Israeli Public Deserves to Know Cost of Destroying Gaza Weapons - by Dr. Aaron Lerner

...It has frequently turned out that the Israeli street has been considerably more willing to bear the costs of military operations than the policymakers anticipated.

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA Weekly Commentary..
20 October '18..
Link: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=73375


Israeli intelligence has devoted considerable resources to maintaining the "target bank" - a detailed listing that includes the location of every known rocket and other weapon system in the Gaza Strip as well as the location of every known facility engaged in manufacturing these weapons.

To date the Israeli policymakers have declined to order the destruction of these targets.

This is most likely out of concern for the collateral damage that would be associated with hitting targets either protected by human shields or located within sensitive targets such a hospitals, schools, mosques. etc.

To put it brutally: it would appear that Israeli policymakers are convinced that it would take an Israeli bloodbath to justify a truly effective IDF operation against these targets.

The NY Times is Puzzled: Who’s Responsible for the Mess in Gaza? - by Liel Leibovitz

Experts see no way to alleviate the economic crisis. Except, you know, not spending billions of dollars on trying to murder Jews.

Liel Leibovitz..
Tabletmag.com..
13 February '18..

This past Sunday, The New York Times treated its readers to another sad story straight out of Gaza. Here’s a representative sample: “’We are dead, but we have breath,’ said Zakia Abu Ajwa, 57, who now cooks greens normally fed to donkeys for her three small grandchildren.”

How to account for such misery? The Paper of Record is on it: Citing Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group and other “Gaza experts,” the Times grimly found that “Hamas itself has few ways to alleviate the crisis.”

Now, I’m no Gaza expert myself, but sad stories of starved children break my heart, so I grabbed the nearest napkin and did some math. Which, mind you, is not easy, because Hamas, like every self-respecting terrorist organization, takes care to hide its assets well.

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New Israel Fund, Adalah and the Support to Save Gaza Tunnel Terrorists - by Stephen M. Flatow

...Adalah is not fighting “for minorities, for the voiceless, and for the powerless,” as the New Israel Fund claims. Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists are not a persecuted minority. They are not “voiceless” or “powerless.” They have a voice through their many supporters around the world, and they have the power of their missiles, guns, and knives.

Stephen M. Flatow..
jewishpress.com..
09 November '17..
Link: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/american-jews-trying-to-save-gaza-tunnel-terrorists/2017/11/09/

An Arab extremist group has submitted an urgent petition to Israel’s Supreme Court, demanding that Palestinians be permitted to rescue Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who may be trapped in a terror tunnel bombed by Israel.

And guess who’s funding the petitioners? American Jews.

The organization trying to save the terrorists is called Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. What the rescue of Hamas and Islamic Jihad murderers in Gaza has to do with “Arab minority rights in Israel” is anybody’s guess.

But that doesn’t seem to bother Adalah’s many donors. In 2016 and 2017, the Swiss Foreign Ministry gave Adalah $165,000. Prominent charitable organizations in Belgium, Germany, Holland, Spain, and England also have contributed generously in recent years.

One of the largest donors to Adalah is the liberal American Jewish organization New Israel Fund. According to NGO Monitor, New Israel Fund contributed more than $2 million to Adalah from 2008 to 2016.

It’s not as if Adalah ordinarily is a reasonable, moderate organization and this petition to save terrorists is some kind of aberration. On the contrary. Adalah’s record of extremist activity is long enough to fill several filing cabinets at New Israel Fund headquarters.

In other words, the folks at NIF have always known exactly what they were getting with Adalah. Yet they keep on signing the checks.

Reuters’ Skewed Neutrality: Israel Made Them Do It - by Sheri Oz

...Why, oh why, do we Israelis (Jews?) refuse to stop defending ourselves and let the world, and Reuters, go on its merry neutral way?

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
05 November '17..

Serious news media work hard to appear to maintain proper journalistic standards. Reuters is no exception, and their website says they have values. Reuters claims to have standards. Here is a relevant statement of such, in their own words, something they call the Trust Principles:

That the integrity, independence and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved;

But Israel seems to provide unfair challenges to the best attempts of news outlets to live up to these stated goals. I want to question whether Reuters manages to maintain their own standards, examining one particular article: Death toll from strike on Gaza tunnel this week rises to 12

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Surprise? BBC News report on Gaza tunnel equivocal about its purpose - by Hadar Sela

...Does the BBC really believe that there is room for doubt about the purpose of a tunnel infiltrating Israeli territory constructed by an Iranian backed terrorist organisation? Apparently it does because the article went on to unquestioningly amplify that terror group’s propaganda.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
31 October '17..

On October 30th the IDF carried out a controlled explosion on a cross-border attack tunnel running from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.

“The military said the tunnel had been under surveillance for an extended period of time and was under active construction at the time of the demolition.

The tunnel, which the IDF described as a “grave and unacceptable violation of Israeli sovereignty,” started in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, crossing under the border and approaching the Israeli community of Kibbutz Kissufim, the army said.

“The tunnel was detonated from within Israel, adjacent to the security fence,” the military said in a statement.

IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the tunnel was approximately two kilometers away from the Israeli kibbutz. […]

The demolition was carried out near the fence separating Israel from Gaza.”

