WarSclerotic

Israel Hayom | Operation defend our existence: still on.

IDF unit twice received order to enter Gaza before being told to stand down | The Times of Israel.

Infantry troops say they got as far as opening the border gates; ‘it’s like crying wolf,’ one soldier says

Israeli soldiers preparing their tanks along the Israel-Gaza border for a possible ground operation inside Gaza Strip at the third day of Operation Pillar of Defense. November 16, 2012. (poto credit: Uri Lenz/ Flash90

A group of infantry troops stationed on the Gaza border during Operation Pillar of Defense was twice given the order to enter the Strip, but was called back at the last moment in both instances, Maariv reported on Thursday.

The report cited soldiers in the Nahal Brigade who said that on Monday night they were told to move into the Hamas-controlled enclave, and had even gotten as far as opening the border gates, when a counter-order was issued, halting the incursion for a further 24 hours.

“Since Saturday we were twice ordered to gear up and told that we are going in, and then we were called back to Israel,” one of the soldiers said, adding that the tension was almost unbearable.

“It’s like crying ‘wolf,’” he said. “After a few of those you no longer believe it. They have to decide already — will they send us in or release us?”

The 60,000 reserve troops massed around Gaza are to be sent home over the coming days if the ceasefire announced Wednesday night holds up

An Alternative Timeline of the Gaza Escalation – Armin Rosen – The Atlantic.

For years, Hamas had been cooperating with Iran and Sudan to improve its ability to strike deep inside Israel.

The series of rocket attacks, tentative ceasefires, and political intrigues leading up to the latest Israeli escalation in Gaza has been closely scrutinized since the IDF launched Operation Pillar of Cloud against Hamas, the U.S. and EU-listed terrorist organization that currently rules the Gaza Strip. Yet this week’s events, which culminated in a ceasefire announced on Wednesday afternoon, occur within a longer and perhaps more significant timeline. Hamas has proven determined to acquire long-range weapons from Iran ever since the last major Israeli operation in Gaza, and thanks to a combination of Sudanese cooperation and Egyptian intransigence, they have done just that. Hamas has not only obtained Iranian-build Fajr-5s, long-range missiles that can strike up to 50 miles inside of Israeli territory. In what could be described as a significant psychological victory, Hamas has turned a rocket attack on Israel’s largest city from a worrying hypothetical to a reality that Israeli military and political planners have no choice but to contend with.

The Fajr-5s became a concern almost as soon as the last major Israeli operation in Gaza ended in early 2009. Two-thousand nine and 2010 were fairly quiet years along the southern border: according to the Jerusalem Post, there were 596 rocket attacks on Israel in 2009, and only 150 in 2010. But a series of Wikileaks cables provides a somewhat different sense of Hamas’s activities during their superficially more-docile post-conflict years.

Operation Cast Lead ended in January of 2009. By November, 2009, an Israeli general had told American officials that long-range Iranian weapons had likely made their way to the Gaza Strip since the campaign ended. “General Baidatz articulated Israel’s concern by highlighting recent intelligence that HAMAS is trying to acquire from Iran (and potentially test-fired the previous weekend) the 60 km-range Fajr-5 rocket that could reach Tel Aviv.”

Just as troubling was the Israeli interdiction of the M/V Francop in November of 2009, a cargo ship containing nearly 11,000 rockets and mortar rounds–some of them stored in crates stamped with the logo of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quods Force. According to Wikileaks, the ship actually picked up cargo in Egypt before it was seized by Israeli Naval personnel and redirected to the port of Ashdod, indication of both the extent of the Iranian smuggling network’s reach across North Africa, and Egyptian passivity towards weapons trafficking.

In a cable from later that month, IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Harel said that Field Marshal Mohamad Tantawi, who would become the leader of Egypt for the 18 months after the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak, was being less than cooperative in curtailing Hamas weapons smuggling along the country’s border with Sudan. According to Michael Ross, a former Israeli intelligence agent and a one-time liaison officer between Mossad and the CIA, official Egyptian complacency towards weapons smuggling along the country’s porous desert border continues. “The Egyptian [intelligence service] has been very cooperative in trying to stem the flow of weapons from Iran-Sudan-Egypt-Gaza, but the Egyptian military seems indifferent to interdicting these shipments,” he told me. “Ironically, if the will was there, it could be done quite easily.”

