Obama speaks with Netanyahu, offering to broker ceasefire with Hamas

By MICHAEL WILNER, JPOST

07/11/2014 02:02

US President reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks; Congress prepares resolution supporting Israel, condemning Hamas “unprovoked” actions; State Department points finger at Hamas as perpetrator of crisis.

Netanyahu Says ‘Additional Stages’ Lie Ahead<
By Hezki Ezra, Gil Ronen, INN

Publish: 7/10/2014, 9:04 PM

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu delivered a short statement Thursday evening after a lengthy session of the Security-Diplomacy cabinet, which was devoted to Operation Protective Edge against Hamas’s terror machine in Gaza.

“The campaign is proceeding as planned,” he said, “but additional stages await us. We have struck Hamas and the sons of terror forcefully, and as the campaign wears on, we will deepen the damage to them.”

Netanyahu thanked the IDF and Israel Security Agency (ISA, or Shin Bet), for their operational activity. “They are making every effort to avoid hitting civilians, and if civilians are hit, it is only because Hamas purposely hides behind Palestinian civilians,” he explained. Read more…

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, INN

Hamas, for the last few days, has been continuing the war it lost in Judea and Samaria – from Gaza.

The kidnapping and murder of the three boys afforded Israel the opportunity and legitimacy to hit hard at the organizaion’s infrastructure and send it several years back in its tracks, just when it was about to take over the area by means of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections.

However, the advantage of fighting on the ground is only the case in Judea and Samaria; in Gaza, Israel will find it vey difficult to act effectively on the ground for the following reasons:

1. Population size and density, especially in urban areas such as Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Rafiah and the refugee camps make it necessary for Israel to introduce large infantry forces to a considerable number of points.  Read more…

US, UN Call for Gaza Ceasefire as Ground Offensive Looms
John Kerry calls for de-escalation that still protects Israel, Ban Ki-Moon demands ceasefire out of concern over ‘many Palestinian deaths.’   
By Ari Yashar,AFP  First Publish: 7/10/2014, 6:41 PM
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/182757

As the IDF on Thursday afternoon warned 100,000 Gaza residents to leave the security border, possibly indicating an imminent ground offensive, both the United Nations and the United States have called for a ceasefire. (G-D FORBID! FG)

Read more…

In a pair of important new books, Joshua Muravchik explains.

By Sol Stern, MOSAIC,   July 9, 2014 at 6:15pm

The Middle East is exploding in mayhem and savagery. The region’s system of nation states is disappearing before our eyes, perhaps to be replaced by one or more jihadist movements pledged to the destruction of Western civilization. In the upheavals to come, only one civilizational force, one stable democracy, has the will and the means to fight back and to defend the values of the liberal West. It is the tiny nation state of Israel.
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Ted Belman – 2/28/2008

The Assault on Israel’s Right to Self-Defense was described by Abraham Bell in his article onInternational Law and Gaza. Dr. Avi Bell is a member of the Faculty of Law at Bar-Ilan University, Visiting Professor at Fordham University Law School, and Director of the International Law Forum at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He clearly advised that Israel has the right of self defense and described the law as it pertains.

But I was left with some nagging questions. What do the principles and rules he set out mean in practice. I wanted to know if Israel had no choice but to invade or whether it could just use artillery and bombs even unintelligent inexpensive bombs. I fully understood that the siege was legal and so were targeted killings though our “international friends” disagree.

I asked Bruce Tucker Smith, JD, LL.M. (International Law), Lt Col USAFR (ret), the Co-author “Seventh Psalm”.

Here is his considered opinion. Read more…

Winning the New Gaza War

By Roger L Simon

The problem with going to war is you really have to win it definitively.  If you don’t, it will come back and bite you in the leg — or worse.

WSJ EDITORIAL: The Next Gaza War Hamas Will Keep Attacking Israel Until it Pays a Fatal Price.

By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

Being a pessimist means that having your predictions come true rarely brings much joy. That’s the situation I and many other Israelis and Palestinians are in right now–all those who warned that John Kerry’s insistence on restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks would likely spark a new round of Palestinian-Israeli violence, but were drowned out by those who insist that talking never does any harm. It’s already too late to spare Israelis and Palestinians the bloody consequences of Kerry’s hubris. But it’s important to understandwhy such initiatives so frequently result in bloodshed, so that future secretaries of state can avoid a recurrence.

Read More

Israel strikes taergets in Gaza

Netanyahu Decides to Expand Operations Until Rockets Stop

The operation will be expanded and will continue until the firing at our communities stops and quiet is restored.