In the hours that followed it emerged that a number of operatives from the terror groups Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas had died.

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Terror tunnels are a violation of international law too, just sayin'? - by Elder of Ziyon

...Not a word against the idea of terrorists building tunnels into Israel to perform kidnapping and massacres.No chiding Islamic Jihad for provoking Israel to defend itself. Israel's actions, across the board, are portrayed as aggressive and unwarranted. The media reports Palestinian claims. It never reports the tacit Palestinian support, across the board, for terror, by the absence of even mild criticism for terror in cases like this.

Elder of Ziyon..
31 October '17..

Once again, the most striking unreported story about Palestinians isn't what some of them are saying, but what none of the are not.

The only purpose of a tunnel reaching under the Gaza border into Israel is to perform war crimes. Whether the crimes are to kidnap civilians, kidnap soldiers, or to pop out of the tunnel and shoot everyone on sight, there is no justification from a human rights or international law perspective to these tunnels.

Looking through Palestinian media this morning, however, and you cannot find a single person who is against such tunnels.

Palestinian leaders rail about "international law" and "justice" at the UN and international forums all the time. They say that they want Israel to be treated as pariahs because of an alleged lack of "justice."

While there is no shortage of Israeli and Western leftists who happily adopt this narrative, there is an absolute (or near-absolute) dearth of Palestinians who are writing op-eds or Facebook posts or tweets who say, you know what? Tunnels are a violation of international law too, just sayin'?

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The Gaza Tunnels Get Far Too Much Attention - by Efraim Inbar

...The project to build a wall around Gaza appears to be motivated by domestic politics. It is intended to calm the understandable concerns of the inhabitants of the southern region with regard to the tunnel threat. It enables the government to relieve the constant political pressure by stating that it is "doing everything possible" to find a solution. It is, however, a wasteful populist response. Above all, it makes no strategic sense.

Efraim Inbar..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 369..
06 October '16..
Link: http://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/gaza-tunnels-get-much-attention/



EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The threat to Israel of terror attack tunnels from Gaza is exaggerated. Thus the Israel Ministry of Defense’s plan to build a very expensive subterranean wall around the Gaza Strip, reaching a depth of dozens of meters, makes no strategic sense. It is a waste of money and effort, and hands Hamas a public relations victory.

The attack tunnels dug by the Hamas from Gaza into Israel are great for the public relations of terrorists. They make for a deeply unsettling image that intensifies the threat perception among Israelis. Terrorists want to be feared and the tunnels seem to achieve that goal, despite their limited destructive potential.

In January 2016, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot played into the hands of the Hamas terrorists by saying that countering the tunnel threat was the army’s “number one mission this year.” Eisenkot’s statement showed that he prioritized the tunnel threat over Hezbollah’s growing rocket capability to Israel’s north or the threat from IS in the Sinai. Moreover, he belittled the serious nuclear threat from Iran.

Similarly, Education Minister Naftali Bennett gave in to the popular mood and exaggerated the threat of the Hamas tunnels. He accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of leaving the cabinet in the dark about the grave danger of the tunnels until after Operation Protective Edge had begun. A leaked draft of a report by the State Comptroller also criticized Netanyahu, then-Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Yaalon and then-IDF CoS Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz for failing to anticipate the Hamas tunnel threat.

In any case, in the summer of 2014, Israel went on a ground attack to destroy tunnels that crossed into Israeli territory. Heavy fighting ensued, particularly in Shujaiyeh, a neighborhood of Gaza City. Forty-one Israeli soldiers were killed and many more injured during the ground phase, which ended after 32 tunnels were destroyed.

Following the development of the Iron Dome system, which has largely neutralized the rocket threat from Gaza, tunnels became an important tool in the Hamas arsenal. They are a low-tech challenge and quite difficult to handle. So far, Israeli efforts to develop technologies to locate tunnels have achieved only partial success.

Yet the tunnels’ potential ability to cause significant damage to Israel is itself limited. True, they enable terrorist attacks and/or the hijacking of dead or alive Israelis. While Israeli inhabitants around Gaza are most directly affected and obviously the most concerned, this type of threat, while undoubtedly disturbing, is not new.

Acts of terrorism have always been considered by the national security establishment as secondary to dangers that affect Israel’s territorial integrity or threaten its very existence. The tunnels cannot threaten strategic targets within Israel, such as power stations or airports, as Hamas missiles have done in the past. Investing in defense against missiles is important; spending money to negate the effects of tunnels is much less so. Limited resources dictate that spending be prioritized in accordance with the relative magnitude of the threats to be faced.

Nevertheless, the defense establishment, prodded by Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is planning a giant project – a 60-kilometer wall around the Gaza Strip that will reach a depth of dozens of meters. Initially, a trial section will be erected at a cost of 600 million shekels ($158 million). This “Maginot Line” around Gaza, if completed, could become one of the most expensive projects in Israel's history.

