WarSclerotic

Are Israel and Hamas headed for another war?.

Theodore May GlobalPost

GAZA CITY, Gaza — Militants, allegedly in Egypt, launched several missiles into Israel Monday morning, joining a wave of violence between Israel and Gaza over the weekend that has led to the greatest escalation of conflict here in more than a year.

At 11:30 p.m. Friday night, in response to several mortar and rocket attacks out of Gaza earlier in the day, the Israeli air force launched three near-simultaneous attacks on targets in Gaza.

In central Gaza City, which has been spared much of the tit-for-tat violence that has persisted in the wake of last January’s war here, several intense blasts targeted a Hamas training facility. The attack was heard for miles and windows in surrounding buildings were shattered.

Hamas soldiers struggled to contain the surging crowd of onlookers as rumors that more Israeli attack planes were on the way induced further panic. One solider fired a warning shot into the air.

At Shifa Hospital, the scene was equally chaotic. Machine gun wielding police, families of the injured and an aggressive local press corps all jostled at the entrance as paramedics struggled to push stretchers through the door.

The Israeli attacks killed a Hamas commander in central Gaza and targeted smuggling tunnels in Rafah, a city on the Egyptian border. The rocket fired from Gaza Friday morning struck a populated area in the Israeli city of Ashkelon. No one, however, was injured.

While spurts of violence have not been uncommon since last January’s war, Hamas had mostly avoided deploying its more sophisticated rockets on Israel’s larger cities. In turn, Israel had mostly contained its air strikes to peripheral targets in Gaza, steering clear of city centers in an effort to reduce controversial civilian casualties.

This weekend’s violence came as the international community renews its push for the Palestinian National Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel to re-enter direct peace talks. The Israeli government said it believed the latest rocket attacks from Gaza are part of an effort to derail those talks.

The violence persisted all weekend. On Sunday night, an explosion at a house in the central Gaza city of Deir el Belah left 58 wounded, according to local hospital officials. Hamas has blamed Israel for the explosion. Israel denies the charge.

On Monday morning, rockets fired from the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt hit targets in Israel and Jordan, killing one. Israeli media reported that the rockets were in retaliation for the recent Israeli incursions in Gaza throughout the weekend.

Ahmed Bahar, a Hamas leader and speaker of parliament, attended the funeral of Issa Batran, the Hamas commander who was killed Friday night, using the opportunity to issue some of the most vitriolic rhetoric heard from Hamas.

Batran, he said in the eulogy, was “a legendary man, who was killed by rockets filled with treachery and betrayal.”

“There is no way we can leave our right to protect our Jerusalem,” he added, “and I say to you that victory is on our side.”

Israeli officials, in turn, have condemned the barrage of rockets coming from Gaza and Egypt, vowing to overcome the violence.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israeli media, called today’s violence a “criminal attack on innocent civilians in both Israel and Jordan [that] was instigated by terror groups who want to sabotage the peace process.”

While Hamas said the rocket and mortars fired into Israel on Friday did not come from them, Israel has previously said that it would hold Hamas, which effectively rules Gaza, responsible for any weapons deployed within the area’s borders.

Hamas, an Islamic militant group that has said it is committed to the destruction of Israel, took control of Gaza in a 2007 coup, which led Israel to enact a blockade against the coastal Palestinian territory.

Last January, Israel launched a major military operation inside Gaza after scores of rockets hit nearby Israeli towns in the months before. The three-week battle killed hundreds of Palestinians and largely stemmed the flow of rocket fire from Gaza.

This latest round of violence is largely seen as a distraction for Israel, which is focusing its attention on the threat coming from Iran, which Israel believes is seeking nuclear arms. Still, with violence at its highest point in a year and a half, it’s difficult to predict just how far the latest hostilities might escalate.

And Gazans aren’t optimistic.

“It seems like the violence is building to something worse,” said Ahmed Kassem, who had come to help friends dig out from this morning’s explosion in Deir el Belah.

The Greenroom » Attacks on Israel: Watch the South.

posted at 4:43 pm on August 4, 2010 by J.E. Dyer
[ Terrorist Attacks ]    printer-friendly

The attacks on Israel in the past week are remarkable for more than their number. No single political development seems to account for all of them. The rocket attacks in the south involved military-grade weapons of a kind rarely seen since before Operation Cast Lead. Those attacks, moreover, affected Jordan as well as Israel’s Negev, and according to some reports included an attack on the UN’s observation force (MFO) in the Sinai.

Tuesday’s clash on the border with Lebanon has gotten the most media attention. As Max Boot observes at Commentary’s “contentions,” UNIFIL’s acknowledgement of the facts points to culpability on the Lebanese side. He’s in broad company speculating that this provocation was intended by Hezbollah as a distraction from the UN tribunal’s impending report on the Rafiq Hariri assassination of 2005.  (See here and here also for good extended treatments of the border clash, including Hezbollah involvement.) Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah made an impassioned speech yesterday, within hours of the border skirmish, in which he accused Israel of being behind the assassination and promised retaliation against Israel in the future.