In the same cable where he offered a mixed assessment of Egypt’s anti-trafficking efforts, Harel shared some worrying information regarding ongoing upgrades to Hamas’s arsenal: “Harel said that Israel has sensitive intelligence that Iran is constructing an additional HAMAS-specific missile, based on the Fajr, that will have a range beyond 40 kilometers.”

In late 2009, Yaakov Katz of the Jerusalem Post reported that the IDF’s Home Front Command was basically taking a future Hamas rocket attack on Tel Aviv for granted, even if it was unsure of exactly which model of imported missile the group had in its possession. “The IDF believes that Hamas has obtained Iranian-made Fajr missiles, either the Fajr 3 or Fajr 5,” Katz reported. “The Fajr 5…has a range of up to 75 km, which could reach Tel Aviv, as well as communities further up the coast. Intelligence assessments are that Hamas smuggled the missiles into the Gaza Strip through tunnels, possibly as separate components.”

Arieh Herzog, the former director of the Israel Defense Ministry’s Homa Missile Defense Agency, told me that the threat of an attack on the country’s largest metro area was “not very new” for Israeli planners, even before the inflow of long-range weapons to Hams. “Hezbollah in Lebanon does have long-range and even much longer-range rockets than the Fajr-5,” he said. “Definitely they were expected to hit the Tel Aviv area one day by rocket.”

With the Lebanese group already capable of hitting Tel Aviv, Israel was eager to prevent rocket attacks on the city from the south as well. Ross characterized the country’s sense of where Hamas’s newly-acquired long-range weapons were coming from, and how they were making it into the Strip. “The Fajr-5 modified by Iran for Hamas makes the trip from Iran to Sudan,” he wrote, “where’s it assembled and shipped overland to Gaza. It has been a concern since 2009.” This “concern” manifested itself on more than one occasion over the next couple years. There was the apparent Israeli attack on Palestinian weapons smugglers in Port Sudan in April of 2011. More dramatic was the previous year’s probably-Israeli assassination of Mahmoud al-Mahbouh, Hamas’s point-person in the militant group’s relationship with Iran.

The Syria conflict has frayed relations between Sunni Hamas and Shiite Iran–after all, the Iranians support an Alawite government whose victims are overwhelmingly Sunni. In early 2012, Hamas set up the Al Aqsa Protectors [$], a paramilitary group headed by the Gaza’s interior minister and expressly independent of any Iranian support. But at the same time, Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of the movement and Hamas’s de-facto foreign minister, visited Tehran twice in 2012. He met with the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council during a trip to the Iranian capital in March. And in September, al-Zahar made a public appearance with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran. At least part of Hamas’s leadership structure is willing to back the Syrian uprising for sectarian reasons–while others are apparently less eager to alienate the group’s longstanding state sponsor.

The most dramatic evidence that the Iran-to-Sudan-to-Gaza weapons pipeline survived the Syria dispute is the possible Israeli bombing of the Yarmouk weapons complex in Khartoum, Sudan last October. The attack was a pinpoint strike on 40 shipping containers being stored outdoors–an attack on a specific supply of weapons, and not on the entire facility. According to one Wikileaks cable, Yarmouk was involved in the production of chemical weapons for Iran and Syria, and Iranian warships docked in Port Sudan just days after the attack. The contents of the containers is still unknown, but the facility’s history, and Iran’s deliberate show of support for Sudan in the days after the attack, suggest that they are still cooperating in weapons production and smuggling.

Since the Israeli operation began, Hamas has hardly been shy about admitting to its use of Iranian weapons–the Al Qassam Brigade’s Twitter has announced its use of Fajr-5s on several occasions, including in an attack on “homes” in the Beersheva area (an Israeli tweeted pictures of Fajr-5 components at the site of a direct hit on an apartment complex Rison L’Tziyon, a suburb of Tel Aviv). And after the ceasefire was announced on Wedensday, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal went so far as to “[praise] Iran for financing and arming Gazans,” according to Sky News. Meanwhile, the Israelis have made a point of explaining that the Fajr-5s were one of the targets of their ongoing operation in the Gaza Strip. Both Avital Leibovitch, the oft-quoted IDF spokesperson, and Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren, assured conference calls of journalists that much of Hamas’s long-range capacity has been destroyed.

