DEBKA, April 20/15
Anxiety about the new terror tunnels they sense Hamas is excavating under their feet is no longer confined to Israelis living in proximity to the Gaza Strip, or the soldiers serving there.
Israel’s northern borderland dwellers, who can see Hizballah’s yellow flags in from their balconies, have the same concerns. Their reports of mysterious underground explosions are confirmed by thousands of Israeli troops conducting field exercises in the neighborhood. The soldiers attest to heavy earthmoving equipment, explosions, burrowing, and shaking ground on the Lebanese side of the border, giving the area the appearance of a huge subterranean building site.
The Lebanese Shiite Hizballah group, Iran’s Lebanese surrogate, has clearly taken a leaf out of its Palestinian ally, Hamas’ book, for a fully mobilized terror tunnel project against northern Israel. Its manpower, including engineering units, is working under the guidance of Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers to sink a large network of tunnels leading under the border into Galilee. They are working efficiently and at top speed with the aid of modern Western-made earthmoving equipment and foreign professionals paid top dollar to manage the project.
Israel seems to be curiously passive in the face of its enemy’s ambitious enterprise. Only last week, the Defense Ministry’s Political Coordinator Amos Gilad denied any knowledge of terrorist tunnels reaching Israel from Lebanon.
However, Brig. Gen. Moni Katz, commander of the IDF’s Division 91, which is responsible for security of the Galilee region, told a different story: “To me it is obvious that the other side is busy digging tunnels. I don’t need intelligence to tell me this. Intuition is enough. There is no denying that this is what they are up to. Can I say they have completed a tunnel?” The general went on to reply: “I must assume they have. I can’t prove it or say for sure a tunnel has crossed into our territory. But my basic premise is that this is so and it is up to us to make plans to fit this case.”
Putting those plans into practice – which would necessitate destroying the tunnels either before they were built or at their entry-points – faces four major difficulties:
1. Close surveillance and first-class intelligence are required to keep track of hostile tunnel projects starting from the planning stage, the recruitment of manpower, the acquisition of engineering technology and equipment and registering the quantity of earth displaced and removed from the underground burrow.
2. The digging process, which sound sensors should have no difficulty in detecting, is a relatively short and irregular process which can just as easily be camouflaged by surface activities.
3. Locating a finished tunnel at the stage when it is still unused and relatively quiet calls for pinning down a number of variables, such as the type of soil, the depth, length, breadth and lining material used in building the tunnel, humidity, weather conditions on the surface as well as its environment, whether urban or rural.
4. Locating such a tunnel – even when it is already in operational use by an enemy – poses another set of difficulties. In combat conditions, electronic listening devices would be drowned out by the fire and explosions of battle and, in the confusion of war, enemy troops would be hard to intercept as they moved in and out the tunnels.
A glance at the map shows that the danger of tunnel warfare should also be taken into account on Israel’s eastern front – where it would just as hard to detect as in the north and the southwest: The Arab populations inhabiting the West Bank and the Israeli side of the border – only hundreds of meters apart – are similar enough to keep counter-terrorism authorities on a high level of alert for the construction of tunnel links between the two territories.
Perhaps a succession of military chiefs should be held accountable for letting the tunnel terror peril develop to its current proportions. But it must also be said that no silver bullet has so far been invented to counter this primitive vehicle of terror, including the methods tried till now, such as buried microphones, optical fibers sensitive to seismic tremors, deep trenches along the border and an assortment of off-beat inventions.
In the view of our military analysts, any solutions would have to vary from sector to sector, adapted to the military and topographical features in each case and an intelligence assessment of the level of risk involved in counteraction. This effort would have to be directed by an interdepartmental, inter-agency administration directly answerable to the prime minister or defense minister.
honeybee Said:
You do not speak for Tzaha”l which consists of more than the annual intace of conscripts that you visualise. The personal cost for Tzaha”l is borne by all Israelis by having to pay for a much larger national armed force than most nations do.
No, the Japanese were stopped in PNG by a battlion of CMF, something like USANG. It is Australia that offered the United States a basing from which to fight the Japanese that Hawaii never could have.
@ mar55:
Manama por favor, Amiga. Estoy inferma .
