United with Israel

Father Gabriel Nadaf, a leader in the Greek-Orthodox church in Israel and a staunch supporter of the State of Israel, dispatched a letter to ambassadors from various countries stationed in Israel, calling on them to support Israel’s government and the IDF during Operation Protective Edge, to unite and fight terrorism and “to safeguard the Holy Land.”

Father Nadaf is a strong supporter of Arab Christians joining the IDF and is considered the spiritual father of the Israeli Christians in the IDF. He has been attacked because of his support of Israel, his family has been assaulted and threatened, and the church has even threatened to excommunicate him.

“In the name of Israeli Christians,” Father Nadaf wrote: Read more…

Israel has an extraordinary opportunity that may not last… Hamas must be rooted out in depth.

By David P. Goldman, PJ MEDIA

There will be endless admonitions to Israel from the Obama administration, the United Nations, and so forth, demanding an early end to the Gaza war now underway. Israel’s security needs dictate the opposite: Hamas’ capacity to make war must be crippled.

Tel Aviv last week remained one of the safest cities in the world despite the incessant rocket bombardment. In the bomb shelters at the David Intercontinental, we joked about the lack of drinks and canapes at the hotel’s hastily-improvised guest mixers. The cafe terraces were full every night on Dizengoff Street. But complacency on Israel’s part would be misplaced, perhaps even fatal. For the moment Israeli ingenuity has shifted the advantage in rocketry to the defense. That may not be the case for very long. Iron Dome has been extremely effective in containing the damage from a barrage of about 2,000 unguided rockets launched from Gaza. Most of these explode harmlessly in empty areas; the few that fly towards targets of value have been taken down with a 90% success rate. But the advantage may shift back to the offense some time in the next few years.
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Israellycool

Some of the claims I am seeing online include how the vast majority of Gazans killed are civilians, and how Israel is deliberately targeting them.

Regarding the latter, we all know this is nonsense – if Israel wanted to kill civilians it would carpet bomb Gaza. It is precisely because we want to avoid civilian casualties, that we opt for pinpoint strikes and ground operations, at risk to our soldiers’ lives.

But what about the first claim? Are the vast majority civilians? Read more…

GOC Southern Command: Only ground op can take out tunnels

YNET

Maj.-Gen. Tugeman says mission is not yet done, while cabinet members disagree with defense minister’s assessment that mission can be accomplished in coming days.
Matan Tzuri

Israel cannot protect itself from the threat posed by the terror tunnels with the Iron Dome, so continuing to combat it is a necessity, GOC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Sami Turgeman said on Monday.

Turgeman said the joint mission by the ground forces, the artillery corps and the air force has been successful in hitting hundreds of Hamas militants. But despite that, the mission isn’t done yet, he stressed.
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10 terrorists killed attempting to infiltrate Israel through tunnel

JPOST

Two terrorist attack cells entered Israel from northern Gaza via a smuggling tunnel on Monday morning.

The second cell fired an anti-tank missile at a military vehicle.

The Shin Bet sent an alert to the IDF hours before the attack, warning of intentions of terrorists in northern Gaza to infiltrate the country. Read more…

al Monitor

Ali Hashem writes that since 2006, Iran has helped Hamas develop an indigenous rocket capability.

“According to information acquired by Al-Monitor from sources in Tehran, Gaza and Beirut, a new strategy was adopted after the July/August 2006 war in Lebanon with respect to military support. The main goal was protecting the fighting groups from the danger of a military siege by making them capable of producing as many rockets as they need on the spot,” Hashem reports.
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Israel draws up over-plan for control of the Gaza Strip

DEBKA

The IDF’s Shejaiya operation in the Gaza Strip continues apace, carried forward by five task forces now heading for the center of Gaza City amid casualties on both sides. Sunday, July 20, Israel’s crack Golani Brigades lost 18 fighters, without slowing down, compared with 170 Palestinian fatalities.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that each task force, the size of half a division, is an integrated amalgam of air, armored, artillery and engineering forces, capable of operating almost autonomously in field combat. The buildup of the last 24 hours has expanded Israel’s fighting strength in the Gaza Strip to a total of 75,000 men, the largest ever fielded in this territory. Because of its scale, Israeli leaders are referring to Defensive Edge as a war rather than an operation.
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Published July 20, 2014

FOX NEWS
CAIRO – Gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades attacked a border guard post Saturday in Egypt’s western desert in a brazen assault that killed 21 troops deployed in the province along the border with neighboring Libya.

Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi called it a “terrorist attack” on soldiers defending the country’s borders that will “not go unanswered.

By Nidra Poller, NEW ENGLISH REVIEW,  reporting from Paris,

My brief article published in Tablet http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/179169/anti-israel-protestors-attack-paris-synagogues was based on information available at the time. When the July 14th holiday weekend ended I started to receive eyewitness accounts from Web sites, Jewish radio, and my own sources. It became apparent that the original Agence France Presse release, used by outlets worldwide, was concocted in lethal narrative format. Now we have videos of the “demonstration” from start to middle to semi-finish at Place de la Bastille that reveal its true nature. It was not a peaceful gathering slightly tarnished by a few rowdies at the last minute. [annotated links to videos below] Distinguished members of the Jewish community who were in the synagogue, including the Chief Rabbi of France, testified to the violence of the attempted intrusion. A [bad] translation of a text by a member of the congregation is posted on Tablet. Read more…

We’ve come this far. We have mobilized 100,000 soldiers. We have suffered many casualties. We have once again learned how implacable our enemy is. We must finish the job. We must destroy Hamas. We must never give them a concession for anything. We must wipe them out so that Iran and Qatar can no longer finance their fight against us. We must have zero tolerance for their continued existence. We must not offer quiet for quiet. We must flatten their strongholds before putting our troops at risk. We must not accept any international guarantees to disarm Hamas. We must do it ourselves. We must present an iron wall. Ted Belman

