Hundreds of Israeli troops and tanks could enter the Gaza Strip this morning
Image :1 of 3
The Times understands that Israeli troops and tanks will imminently be operating inside the area as part of large-scale operation to prevent Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel.
One of the main thrusts of the attack could be the so-called Philadelphi Road that runs along Gaza’s border with Egypt, under which Hamas has smuggled arms, missiles and men through a network of tunnels. Israel controlled the border until its army withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
A week of airstrikes has killed at least 430 Palestinians and left scores of buildings as rubble, despite diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire. Hamas rocket attacks have killed four Israelis since the fighting began.
Times Archive
Multimedia
Despite the looming onslaught, the rocket squads fired yet more projectiles into southern Israel yesterday. Hamas vowed that its barrage, which has lasted for years and which finally provoked the Israeli campaign, would not stop. “I call on the resistance to continue pounding Jewish settlements and cities,” said Sheikh Abdelrahman al-Jamal at the funeral of Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas political leader killed, together with his four wives and 11 children, in an Israeli airstrike on his home. “We will remain on the path of jihad until the end of days.”
The funeral was held outdoors because an earlier air raid had smashed the mosque where the service had been due to take place. Israel said that the building had been used to stockpile weapons.
Among the mounting Palestinian death toll yesterday were three young brothers, aged 7 to 10, who were killed in one of the 30 or so strikes carried out by Israeli warplanes. All along the border, Israeli tanks and troops have turned fields into muddy, makeshift camps from which to launch their offensive. The Government has already mobilised more than 6,000 reserve troops and has given the green light to call up almost 3,000 more. Artillery barrages were also fired into the strip, while aircraft bombed the open ground that the hundreds of troops will need to cross, and where Hamas has placed mines and dug tunnels to outflank the invaders.
Support for Operation Cast Lead remains high in Israel, with polls showing that almost 85 per cent of the public back the campaign.
Hamas has an estimated 15,000 fighters who have used the 18 months that they have controlled the Gaza Strip to hone their skills in anticipation of open combat with Israel.
The onslaught has provoked large antiIsraeli demonstrations around the world, with protests yesterday in India, Indonesia, Turkey and Australia. But Hamas’s calls for a “day of wrath” in the Palestinian territories produced only a lukewarm response in the face of clampdowns by Israeli security forces. Several thousand protesters marched through the West Bank city of Ramallah and youths in east Jerusalem threw stones at Israeli security forces and 50 women demonstrated outside the Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque. The protesters directed their anger at their own Palestinian leaders, and heads of Arab countries whom they felt had not done enough to stop Israel’s incursion. “[President] Abbas is with the Jews, not with the Arabs. If he really was supporting and working in favour of our Arab brothers in Gaza, this would not have happened,” Um-Mahr, a 66-year-old resident of east Jerusalem said. Akram Jwaeibis, 58, said that Arab leaders were afraid to do more than voice criticism of the Israeli Government. “That is why we are waiting for [the Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah. Or [the Hamas leader Ismail] Haniya to do something more.”
Diplomatic efforts to contain the crisis were growing after Israel’s surprise offensive. “We are working towards a ceasefire that would not allow a reestablishment of the status quo ante where Hamas can continue to launch rockets,” Condoleezza Rice, the outgoing US Secretary of State, said.
A high-level European delegation is due in the region this weekend, as are President Sarkozy of France and Tony Blair, the international community’s envoy to the Middle East.
enlarge
Print 
Email 
Peace and Justice Post 
Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed
December 31, 2008The US-backed attempt to bring Hamas to heel by overwhelming force is in fact more likely to boost the movement’s appeal
Israel’s decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a “stroke of brilliance”, the country’s biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed”. The daily Ma’ariv agreed: “We left them in shock and awe”.
Of the ferocity of the assault on one of the most overcrowded and destitute corners of the earth, there is at least no question. In the bloodiest onslaught on blockaded Gaza since it was captured and occupied by Israel 41 years ago, at least 310 people were killed and more than a thousand reported injured in the first 48 hours alone.
