Israel threatens massive Gaza ground assault
Pastor Dale Morgan
Wednesday October 18, 2:14 AM
*Israel threatens massive Gaza ground assault*
Israel has ratcheted up threats of a massive ground offensive in the
Gaza Strip, amid an ongoing war of words with the ruling Hamas movement
which has vowed to teach the army a harsh lesson.
"Gaza should not become a second Lebanon," said Immigrant Absorption
Minister Zeev Boim on Tuesday, reiterating a phrase used by Israeli
leaders recently to mean the territory should not become a bastion of
militant resistance.
"Apparently we will not have any other choice but to launch an expanded
operation, like Defensive Shield, in order to destroy the stockpiles of
weapons and to hit the terrorist organizations," said Boim, a close ally
of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Defensive Shield, the largest military operation in the West Bank since
the 1967 Six Day War, was launched by Israel in 2002. It left more than
200 Palestinians and 29 Israeli soldiers dead and some 5,000
Palestinians detained.
"We have to completely stop the rocket fire and not allow the terrorists
to smuggle modern arms that would upset the balance of power between the
forces," Boim told public radio.
Israel has already been pounding Gaza for nearly four months after
militants, including those from the armed wing of the Islamist party
Hamas, seized a soldier and killed two others in a cross-border raid in
late June.
More than 250 Palestinians as well as two Israeli soldiers have been
killed in the territory since June 28.
Nevertheless, militants have continued to fire rockets into the Jewish
state and, according to Israel, have accumulated vast stockpiles of arms
via tunnels dug to Egyptian territory.
The Israeli military said it overnight uncovered and destroyed a tunnel,
dozens of metres long and 12 metres (40 feet) deep, that officers
maintained had been used to smuggle weapons from Egypt into southern Gaza.
In northern Gaza, the military fired a missile, which witnesses said
destroyed a generator serving a large part of the town of Beit Hanun,
depriving it of power. The army said it targeted militants preparing to
fire rockets.
On Monday, the armed wing of Hamas declared it had the "means and arms
necessary to confront the Zionist enemy with all our force if it
proceeds (further) with military operations in the Gaza Strip."
"If the enemy decides to go towards a large confrontation with Hamas, we
will be up to this challenge and are totally ready to resist. We have
finished preparations to teach the Zionist enemy a lesson it will not
forget," the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said.
The group rejected Israel's claims that vast stores of smuggled arms
have been amassed, accusing the Jewish state of "using such allegations
to justify criminal operations it seems to have decided to wage in the
Gaza Strip."
Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya, who heads the Hamas-led
government, promised again Tuesday not to bow to foreign pressure.
"The Americans don't want the Palestinian people to form a government
based on national consensus but based on their views and their
conditions," Haniya told a gathering of business leaders in Gaza City.
"Foreign diktats will not weaken our determination," he added.
Haniya and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas have failed to agree on
the formation of a unity government, with Hamas refusing international
conditions to recognise Israel and past peace agreements, and to
renounce violence.
As a result, the West froze direct aid to the Palestinian government
after Hamas took office in March, flinging the territories into economic
meltdown and exacerbating plummeting living standards, particularly in
the Gaza Strip.
Israel's Summer Rain offensive has wreaked havoc in the impoverished
territory, where 1.4 million people live on rationed electricity since
Israel bombed Gaza's sole power plant in late June.