WarSclerotic

Israeli army set for ground strikes in Gaza. Hamas conceals terrorist and suicide ambush units.

Both sides were preparing Saturday night, Aug. 23, for an impending battle on Gaza Strip soil, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Heavy IDF ground forces were poised ready to enter the territory for the initial mission of reaching and demolishing the sources of Hamas’s short-range rocket and mortar attacks, which have disrupted the lives of neighboring Israeli communities and forced their mass evacuation.

Hamas has been firing those short-range weapons from 3-7 km inside the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian extremists escalated the barrage in the last 48 hours as a provocation, daring the IDF to send in the forces massed around its borders.
All the signs point to Israeli forces preparing for limited ground strikes in the first stage.

Hamas spent Saturday deploying its strength to waylay an Israeli incursion. Whole brigades were pushed underground into tunnels and placed on preparedness. Groups of suicide killers were hidden in orchards ready to ambush advancing Israeli troops.

The decision by Israel and Hamas to raise the stakes of the conflict to another ground engagement in the Gaza Strip was dictated by a string of new developments, which made a final clash of arms unavoidable.

1. At their meeting in Qatar, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas failed to talk Hamas political secretary Khaled Meshaal around to a compromise to enable a negotiated ceasefire with Israel.

2. Abbas notified Egyptian President Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi Saturday night in Cairo that hope had run out for a political accommodation to resolve the Gaza conflict, because Hamas was set fixedly on full-scale war with Israel. Abbas passed the same tidings to Washington.

3.  Hamas rejected every draft accord incorporating a ceasefire, including the draft resolutions to be submitted to the UN Security Council.

4.  Abbas informed Washington and Cairo that the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim al-Thani, had conned President Barack Obama and Saudi King Abdullah, when he promised to soften Meshaal on the Gaza crisis, when in fact he proffered Hamas all possible assistance for continuing the war with Israel.

General Dempsey: ‘It is possible to contain’ the Islamic State, The Long War Journal, Bill Roggio, August 22, 2014

(Isn’t “containing” the Islamic State like “containing” a nuclear Iran? — DM)

Is the Obama administration considering a policy of containment with respect to the Islamic State? Yesterday, in a press conference at the Pentagon, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey said that it is “possible … to contain them.” The question and Dempsey’s full answer is below:

Q: General, do you believe that ISIS can be defeated or destroyed without addressing the cross-border threat from Syria? And is it possible to contain them?GEN. DEMPSEY: Let me start from where you ended and end up where you started. It is possible contain — to contain them. And I think we’ve seen that their momentum was disrupted. And that’s not to be discounted, by the way, because the — it was the momentum itself that had allowed them to be — to find a way to encourage the Sunni population of western Iraq and Nineveh province to accept their brutal tactics and — and their presence among them.

So you ask — yes, the answer is they can be contained, not in perpetuity. This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated. To your question, can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no. That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border.

And that will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time. ISIS will only truly be defeated when it’s rejected by the 20 million disenfranchised Sunni that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad.

Q: And that requires airstrikes (OFF-MIKE)

GEN. DEMPSEY: It requires a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is airstrikes. I’m not predicting those will occur in Syria, at least not by the United States of America. But it requires the application of all of the tools of national power — diplomatic, economic, information, military.

Keep in mind that top Obama administration officials have described the Islamic State as “a cancer” (President Barack Obama), “evil” (Secretary of State John Kerry), “an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else” (Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel), and “as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen… They’re beyond just a terrorist group …. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess …. They are tremendously well-funded” (Hagel).

Even Dempsey weighed in on the threat posed by the Islamic State. He described it as “an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated.”

If the Islamic State poses such a dire, “imminent threat” to the United States, then the nation’s top military official shouldn’t be floating a policy of containment.

Taking the US fight against IS into Syria would consolidate Assad and his Iranian-Hizballah allies.

Debka

British and German intelligence sources reported Saturday, Aug. 23, that US intelligence aid to the Assad regime, channeled through German BND intelligence, had enabled the Syrian air force to more precisely target al Qaeda units. These reports tie in with proliferating accounts from Washington that President Barack Obama is on the point of a decision to extend military strikes into Syria for targeting the Islamic State’s terrorist base.

He has been warned by some top US generals that IS poses a threat to the United States and cannot be seriously engaged without dealing with the group’s Syrian stronghold. “We’re not going to be restricted by borders,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, in a comment Thursday.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that there is no confirmation from the ground in Syria that Washington is indeed passing intelligence to Syria through Berlin to help the Syrian air force reach IS targets. The fact is that Syria is falling well short of arresting the IS advance on two critical fronts:

1. Aleppo. The Islamist threat looms grimly over an approaching Syrian-Hizballah military victory, under Iranian commanders, in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. They have come close to dislodging rebel forces from their last footholds, only to be faced with a new enemy. In the last fortnight, al Qaeda forces armed with American weapons taken booty in Iraq have surged out of their northern Syrian stronghold of Raqqa to capture dozens of villages around the city. Syrian and Hizballah forces, after completing their takeover of Aleppo, will find themselves encircled by Islamist units.

2. Tabqa Air Base. IS forces have pinned down some 1,000 Syrian air force and military personnel in the Tabqa air base southwest of Raqqa. They are locked in fierce combat. Every attempt by the Syrian army in the last two weeks to break the siege has been repelled by the Islamists. The latest attempt by the new Syrian Republican Guard’s 124th Brigade to reverse the battle has not so far broken the extremists’ stranglehold.

The fall of Tabqa air base would represent the Islamic State’s next major victory after the capture of Iraq’s second city of Mosul in July. It would open the road to Hama, 480 km to the west, and the main highways to Syria’s most important ports and naval bases in Latakia and Tartus in the Assad clan’s heartland.

In a word, by taking Tabqa, IS would virtually roll back a year of advances made by the Hizballah-backed Syrian military against the insurgency, and replace the former threat to the Assad regime with a new one from the Islamic State.

So in any decision to extend US military action from Iraq to Syria, President Obama must take into consideration its likely collateral effect – if successful, which would be to rescue Assad’s rule in Damascus from the Islamist peril and relieve his Hizballah and Iranian allies of this pressure.

After declaring for nearly four years that Bashar Assad must go, the US president may end up sending a US aircraft carrier to save him.
This decision by the US president would bear heavily on the security of two of Syria’s neighbors, Israel and Jordan.

debkafile’s military and intelligence sources add that, in view of Egyptian president Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi’s recent clandestine contacts with President Assad, an American decision to strike al Qaeda in Syria may also influence El-Sisi’s calculations about hosting diplomacy for an accommodation of the Gaza conflict.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/gaza-ceasefire-2014823124231314980.html

Look at the picture, they knew exactly where the bomb would hit !

And you can see the special explosives used by Israel to avoid as much as possible collateral damage, the bomb head is made from nano aluminum and has no shrapnel, just dust what is harmless after a couple of meters !

And they Know it !

And the pin point precision !