@ dove:
Real Women, no Jenner wantobes !!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
Please go to Chit Chat
@ mrg3105:
I’m not knowledgeable in military warfare but, if I had to do something about the tunnels I would not move a finger now. Wait until they are finished and then, blow them out of existence. Why to do it so early in the process? As long as they are working in them they are not bothering Israelis and they are expending time, effort and money to build them. Money they use in concrete is less money available to buy arms. Labor is keeping them occupied and, at the end we can destroy them and if they are inside at the time, much better. Let them, let them build.
WOMEN (girls) IDF training camp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgmo0E1K5wE&feature=player_detailpage
@ mrg3105:
I am speaking of the IDF. the young Jewish men who fight for the existence of Israel at great personal cost. Not their leader or their leaders strategies.
As for the USA !!!!!! As I vaguely remember we had to save Australia’s ass from the Japanese.
@Honeybee, because you are an American, you don’t unctually understand anything about warfare, so you have a kneejerk reaction when you see anything with IDF that seems negative.
The tunnels are a strategic problem, and the saying that best describes a bad strategy is that “the fish always rots from the head”
In war, such as Israel is in now, the head of IDF is the Prime Minister, who is effecively the CinC, but who is ineffective, and so is the IDF.
However, just so we are clear, there is nothing wrong with criticism because without it failure becomes the ‘new normal’, and mediocraty sets in. Torah teaches this, and so does recent history of the United States.
Am Yisrael expereinced defeat even under Moshe’s leadership, yet recovered because of constructive criticism, not because everyone had ‘positive thinking’ 🙂
mrg3105 Said:
You have stepped into a cow pie !!!!!!!!! Never “put down” the IDF to me.
@ mar55:
TX injured his forearm and is in need of minor surgery. And I have had what DR. called the coughing/sneezing virus. So have been busy surviving. I stopped trying to sell painting to much trouble for the remuneration.
lol
I quote from TaNaKh and HaZa’L, and you quote an art collector?!
Firstly you don’t know how I came to know and understand anything.
Secondly, “the beginning of wisdom is to call thing their proper names” (Chinese), aka dikduk in Ivrit.
I now know that you are just a dieheart political ‘zionist’ who has a smattering of Torah shiurim in English despite years in Israel. In fact ‘religion’ scares you because you may discover that haredim are right, and that would cause you to change your entire World-view, and admit you are not as ‘clever’ as you think you are, and your ideals are not ideal.
Rest assured, the haredim are not right, but they don’t know it! This galut is just like that galut, and the gematria of hakhma is 73, an allusion that despite the 70 elders, Miryam and Aharon in their midst, Am Yisrael could not take a step out of Mitzrayim until Moshe arrived. Where was the wisdom of the 72?
Dikduk matters because reality is made with words; HaShem looked into the Torah before creating (Midrash Rabbah, Sefer Beresheit 1:1).
The reality of political Zionism is that its still a German word that starts with a Zayin. So you know what Zayin means in Ivrit, and why no IDF unit has a Zayin company 🙂
And the road to ‘Zion’ is still named after a pope Derekh Ha’Apifyor. Since you don’t open the Talmud, and perhaps have never learned Onkelos, here is a good link for you http://www.balashon.com/2009/05/afifyor.html on who lights the way for Zionism 🙂
It’s quite different from a Tzadi, isn’t it? While Israel is ‘led’ by Zionist ‘tzadikim’, it is forced to remain armed because the thinking is done with the lower parts.
So I see your Leo Stein, and paraphrase Johann Banner, “you hear nothing, you see nothing, you know nothing!” You are just guarding an ideological ‘prison’ that people come and go from at will, and most never return.
And this is why IDF has no solutions for the Hizballah tunnels.
Shalom (in the Talmudic sense)
@ honeybee:
Where have you been? If you want to talk lets go to Chit Chat.
Are you still painting? I have an idea that will sell your paintings. You are a talented young woman.
mrg3105 Said:
@ yamit82:
http://www.searchquotes.com/quotation/The_wise_man_questions_the_wisdom_of_others_because_he_questions_his_own%2C_the_foolish_man%2C_because_i/13166/
Torah is not given so people can quote what suits them.
Nowhere in the Torah, and I mean TaNaKh and HaZa”L does it say that Am Yisrael should believe in HaShem.
This is because belief is falsifiable.
Ultimately every question asked in either TaNaKh or by HaZaL comes with fact-based proof. That is, if a member of Am Yisrael can’t get an answer which is factual beyond doubt, it’s not true.
In Christianity or Islam it doesn’t work that way because they don’t have the original texts 🙂 No Christian or Muslim has ever proven beyond any doubt that HaShem was, is and always will be.
This is the difference – Am Yisrael KNOWS this, or should, from the “And I will take you to Myself as a People, and I will be your G-d. Then you will KNOW that I am Hashem, the One who took you out from the subjugation of Egypt.” (Shemot 6:7, psukim geula), which is why it says “No longer shall any man teach his neighbour nor any man his brother, saying, KNOW Hashem! For all of them will know Me, from their smallest to their greatest.” (Yeremiah 31:33) and, “KNOW Hashem while you go about your ways, and He will make your paths straight” (Mishlei 3:6) which according to rabbi Yochanan the whole Torah is dependent on (Berachot 63a)
So how do we know? Where is the proof? Where is the evidence?
For that you will need to contact me off the forum.
As for facing armies, three types of individuals are urged not to go into combat: those that hadn’t planted, those that hadn’t built, and those that hadn’t fathered children. These are al allusions on how to conduct a campaign even when the enemy is faster, better equipped and more numerous. If you read every book on military art and science by every thinker in human history you will eventually (as I have) realise that there is no better way to decisively win a war. The only problem is, its not written for Greeks who require literal statements, but for members of Am Yisrael who have conceptual mindsets. Which is why a single person can defeat an army from 10,000 miles without so much as lifting a kitchen knife 🙂
No faith required.
Ze Torah tehyia, lo tikvah
Shalom
yamit82 Said:
Say those who rarely smoke !!!!!!
mrg3105 Said:
Steers are grain feed so they can put on weight for slaughter. The reason for the improvement in cattle herds can be attibted the culling of unnecessary males.
I am a very good tracker even with out the aid of an Amer. Indian.
mrg3105 Said:
I quoted the part that supports me and did not find it relevant to go further, But if you can add insight that I have ignored and relevant pls tell me what you are driving at, bearing in mind that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Let’s have it then…? First do enlighten about your christian analogy reference. You are going off on tangents ignoring what prompted my response in the first place.
yamit82 Said:
Yamit82, you have to get offline sometimes and read some sforim. Midrashim are ALSO Torah.
yamit82 Said:
Hints are the very essence of speculations.
@ honeybee:
The Torah has almost nothing to say about Abraham’s earlier life before age 75 but there are hints because of references to family members and their lives and positions of status.
These are midrashim http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/hl/hl92.htm
Midrash wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrash
mrg3105 Said:
Then the difference in feces is due to feed not sex.
honeybee Said:
And you need to get out more and find out how animal husbandry economics work. Dairy farms are not run like cattle ranches. Most cows are inseminated by lab techs that come around and service the herds. Steers are brought in if that fails, as occasionally it does.
yamit82 Said:
It is disingenous to quote the start of a concept there and not the end.
Ask yourself why ch.20 starts with horses, chariots and a larger enemy force, but ends with an advice how to conduct a siege.
yamit82 Said:
My Biblical Hebrew is rusty. You wouldn’t mind pointing out where the word ‘guarantee’ is to be found in the TaNaKh?
While you are looking for a ‘guarantee’, perhaps you can also find where HaShem says “Believe in Me”.
This must be why there are laws about being a part of the Army in the Torah, and why David HaMelekh went to wars.
Arabs have faith and belief in Allah also, yet they seem to be affected by the air delivered munitions as designed.
Tell that to the exiled tribes.
And don’t make an ass out of u and me.
Lots of Israelis sit a few miles from the border and do nothing either.
Lots of Israelis claim their prayer are heard, but wouldn’t know which side of the weapon to point towards the enemy.
