Ten IDF combat brigades have been seconded, equal to nearly three divisions and including Special Operations forces, auxiliary contingents, police units and Shin Bet internal intelligence personnel.
The high command has transferred to Judea and Samaria units from Israel's northern borders.
The war engulfing Iraq is burning so fiercely that Tehran has pulled Hezbollah fighters and Iraqi Shiite militiamen out of Syria to battle the Sunni ISIS and save the Baghdad regime. This has somewhat reduced the risks facing northern Israel.
The Israeli brigades are not just dismantling Hamas' resources for waging terror, but every other terrorist entity they encounter - some on the strength of new information obtained from interrogations of detainees.
Israeli troops are rooting out the smallest and most primitive of these entities, one by one, to make sure that none will ever raise its head and stir up a third intifada.
Thorough though it is, this operation has three shortcomings:
1. It has not accomplished its declared mission of rescuing the three kidnapped teenagers and catching their abductors.
2. It is not reasonable to expect Hamas or its Iranian and Hezbollah backers to allow Israel to continue hammering Hamas for weeks or months or "for as long as its takes," as Israeli leaders have pledged, without pushing back. At some point, the trio running the operation, Netanyahu, Ya'alon and Gantz, will have to set a timeline.
Already Tuesday, a solid front of all the terrorist organizations based in the Gaza Strip, led by Hamas and the pro-Iranian Jihad Islami, declared full mobilization and set up a common war room for operations against Israel.
3. The man who has profited most from the IDF operation thus far is Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. He can stand back and watch Israeli forces smash Hamas' assets and influence in the most important West Bank towns of Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkarm, Hebron and Nablus. Those towns were formally transferred to PA rule, but its security forces fear to set foot there.
Now, Abbas' Fatah party can hope to win the Palestinian elections when they take place next January.
In Jeddah, Abbas came forward Wednesday to publicly demand that the abductors of the three Israeli boys, whoever they are, let them go at once. He accused the kidnappers of seeking to "ruin the Palestinian Authority" and vowed they would be held accountable.
Addressing a gathering of Organization of the Islamic Cooperation foreign ministers in Jedda, Abbas also pledged that there would be no third intifada.
Will Netanyahu use boys' rescue operation to finally thrash Hamas in Gaza too? - http://www.debka.com/article/24011/Will-Netanyahu-use-boys'-rescue-operation-to-finally-thrash-Hamas-in-Gaza-too-
Signs of an approaching IDF military operation against Hamas abounded this week as a possible outcome of the massive military-cum-intelligence effort to rescue the three Israeli boys Hamas is accused of abducting near Hebron on June 10. Military strength constantly poured in to reinforce the siege around the Hebron, a West Bank city of 170,000 and is environs. Sunday night, June 15, Israeli forces surrounded and then stormed two houses for suspects, after detaining up to 100 Hamas operatives.
During the day, a limited call-up of reserves was announced.
All in all, it looked as though the fundamentalist Islamic organization was in for a major smack - and not only in Hebron. Opposite Hamas' Gaza base, Israel deployed Iron Dome missile interceptors at important towns within range of Palestinian rockets - Ashdod, Beersheba and Rehovot as well as Ashkelon, where Sunday night, the battery caught two missiles incoming from the Gaza Strip.
Israel and Egypt had meanwhile shut down their border crossings to and from the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian army also beefed up its deployment along the Israeli border and posted an armored battalion at the Sinai terminal at Taba.
Hamas has avoided admitting to the abduction or making any demands. Pent-up Israeli fury against its constant menace and routine extortions is fueled by the anguish of the teenagers' families. The government would find it hard in the current environment to bow to yet another demand to hand over Palestinian prisoners. Dealing with Hamas in military terms is backed across the political spectrum under popular pressure.
This confrontation may blow quickly from the West Bank to the Gaza sector. There, Hamas holds its vast missile arsenal and terrorist infrastructure, which it has refused to relinquish even for the sake of Palestinian reconciliation and a unity government, and will use it to the full to terrorize southern and central Israeli cities and villages.
There, too, Hamas could count on backup from the pro-Iranian Palestinian Jihad Islami, which has accumulated firepower that rivals that of Hamas as well as a strong foothold in West Bank refugee camps.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, in his brief comment Saturday night, June 14, made an important point when he said: "While bending all our efforts to rescuing the three boys, we are keeping a watchful eye on the north and the south."
He has clearly taken into account that in a conflagration with the Palestinians, Hezbollah units in Lebanon and Syria, including the Golan border, may well open a second and third front against Israel to ease the pressure off its allies.
All these calculations weigh heavily on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, Lt. Gen. Gantz and his deputy Maj. Gen. Gady Eisenkott in deciding on the scale and targets of military action against Hamas, which may have started rolling. It has been given a name: "Our Brothers Come Home."
The Egyptian military concentrations on the Israeli and Gaza borders attest to a degree of coordination between Jerusalem and Cairo, under former army chief President Abdul Fattah El-Sisi.
On the one hand, El Sisi Israel's leaders are of the same mind as Israel on the pressing need to keep Hamas and some of its Al Qaeda allies in Sinai from using the peninsula as their launching- pad for cross-border attacks on Israel.
On the other, the Egyptian president will not readily commit himself to supporting an Israeli military operation to destroy the military resources of the Muslim Brotherhood's ally and offspring in Gaza, without first obtaining the nod of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, which bankroll his regime and armed forces.
Netanyahu appears to be holding his fire in the hope of a positive reply from Cairo before approaching Washington for its blessing.
In the meantime, other punitive measures are to be broached, such as a proposal to declare null and void the much-criticized 2011 deal which traded a thousand convicted Palestinian terrorists, including mass murderers, for Gilead Shalit, the soldier held hostage by Hamas for five years. Another is to deport Hamas leaders from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip.
The Netanyahu government and Obama administration have attained a limited area of assent in recent months over Israel's role in the Syrian civil war. It is based on the understanding that Jerusalem will give Washington advance notice of its military steps without the obligation to comply with the administration's position.
Would this informal US-Israeli arrangement work for an operation against Hamas? Would the Obama administration abstain from supporting this Israeli initiative in the war on terror?
Israel is mulling its strategic options not too far away from the sights and sounds of ISIS (Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant) feats in conquering one city after another in Iraq's Sunni heartland - and its backlash: Although the Iraqi national army claims to be pushing back, it is in reality thousands of Iranian Al Qods Brigades troops who have take ISIS on.
If Tehran succeeds in stabilizing the Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government and saving his army from collapse, just as it did for Syria's Bashar Assad, that success would consolidate Hezbollah's strength in Lebanon and Syria and that of Hamas and Jihad Islami in Gaza City and Ramallah.
The two terrorist organizations would rule the roost in the Palestinian governing administration.
Although this process may take some months to unfold, Netanyahu would be advised to act soon to nip it in the bud before radical rule in Hebron and Gaza is transposed to Ramallah.
In 2012, Netanyahu stepped back from finishing the IDF operation against Hamas' rocket blitz without putting paid to the threat. Two years later, he vowed there would be "grave consequences" for the abduction of three teenage Israeli civilians. Will he make good this time on his strong words against Hamas?
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