WarSclerotic

At least five rockets fired from Syria at northern Golan Heights – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Rocket hits empty house in Western Galilee; 2 people lightly wounded in Be’er Sheva; some 100 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel since midnight.

Ynetnews

Latest Update: 08.24.14, 01:41 / Israel News

At least five rockets were fired from Syria at the northern Golan Heights Saturday overnight, after a rocket fired from Lebanon hit an empty house in the Western Galilee earlier.

Rocket alert sirens blared through the Golan Heights at least three times around 1:30am in short intervals. All of the rockets hit open areas, while three of them hit close to communities in the northern Golan. There were no reports of wounded.

Earlier Saturday night, two people were lightly wounded from rocket shrapnel in Be’er Sheva on Saturday night after two rockets hit a parking lot and a park in the city, police said.

Lebanese reports indicated that two rockets had been fired into Israel from Dheira in southern Lebanon, three kilometers from the border with Israel. According to the reports, security forces from Lebanon began searching for the locations from where the rockets were fired.

A Lebanese source said IAF helicopters were seen flying over the area of ​​the border.

Some 100 rockets were fired at Israel on Saturday, with one of the rockets hitting a communal dining hall in Nahal Oz, the very same kibbutz in which 4-year-old Daniel Tregerman was killed from a mortar hit the day before. Damage was caused to the structure, but fortunately there were no injuries.

At least one rocket was intercepted over Petah Tikvah in a rocket volley at central Israel on Saturday evening, with shrapnel falling the yard of a house. Three rockets were intercepted earlier over Ashkelon and shrapnel from the interceptions caused damage to buildings in the city. Another rocket shot down over Sdot Negev. One rocket hit an open area in Sdot Negev, one in Be’er Tuviya that started a fire, and three in open areas in Eshkol and another hitting a cowshed.

Rocket fire inceased in the late afternoon, with seven rockets hitting open areas in Eshkol and two inside communities, one of which caused light damage to a storage space. Six rockets hit Sdot Negev while four were intercepted by the Iron Dome over Hof Ashkelon.

In the early afternoon, 1 rocket landed inside a community in Eshkol, causing damage to houses while another landed near the border fence inside the regional council’s area. No one was hurt. One rocket landed in an open area in Sdot Negev, while three rockets were intercepted over Ashdod, Ashkelon and Hof Ashkelon.

Around noontime, two rockets hit open areas in Sdot Negev, while another hit inside a community in Eshkol. One woman was treated by paramedics for shock.

Sirens sounded multiple times around noontime in the Sha’ar HaNegev, Sdot Negev and Eshkol Regional Councils. One rocket exploded in a small forest near one of the communities, causing a fire to erupt.

Five other rockets exploded inside communities in Eshkol, causing damage to property, including agricultural machinery, tractors and houses. One woman suffered from an anxiety attack after a rocket hit in the area. Another rocket was intercepted above Ashkelon.

Palestinian rocket attacks continued to pound southern Israel on Saturday morning, with six rockets landing in the Sdot Negev Regional Council area.   Iron Dome shot down one rocket above the council.

Four-year-old Daniel Tregerman became on Friday afternoon the first child casualty in Israel since the beginning of Operation Protective Edge when a mortar fired from Gaza struck his kibbutz in the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council, and took his life.

On Saturday morning, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said that the mortar that killed Tregerman was fired from a Palestinian Authority school that provides shelter for refugees in the Gaza Strip, and is close to an UNRWA facility.

Earlier Saturday, security officials stated that the mortar had been fired from within an UNRWA school in Gaza.

AFP contributed to this report.

I consider this the greatest day of my life. Hitherto I have always found something to regret in the Jewish soul, and that is the forgetfulness of its own people — forgetfulness of its being, almost. Today I have been made happy by the sight of the Jewish people learning to recognize themselves and to make themselves recognized as a force in the world. This is a great age, the age of liberation of the Jewish soul, and it has been accomplished through the Zionist movement, so that no one in the world will be able to destroy it. (Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, World Publishing (1971) pg 393)

I have read your article on Zionism and feel, as a strong devotee of the Zionist idea, that I must answer you… I realized that only a common enterprise dear to the heart of Jews all over the world could restore this people to health…It was the great achievement of Herzl’s to have realized and proclaimed… the establishment of a national home, or more accurately, a center in Palestine…

All this you call nationalism… But a communal purpose, without which we can neither live nor die in this hostile world, can always be called by that ugly name. In any case it is a nationalism whose aim not power but dignity and health.If we didn’t have to live among intolerant, narrow minded and violent people, I would be the first to discard all nationalism in favor of a universal humanity

Letter to Professor Hellpach, published in Mein Weltbild (The World as I See It), 1934

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.