But the rocket attacks near Gaza and in the south – on Ashkelon, which fronts the Mediterranean, as well as on the Gulf of Aqaba resort city of Eilat, and on Aqaba, Jordan – are potentially of greater interest.

The 29 July attack on Ashkelon involved a Grad-type military-grade rocket launched from Gaza. (The Grad, a former-Soviet battlefield-rocket design, is a variant of the generic Katyusha; the 29 July rocket was reportedly of Chinese manufacture.) This profile, reminiscent of rocket attacks in 2008, is an established Hamas attack pattern.

But the 2 August attack on Eilat and Aqaba came from the Sinai. Unlike an earlier rocket attack from Sinai in April 2010, it involved military-grade Grad rockets fired in a salvo, probably from the mountain range north of Sinai’s Taba resort area.

Google Earth map; author annotation

It’s possible the rocket attack from Sinai was mounted by Hamas in a cross-border operation, but I doubt it. This is an incident that must bolster the IDF’s growing concern about a “new front” being opened by global jihadists. The salvo launch may well indicate the use of a military multiple-rocket launcher: not something Hamas could easily sneak into the Sinai.  (The thousands of terrorist rocket attacks on Israel, including those from Gaza since 2005, have more typically been launched from homemade apparatuses rather than from military MRLs; the latter “scoot” handily, but are big and hard to hide.)

No responsibility has been claimed for the attack – in fact, Hamas has denied it – probably because one of the rockets hit Jordan. The IDF reportedly says the recovered rockets are of Iranian or North Korean manufacture, indicating the backing of a state sponsor (presumably Iran). But there are discrepancies that bear watching, with trying to make a “fingerprint match” to Hamas. It’s not ultimately a very good one.

The DEBKAfile report of a simultaneous attack on the UN MFO in the Sinai (near El-Arish and the border with Gaza) must be approached with skepticism. But another author makes a separate reference to that attack (not sourced to DEBKA); and if it did occur, the tally of attacks on 2 August is increasingly inconsistent with the apparent posture of Hamas: recalcitrant, certainly, but somewhat disorganized, and lacking a clear strategic direction of its own. The emerging focus on the Sinai is beyond the scope of the objective Commentary’s Evelyn Gordon attributes to Hamas in her well-reasoned piece: that is, wringing more concessions from Israel before agreeing to join talks.

But it’s what we would expect from Iran’s ongoing campaign of subversion in Egypt – involving the Sinai in particular – which achieved brief notoriety after an Egyptian security sweep in 2009. (For more on Iran’s long-term objectives, see here and here.)

Meanwhile, the momentum for political change in Egypt, gathering this summer with the Muslim Brotherhood’s endorsement of Mohamed ElBaradei’s opposition effort, makes Egypt a crucial battlefield for the competing Iranian and Arabist visions of regional hegemony. Saudi King Abdullah visited Egypt last week before the regional summit in Beirut, his first stop in a trip seen in Arab eyes as a “fence-mending” effort among Arab nations in advance of a U.S-Iran clash. The day of his arrival in Cairo, a bomb was detonated at an Egyptian residential compound near the country’s embassy in Beirut.

Things are likely to heat up further in the regional competition for Egypt’s future. From the Sinai, terrorists can affect both Israel and Egypt, a fact that Iran’s paramilitary planners have recognized for some time. Sunni guerrillas opposing the Iranian gambit will recognize it too. Iranian and Arab leaders, and the terrorists they sponsor, all anticipate a “coming storm” in the region; it’s not by any means too early to recognize that they are preparing to exploit the opportunities the storm will present.

I agree that Hamas has no intention of good-faith engagement with the peace process. But I don’t think the peace process – or the UN findings on the Hariri assassination – is the only driver of any regional actor’s strategy today.  I think they’re all looking ahead.  And we should be looking south – toward Egypt – as well as north

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Lt. Col. (Res.) Dov Harari, killed by Lebanese sniper