When Hamas takes Palestinian children into the depths - by Michael Freund

...Indeed, when Hamas takes Palestinian children into the depths, it is sentencing them to walk in paths of darkness and despair. Like the rest of the global Islamic jihadist movement, the terrorists of Gaza are choosing a route that leads to nowhere. The urgent challenge now facing Israel and the entire West is to unearth those tunnels and destroy them, along with everything they represent.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
21 July '16..
Link: http://www.michaelfreund.org/19036/tunnels-terrorism

There is a short video making the rounds on the Internet, the kind of audiovisual presentation that serves as a painful reminder, as if one were needed, of the depths of evil that Israel and the West now face.

Produced by Hamas to commemorate two years since the start of Operation Protective Edge, when Israel was compelled to enter Gaza to put a halt to rocket attacks that were terrorizing the country, the two-minute clip speaks volumes about the depravity of our foes and their fiendish vision for the future.

The film takes place entirely underground, in one of the Hamas tunnels that was built in the Gaza neighborhood of Sajiya.

There is no violence or gore on display, but something much darker fills the screen: a group of Palestinian children being taken on a school outing to tour one of the "heroic" subterranean passageways that was used to launch terrorist attacks against the Jewish state.

As martial music plays in the background, gleeful Palestinian kids, some appearing to be no more than 10 years old, scamper through the secretive corridor, smiling and posing for the camera with their fingers held up high in the shape of the letter V to indicate victory.

The walls of the tunnel are lined with posters hailing the exploits of Hamas and its leaders, and the message being ingrained in the children is as unmistakable as it is immoral: violence and murder are to be cherished rather than loathed.

According to Ynet, the video is part of an exhibition that Hamas has created to boost its image among the Palestinian population, which also includes a display of firearms that were used to kill Jews.

Stop and think about this for a second. What does it say about Palestinian society and its moral calculus that it sees fit to inculcate the next generation with a loving admiration for the spilling of blood? And if celebrating terrorism is a way for Hamas to enhance its popularity among the Palestinian public, how can one possibly conceive of making peace with such people? Consider the contrast between Hamas' approach and how Israelis look back on the Gaza conflict. We do not rejoice over the need to have taken up arms, nor do we revel in it, and we certainly do not create macabre displays to teach our children that the use of violence is a lofty or noble ideal.

Human Rights Watch lies again about international law - by Elder of Ziyon

Why is HRW, which normally errs on the side of protecting civilians when interpreting international law, suddenly deciding to rule against Gaza civilians and for the Hamas terrorists who are deliberately digging tunnels underneath Gaza civilian homes?

HRW's Sari Bashi

Elder of Ziyon..
22 May '16..

From the New York Times:

Sari Bashi, a spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch and expert on international law regarding warfare, said that building tunnels in residential neighborhoods was not explicitly prohibited. But she said militant groups had “an obligation to take all feasible measures to protect civilians, including not taking the armed conflict to civilian areas, to the extent possible.”

Here's what the ICRC has to say:

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Question - Are building terror tunnels in civilian neighborhoods a war crime? - by Jonathan Tobin

...But the main thing to understand about Gaza is that an Islamist terror group tyrannizes it and is expending enormous resources, from both its Iranian sponsors (newly enriched themselves by the nuclear deal it struck with the Obama administration) as well as more philanthropic donors with better intentions in order to create an infrastructure that will facilitate murder of Israeli civilians. To that, the international community continues to respond with merely the same shrug of the collective shoulders than Human Rights Watches gives the question of whether building terror tunnels in civilian neighborhoods is a war crime

AP Photo/Jack Guez, Pool

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
22 May '16..

What does Hamas’s massive tunnel-building project mean to the people of Gaza? The answer can be summed up in one word: fear. They live in fear that the structures being dug beneath their homes will start a conflict that will bring down another round of death and destruction upon their families. Speaking off the record to the New York Times’ Gaza correspondents, various residents said anonymously what they couldn’t say in public at the fear of their lives. They had no doubt that much of the aid and building materials that has been sent to Gaza to rebuild the homes that were destroyed the last time Hamas started a war with Israel is being diverted to the Islamist terrorist group’s massive project.

But when asked as to whether Hamas building tunnels in residential neighborhoods whose only purpose is to facilitate cross-border terror raids into Israel is a war crime a Human Rights Watch official that the Times described as an “expert on international law regarding warfare, the best that Sari Bashi could come up with is a shrug of her shoulders. According to Bashi, building terror tunnels in residential neighborhoods is “not explicitly prohibited.”
Really? That, in a nutshell, sums up everything that is wrong with the international community’s response to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

While Bashi, an American-born Israeli lawyer, admits Hamas has “an obligation to take all feasible measures to protect civilians, including not taking the armed conflict to civilian areas, to the extent possible,” she won’t go farther than that. That’s bizarre because it would seem obvious, even to those who aren’t “experts” in international law that structures built solely to facilitate efforts to cross an international border to murder and kidnap is illegal. Indeed, terrorism, whether it is committed via a tunnel or with rockets shot indiscriminately at cities (as Hamas did several thousand times during the 2014 war) or suicide bombings, is always illegal.

But in the upside-down world of human rights activism that a group such as Human Rights Watch epitomizes, ambivalence about Palestinian war crimes is always accompanied by vicious condemnations of Israel’s efforts to defend its people against things like terror tunnels and rocket fire. But while such organizations purport to have great sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, their ire is almost always directed at the wrong people.