But it’s worth wondering how long it will take for Hamas to recover its supply of long-range rockets. In a conventional military environment, Fajr-5s are fired from bulky truck-mounted rocket launchers. As Herzog explains, the rockets that Hamas uses are modified so that they can be fired using improvised delivery systems. “They don’t’ need trucks for launching them,” he says. “They just need a tube, and it can be located anywhere.” Even underground, he added.

The Gaza escalation might have been an attempt to forestall a reality where militant groups on Israel’s northern and southern border possess missiles capable of hitting the country’s largest civilian areas. But even if many of them have been destroyed, these missiles are replaceable, easily-hidden, and easily fired. That reality has already arrived.

It’s about Tehran, not Gaza – JPost – Opinion – Columnists.

Iran Missiles in Gaza Give Tehran Government a Lift – NYTimes.com.

TEHRAN — Above the bustling Niayesh highway in the western part of the Iranian capital, a huge billboard hangs on an overpass to remind drivers of Iran’s missile abilities. Cars zip underneath the image of a green missile on a launcher and text in Persian saying “Destination Tel Aviv.”

Few here take note of the sign, as average Iranians are too busy trying to cope with rising prices and occasional shortages brought about by a faltering economy. But Iran’s missiles and weapons technology are getting plenty of attention hundreds of miles away in Gaza, giving the country’s ruling clerics a rare bit of good news in what has otherwise been a long, dismal year.

The Israeli attack on the Palestinian coastal strip, and the retaliation by Hamas with Iranian-supplied missiles that brought Israel’s major cities within range for the first time, turned the tables for the Islamic republic. With the declaration of a cease-fire in Gaza, and with President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt earning plaudits for brokering the deal, some of the euphoria in Tehran has been tempered. But the diplomatic gains to Iran from the fighting will remain.

Before Gaza, Iran was reeling from a number of setbacks, and not just the tightening of Western sanctions this summer, which cut oil exports and sent the national currency into free fall.

The clerics had to endure the indignity of Mr. Morsi, speaking at a conference in Tehran, smashing their long cherished dreams of a strategic partnership by criticizing Iran’s support for its lone regional ally, Syria, in its brutal prosecution of its civil wear.

Even Hamas, Iran’s longtime ideological partner, openly turned its back on Tehran and Damascus and sided with the alliance of Sunni Muslim kingdoms against the Syrian government. Newer and more dynamic countries, like Qatar and Egypt, emerged to take the lead on issues in Syria and Gaza, making Iran’s uncompromising message of resistance look stale.

Then, a week ago, when Israel struck back against the rockets and missiles coming from Gaza, all the regional players were roughly pushed back into their traditional roles, beginning with Mr. Morsi, who led the effort to broker a cease-fire just as the country had done when Hosni Mubarak was president. Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, who in October had paid an unprecedented visit to the Gaza Strip, presenting himself as Hamas’s new benefactor, waited four days before giving a statement on the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians.

Throughout the battle, Iranian-designed missiles, the Fajr-3 and the Fajr-5 that allowed Hamas and another Gaza-based movement, Islamic Jihad, to hit Israel’s heartland, sent Israelis fleeing to bomb shelters. While political support and money helps, Palestinian leaders said, Iran’s weapons technology is a far greater help.

“The arms of the resistance, including those of Hamas, are Iranian, from the bullet to the missile,” Ziad al-Nakhla, deputy leader of the Islamic Jihad, told the Lebanese Al Manar TV in Cairo on Tuesday. “If it wasn’t for these arms, the Israeli Army’s weapons would have run over the bodies of our children,” he added, lauding the “great sacrifices” Iran had made by “shipping” these weapons to Gaza.

Iranian officials have not been shy about taking credit for the changes in the battlefield, even though analysts noted that admitting to transferring weaponry could lead to future reprisals. “We proudly say we support the Palestinians, military and financially,” the head of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, told local reporters this week. “The Zionist regime needs to realize that Palestinian military power comes from Iranian military power.”

Mr. Larijani even nodded to the other problems facing Iran, which suddenly did not loom so large. “We may have inflation, unemployment and other economic issues in our country,” he said. “But we are changing the region, and this will be a big achievement.”

The highest commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Mohammad Ali Jafari, was even more blunt. Missile technology, he said, “has been transferred to the resistance, and an unlimited number of these missiles is being built.”

The celebration in Tehran might not last long, analysts say. Hamas leaders were lavish in their praise of Mr. Morsi for his role in arranging the cease-fire, saying he had well represented the group’s interests. And Egypt could close the tunnels that are used to smuggle the missiles into Gaza.

Nevertheless, they say, the fighting has done much to repair the damage to Iran’s regional image inflicted by the Syrian conflict. “This war has brought Iran and Hamas back together, and the debate over the Syrian issue is over,” said Hamid-Reza Taraghi, who heads the international department of the influential Islamic Coalition Party.

In the end, Iran’s leaders believe that military power is the only measure of success, and they have little faith that cease-fires and diplomacy will accomplish anything lasting. For average Iranians, though, Iran’s missile program and the events in Gaza are faraway problems, and many said the triumph may be short-lived.

“Maybe in the short term Iran is increasing its influence among the Palestinians, but politics are fast nowadays,” said Allahgoli Abbaspour, 53, a shop owner. “The Palestinians need their independence, but I doubt they will ever get it. It’s not like normal Iranians have anything to say about this.”

Obama Legitimizes Morsi’s Protection Racket.

Hamas fires 275 rockets at Israel and is rewarded with de facto acceptance as a legitimate negotiating partner in the Middle East peace process, as well as with a relaxation of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast.

Israel is prevented from exacting a price for Hamas’ actions sufficient to deter future attacks or degrade Hamas’ capabilities. In one stroke, the Obama administration has overturned thirty years of American policy, which rejected negotiations with Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Secretary of State Clinton, to be sure, did not negotiate directly with Hamas, but rather with Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi, who supported Hamas unequivocally and encouraged its attacks on Israel. Morsi is the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian chapter. It is astonishing that American officials and the world media have hailed Morsi simply because he first sicced his dog on his neighbor, and then called the dog off.

As the Associated Press put it:

“The accord inserts Egypt to an unprecedented degree into the conflict between Israel and Hamas, establishing it as the arbiter ensuring that militant rocket fire into Israel stops and that Israel allows the opening of the long-blockaded Gaza Strip and stops its own attacks against Hamas. In return, Morsi emerged as a major regional player. He won the trust of the United States and Israel, which once worried over the rise of an Islamist leader in Egypt but throughout the week-long Gaza crisis saw him as the figure most able to deliver a deal with Gaza’s Hamas rulers.”

It is a misstatement of huge proportions to suggest that Morsi “won the trust of Israel.” On the contrary: American pressure prevented Israel from degrading Hamas’ terror capabilities.

When Hamas cranked up its rocket barrage against Israel ten days ago, numerous analysts asked: Why now? In retrospect, the answer appears obvious: Because Barack Obama had been re-elected and had a free hand. From February 2011, when National Intelligence Director James Clapper praised the Muslim Brotherhood as a “largely secular” organization, the White House has made clear that it believes that the Brotherhood represents the wave of the future in the Middle East. American backing for Morsi was nearly derailed in September when the Egyptian president failed to provide security for America’s embassy in Cairo during riots that followed the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi. That affront has been forgotten amidst the accolades.

America’s traditional allies in the region, notably Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States (notably excepting Qatar) viewed Morsi as an enemy. Almost out of cash and suffering from extreme shortages of fuel and other essential items, Morsi failed to obtain financial support from the Saudis. With a current account deficit of perhaps $1.5 billion a month, Egypt was running on fumes and small handouts from Qatar and Turkey. A number of American commentators suggested that Morsi was motivated to act moderately because he needed Saudi and American help to prevent economic catastrophe. Precisely the opposite is true: the only way Morsi could shake down the Saudis for significant sums was to threaten a regional blowup.

Morsi read the American political landscape accurately. He perceived that the White House was so deeply invested in the success of the Muslim Brotherhood that it would respond to a crisis provoked by Hamas by splitting the result down the middle, giving Hamas sufficient concessions to allow the terrorist group to declare victory. He also understood the implications of Mitt Romney’s supine performance during the third presidential debate on foreign policy. The Republican party continues to drag around the chains of the Bush foreign policy like Marley’s ghost, and will offer no opposition to Obama. Influential Republicans, moreover, are so invested in the notion of Islamist democracy that many of them will go along with Obama in supporting Morsi’s protection racket. Bill Kristol, for example, opined in the Weekly Standard’s weekly podcast that Morsi has “behaved somewhat responsibly” and that the ceasefire, although it might last only a few months, was “better than nothing.”