As well as scores of ordinary police officers incinerated in a passing-out parade, at least 56 civilians were said by the UN to have died as Israel used American-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters to attack a string of civilian targets it linked to Hamas, including a mosque, private homes and the Islamic university. Hamas military and political facilities were mostly deserted, while police stations in residential areas were teeming as they were pulverised.
As Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote in Ha’aretz at the weekend, “little or no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians”, as in US operations in Iraq. Among those killed in the first wave of strikes were eight teenage students waiting for a bus and four girls from the same family in Jabaliya, aged one to 12 years old.
Anyone who doubts the impact of these atrocities among Arabs and Muslims worldwide should switch on the satellite television stations that are watched avidly across the Middle East and which – unlike their western counterparts – do not habitually sanitise the barbarity meted out in the name of multiple wars on terror.
Then, having seen a child dying in her parent’s arms live on TV, consider what sort of western response there would have been to an attack on Israel, or the US or Britain for that matter, which left more than 300 dead in a couple of days.
You can be certain it would be met with the most sweeping condemnation, that the US president-elect would do a great deal more than “monitor” the situation and the British prime minister go much further than simply call for “restraint” on both sides.
But that is in fact all they did do, though the British government has since joined the call for a ceasefire. There has, of course, been no western denunciation of the Israeli slaughter – such aerial destruction is, after all, routinely called in by the US and Britain in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them. How could any government not respond with overwhelming force to the constant firing of rockets into its territory, the Israelis demand, echoed by western governments and media.
But that is to turn reality on its head. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip has been – and continues to be – illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Despite the withdrawal of troops and settlements three years ago, Israel maintains complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. And since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has punished its 1.5 million people with an inhuman blockade of essential supplies, backed by the US and the European Union.
Like any occupied people, the Palestinians have the right to resist, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But there is no right of defence for an illegal occupation – there is an obligation to withdraw comprehensively. During the last seven years, 14 Israelis have been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, while more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel with some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world. And while no rockets are fired from the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have died there at Israel’s hands this year alone. The issue is of course not just the vast disparity in weapons and power, but that one side is the occupier, the other the occupied.
Hamas is likewise blamed for last month’s breakdown of the six-month tahdi’a, or lull. But, in a weary reprise of past ceasefires, it was in fact sunk by Israel’s assassination of six Hamas fighters in Gaza on 5 November and its refusal to lift its siege of the embattled territory as expected under an Egyptian-brokered deal. The truth is that Israel and its western sponsors have set their face against an accommodation with the Palestinians’ democratic choice and have instead thrown their political weight, cash and arms behind a sustained attempt to overthrow it.
The complete failure of that approach has brought us to this week’s horrific pass. Israeli leaders believe they can bomb Hamas into submission with a “decisive blow” that will establish a “new security environment” – and boost their electoral fortunes in the process before Barack Obama comes to office.
But as with Israel’s disastrous assault on Lebanon two years ago – or its earlier siege of Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Beirut in 1982 – it is a strategy that cannot succeed. Even more than Hezbollah, Hamas’s appeal among Palestinians and beyond doesn’t derive from its puny infrastructure, or even its Islamist ideology, but its spirit of resistance to decades of injustice. So long as it remains standing in the face of this onslaught, its influence will only be strengthened. And if it is not with rockets, its retaliation is bound to take other forms, as Hamas’s leader Khalid Mish’al made clear at the weekend.
Meanwhile, the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has been further diminished by being seen as having colluded in the Israeli assault on his own people – as has the already rock-bottom credibility of the Egyptian regime. What is now taking place in the Palestinian territories is a futile crime in which the US and its allies are deeply complicit – and unless Obama is prepared to change course, it is likely to have bitter consequences that will touch us all.
s.milne@guardian.co.uk
Share this:
Tags:barbarity, British government, death, Gaza Strip, Hamas, Israeli attack, Israeli slaughter and the West
Posted in Commentary, Palestine, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »