[News] Daring and lethal Palestinian raids from Gaza sap Israeli morale

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Daring and lethal Palestinian raids from Gaza sap Israeli morale

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Wed, 07/30/2014 - 14:11
*http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/daring-and-lethal-palestinian-raids-gaza-sap-israeli-morale*

The Israeli army is reeling from two attacks behind its lines by 
fighters of the Qassam Brigades 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/qassam-brigades>, the military 
resistance wing of Hamas.

The attacks are feeding a sense in Israel that its ground assault on 
Gaza is turning into a disaster and there are indications that Israeli 
anger and frustration are being taken out with even more deliberate 
killings of Palestinian civilians.

On Monday, four Israeli soldiers 
<http://www.jpost.com/Operation-Protective-Edge/Mortar-shell-attack-wounds-10-in-southern-Israel-369179> 
were killed and ten injured when Palestinian resistance fighters fired 
mortars across the boundary from Gaza.

But the most dramatic incident was a commando raid in which seven Qassam 
fighters emerged from a tunnel, raided a fortified Israeli army outpost 
at Nahal Oz inside Israel, killed five soldiers according to the Israeli 
count, and returned safely to Gaza through the tunnel.

Qassam said its fighters killed 10 Israeli combatants in the attack.

Multiplying the psychological impact is the fact that Qassam released a 
video of the incident on Tuesday (above), which the military 
correspondent of Israel's Channel 10 television acknowledged "appears to 
be authentic 
<http://www.timesofisrael.com/day-22-five-soldiers-killed-four-of-them-in-mortar-attack-idf-bombards-gaza/>."


    No ceasefire without end of siege

Along with the video of the raid, Qassam's commander Muhammad Deif 
released an audio recording 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpt3NTFH5X0> saying that his group 
would not accept a ceasefire which did not end the siege of Gaza. Deif 
said that his fighters were prepared for a long battle and were working 
according to a plan rather than "reacting" to events like Israel.

Deif said that the "enemy" had been "defeated" in its ground war and 
would continue to pay a heavy price as long as its army was in Gaza.

The latest resistance attacks across Israeli lines have rattled 
frontline Israeli soldiers, one of whom grumbled to /Ynet/ that " I'm 
not sure where is safer, inside or outside" Gaza.

"We have been to a number of rallying points, and were amazed to 
discover that the lessons of the Second Lebanon War and Pillar of 
Defense had not been implemented," the soldier added, referring 
respectively to Israel's failed 2006 invasion of Lebanon and its 2012 
bombardment of Gaza.

"Yesterday we were punched hard in the gut,because the feeling was that 
outside the Strip was much safer -- but it's not true," another soldier 
said after Monday's attack.

The attacks have yet to dent the support for the massacre among the 
Israeli Jewish public, 90 percent of whom 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4551824,00.html> still 
support the assault, according to a recent poll.


    Israeli exhaustion

While Palestinian civilians have been the main targets of Israeli 
attacks -- the number of fatalities from Israel's 23-day assault has now 
surpassed 1,200 persons, 80 percent civilians -- Israel's losses are 
overwhelmingly military.

With more than 50 soldiers dead, a price no one in Israel expected to 
pay for attacking Gaza, even the country's top leaders appear weary.

After visiting wounded soldiers today, Israeli former president Shimon 
Peres <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/shimon-peres> said the assault 
on Gaza had "exhausted itself ... and now we have to find a way to stop 
it," /Ynet/ reported 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4552247,00.html>.

Peres said he hoped the war would end with Israeli-backed Palestinian 
Authority /de facto/ leader Mahmoud Abbas resuming control of Gaza with 
the support of Israel and Israeli-allied Arab dictatorships.

Abbas "has the support of Egypt and the Arab world more than anyone else 
today," Peres said. He appeared to be reflecting broader thinking among 
Israel's elites who now see Abbas as their "savior 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4552112,00.html>."


    Israel "dragged"

The raids from Gaza have heightened the sense among establishment 
commentators that Israel has lost -- or never had -- the initiative in 
the ground assault that it launched on Gaza.

"From the first day of the operation, we have been dragged and we are 
still being dragged," wrote Nahum Barnea 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4551558,00.html>, Israel's 
leading columnist, in /Ynet/, "Hamas is dictating the extent and length 
of the conflict, and our forces have not found a move, an initiative or 
a patent to break this dictation."

Commenting specifically on the Nahal Oz video, /Ynet's/ Yossi Yoshua 
wrote <http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4552236,00.html> that 
the Israeli soldiers who were targeted appeared "unprepared and off 
guard, even in broad daylight."

In a sign of the potential impact of the video in Israel, Yoshua wrote 
that /Ynet/ "has chosen not to post" the video "because of its graphic 
nature and from the desire not to aid Hamas in its propaganda."

But he acknowledged that the Israeli army "has some tough questions to 
answer regarding what went down in the pillbox next to Nahal Oz."