Jonathan S. Tobin, COMMENTARY

After two weeks of fighting along the border with Gaza, there is a growing sense that the Israeli government is starting to realize that its assumptions about how to obtain Prime Minister Netanyahu’s goal of “sustainable quiet” may have been all wrong. But if the Israelis are being forced reluctantly to reassess their beliefs about how Hamas could be forced to stop shooting, the question remains whether the Obama administration is up to speed about the changing rules in the conflict.
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DEBKA

Still ahead of the Israeli operation, after the troops finish cleansing Shejaiya are similar challenges to dismantle Hamas’ offensive capabilities in another three of their Gaza City strongholds: Shaati, Al Bureij and Nuseirat, before Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure can be said to have been disarmed.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz praised the Israeli units fighting in the Gaza Strip and pledged they will carry on for as long as necessary, until Israel is safe from Hamas terror. While regretting the loss of Palestinian civilian life, Gen. Gantz held Hamas responsible for the innocent casualties, by forcing them to stay in place in spite of Israel’s warnings to them to escape. Hamas could have provided the population with shelters, schools and hospitals, instead of investing in rockets and tunnels for Israel’s destruction, he said.

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ADL’s Interfaith Summer Camp Infiltrated by Supporters of Al Qaeda Terrorist
By Ilya Feoktistov and Charles Jacobs

Janet Levy brought this very important expose to my attention with this covering email.

Washington Post

July 20 at 4:38 PM

Day 13 was the bloodiest so far. More than one hundred Palestinians were killed in heavy bombardment and street battles in Gaza on Sunday and 13 Israeli soldiers were slain in the most intense day of fighting in Israel’s current offensive against Hamas, officials said.

Israel said it pummeled a neighborhood in east Gaza because the warren of shops and concrete-block homes was the site of frequent rocket launches and concealed a network of tunnels dug by Hamas fighters and allied militant factions.

When their troops went in, Israeli military officers say, they were surprised by the tenacity, training and weaponry of their opponents. They said Israeli soldiers were repeatedly hit by Gaza militants firing from windows, employing land mines and setting booby traps. Read more…

Seven soldiers were killed when an anti-tank missile fired from a home in Gaza struck their APC on Saturday; others killed in separate firefights with terrorists throughout the Strip

JPOST
Eighteen IDF soldiers have been killed since the start of the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza in multiple exchanges of fire with Hamas. The majority of the casualties occurred throughout Saturday and Sunday.

The IDF was still completing the process of identifying the fallen soldiers. The families had been notified of the soldiers’ deaths.

Additionally, Col. Rasan Alian, commander of the Golani Brigade, was moderately injured in an exchange of fire in Gaza. He has been hospitalized at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva Dozens of wounded IDF soldiers were brought from the fighting in Gaza to a number of hospitals across Israel on Sunday morning.In total, fifty three wounded Israeli soldiers have been hospitalized from the fighting in Gaza.
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Daniel Greenfield

Posted: 19 Jul 2014 08:48 PM PDT

Shiites and Sunnis temporarily put aside their blood feuds and entire families of Syrian Alawites and Turkish Sunnis stand in London or Berlin screaming “Death to the Jews”.Joining them are elderly Trotskyists and aging Stalinists, normally as mutually hostile as Shiites and Sunnis, who put aside their differences to feebly wave cardboard signs about the Zionist war machine.

Fake blood is everywhere. Aspiring art students who can’t draw try to figure out new ways of intersecting a Swastika and a Star of David. Latuff cartoons are printed out along with bloody photos  of dead people from Syria, Hollywood horror movies and on the rare occasion, Gaza, and shoved in everyone’s faces.

The organizers take a break from submitting angry Truth Dig articles about Brazilian cocoa exploitation and dive headfirst into a rally that, unlike all their other rallies, the media will actually cover. They prowl the police barriers like hungry hyenas looking for a reporter.

Any reporter.

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Israel faces perilous, protracted war

DEBKA

The IDF tried to mitigate the bad news from Hamas warfront by releasing it in sections over Saturday and Sunday, July 19-20. Four soldiers were killed and a score were wounded. Maj. Amotz Greenberg, 45, from Hod Hashorn and Sgt. Adar Bresani, 20, from Nahariya, were shot dead Saturday when their jeep was attacked by Hamas infiltrators bursting out of a tunnel.

On the Gaza battlefield, Paratrooper Staff Sgt. Bana Roval, 20, from Holon, was shot dead by a terrorist from another tunnel, and 2nd Lt, Bar Rahav, 21, from Ramat Yishai, was killed by a missile defense system in a nearby tank.
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Security forces have been preparing for years for the next ground operation; training focused on another Lebanon war but is relevant for Protective Edge as well.

IDF reservists on the Gaza border. (Photo: EPA)

The message that the IDF official wanted to convey in late March was also evident in the field: In the past year, the IDF has spent NIS 1.3 billion in training of thousands of ground, armored, engineering and artillery troops. This does not include billions of shekels allocated for the purchase of advanced weaponry.
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After telling residents to leave pronto, Israel has now shown they mean business. Gazans and everybody else now understand this. Ted Belman

JPOST

Thousands of residents flee homes as IDF ramps up military offensive; Palestinian death toll stood at 353 before latest attack.

At least 20 Palestinians were killed on Sunday by Israeli shelling in a Gaza neighborhood, where bodies were strewn in the street and thousands fled toward a hospital packed with wounded, witnesses and health officials said.

The mass casualties in the Shejaia district in northeast Gaza appeared to be the heaviest since Israel launched its offensive on the Palestinian territory on July 8 after cross-border rocket strikes by militants intensified.
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