Keeping goals realistic, with one eye on the clock

Experience shows that Israel will have time to continue the operation until one errant shell or bomb hits an apartment building or home and inadvertently kills a large number of people, or creates a heartbreaking reality, that will shake the world into action to stop Israel’s fire. And then Hamas, or whatever terrorist organization Israel is fighting at the time, will – too – stop its fire, until the next round.
Read more…

By Jonathan Tobin, COMMENTARY

John Kerry’s failed peace negotiations set off the spiral of violence between Israel and the Palestinians

By Lee Smith, MOSAIC

July 8, 2014

Events are moving so quickly in the Middle East that it seems like whatever you are reading is already outdated. Yesterday, after Hamas fired dozens of rockets into Israel over the weekend, Israeli Air Force planes targeted the Gaza-based group and killed at least seven members. Hamas’ actions follow the murderof a 16-year-old Arab Israeli, who was killed by soccer thugs in an alleged act of retribution for the abductionand murder of three Jewish Israeli teenagers, whose bodies were found last Monday. Netanyahu has repeatedly warned Hamas to cease its attacks. Hamas responded on Monday that it will continue its attacks until the blockade on Gaza is lifted. Both sides are likely to escalate.

So, how did we get here? Who is to blame? From one perspective, what we’re watching is the latest round in a nearly century-long cycle of Arab-Israeli violence, so it’s hardly surprising to see violence erupt once again. However, it’s also worth noting that it is precisely because peace is so rare in the Holy Land that the status quo needs to be given its space and left alone. Or you need to have a very good reason for disturbing it. Read more…

The Israel Project

Hamas launches rocket attack against Israeli nuclear reactor, expands targeting of Israeli population centers

WSJ: Tehran supplied arms to Gaza, “fueling Middle East terror”

PA mulls International Criminal Court bid

Hamas on Wednesday claimed credit for a rocket barrage targeting Israel’s nuclear reactor in the city of Dimona, issuing a statement boasting that the terror group’s fighters had attempted to hit the reactor with long-range M75 rockets. Reports confirmed that three rockets were launched from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip toward Dimona, and that Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system knocked one out of the sky and allowed the other two to pass by and land in open areas. Palestinians launched at least 82 rockets at various Israeli population centers over the course of the day, including barrages that reached further north than any previous Gaza-based attacks and which at times saw dozens of projectiles fired in the course of a single hour. Israeli sources, up to and including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have sought to emphasize that the attacks constitute a double war crime, inasmuch as the rockets are being launched from within densely packed Palestinian civilian areas and are aimed at Israeli civilian centers. White House and State Department spokespeople had gestured toward a broader dynamic during yesterday’s press briefings, noting that “civilians in Gaza… are subjected to the conflict because of Hamas’s” violence and actions. The Israelis for their part continued to press Operation Protective Edge, with a source telling the Jerusalem Post that “in the past 36 hours, [Israel] destroyed more than what was destroyed during all of Operation Pillar of Defense [in November 2012], and many targets were areas where senior Hamas commanders operate.” Netanyahu Spokesman Mark Regev separately stated that Jerusalem has “repeatedly warned Hamas that [rocket attacks] must stop.” Read more…

HAMAS’S LAST STAND?

Operation Protective Edge may look like its predecessors–Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012–in that it is a response to Palestinian terrorism launched from Gaza against Israeli civilians. The previous two rounds of the conflict ended with Hamas still in power in the Gaza Strip, weakened but able to re-arm over time and to project a strategic threat. There are five reasons, however, this time may be different.
Read more…

by Prof. Hillel Frisch, BESA

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 253

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

It is time for a full-scale offensive against Hamas and the other Islamist-Jihadist groups in Gaza. Israel should take over Gaza temporarily; destroy the terrorist infrastructure as much as possible, to the point where Israel will then be able to minimize future damage to its cities by limited military actions against the Hamas infrastructure. In short, Israel should adopt the highly successful anti-terrorist strategy it employed in the West Bank over the past decade. This will not completely end terrorism from Gaza, nor will it fully alleviate the plight of Israeli communities adjacent to Gaza, but it will considerably reduce the threat to Israel’s major population centers.

Israeli military strategy towards Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) has been vastly different from its strategy towards Gaza. Israel assessed correctly in the second intifada that the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Judea and Samaria was easy to penetrate because of its relatively low density of population, but difficult to contain because of its size and the length of the green line (over 300 kilometers long). Gaza, by contrast, was easy to contain but difficult to penetrate because of its small size and high density of population, especially its very large refugee camps. Read more…

By Ido Ben-Porat, Ari Yashar

Yoav Zitun, YNET

The army launched over 160 attacks on terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip overnight Tuesday as fighting in the south intensified after the first day of Operation Protective Edge saw rockets fired at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, extending further north than some had expected.

At least one Palestinian was killed in response to morning fire at Tel Aviv Wednesday, and Palestinian media report that a father and son were killed in yet another IAF response attack on central Gaza.

According to the military, they hit at least 120 concealed rocket launchers and destroyed ten homes of senior Hamas commanders, among them the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades’ Rafah and Khan Yunis regional commanders.

by Lee S. Bender and Jerome R. Verlin, ALGEMEINER Je