The Times article is a reminder that as much as Hamas poses a terrible threat to Israel, the people who suffer the most from its despotic rule are the citizens of Gaza, who not only must cope with the consequences of the armed conflict that the terror group will not give up but also live the lives of silence that is typical of anyone under the thumb of a brutal dictatorship.

Both patchy and selective: BBC News reporting of Gaza border incidents - by Hadar Sela

Since the beginning of the year the BBC News website has failed to report on any of the missile attacks on Israeli civilian communities by terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
08 May '16..

On May 3rd terrorists in the Gaza Strip fired shots across the border at an Israeli military vehicle. The next day cross-border incidents continued with five separate mortar attacks on Israeli troops which were claimed by both Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the evening the Israeli airforce responded with strikes on Hamas installations in the Gaza Strip. On May 5th an additional mortar attack raised the number of cross border incidents to seven in less than 48 hours and further incidents which took place later in the day brought the number of attacks into double figures. On the same day the IDF announced that it had discovered a cross border attack tunnel – the second to be detected in less than a month.

None of the above was reported at the time on the BBC News website.

As the mortar attacks against IDF soldiers dealing with the newly discovered tunnel continued, the IDF retaliated with artillery fire and according to Palestinian media reports, a woman was killed near Khan Yunis.

In the early hours of May 6th the BBC News website published a report with the context-free headline “Israel tank fire kills Gaza woman, medics say“.

Readers of the report found the background story presented in qualified terms, using the BBC’s standard ‘Israel says’ formula.

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Actually it's in their name that Hamas digs and plots the murder of Jews

...But if you aren’t willing to state clearly that you support the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself inside some borders or to oppose the launching of rockets and the digging of terror tunnels, then what these anti-occupation activists are really telling us is that they agree with Hamas about the definition of occupation. That would mean they can’t deny that it is in their name that Hamas digs and plots the murder of Jews. If so, then they should stop pretending to be acting in the name of human rights and state openly that their only real goal is to eliminate Israel. Doing so would expose them as unabashed anti-Semites, but at least it would be honest.

Israeli drills search for terror tunnels on the
Gaza border. (AP Photo / Tsafrir Abayov)

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
05 May '16..

In the last year, Israel’s foes and critics have redoubled their efforts to pressure it to end the “occupation.” Most observers assume that to mean that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and/or much of Jerusalem. But do these people actually care what would happen if Israel did just that? The current standoff on the border between southern Israel and Gaza gives us a pretty good idea of the answer to the question.

The independent Palestinian state in-all-but-name run by Hamas terrorists that exists in Gaza has lobbed thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities and has dug tunnels in order to facilitate cross-border kidnapping and murder raids. The discovery of yet another such elaborate tunnel by the Israel Defense Forces and the skirmishing with Hamas as it seeks to prevent the army from destroying that and other such facilities illustrates what the government of Gaza does with the aid that is funneled into the strip ostensibly to help the poor and rebuild homes destroyed in the last war. That raises the question for those activists determined to help isolate Israel or to disassociate Americans and Jews from its measures of self-defense, why the silence about Gaza terror? In whose name does Hamas dig?
Few of those who seem most outraged by the presence of Jews in these places where Jewish history began seem to think they have any sort of obligation to also pressure the Palestinians to make peace with Israel in exchange for such a gesture. Of course, given the continued Palestinian refusal to negotiate with Israel or to indicate that any sort of gesture from the Netanyahu government would incline them to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders would be drawn, such calls would not be heeded.

But those who are most vocal about about the occupation — a term that most Palestinians, including their supposedly moderate leader Mahmoud Abbas, thinks refers to all of Israel, including the lands under its control before June 1967 — seem to be curiously silent about what happened when Israel did end their presence in part of the territories. The occupation of Gaza ended in 2005 when then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pulled out every Israeli soldier, settler, and settlement from the strip. Sharon was no peacenik but by that point he agreed with the notion that Israel needed to separate from the Palestinians.

Yet the withdrawal from Gaza — the exact thing that Israel’s critics have said they wanted — led to two interesting developments.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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What's not clear is why Israel wants to wait for Hamas to get stronger

Dr. Aaron Lerner - it is clear why Hamas wants to wait until they are stronger to attack. What's not clear is why Israel wants to wait for Hamas to get stronger.

Dr. Aaron Lerner..
IMRA..
19 April '16..

The Story behind the Tunnel: The IDF and Hamas are Trying to Prevent a War

Since the conclusion of Operation Protective Edge, the issue of attack tunnels has remained a top priority among decision-makers in Israel. A special column by Amir Rapaport following the discovery of the tunnel near Kerem Shalom

Amir Rapaport | 18/04/2016 Contact author
http://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/content/story-behind-tunnel-idf-and-hamas-are-trying-prevent-war

The untold story behind the recently uncovered Hamas tunnel near the Israeli community of Kerem Shalom is no less interesting than the minute details on the tunnel itself, which by now are known to all. During the past few weeks, a great effort was made in order to prevent an all-out war with Hamas.

Let us begin with what is known: The tunnel found near Kerem Shalom was restored last year, and is probably part of the network of tunnels that was dug prior to Operation Protective Edge. The construction method of the tunnel has improved, and now includes thicker concrete revetments that will prevent a collapse from explosions or infiltration of rainwater. The very fact that Hamas has invested considerable effort in building tunnels is well known and understandable – tunnels are a strategic achievement in the conflict with Israel, and Hamas is preparing for the next round of fighting since the last round ended.

Since Operation Protective Edge, Hamas lost the logistical infrastructure it had during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Most of the tunnels used by Hamas during Operation Protective Edge were dug in this period. Despite the difficulty, the digging rate remains very high. Thousands of Gaza residents are engaged in the digging work. No less than 15 of them were killed in recent months as a result of collapsed tunnels while working (primarily due to the heavy rains this year in the South of Israel).

For its part, Israel views the challenge posed by tunnels as the highest priority since the conclusion of Operation Protective Edge. Every single idea is considered by the defense establishment. Hundreds of millions have been invested in various technology projects to locate and "handle" tunnels. Billions more will be spent. The engineers who deal with the various developments deserve the highest of compliments, and yet it seems that intelligence still has an important role to play. Also, a little luck always helps.

Light at the End of the Tunnels - by Dr. Michael Curtis

...Hamas never stops its war against Israel....Sometimes the truth seeps out, even from terrorist leaders. At the funeral service in the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City on January 29, 2016 for seven Hamas operatives who were killed when the tunnel on which they were working collapsed because of rain and flooding, Ismael Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, spoke truth.

Dr. Michael Curtis..
American Thinker..
14 February '16..

On July 8, 2014 the Israeli air force began to deal with rocket fire coming from Hamas operatives in the Gaza Strip. In the preceding three weeks, Hamas had fired 250 rockets capable of reaching Israeli population centers. Many of those rockets were intercepted by the Israeli Iron Dome system, but Israel soon found that confronting it was a new and challenging menace, a labyrinth of highly sophisticated tunnels built by Hamas.

For years Hamas had been using building materials and an estimated 600,000 tons of concrete to build tunnels similar to, though much more skillfully constructed than, the Viet Cong tunnels dug in South Vietnam. The U.S. forces, the so called “tunnel rats” had to dispose of them using simply a pistol and a flashlight. Israel, between July 17 and August 5, 2014 using more advanced methods, disposed of 33 tunnels, 14 of which crossed into Israel, and one of which was 66 feet deep and 1.5 miles long.

The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has long been laughable. Its absurdity reached a zenith with the 284-page report on June 22, 2015 of its Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Gaza war chaired by the American jurist, Mary McGowan Davis who had replaced the discredited William Schabas. The Commission found there was no indication the Hamas tunnels were constructed to attack Israeli civilians. It did not say the tunnels were used as playgrounds for recreational purposes or for sightseeing trips, but it did say that it could not “conclusively determine the intent of Palestinian armed groups with regard to the construction and use of the tunnels.”

Yet the evidence to the contrary is abundant. Everyone was aware that Hamas had built tunnels in Sinai for smuggling people and communities between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. More important they had been built for both defensive and offensive purposes in connection with the State of Israel. Defensively, Hamas used the tunnels to store rockets, launchers, and explosives, and as military command centers. Offensively, they were built to attack Israeli civilians, or to kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians. Hamas had done this in June 2006 when it kidnapped Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, and held him in prison until October 2011.

The UNHRC disregarded the Hamas violations of human rights and indeed war crimes by its construction of tunnels under civilian homes, among other violations. The Institute for Palestinian Studies recorded that Hamas between 2007 and 2012 had caused 160 Palestinian deaths in building the tunnels: by August 2014, 400 had died. The UNHRC also seemed unaware of the Hamas plot to use Rosh Hashanah, September 24, 2014, as an opportunity to initiate a mass attack on Israel. It had begun rebuilding some of its tunnels that been destroyed and planned to use a dozen of them to carry 200 heavily armed fighters into Israeli territory.

Hamas never stops its war against Israel. Since the beginning of 2016 there have been five incidents when tunnels being built by Hamas in the Gaza Strip have collapsed with Palestinian operatives being killed in them. On February 9, 2016 one operative, a member of the military wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassan Brigades died in the tunnel near Khan Younis. He was repairing a tunnel that had been damaged by Egyptian authorities because it was being used to smuggle arms and fighters for affiliates of ISIS in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.

Expectations of More “Accidents” for Hamas Tunnels? - by Jonathan Tobin

...Having been caught by surprise by the tunnels in 2014, it may be that the IDF has a few surprises in store for Hamas. In the meantime, Israel’s critics need to remember that no matter whether action is taken against the tunnels or not, the sole priority of the independent Palestinian in all but name that exists in Gaza remains terrorism. Those who argue for duplicating a unilateral Gaza withdrawal in the West Bank are asking Israel need to think about how much more terrible Israel’s tunnel dilemma would be if Hamas ran things there too.

Image by © JIM HOLLANDER/epa/Corbis

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
09 February '16..

