A Peek into a Mind

Update 6:43: 2 Soldiers were killed in the operation in Gaza. 6 others were wounded. Picture by Hetzel Yosef of Ynet.

17:10: Just came back from watching the special news broadcast on Israel Channel 2 (The site has video broadcasts in Hebrew but doesn’t like Firefox very much). According to what the experts said on the broadcast, the current fighting in Gaza is not just a simple retaliation operation.

According to Roni Daniel, this is not yet the real operation. The official targets the army was instructed to achieve include changing the whole equation and either weakening the Hamas considerable, or even, if the conditions will allow, wiping it out completely. Of course, firing of any rockets what so ever needs to halted.

What Ehud Yaari suggested, is that the current battle is trying to achieve a starting point to Cease-Fire understanding that Israel could live with - which won’t mean the Hamas could arm itself to the teeth and continue smuggling weapon from Egypt and Israel could do nothing. Also, in no case the Israeli government will not agree to any cease-fire with Hamas in the west bank. Such a thing is the death warrant of the Palestinian Authority headed by Abu Mazen (we all so how brutal were the Hamas coup when they took over Gaza).

What currently happens in Gaza is that IDF went physically 3km deep into the strip to create some kind of a “security belt”. Since some of the 3km include heavily populated settlements, and almost all the terrorists (Hamas security forces, Islamic Jihad etc) flow there to fight, it became very intense. There is also use of artillery and F-16 fighter jets. Since there is serious fighting inside populated area, there are so far civilians hurt as well.

The leaders of Hamas in Gaza went all underground as they fear targeted assassinations (Which means both the army and me are on the same page here), and the spokesmen of Hamas currently are the Haled Mashaal guys that sits in Syria.