WarSclerotic

For new ceasefire, Israel agrees to shrink Gaza buffer zone, for Hamas demilitarization, a seaport, DEBKAfile, August 10, 2014

In response to Egyptian mediation, Israel is ready to shrink the security zone inside the Gaza Strip by 200 meters, provided the Palestinian Hamas observes a further 72-hour ceasefire going into effect at midnight Sunday, Aug. 10, DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report.. And if the truce holds overnight, Israeli negotiators will return to Cairo Monday morning to resume the talks interrupted by Hamas rocket fire Friday.

DEBKAfile further reports that Israel may allow Gaza Strip to have a seaport at some time in the future, in return for the territory’s demilitarization – but not an airport. These concessions, say our sources, are not yet on the table, but part of a potential future deal that depends on Hamas holding to its side of the bargain, including disarmament and a permanent ceasefire.

But, most of all, it depends on the Hamas’ real decision-maker. Egyptian and Israeli intelligence believe that the elusive Muhammed Deif, commander of the Hamas military wing, is the organization’s final arbiter and have reason for presuming that he has decided that the time has come to halt hostilities with Israel.

If they have got this wrong, then the seventh ceasefire in the six-week long conflict will last no longer than the previous six.

These developments come in the wake of the steps reported by DEBKAfile earlier Sunday.

Cairo sent a secret message to Jerusalem Saturday night, Aug. 9, saying that Egypt had been unable to bring Hamas around to any compromise because “you [Israel and the IDF] haven’t hit them hard enough.” This is revealed by DEBKAfile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources. Therefore, there was no point in sending Israel’s envoys back to the Egyptian capital for negotiations on a durable ceasefire, because they would be coming on a fool’s errand.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu cancelled their departure, after understanding the import of the message: The Egyptian ceasefire initiative proposed by Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi had nowhere to go, until Israel’s armed forces clobbered Hamas’ military wing, Ezz e-Din Al-Qassam, into submission.

After their price for a ceasefire was rejected, Hamas and Islamic Jihad considered dropping out of the negotiating track. But meanwhile, on Friday, Aug. 8, they went back at their old practice of shooting rockets at the Israeli population, while also reserving the option to ramp the barrage up or down as it suited their plans.

By Sunday morning, Aug. 10, the short 72-hour respite for southern Israeli was over and the diplomatic impasse in Cairo had evolved into a diplomatic void.

From the first week of the IDF ground operation in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s leaders had been groping for a way out of the hostilities. Half a dozen ceasefires were declared – and violated by Hamas, who viewed the effort as a sign of Israeli weakness.

The prime minister and defense minister Moshe Ya’alon had counted on the 72-hour ceasefire, which expired Friday morning, providing Hamas commanders with a chance to come out of their bunker hidey-holes and view the devastation on the Gaza Strip surface. They would then be shocked into throwing in the towel – or so it was hoped.

But instead, Hamas commanders immediately seized on the ruins as an opportunity to parade the Palestinians of Gaza to the world as victims of “Zionist” inhumanity, of which they hands were entirely clean.

By now, Netanyahu and Ya’alon appear to be stumped for a policy.

All their military and political maneuvers, including their decision to limit the IDF ground incursion in the Gaza Strip last month to a depth of no more than one kilometer, failed to wrest the tactical initiative of the war from Hamas or bring harm to its military wing.

Friday, when Hamas resumed its rocket barrage Friday, it was in good shape, unlike the Gazan population, to embark on a war of attrition and keep it going for weeks, if not months.

The inhabitants of the communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip were cast into a depressing uncertainty. After living under rocket attacks of varying intensity for 14 years, many decided to finally pull up roots, when promises by the prime minister and army leaders, that the bane was finally over and they could live in peace and safety, went out the window.

