WarSclerotic

PLO reports new Gaza truce, Hamas denies and shoots rockets. Israel is silent, retaliates with air strikes.

Debka

Total confusion reigned Thursday morning, Aug. 14, stirred up by a night of contradictory words and actions around the mirage of yet another truce in the Gaza war. The only immutable fact was Hamas rocket fire starting two hours before the last 72-hour ceasefire was scheduled to end Wednesday midnight and continuing up until 2 a.m. Thursday – namely before and after PLO-Ramallah envoys in Cairo and Egyptian officials reported a new five-day ceasefire had been agreed.

Hamas-Gaza denied any such deal until all its conditions met. No Israeli official was available to confirm or deny the PLO-Egyptian claims. However, the Israeli air force retaliated for the Palestinian rocket fire with air strikes over the Gaza Strip.

Early Thursday, the unofficial word from Jerusalem was that the indirect talks in Cairo, which according to Hamas had broken down, will “apparently” be resumed Sunday.

Egypt, Hamas, the PLO and Israel appear to be totally at loggerheads. This impasse has produced a volatile and unpredictable situation that is closer to a lingering war of attrition between Hamas and Israel than a negotiated accommodation.  Towards dawn Thursday, Ashkelon, Kiryat Gath, Netivot, and the Lachish, Eshkol and Shear Hanegev Districts again heard the explosions of Hamas rockets and Israeli air strikes over Khan Younes and central Gaza.
Members of the Israeli cabinet say that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon don’t keep them in the picture. Its hazy outline indicates that the two war leaders still hope to maneuver Hamas into accepting a prolonged ceasefire. Because that is the last thing that the Palestinian Islamists seek, they will keep on shooting.
debkafile reported Wednesday night:

Two hours before the Gaza truce was due to end Wednesday midnight, Palestinian rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip at large parts of southern Israel, including Ashkelon, Kiryat Gath, Yoav District, Shear Hanegev. Two were intercepted. No casualties were reported. Hamas envoys said that the Cairo talks had broken down and the truce would not be renewed unless their conditions were met. They called off a scheduled news conference without explanation.

Hamas went back to launching rockets after Israel nodded its acceptance of a further truce, while at the same time concentrating armored forces on the Gaza border in case the Palestinians against fired rockets. Wednesday afternoon, IDF reservists were called up, as columns of tanks, tank carriers and APCs thundered down the roads leading to the Gaza border.
debkafile reported Tuesday: The seventh truce in the ongoing Israel-Hamas passage of arms is generally expected to end Wednesday night Aug. 13, in a fresh outbreak of hostilities triggered by resumed Hamas rocket fire. The general media trend predicted a further ceasefire.

Our sources also reported that the indirect Egyptian-brokered talks between the parties in Cairo never got off the ground. From the start, all three realized that the gaps between Israel and the Palestinians were unbridgeable and, moreover, that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were totally at odds on a common negotiating stance.
debkafile’s intelligence sources learned that Egyptian intelligence mediators presented separate papers to the Israelis and Palestinians, knowing – as they acknowledged behind the scenes – that the two papers were miles apart but they were not overly concerned about the lack of headway.
Our military sources say that Israel’s government and military leaders were braced for the next stage of the confrontation with Hamas, which will be a lot tougher, deeper and broader than a few restrained air strikes.

Oren: Israel May ‘Take on Iran’ when Nuclear Talks ‘Expire’.

In contrast to those Israeli leaders who have said that the Israel Defense Forces needed to “re-occupy” Gaza to root out Hamas, Oren said a ground operation should be more limited. Not only would a larger invasion require fighting in civilian areas, but there was the “possibility that Iranian nuclear negotiations go into a prolonged state, and expire. I don’t think Israel wants to be fighting in Gaza at the same time that we take on Iran.”

The six-month deadline for the nuclear talks is July 20. Negotiators are far apart on the core issues, and the interim deal that led to the talks already backed down from earlier international demands to stop all nuclear enrichment activity. The Obama administration has repeatedly claimed that the interim deal would “eliminate” Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but that is false, because the oxidization process is reversible.

Iran touted the interim deal in January as a “surrender” by the West, with Foreign Minister Zavad Jarif noting that the regime “did not agree to dismantle anything.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deal as an “historic mistake.” Events thus far have confirmed that assessment, as the Iranian economy recovers due to sanctions relief and the Tehran regime feels even less pressure than before to accede to U.S. demands.

Oren told Breitbart News that the possibility of Israeli military action against the Iranian nuclear threat was not something new, and that Israel had always reserved the right to act in its own self-defense.

The possibility of an Israeli pre-emptive strike without American approval may have increased during the Gaza conflict, as the U.S. has called for a ceasefire rather than offering full support from the outset to Israel’s response to Hamas attacks.

That widened a gap that has been growing in recent months, not only over Iran but also over Iraq, as Israel has supported Kurdish independence as a counter to both Sunni extremists in ISIS and Iranian-backed Shia forces. The U.S. has discouraged Kurdish independence, urging Kurdish leaders to continue to support a unified Iraq.

The nuclear talks may be extended–but they will eventually “expire,” Oren said, and Israel had to be free to act.