When you stop with the tirades, get a grip, and are ready to listen…
mrg3105 Said:
Steers brought in for artificial insemination. Mrg3105 you need some basic lessons in biology.
yamit82 Said:
I guess thats a NO for listening with an open mind?
honeybee Said:
You didn’t make scientific observations, you just looked at whats on th eground.
A scientific observation is the analysis of the product of a scientific method used to test assumptions about an observed phenomena, when replicated in a controlled manner, i.e. an experiment.
For example on a NZ dairy farm where cows are paddock grass fed, the cow-pat is different in consistency to the steers that are brought in when artificial insemination fails because steers don’t give milk and don’t need to be grass-fed, so are grain-fed, producing a different sort of bull-shit.
Find some native Americans that can still track animals and they will explain to you all about this crap.
@ yamit82:
Read your statement, the contexts is ” somewhat” muddled. No offence.
honeybee Said:
If you like but so is most of the Bible…. We interpret the bible based on hints contained in the text where nothing or almost nothing is stated in the texts but then so does everyone else with their sacred texts you can accept or reject it’s all the same and of no consequence. 😛
@ yamit82:
Speculation !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bear Klein Said:
thank you Bear. My expertise has allowed me to be uniquely prepared for discussions with bloggers on the Pundit [er.] Max, CA, mrg3501, Felix and, of course, Yamit82.
Bear Klein Said:
Thank you Bear. My expertise has uniquely enabled me to debate with dweller, mrg3105, Felix Q, Max and , of course, Yamit82.
@ Bear Klein:
Thank you Bear. My expertise has uniquely enable me to best debate with the likes of dweller, mrg 3105, Felix Q, Max and ,of course, Yamit 82,
@ honeybee: So you have developed a unique expertise?
honeybee Said:
Read: http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/112063/jewish/Abrahams-Early-Life.htm
yamit82 Said:
You first Lord ??????
mrg3105 Said:
Going to War Deu 20
When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you. 2When you are about to go into battle, the priest shall come forward and address the army. 3He shall say: “Hear, Israel: Today you are going into battle against your enemies. Do not be fainthearted or afraid; do not panic or be terrified by them. 4For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies to give you victory.”
What does that say to you dullard?
@ yamit82:
Where did you Attend Sat. School? It was Shadrach, Mishach and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r1baNdgImo
@ honeybee:
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
@ mrg3105:
Not sure you are Jewish and if you are yuou seem to be an ignoramus re: Jewish authentic Jewish thought and your attempt at accurate exegesis. Your mostly cryptic statement are at best revisionist if anything influenced by Christianity and not the converse.. Once you have certainty re: HaShem then the faith is what we expect from him based on his promises to the Jewish people…. Earthly fear disappears in the knowledge that the Chosen people of this Omnipotence need fear no nation or might or force on this world and that the Jewish Destiny is – guaranteed by the G-d of History.
Yes, there are practical consequences that are to be drawn and there are very real steps that are forced upon us by the reality of the Jewish G-d of History. From the existence of this G-d, from both the awesome fear on the one hand and the certain confidence on the other, emerges an inescapable and imperative path. It is the path of faith and belief. Faith in the Jewish destiny and that if only the Jew remains true to His G-d and his heritage he can never be destroyed or overcome. Belief in the power and will of his G-d to destroy the enemy of the Jews. Faith and belief that all the horses or chariots and all the Jets and nuclear weapons in the world are as nothing before the G-d of History. Faith and belief that the rational and logical and obvious and pragmatic wither away before the power of the Creator and Destroyer, the G-d who shapes and forms, the G-d of History.
f we really believe that Abraham followed the path of the fiery furnace and that Nachshon leaped into the sea and that Gideon led 300 soldiers into battle against mighty enemy forces and Isaiah spat in the face of the all-powerful Assyrians, then we have cited the cases of Jews who truly believed and who believed in the only way that belief has any meaning – who, at the moment of truth, risked their lives on the assumption that the G-d of History did indeed exist. It is not enough to be a comfortable practicing Jew. Too many atheists practice a superficial kind of religious observance. We know so many of them. The Jew who believes in G-d until the war in Israel sends him flying back to New York. The Jew who believes in G-d until his son seeks to become part of the dangerous profession of Jewish freedom fighter. The Jew who prays for Zion from 5,000 miles away. All of them are Jews whose prayer shawls cover a body that denies the Jewish G-d of History.