IDF generals warned Sunday morning of the dangers to the Gaza communities of a protracted period of indecision. They recalled the situation on the eve of the 1967 Six Day War, when the army stood ready, day after day, to rebuff Arab aggressors around its borders, while the late Prime Minister Levi Eshkol dithered and the Chief of Staff, the late Yitzhak Rabin, couldn’t take the suspense.

Today, too, IDF divisions stand at their staging posts, ready and willing – just as soon as they get the order – to drive deep into the Gaza Strip and finally dislodge the fundamentalist Palestinian orchestrators of the senseless violence emanating for so many years from this sliver of territory.

If this order goes out, then, perhaps, Egypt may find Hamas more amenable to negotiating some sort of durable cessation of hostilities and an end to the destruction.

Exclusive: New Details Surface in Hamas Murder of IDF Soldier Hadar Goldin
by Breitbart News9 Aug 2014

(“…grabbed parts of his body and ran back into the tunnel from which the terrorists emerged.” Chilling story about who we’re dealing with. A must read .-LS)

On Friday, August 1st, media reported that Hamas had kidnapped IDF Officer LT Hadar Goldin, 23; the next day, he was announced killed in action by a Hamas suicide bomber who had emerged from a tunnel. Lt. Goldin was an officer in the Givati Brigade, an elite Israeli infantry unit. He had become engaged weeks before going to Gaza.

Major Benaya Sarel, 26, and 1st Sgt. Liel Gidoni, 20, were also killed in the explosion detonated by a Hamas suicide bomber.

An unnamed Israeli military source spoke to Breitbart News about the story of how Hamas used an UNRWA ambulance, a mosque, and the Islamic University to carry out the attack that killed the three IDF soldiers.

The officer explained how, after the suicide bombing that killed Lt. Goldin, a second kidnapping team of Hamas terrorists grabbed parts of his body and ran back into the tunnel from which the terrorists emerged. The tunnel led back into a mosque. From the mosque, they escaped in a clearly marked UNRWA ambulance. The terrorists then made contact with high-ranking Hamas officials hiding in the Islamic University.

As a result Abu Marzook, a senior member of Hamas, announced in Cairo that Hamas had kidnapped an Israeli soldier. Israeli intelligence intercepted a conversation between the kidnappers and the Hamas officials at the Islamic University and thus got all the particulars regarding the hiding place of the kidnappers. Within minutes, the IAF attacked both the kidnappers’ location and the Islamic University.

In the midst of this attack, a second force of IDF soldiers–which had gone into a mosque looking for weapons, explosives, and rockets– encountered a female suicide bomber who was about to detonate the belt she wore, which would have resulted in the deaths of the soldiers. One of the soldiers instinctively recited the opening words of the holiest Jewish prayer “Shema Yisrael”. The female suicide bomber hesitated and began trembling, giving the soldiers a chance to grab her and disable the device.

The soldiers then took her prisoner and turned her over to a counter-intelligence unit. Their investigation uncovered that the female suicide bomber’s mother was a Jew who had married a Palestinian in Israel and, after the wedding, was smuggled against her will into Gaza. There she lived a life filled with abuse and humiliation, and was basically a captive. In addition to the female suicide bomber, there were two smaller children as well. An armored force went in and rescued the two small children.

Hamas uses places of worship, hospitals, schools and civilian areas to launch attacks against Israel. Before the IDF carries out an attack against Hamas, they drop hundreds of leaflets, warning people to leave the area. They call every resident and send a warning shot before they actually launch the attack on a building. As one former IDF soldier told Breitbart News, “Israel defends their people; these are people that use their people to defend themselves.”

Hamas Defiant: Rockets and Revenge (Dispatch 11), You Tube, Vice News, August 10, 2014

(And yet, support for Hamas, et al, persists. — DM)

As the 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire entered it’s second and third days last week, the people of Gaza used the lull in fighting to take stock of the destruction, flee the fighting, and demonstrate their defiance.