Turkey’s Islamist prime minister Tayyip Erdogan had another motive for backing Hamas. Turkey views the prospect of Syrian disintegration and the spinoff of an autonomous zone for Syria’s two million Kurds as an existential threat. At current trends, half of Turkey’s military-age population will come from Kudrish-speaking households within a generation, and a Syrian precedent for Kurdish autonomy threatens the integrity of the Kurdish state. Erdogan is counting on the Muslim Brotherhood to rule a unified Sunni government in Syria, and has allied with Morsi to bring this into effect. Turkey’s weakness gives Morsi additional bargaining power.

Presuming that Morsi’s ceasefire holds, the absence of rocket fire from Gaza during the next several months holds little comfort for Israel. Hamas will have more opportunity to stockpile the longer-range Iranian Fajr rockets that struck near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem last week. Iran has boasted that it has transferred the technology to Hamas to quickly produce the rockets in Gaza. Whenever the ceasefire breaks down, Hamas will have far greater capacity to kill Israelis in the future. If Israel were to strike Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the price it would pay in rocket attacks from Hamas as well as Hezbollah in the north would be substantially greater than it is now.

Israel suffered a setback, but not a decisive setback, because the whole Gaza business is tangential to the overriding strategic issue, namely Iran’s prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons. Were Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity, it will pay a higher price for doing so in terms of civilian casualties. That is a human tragedy but not a strategic disadvantage. Hamas does not represent a strategic threat to Israel, and the degraded and demoralized Egyptian military represents less of a threat to Israel than at any time since its founding, while Syria represents no threat at all. The unexpectedly strong performance of Israel’s anti-missile technology, meanwhile, represents a new and critical strategic advantage for Israel. Egypt’s Morsi may obtain a respite, but Egypt will continue to live under the threat of economic breakdown for the indefinite future. The Muslim Brotherhood will fail to stabilize Syria.

Nothing that happens in Gaza will decide the future of the region. Israel still must decide whether to attack Iran’s nuclear program in the face of adamant opposition from the Obama administration. It is not clear how long the window of opportunity will last for Israel to pre-empt Iranian nuclear weapons deployment, but it is measured in months, not years.

David P. Goldman is a PJMedia columnist and the author of How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too).

Southern residents: Bibi capitulated to terror – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Israelis whose towns were barraged by rockets in latest round of hostilities receive news of ceasefire with disappointment; IDF remains on standby near Gaza border

Gilad Morag

Eight days after Operation Pillar of Defense began, southern residents received the news of a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza groups with great disappointment.

“This wasn’t the conclusion we prayed for,” said Ashdod Mayor Yehiel Lasri, whose city continued to come under fire after 9 pm Wednesday, when the truce went into effect. “I am afraid this lull will last for only a short while, and hope that at least we have garnered international support for a harsh response that will become necessary when the fire is renewed.”

Related stories:

• Gaza rockets hit south after truce; IDF holds fire
• Mofaz: Deterrence not restored
• Netanyahu: Give ceasefire a chance

Sderot Mayor David Buskila echoed the sentiment, saying he opposes the way the hostilities were put to an end. Dozens of residents of the city rallied on Wednesday night against the truce agreement and called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign.

Sderot residents protest against ceasefire (Photo: George Ginsberg)

“The fighting should have been concluded with an accord indicating Israel’s clear supremacy and with the Israeli deterrence being restored to its former level,” he said. “I hope the decision turns out to have been the right one. Only time will tell.

“In any case, I feel no pride,” he added.

‘Rocket fire to continue’

Some 1,500 rockets were fired towards Israel since the operation began last Wednesday, killing five Israelis. The Jewish state announced it is holding its fire at 9 pm with hopes that the groups in Gaza will stop the rocket fire, but some 13 projectiles were launched towards the south before subsiding around 11 pm. Sirens sounded across the region, and the Home Front Command announced that schools will remain closed on Thursday in towns within 40 kilometers of the Strip.

Interception over Sderot (Photo: Reuters)

IDF forces remained on standby near the Gaza border. Officials in the defense establishment said they hope the blows the army dealt in the enclave during the operation will put off another round of escalation, although they speculated that some rocket fire will continue in the coming days.

“No one is under the illusion that the fire will stop,” one official said, but asserted that Israel’s deterrence has been reestablished after the army mounted some 1,700 strikes on Gaza. The IDF is concerned that terror groups competing with Hamas, including the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, as well as Salafist operatives who have returned to the region, will try yet again to reignite the hostilities.

Nevertheless, the officials say Hamas was caught off guard by the intense pounding.

“We have seen 300 bombings within a few hours, which shocked Hamas,” one source said. “Hamas wanted a ceasefire. It wasn’t prepared for such an escalation.”

The IAF destroyed Hamas’ long-range missile stocks almost entirely, but thousands of short and midrange rockets remained in the group’s possession. Hamas was estimated to have 10,000 rockets before the operation was launched, and it used up some 1,500 of them over the past week. The IDF destroyed roughly a thousand launchers, leaving Hamas with some 6,000 rockets.

The IDF forces remained on high alert overnight. Soldiers deployed in the Gaza region were informed that abduction warnings were in place. The army had uncovered and bombed in recent days several tunnels that were meant to bypass the border between Israel and Gaza.

Residents dispirited by op

Nevertheless, residents of the south said they were dissatisfied with the results of the operation.

“We expected more,” said Shlomit, a resident of Sderot. “The rocket fire will return within a week or two and once again no one will care about projectiles fired on Sderot. Maybe they won’t fire towards Tel Aviv anymore, but some rockets will be fired towards Sderot.”

Lihi Ben-Amo, a resident of the city of Beersheba, said she sees the ceasefire as capitulation.

“Why should we go through all this suffering if we immediately fold?” she pondered.

“We’ve suffered for eight days and we can suffer for two weeks if they can put an end to it once and for all,” added Ziva Shmuelov, another resident. She said the truce guarantees that the escalation will repeat itself every few years.

Itay Levy, a reserve soldier who was drafted for the operation and a resident of a Negev town, said he was “dispirited” but the situation.

“If someone fires a rocket on my town tomorrow, do you think anyone will respond? We didn’t do this operation properly. The rocket fire will return soon,” he said.

Iron Dome in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area (Photo: MCT)

Ofakim Mayor Zvika Greengold noted that ceasefire agreements like the one that was reached on Wednesday tend not to stick in the long run.

“You cannot live a normal civilian life under fire, which is why we look upon this deal with mixed feelings,” he said. If the agreement fails to reinstate a long-lasting lull “we will be very disappointed,” he added.

Shortly after announcing the truce in a press conference on Wednesday evening, Netanyahu posted a statement on Facebook trying to explain the move. The post drew more than 1,700 comments from constituents, most of them blasting the agreement.

“I am a resident of the south, and we’ve just been hit by a barrage of 10 Grad rockets,” one said. “What ceasefire are you talking about… You folded under the table, and now Hamas is celebrating. Why? Because Bibi sold the south.”

“For the first time in my life I won’t be voting for Likud,” said another.

“Hamas released a statement saying that ‘our terms for the truce have been met, we have won,'” another comment read. “The painful truth is that this time they are right.”

“You have lost my vote and I’m a Likud voter,” Anat Cohen wrote on Facebook.

“Shame on you, you embarrassingly capitulated to terror,” another commentator wrote in response to the PM’s post. “Let’s hope that the people of Israel will kick you out in the next elections.

Only some spoke favorably of the prime minister’s decision.

“Dear Bibi, thanks for all you’ve done,” one response read. “You didn’t rush to send our troops in and protected their lives and the life of my dear son.”

“I am proud of your decision,” another web user wrote. “People, calm down. What do you prefer? That more people and babies die here? Use your brain. I am proud of Bibi! He is the only one I will vote for.”

Yoav Zitun and Attila Somfalvi contributed to the report

Mofaz: Hamas won upper hand, truc… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

Mofaz: Deterrence not restored – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Government’s decision to end Operation Pillar of Defense draws harsh criticism from MKs. Lapid says goals not achieved, National Union’s Ariel calls truce ’embarrassing capitulation’

Ynet reporters

Labor Party chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich, who backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throughout Operation Pillar of Defense, also expressed her support for the ceasefire with Hamas, which went into effect at 9 pm Wednesday.

“Let’s hope that the justified goals that were set before the operation have actually been achieved,” she said.

However, Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid and several other politicians leveled harsh criticism at the government’s decision to agree to a ceasefire. “The truce comes at the worst possible time and before the goals set by the government itself had been achieved,” he said.

Hamas supporters celebrate ‘victory’ in Gaza (Photo: Reuters)

“After it was promised that Hamas would be eliminated and that we would not negotiate with it, the State of Israel negotiated with Hamas and failed to eliminate it,” said Lapid. “The government displayed weakness and hesitance in the implementation of its goals after promising complete calm to the residents of Israel.”