This week the debate in Israel about what to do about the renewed threat of Gaza terror tunnels escalated. Leaks from a Security Cabinet meeting indicated that Naphtali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home Party that sits in an always-uneasy alliance with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud, had pushed for the government to take action now against the tunnels before Hamas used them. However, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yaalon spiked the proposal. The PM’s office didn’t confirm that the debate took place but did bitterly protest the leak that almost certainly came from Bennett’s camp. This was further evidence of the tension within the coalition, as Bennett wanted the public to know that he agreed with the Zionist Union opposition that it was a mistake for Israel to sit back and wait to be attacked rather than to strike first.

As I noted last week, the question of what to do about a Hamas tunnel network that almost certainly has been completely rebuilt, if not expanded since the 2014 summer war in Gaza, is a complex debate. The rationale for immediate action as demanded by both the left and the right is strong. Yet the case for standing pat is not negligible. Moreover, the government is hoping that Hamas may be deterred not only by the cost of another war but also by the thought that the Israelis might actively be sabotaging the tunnels.

There have been at least five separate reported tunnel collapses in Gaza in the last few weeks. At least 11 terrorist personnel are believed to have died as a result of the mishaps that were initially thought to be the result of flooding from bad weather or poor engineering. But on Tuesday Israel’s top general hinted that the setbacks to Hamas’s preparations for the next war might not have been accidents.

As the Times of Israel reports:

IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot told a conference at Herzliya’s Interdisciplinary Center that the IDF is working, mostly in secret, to counter the Gazan tunnel threat and has employed nearly 100 engineering vehicles on the border to locate and destroy the Hamas passageways into Israel.

“We are doing a lot, but many of [the things we do] are hidden from the public. We have dozens, if not a hundred, engineering vehicles on the Gaza border,” Eisenkot said.

We don’t know whether this is a bluff intended to make Hamas think that Israel can destroy its tunnels faster than they can built, or is it actually an indication that the Israel Defense Forces may have arrived at what may be at least a partial solution to the problem. But we do know that Egypt has been actively seeking to flood and destroy the smuggling tunnels between the Sinai and Gaza. The Egyptian government, which views Hamas as an ally of its Muslim Brotherhood foes, is just as if not more zealous than the Israelis about maintaining a partial blockade of Gaza. The urgency of their campaign against Hamas was only emphasized by another recent report that told of ISIS terrorists operating in the Sinai receiving medical assistance in Gaza.

But even if we willing to believe that Israel is taking active steps against the tunnels rather than, as Bennett and Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog seem to think, doing nothing, that still puts Netanyahu in a difficult position.

The Terror Tunnels Have Returned, But the World Is Silent - by Stephen M. Flatow

...Hamas terrorists are dying in the collapse of tunnels that supposedly do not exist. And the Times of Israel reports: “It is estimated that since the end of [Operation] Protective Edge, Hamas has dug dozens of tunnels of varying lengths.” Dennis Ross summed it up: “They were right.” The Israelis were right, after all. The Israelis were right that cement would be used for terror tunnels. Now it’s time for all the Obama administration officials, past and present, who had a hand in this fiasco to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and to endorse Israel’s right to intervene.

Stephen M. Flatow..
Algemeiner..
03 February '16..

JNS.org – Last week’s deaths of seven Hamas terrorists in the collapse of a tunnel they were digging coincided with complaints by residents of an Israeli town near Gaza that underground digging has come so close to their homes that they have felt their floors shake.

Speaking on Israel Radio, the head of the Eshkol Regional Council, Gadi Yarkoni, said numerous residents of Moshav Pri Gan, adjacent to the Gaza border, have reported hearing the sounds of underground digging and felt the floors of their homes shaking.

What’s going on here? We thought the Hamas terror tunnels were a thing of the past. They were supposed to have been destroyed in the 2014 Gaza war. The Obama administration promised that safeguards would be in place to ensure that cement entering Gaza would be used for houses that were damaged in the fighting.

Thanks to former State Department official Dennis Ross, we now know what happened to all those US promises. From 2009 to 2011, Ross served as a senior aide to then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton and as Middle East director on the National Security Council. During the 2014 Gaza war, Ross, writing on the op-ed page of the Washington Post in August, revealed some of what went on behind the scenes in the preceding years.

“I argued with Israeli leaders and security officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools, and basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross disclosed. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

Assured by the Obama administration’s insistence that the cement would not be used, Israel allowed it to be imported. The result? Hamas built “a labyrinth of underground tunnels, bunkers, command posts and shelters for its leaders, fighters and rockets,” Ross wrote. They built them with “an estimated 600,000 tons of cement,” some of which was “diverted from construction materials allowed into Gaza.”

Question. Can Israel Strike Before It is Hit? - by Jonathan Tobin

...at some point during the course of the year, Netanyahu will be faced with the choice that Herzog outlines. If so, then it is inevitable that he will be compelled to strike at Gaza before more Israeli lives are needless lost due to excessive caution and fear of international criticism. When that happens, the usual chorus of liberal critics decrying his behavior will need to think back on this moment and ponder why it is that those that are seeking to punish Israel for failing to make suicidal concessions were unprepared to support preemptive strikes on Hamas’s terror tunnels.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
02 February '16..