By launching a cross-border sniper attack on Israeli forces Tuesday, Aug. 3, and provoking a major clash, the 9th Brigade of the Lebanese Army laid down a new fact of life in the Middle East: The next war against Israel will be fought – not by the Hizballah militia, but by the Lebanese army, whose mission is henceforth merged into the radical objectives of the Iran-backed terrorist group.
By taking on Israeli forces, the Lebanese Army assumed responsibility for the volatile Lebanese-Israeli border and showed it was prepared to take the consequences of aggression. Never seen as capable of anything more than substandard police work and inclined to run a mile from combat situations, this army was described by debkafile‘s military sources as having astonished military observers by its performance against the IDF.
1.  Its commanders proved capable of catching the Israeli military unawares, in exactly the same way as Hizballah did when it kidnapped and murdered three Israeli soldiers in 2000 and, again, when it snatched another two Israeli officers in a cross-border raid in 2006.
In both cases, the terrorists stole across the border into Israel.
Tuesday, the Lebanese army showed itself to be not only an apt pupil of Hizballah’s tactics, but capable of going “one better.” Its snipers shot Lt. Col. (Res.) Dov Harari, 45, from Netanya, in cold blood as he stood well inside the Israeli border, and seriously injured Capt. Ezer Lakiya from Kfar Harif. Doctors are fighting to save his life by removing a piece of shrapnel from his heart.
Both were watching Israeli troops carrying out routine tasks on the Israeli side of the border fence.
2.  The Lebanese army was able to hoodwink Israeli military intelligence border scouts and keep its plan of attack dark. The fact that Hizballah was also out of the picture would have been cold comfort for the Israeli high command.
3.   Its commanders were not deterred by Israeli retaliation and rather than backing down raised the pitch of violence.
4.   Israel commanders judged that, by exacting a painful price, they could silence the enemy’s guns. They therefore bombed the Lebanese Army’s regional command center at Taybeh, torched an APC and left three soldiers dead. The enemy kept on shooting.
5.   The day’s combat ended with the Lebanese army’s 9th Brigade established as a new threat to the Israel Defense Forces from positions abutting the border.
Its presence in South Lebanon is moreover legitimate, unlike Hizballah, which moved men and weapons into the south although prohibited from doing so by the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006.
6.  The Lebanese army may decide to follow up on its attack, using one flimsy pretext or another. After all, the UN peacekeepers stood by idly when the snipers opened fire into Israel under the world body’s flag – even though their commander Wednesday admitted the force had been duly informed of the the IDF activity that day and passed the word to the Lebanese army command.
8.  The IDF’s response was disproportionately mild given the loss of two high commanders in an act of unprovoked aggression. But it was enough to allow Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah to pose as Lebanon’s great national unifier.
In the speech he delivered Tuesday night, he capitalized on the incident by saying he had ordered his militiamen not to interfere in the clash with Israeli forces, commended the Lebanese Army for its bravery in taking on the Zionist foe and let it be understood that his rockets and missiles would be made available for the next round of fighting with Israel.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

Mysterious explosions at new Iranian petrochemicals plant

A massive explosion killed at least five workers at the giant Pardis petrochemicals complex in southern Iran Wednesday, August 4, at around 12:30 – just about the time an explosive device was hurled at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as his heavily secured armored convoy drove through the northern Iranian city of Hamadan. This is reported by debkafile‘s Iranian sources.
Ahmadinejad was unhurt although some of his bodyguards and bystanders were certainly injured. He made straight for Hamadan’s central stadium and began delivering a speech that was broadcast live by state television.
Assaluyeh, the site of the Pardis complex, is situated at the opposite end of Iran, on its southern Persian Gulf coast not far from the Bushehr nuclear reactor. Iranian officials admit that large sections of the complex were destroyed but attributed the blast to a ruptured gas pipe. debkafile‘s intelligence sources report that the plant was hit by five explosive devices. It was new, personally inaugurated on July 28 by President Ahmadinejad, who described it as a miracle of Iranian hi-tech.
Iranian spokesman were also trying to play down the attempt on the president’s life by a bomber present in the large audience surrounding his convoy. At first they reported that the target was the journalists’ minivan riding in his convoy. But their security services made haste to put the Hamadan and Pardis attacks together for a joint investigation. They suspect some enemy antagonist may have sought to prove it can simultaneously strike at two major targets in opposite ends of the country and get close to the president and also the Bushehr reactor.
Assaluyeh the town is a particularly sensitive place, because it is the hub of the Pars Special Energy Economic Zone whose industries are fueled by the natural gas piped in from the giant South Pars field.
Three days before the petrochemical complex was inaugurated, there was another mysterious explosion at a second energy plant, this one located on Kharg Island.
Iran’s security chiefs are beginning to suspect that one or more groups of covert saboteurs are at large on Iran’s coast opposite the Strait of Hormuz and are gunning for the strategic industries and facilities located there.

Hamadan’s population is incidentally purely Iranian Shiite with none of the ethnic or religious minorities persecuted by the regime. It was built at Biblical Shushan, the burial sites of Queen Esther and Mordecai, several hundreds kilometers west of Tehran.

Netanyahu: Hamas responsible for rockets on Eilat; we will retaliate – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News.

PM also blames Lebanese government for violence at border, days after Grad rocket salvo killed Jordanian man in attack from Sinai.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Israeli television Wednesday that Hamas was responsible for the deadly rocket fire on Israel’s and Jordan’s Red Sea ports on Monday, and that Israel would retaliate.

	Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking on Israeli television on August 4, 2010
	Photo by: Avi Ohayon

Earlier Wednesday, Egyptian officials also confirmed that the rocket attacks, which had killed a Jordanian taxi driver in Aqaba, had been carried out by the militant Palestinian group operating from Egypt, after days of denials.

“Over recent days we’ve witnessed three attacks against Israel,” Netanyahu said in a special announcement on Israeli television. “An attack from Gaza on Ashkelon, an attack by the Lebanese army on Israel Defense Forces troops carrying out a routine operation, and another attack from the Sinai peninsula at Eilat. I want to make very clear to Hamas and to the Lebanese government that we view them as responsible for the violent provocation against us.”

“Don’t test our determination to protect our citizens,” the prime minister went on to say.

“Israel will retaliate for every assault. Apparently there were those who understood that, and tried to avoid taking responsibility for these crimes. Three days after our retaliatory operation in Gaza, Grad rockets were fired from Sinai at Eilat and Aqaba by a seemingly anonymous organization. Several months earlier, on April 22, similar rocket fire came from Sinai. We investigated the two incidents – it became clear beyond a doubt that Hamas’ military wing in Gaza had perpetrated both attacks under disguise,” Netanyahu explained.

	Wreckage of cars damaged by a rocket attack is seen at a hotel area in the Jordan’s Red Sea city of Aqaba August 2, 2010.
	Photo by: Reuters

“I want to clarify that the use of a third country’s soil, one that seeks peace, in order to launch rockets at Israel, will not help Hamas escape culpability. Israel views the attacks against its citizens with extreme severity, as well as the attempt to destabilize Israel’s relations with Egypt and Jordan,” the prime minister continued.

“Whoever shoots at Israeli citizens, and it doesn’t matter from where, we will find them and hit them hard,” Netanyahu concluded.

Earlier Wednesday, an Egyptian security official said Hamas had fired seven rockets, including one which misfired and left debris near a security facility in the town of Taba.

The attackers fired Soviet-style Grad rockets of the type used by militants in Lebanon and Gaza, he added, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The rockets hit a narrow area of the Red Coast where the Israeli and Jordanian ports are located side by side. One person was killed and four people were wounded.

Aqaba and Eilat are more than 300 kilometers from Hamas’ stronghold in the Gaza Strip. However, an unnamed Egyptian source told Egypt’s state MENA agency on Wednesday that “preliminary information indicates that Palestinian factions from the Gaza Strip are behind that operation.”

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri criticized the Egyptian claim, calling it politically motivated. “This sounds silly and does not depend on any actual reasonable evidence,” he said.

MENA quoted Egyptian security sources on Monday as saying rockets could not have been fired from Sinai since the largely empty, desert region was very mountainous.

“Egytian statements are conflicting,” Abu Zuhri said. “We doubt the credibility of these statements and believe they are unprofessional and politically motivated.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, when asked if he was convinced the rockets were fired by Hamas, told Israel Radio there could be a link.

“I do not want to say convinced, but it could be that there is a link between Hamas and this firing – perhaps not people who are part of Hamas in Gaza, perhaps a link that is a little more indirect,” he said.

Egypt has not indicated where the rockets were launched from, but said it was scaling up the investigation.

“Egypt will not accept the use of its land by any party to harm Egyptian interests,” the Egyptian security source said.

In 2005, rockets were fired at U.S. warships in Aqaba but missed their target and killed a Jordanian soldier on land. A group claiming links to al Qaeda said it was behind the attack.

Two years later, a Palestinian suicide bomber infiltrated through Sinai and killed three people at a bakery in Eilat, a tourist resort on Israel’s southern tip which has only rarely been touched by the Middle East conflict.

Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab states to have full peace treaties with Israel. Those relations were frayed by Israel’s crackdown a decade ago on a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Although Egypt had initially denied that the rockets were fired from its territory, security forces in Israel were certain that the rockets came from Sinai, as has happened in the past.

A number of terrorist groups are operating in the Sinai peninsula and are busy with smuggling arms into the Gaza Strip and efforts to penetrate into Israel.

Among the groups operating in the Sinai are those with links to Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaida and other global Jihadi groups.

A senior IDF source said yesterday that the rockets were meant to “embarrass Egypt.”
Israel’s long border with Egypt is relatively unguarded compared to the electric fences and advanced surveillance systems surrounding the Gaza Strip.

The presence of terrorist groups in the Sinai is one of the reasons for the serious travel warning issued by Israel’s Counter Terrorism Unit against Israelis traveling to Sinai and Egypt.
Senior IDF sources stressed that in the past year there has been significant improvement in the coordination activities with the Egyptian and Jordanian armed forces, but they also note that on the Egyptian side there is still some hesitation to confront the gangs in the peninsula head on.