Haim Ramon, who served as vice prime minister during Operation Cast Lead some four years ago, also criticized the ceasefire. “Unfortunately, it is obvious that this operation did not achieve its goals – when the main goal was to end the suffering of a million and a half citizens,” he told Ynet.

Opposition leader Shaul Mofaz blasted the decision to announce a ceasefire in Gaza, saying that “the operation’s goals haven’t been met. It’s only a matter of time before the next round occurs. This is not how you end a battle against terrorism.”

Mofaz claimed that “the operation shouldn’t have been stopped at this point. Hamas is empowered and deterrence hasn’t been restored. Hamas has the upper hand.”

National Union Chairman Uri Ariel said that the Israeli ceasefire announcement was “a lame display that unsuccessfully attempted to excuse the embarrassing capitulation of the Netanyahu-Lieberman government.”

The Knesset member said that “the residents of Israel feel betrayed, and they know that they will have to experience the government’s hesitance on their own flesh.”

Moran Azulay contributed to the report

Iron Dome was the only real Israeli winner of the Gaza operation.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis November 21, 2012, 11:27 PM (GMT+02:00)

Iron Dome was the winner

The trio which conducted Israel’s eight-day Gaza operation, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, marked the Gaza ceasefire that went into effect Wednesday night, Nov. 21, by announcing that all the goals set for the Pillar of Cloud operation were achieved.
They did not reveal the concessions they made to enable the US and Egypt to persuade Hamas to promise to halt its long missile blitz against Israel. The most damaging was Israel’s consent for Egypt to act as truce monitor and arbitrator between itself and Hamas and the address for complaints of violations, misunderstandings and broker of future negotiations to follow the ceasefire for regulating future relations.
By deferring to Egypt’s superior authority, Israel let itself be demoted to an equal footing with Hamas, a group listed as a terrorist organization in the US and Europe and dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state.
In some respects, Israel might have been better served by direct talks with Hamas itself rather than placing its strategic policy on two borders in the hands of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

As of 9 pm, Nov. 21, Israel’s security actions on its borders with Egypt and the Gaza Strip must be adjusted to staying on Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s good side.
Netanyahu and Barak’s advisers defend this concession by maintaining that it is superseded by Morsi’s dependence on Washington for the sake of American aid grants and guarantees for international credit to rescue Egypt’s economy from collapse. Cairo will be in the hands of the Obama administration and so Israel has nothing to worry about, they say.
However reasonable this argument may sound, debkafile’s analysts say it has nothing to do with Egyptian-Israeli relations which operate on a separate plane. It is a fact that Barack Obama never managed to persuade Egypt to resume its gas supplies to Israel after the Sinai pipelines were repeatedly sabotaged, or raise a finger to halt the arms smuggling traffic running through its territory to the Gaza Strip from Libya and Sudan.

Washington has very little influence on the Muslim Brothers when it comes to Cairo’s attitude towards Israel. They are far from being American puppets. President Morsi may heed US wishes up to a point with regard to the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian terrorists ruling the enclave, but the Brothers will prefer to line up with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates and follow the gospel of their radical guru, Sheikh Yousuf Qaradawi, the great champion of suicide terrorism against Israel.

Israel has gained substantially less than Defense Minister Barak claimed from the eight-day air operation launched to rescue southern Israel from the 12-year old Palestinian missile war waged from Gaza .
Hamas undoubtedly took a heavy beating and devastating damage to its command and control, military infrastructure, arms manufacturing and arsenal. But its 15,000-strong militia remains largely intact after losing 50 men and can be reconstituted. In any case, Operation Pillar of Cloud was not meant to be a military contest between the IDF and the Hamas military wing. What it finally boiled down to was a duel between the Iranian weapons wielded by Hamas and Jihad Islami and Israel’s Iron Dome missile interceptor.

Iron Dome came out of the ordeal the unchallenged victor.

With that success in hand, Israel had no need to get into negotiations with Hamas and Jihad Islami over a ceasefire, which neither of the two organizations is expected to honor. A unilateral ceasefire declaration from Jerusalem would have been enough. And in fact two hours after the ceasefire went into effect, Hamas had fired some 12 rockets against Israel. Schools in the south will remain closed Thursday.