On Sunday, the heads of Israel’s opposition party went to the Gaza border to make a point about the failure of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. But rather than complain about his alleged failure to advance the dead-in-the-water peace process or his feuds with the United States and the United Nations, the Zionist Union’s Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni were there to sound the alarm about the threat of terrorism from Hamas-run Gaza. Attacking Netanyahu from the right may strike his liberal American critics as absurd, but Herzog and Livni are responding to the needs of Israelis who are living under siege in a stabbing intifada that remains unchecked and the possibility of a new Islamist terror offensive.

Unlike the Obama administration, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon and the Jewish left on this side of the Atlantic the majority of Israelis are not railing at Netanyahu for perpetuating the status quo with the Palestinians, much as they’d like to change it for the better. Rather, they worry about the possibility that Netanyahu may be too concerned with international opinion to do something about the tunnels being dug in Gaza before it is too late.

Herzog and Livni, both of whom have, over the course of the last seven years, carried the hopes of the Obama administration in unsuccessful election duels with Netanyahu, went to the border to highlight the fact that residents of the area claim they can hear Hamas terrorists digging tunnels. The terror tunnels constituted the one limited strategic success of Hamas during the 2014 summer war with Israel since the Jewish state wasn’t sufficiently prepared for the Islamists to be able to use them to cross the border to conduct kidnapping and murder raids. It was the existence of a tunnel network that forced the Israel Defense Forces to launch a ground offensive into Gaza that year, rather than content itself with air strikes aimed at suppressing the firing of several thousand rockets at Israeli cities, towns, and villages.

But, while the IDF claims it has the situation under control, Netanyahu’s opposition is skeptical about the government’s assumption that Hamas doesn’t want another war. Herzog and Livni say Israel shouldn’t wait, as it did in 2014, to be attacked before doing something about the tunnels. That surrenders the strategic initiative to the Palestinians and allows them to start a war at a time of their choosing. Meeting with local officials, Herzog said, “Hamas brags and we are idle.” While Israelis hope their army is prepared this time and has been monitoring the digging in such a way as to forestall the use of the tunnels, there is reason for worry. Reports claim that Hamas is working non-stop to build and lengthen new tunnels and a recent collapse that took the lives of seven terrorists shows that they aren’t proceeding cautiously.

The escalation of the conflict in the West Bank is just as worrisome. An attack this week in which a Palestinian Authority policeman shot three Israeli soldiers, including two seriously, at a checkpoint, was a shocking reminder of what happened at the start of the second intifada. At that time, the same Palestinian security force that was supposed to be cooperating with the Israelis in the fight against terrorism turned on the IDF and joined the terrorists in open warfare. While this was, at least for the moment, an isolated incident, it’s a sign of possible trouble that can’t be ignored as well as an indication of how dangerous the PA’s incitement of hate against Jews and honoring of terrorists can be.

The question is what can Netanyahu do about any of this?

Surprised? The U.S. Spies While Hamas Digs

...If Israelis are sometimes confused about whether the administration means it well, they cannot be blamed. It’s a cruel world where friends spy on each other. But the willingness of the U.S. to look the other way about terrorists planning mayhem takes the cognitive dissonance of this situation to a new and altogether more troubling level.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
29 January '16..

This week President Barack Obama reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security with the sort of ringing rhetoric that might have soothed the concerns of even his most strident critics. It was possible to point out a gap between the reality of American actions on the Palestinians and Iran and the president’s words. But, as I noted yesterday, there’s no denying that the administration has continued the security alliance with the Jewish state even if President Obama’s main goal in the relationship continues to be the establishment of more daylight between the positions of the two nations. But even as some pundits were touting the president’s appearance at an Israeli embassy event as a sign of a rapprochement between Washington and Jerusalem, we must now figure into the equation the news that the U.S. has been operating an extensive electronic spy operation against the Israelis for 18 years.

The revelations, which are part of the Edward Snowden leaks of classified data, were apparently published by his journalistic collaborator Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept as well as Der Spiegel. The anti-Israel hacking dates back to the Clinton administration and was a joint operation of U.S. and British intelligence that was conducted from a base in Cyprus that is used by the U.K. forces. Though the operation could be used against any number of nations in the Middle East, its primary focus was clearly the state of Israel and resulted in the U.S. being able to track the transmissions of Israeli aircraft and view videos and any commissions between planes, drones, and Israeli commanders. The point of the endeavor was apparently to keep tabs on any possible Israeli moves against Iran as well as to merely give U.S. spooks and their political masters the ability to know just about everything that Israel is doing in its efforts to defend the country from Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist bases.

It is being described in the Israeli press as the worst disaster in the history of Israeli intelligence, and it’s hard to argue with that. The point is, if the U.S. and the Brits have been able to crack Israeli encryption systems then not only must Jerusalem worry about what use its friends are making of this data, it must also worry about whether they will keep it secret. Just as scary is the prospect that enemies have also been able to snoop on Israeli military communications.

What conclusions should we draw from this?

A tale of two Gazas: concrete evidence that keeps being buried

...By the way, did Friday's report of the massive concrete-lined Hamas tunnel found and destroyed along with the explosive materials stored inside it, make it to the news reports in your community?