VICE News correspondent Henry Langston traveled to the Rafah border gate with Egypt, where hundreds of Gazans and Egyptians alike attempted to flee. With only two bus loads making the trip each day, however, many left disappointed and were forced to return the following day.

Meanwhile, in the towns of Shejaiya and Khuza’a, residents returned to neighborhoods completely devastated by the fighting.

As the ceasefire entered it’s last 24 hours, Hamas organized a demonstration in the center of Gaza City. Thousands converged from different mosques across the city, waving Hamas flags as kids with toy guns and grenades rode on their dad’s shoulders.

The spokesman for Hamas’ military wing, Abu Ubaida, made clear in a speech that evening that if Israel refused to re-open Gaza’s port, then rockets would once again threaten the people of Israel.

Imagine if today’s ‘balanced’ media was around during WW2

If the military measures taken by Israel to protect itself are “war crimes” as defined by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, then that means that the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union resorted to war crimes to a much larger extent in order to defeat Nazi Germany.

Several factors saved the Allies from the charge of war crimes and prevented their prosecution in court or at least the establishment of commissions of inquiry in respect of the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, including women and children, during the bombing of military targets and cities in Germany and the Axis (based on estimates of World War II historians, the bombings on German cities carried out by the air forces of the United States and Britain killed two million civilians). A major factor is the fact that World War II was reported, reviewed and retold by the written press, carefully linked to factual reports and descriptions of reality. There was no TV, and newspapers in the US and the UK published news headlines and detailed reports on the course of the fighting. Photographs that accompanied the articles showed total destruction of towns and villages caused by the progress of Allied liberation of Europe. Blogs, Facebook and social networks were then as fictional as spacecrafts and heart transplants. Live reports from the battle zone could only be seen in the journals screened in cinemas before the start of movies.

Print and broadcast media in the US and Britain that were active during World War II did not enjoy the power and influence they have today. But a major factor that, in our day, determines and dictates reports from areas of tension and armed conflict, and that did not exist in the written press during World War II is the principle of balance, which, in recent years, has become the sacred and unassailable tenant of media in the US and Western Europe. In any report, important or marginal, on political scandals, election campaigns, demonstrations or trials of public interest, the views and explanations of both the parties involved are provided. The careful and extremist preservation of the principle of balance that characterizes American media often ridicules reports, undermines the significance of reported events and paints the involved parties as non-credible.

What luck, what a miracle that the sacred principle of balance did not exist during World War II. Let us imagine that in 1943 a Jewish organization in America had received a report that claims that the Nazis run a concentration camp at a place called Oświęcim in Poland and murder thousands of Jews there. In response to the claims by the Jewish organization and in the name of balance, at a meeting of the New York Times or the morning briefing of the production team at CBS‘s evening news program, the decision is made to send a reporter to Berlin to check the veracity of this serious contention. Dan Rather would have gone to Berlin and interviewed Heinrich Himmler or Goering and heard from them a vigorous denial of the claim of Jews being murdered at Auschwitz. The Nazis would have even organized for Rather to visit a concentration camp and showed him the barracks they had prepared with elderly Jews sitting and eating a hearty dinner. Of course, the interview with Goering or Himmler would have been published together with a picture of the barracks to balance the claim of the Jewish organization for the murder of Jews. According to the currently accepted practices it can be assumed that the Nazi version would have been more palatable.

Valued veteran interviewer Charlie Rose boasted a great scoop with his exclusive interview with Khaled Meshal that was aired last week. When the Allied soldiers fought against the Nazis, it was inconceivable for a Western journalist to interview the enemy or for an American or British newspaper to give a stage to a Nazi general. The absence of the sacred principle of balance helped the victory over the Nazis.

Harold Macmillan, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1957-1963 once said that if in the 1940s the BBC had the power that it has nowadays, the world would speak German.

Shlomo Shamir, for 40 years the Haaretz correspondent in New York, is an expert on the US Jewish community and its organizations.