Netanyahu indicates Israel won’t cooperate with UN probe
BY YIFA YAAKOV August 13, 2014, 8:11 pm Via The Times of Israel

(If anyone needs investigating, it’s the UN.-LS)

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC), which this week appointed a commission to investigate Israel’s conduct during the month-long Operation Protective Edge, lends legitimacy to such terror groups as the Islamic State and Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday.

Netanyahu said the commission should look elsewhere, not Israel, for war crimes, and intimated that Israel would not cooperate with its members, although he did not explicitly rule out such cooperation.

Most ministers oppose any dealings with the UN team, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said earlier Wednesday that Israel should not cooperate with the probe.

Israel’s State Comptroller Yosef Shapira announced he would launch an investigation into the military and political leadership’s handling of Operation Protective Edge. Analysts have noted that the holding of a credible Israeli investigation into war crimes allegations could have weight in any international legal battle.

In a filmed statement uploaded to his official Facebook page, the prime minister blasted the UN rights agency for failing to probe Hamas’s attacks against Israeli civilians and its use of the people of Gaza as “human shields,” as well as Syrian President Bashar Assad’s “massacre” of Syrian civilians and what Islamic State fighters are doing to Iraqi Kurds.

“Instead, the UN has decided to come and investigate Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, a democracy that acts in a legitimate way to protect its citizens from murderous terrorism,” Netanyahu said.

“This commission’s report has already been written, the one leading it [Canadian Prof. William Schabas] has already decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, and that’s why there is nothing for them to do here,” he said.

“First, let them visit Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli. Let them see the Islamic State, the Syrian army, let them see Hamas — that’s where they’ll find war crimes, not here.”

Netanyahu was referring to statements Schabas, a professor of International Law at London’s Middlesex University, has made in the past, calling for Netanyahu and former president Shimon Peres to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.

The prime minister was also referencing comments made by Schabas in an interview with Channel 2 on Tuesday evening, in which he refused to outright condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization or reveal how the commission plans to investigate it.

“It would be inappropriate for me to say” if Hamas is a terrorist organization, Schabas said, stressing that the investigation into the Gaza conflict must be opened “in as neutral a manner as possible.”

Schabas also said past comments he had made concerning the Israeli leadership’s implication in crimes against humanity had been “exaggerated.”

“I said my favorite [Western leader to try at the International Criminal Court] was Netanyahu. I was echoing the Goldstone Report,” Schabas explained, referring to the UN fact-finding mission on the 2008 Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip — which, Finance Minister Yair Lapid quickly pointed out, was compiled when former prime minister Ehud Olmert, and not Netanyahu, was serving as premier.

On Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu met with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, thanking him for his solidarity with Israel and for rejecting the “false moral symmetry” between Israel and Hamas.

“Hamas continues to do these horrible things that ISIS does: They persecute Christians, they persecute gays, they persecute women, they basically reject modernity and there are a terrorist tyranny that is imposed on their people. And where their people reject being used as human shields, you know what they do, Governor? They execute them,” Netanyahu told Cuomo during the Jerusalem meeting.

“This is the kind of moral divide that is evident today in the world, and on one side you have Israel and the United States representing democracies committing to human rights, committing to a real future for our people; and on the other side, you have the likes of ISIS and Hamas, Islamist tyrannies that have no inhibition and pursue their grisly creeds and their grisly deeds.”

Earlier Wednesday, a report by Channel 2 revealed that the majority of Israeli government ministers, 14 out of 22, oppose the probe ordered by the HRC into the IDF’s Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip.

On Monday, Israel decried the appointment of the three members of the investigative UN committee to review the recent military operation in Gaza, saying the identity of the three proved that the results of the probe were a foregone conclusion.

But Schabas, who was appointed to lead the inquiry, defended his record to Israeli media Tuesday and said past statements he’s made that paint him as anti-Israel would have no bearing on his probe of the Gaza conflict.

Schabas told Army Radio in an interview on Tuesday that he is not anti-Israel, has visited Israel in the past to give university presentations and is a member of the editorial board of an Israeli legal journal.

The Canadian law professor indicated his panel would look at all aspects of wrongdoing regardless of which side was behind them, stressing that regardless of his personal opinions, he will be objective.

“What has to happen in a commission like this is that people like myself have to put anything they may have thought and said behind them and to approach their mandate in the most fair and objective and impartial manner possible. And that’s what I intend to do,” he told Channel 2.

But Israel’s Foreign Ministry was bitterly critical of the probe and the panel. “Already at the time that the decision to establish the committee was adopted, on July 23, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister announced that the Human Rights Council long ago became the Terrorists Rights Council and a ‘kangaroo court,’ and that the findings of its ‘investigations’ are predetermined,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“If further proof is needed, the appointment of the chairman of the committee, whose opinions and positions against Israel are well known, proves beyond any doubt that Israel cannot expect justice from such a body.”

The statement concluded that “the committee’s report has already been written and at the moment it has only been defined who will sign on it.”

The probe team has been tasked with reporting back to the council by March 2015.

Two PJ Media Trifecta videos with Bill Whittle, Scott Ott and Stephen Green

Part I: Where the Caliphate is So Bad, Al Qaeda Disowned It

Part II: Obama Yanked the Troops and Iraq Collapsed, Should We Go Back?