Above the ground:
Gazan misery, unrepaired
destruction. For Hamas,
 it's win/win [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
05 July '15..

The thuggish groups that hold sway over Gaza's miserable population have never hesitated to exploit for political purposes the third-world conditions in which life is lived there.

And why should they? Simply put, it's a strategy that works, arousing pity and sympathy for the ordinary people living in filth and destruction, with the military might of heartless Israel to blame. And done the right way, it can just go on and on, cycle after cycle, year after year, giving the inner circle of Hamas opportunity after opportunity to keep trying to inflict damage on the enemy without ever themselves paying a price.

A key element in avoiding the price: ensure the fattest of the privileged Hamas fat-cat insiders don't ever live anywhere near the fighting.

Qatar, the spectacularly rich enclave nourished by one of the world's largest gas resources, offers a pretty good choice: Khaled Meshaal and a group of his most trusted deputies are ensconced there, living in the lap of luxury. (Reports emerging this past winter suggested they were being kicked out ["Report: Qatar expels Hamas leader to Turkey", Haaretz, January 6, 2015] but these were soon exposed as disinformation. When the BBC interviewed Meshal in April, it was in Qatar.)

There has been a flurry of news and analysis in the past few days reflecting on what has and has not changed since last summer's intensive Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and the massive Israeli response:

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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But if you think the Jews are the one people in the world not entitled to a state or its defense...

...By any rational standard, Israel’s effort to stop Hamas missile fire and tunnels was a just war. But if you think Israelis deserve to be killed simply because they are Israelis and that the Jews are the one people in the world not entitled to a state or its defense, then it doesn’t matter how hard the IDF tries to save Palestinian lives. Such bias has a name and it applies to those who hold such views whether they are Arabs or Jews: anti-Semitism. That and not the details of the reports about Gaza is what will continue to drive the debate about the war.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
15 June '15..

It’s not likely that many of Israel’s critics will pay much attention to the report issued on Sunday by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs about last summer’s war in Gaza. Nor will they take notice of a separate report compiled by a multinational group of retired generals and admirals on the conflict that was submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) last week. Both of these reports say the Israel Defense Forces acted in a largely exemplary fashion during the 50 days of conflict. They conclude that charges of war crimes against the Israelis are false and that the primary responsibility for the entire conflict and the toll of civilian casualties belongs to the Hamas terrorists who started the Gaza war and used the population in the strip as human shields. Instead, Israel-bashers will wait for the report of the UNHRC, which is likely to condemn the IDF. But the problem here goes deeper than dueling reports from two parties — Israel and the HRC — whose bias is not in doubt. The battle over the reports provides a microcosm of the entire conflict precisely because the facts are irrelevant to the debate. It doesn’t matter how much care the IDF takes to avoid hurting noncombatants. If, like the HRC and other Israel-haters, you don’t think the Jewish state has a right to exist or to defend itself, everything it does is illegitimate. By the same token, it doesn’t matter how culpable Hamas is, their crimes are always going to be rationalized or even justified by those determined to smear Israel.

The MFA report, like that of the group of foreign military leaders, examined the conflict soberly and admitted that, as in every war, there were plenty of mistakes made in the heat of battle. Though the rules of engagement for allowing a strike on a specific target in Gaza involved a formidable list of assurances that civilians were not put at risk, there are always going to be instances in which circumstances change in the short period between authorization of firing and when the shells land. Moreover, it is not always possible to distinguish between armed combatants and civilians when Hamas fighters are doing everything possible to blend in with their human shields. That is why, contrary to Hamas propaganda mimicked by much of the international press, sought to deny that nearly half of the Palestinians killed were actually terrorist personnel. Sometimes those who are warned to leave areas about to come under attack don’t do so (often at the demands of Hamas). Sometimes fire is inaccurate. But despite the attempt of Israel-haters to portray the IDF as bloodthirsty, even those incidents that were clearly errors cannot be said to be the result of deliberate action. Sometimes soldiers just make a mistake, as happens in every war in history.

It should be remembered that General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year that the conduct of the IDF was a model for Americans forces to follow in their own fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. As these reports make clear, there isn’t a military in the world that is forced to observe such restrictive rules of engagement when fighting terrorists.

Nor should it be forgotten that the context of the Gaza war is not one in which Israel launched an unprovoked attack on innocents. To the contrary, the chain of events that led to war began with the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by a Hamas cell. The Hamas rulers of Gaza then escalated the conflict by firing thousands of rockets on Israeli cities and towns. They also attempted to use terror tunnels dug under the international border between Israel and Gaza to kidnap and murder other Israeli civilians.

Hamas runs what is for all intents and purposes an independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza. But its conduct in the war consisted of acts of terrorism as well as war crimes against its own people because of its decision to launch missiles and conduct attacks against Israelis in the vicinity of civilians. Its leadership hid in secure bunkers under hospitals that Israel did not attack. Though, unlike Israelis, the people of Gaza had few places to which they could flee for safety, there were plenty of shelters in the strip. But those shelters were for Hamas’s bombs and fighters, not ordinary Palestinians.