You still have evaded explaining your statement re: ”that belief in HaShem is a Christian thing.”
Sophistry and obfuscation seems to be your forte instead of reasoned and knowledgeable argument.
@ mrg3105:
I remembered your comment about difference between cow and bull feces. Every morning ,when I walk down my
road pass the corner post in the pasture where the cattle gather, I make scientific observations. And, according to those observations I have concluded, no differences in color , shape or smell..
@ yamit82:
@ mar55:
Amen
@yamit82
Thats funny. First you call my comments “stupid and provocative”, i.e. judge me, and THEN you ask me to expalin what I mean, having already indicated your mind is closed.
Where in the lyrics is the “faith in G-d’d promise to the Jewish people”?
And, yamit82 Said:
No, this is a dullard you describe. There are two forms of warfare, asymmetric and stupid. Our mesorah mi Avraham avinu follows the first. As long as we use the one you suggest, we will always loose.
Faith is a hope, but hope is not a strategy.
I also noted you didn’t highlight “All is expected and is allowed”
Golan (not his real name), has been investigated for sexual abuse, is divorced (like father) and convicted of tax fraud, with a purfume named after his assumed name E-Go. He is the ‘tzadiq’ who chose Nissren Kader singing for Israel to listen to. He evaded reserve duty.
Not quite the Shelomo ibn Gabirol, is he?
Leadership is about truth and trust, and ‘Golan’ exhibits neither.
Tell me when you are ready to listen…with an open mind
@ yamit82:
AMEN!
mrg3105 Said:
If you are going to make such a stupid and provocative statement then it’s incumbent upon he who make it to state why he thinks so..”that belief in HaShem is a Christian thing.” Pls give your reasoning and any sources upon which you base your contention.
Not faith in G-d but faith in G-d’d promise to the Jewish people The brit!!!!
The true believer is the Jew whose values are clear and unpretentious, with knowledge of what is finite and infinite, important and meaningless, permanent and transitory. Who knows what is expected of a Jew and who leaps into the battle to perform as expected, regardless of the odds against him and the pragmatic chances of success. Who walks hand in hand with a real G-d and knows that ultimate success must be his, because of the Companion beside him. Who knows that it is not the breath of life of the gentile or the finite human that gives us existence and that the only criteria of one’s actions must be!
The destiny of the Jewish People is a guaranteed one.
There is a guarantee, a solemn oath, a surety, a divine bond that the Jewish people cannot be ever destroyed but rather that they and their G-d will emerge in days to come triumphant over the evils and the foolishness of all other nations.
Now tell us what you mean, if you can?
‘South Lebanon’ is actually territory in part belonging to sh’vatim Dan, Asher and Naftali
Pity Eyal Golan doesn’t know that belief in HaShem is a Christian thing.
@ Topaz:
Fear of the Goyim and not the fear of G-d is a generational Jewish disease.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkWGUkQf3e8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgj2y7cZwSQ
Because the leaders have been repeatedly saved from their own folly by the courage of the young soldiers THEY send to fight and die while FIRST protecting the enemy at the cost of their own. NOTHING will save the nation until the people of Israel march on the Knesset and demand the dissolution of the government and the removal of the military leadership that does not stand strong for Israel, AS ANY SANE COUNTRY MUST DO. Israel was to be armed, and to USE those arms to not allow Jewish people to be attacked and killed at will, with no means of resistance. What is with thousands of rockets, tunnels, knife attacks, car attacks, stone throwing, sending materials for tunnel building, funds and aid to the enemy, leaving kidnapped soldiers to be tortured for years. ALL ALLOWED. Israel is following in the path of the weakened politically-correct West – rushing to its ultimate destruction. A horrid dis-utopia is awaiting us ALL. Sadness
What a bunch of malarkey! Sisi had no problem, he just expelled thousands of Arabs from their homes and leveled a mile or two around the Rafah border. No more tunnels, finished. Israel sees the heavy earth moving equipment in play so why can’t it just bomb it and level a 2 mile security corridor and finished!