    "Massive attack" in Shujaiya routs Golani Brigade

It is well established 
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/15/israelpalestine-unlawful-israeli-airstrikes-kill-civilians> 
that the Israeli army deliberately targets civilians, civilian homes and 
other civilian objects.

Unable to break the resistance on the ground, Israel is going after the 
civilian population to "terrorize" them into submission, dozens of 
international law experts and human rights experts said in a recent 
statement 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-attacks-designed-terrorize-gaza-population-international-law-experts-say>. 
This is a reprise of Israel's so-called "Dahiya Doctrine" used against 
civilians in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2008-2009.

In the latest horrifying massacre today 
<http://maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=716936>, Israeli shells 
reportedly slammed into a UN school in Jabaliya refugee camp, killing 16 
people.

Yet the sheer unpreparedness of the Israeli army for military resistance 
may be causing it to take its rage out in even more vengeful attacks on 
Palestinian civilians.

In a revealing account 
<http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=369102> of 
Israel's 20 July attack on the Shujaiya 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/shujaiya> neighborhood east of Gaza, 
/The Jerusalem Post/ revealed that the army's elite Golani Brigade 
suffered a thrashing at the hands of well-prepared resistance fighters 
who launched a "massive attack."

"The Golani Brigade in [Shujaiya] sustained heavy casualties," the 
newspaper reported citing an army source, "after Hamas intelligence 
units mapped out its location."

Fearing they "would be getting 600 body bags back" containing dead 
Israeli soldiers, commanders withdrew the Israeli infantry and simply 
shelled Shujaiya, causing mass destruction and the deaths of dozens of 
civilians <http://electronicintifada.net/tags/shujaiya-massacre>.


    Shoot to kill

In a Facebook posting, Eran Efrati, a former Israeli army combat soldier 
turned dissident researcher and activist, claimed that Israeli soldiers 
serving in Gaza had leaked information to him in recent days that 
soldiers were "murdering ... Palestinians by sniper fire in [Shujaiya] 
neighborhood as punishment for the deaths of soldiers in their units."

Efrati claimed that commanding officers had given shoot-to-kill orders 
ostensibly meant to protect Israeli forces, but whose real purpose was 
to "enable soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing 
their fellow soldiers (something that for years the IDF [Israeli army] 
has not faced during its operations in Gaza and the West Bank)" by 
killing Palestinian civilians.

Efrati cited the cold-blood sniper shooting, caught on video 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/war-crime-video-shows-sniper-killing-wounded-gaza-civilian>, 
of Palestinian youth Salem Shamaly in Shujaiya on 20 July, as a likely 
example of this phenomenon.

Efrati spent years <http://www.soldierandrefusenik.com/about-us/> 
working with Breaking the Silence 
<http://electronicintifada.net/tags/breaking-silence>, an Israeli group 
that collects and publishes testimonies of abuses from Israeli soldiers 
but also protects them from consequences by concealing their identities.

Since Efrati's posting, a copy of which was captured by The Electronic 
Intifada, Efrati's entire Facebook page is no longer available.


    Looming political disaster for Netanyahu

Nahum Barnea points 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4551558,00.html> to the 
political crisis the heavy losses of Israeli soldiers is causing to 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing pressure to 
expand a ground attack in Gaza which Barnea and other commentators say 
is falling far short of the stated aim of destroying the resistance's 
system of tunnels.

There are signs of internal disarray as senior Israeli army officers 
leak to the media about disagreements with the country's political 
leadership. One "senior officer" disputed Netanyahu's claim that the 
army had not made him fully aware of the "threat" from Gaza tunnels.

"Our responsibility is to lead the offensive to where it needs to go, 
not to where the public wants. This is not reality TV and rating is not 
a factor," the senior officer told /Ynet/ 
<http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4551817,00.html>.

If Netanyahu presses on, Barnea writes, "he will have to deal with the 
[rising Israeli] death toll. He probably remembers what happened to 
former Prime Minister Menachem Begin in similar circumstances; if he 
stops, he will have to deal with disappointment and internal criticism."

Barnea is referring to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon which killed 
tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese.

It was seen as a catastrophe in Israel, which lost almost seven hundred 
soldiers. Begin, once the revered leader of the Irgun Zionist terrorist 
group in the 1940s, left office in disgrace and died soon afterwards.


    Israel looking for a way out

In an astonishing sign of Israel's eagerness to end the Gaza assault on 
less than humiliating terms, the foreign ministry advised Netanyahu to 
initiate a UN Security Council resolution 
<http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.607936> that 
would set favorable terms for Israel. Israel normally seeks to avoid any 
action by the UN.

The resolution would call for Gaza to be "disarmed," /Haaretz/ reported, 
and for Abbas to return to Gaza. It would be modeled on resolution 1701, 
that allowed Israel to retreat from Lebanon in 2006.

But despite the face-saving 2006 resolution, no one in Israel doubts 
that Lebanese resistance forces are likely to be fiercer than ever 
should Israel ever plan a return. No matter what the Security Council 
says, Palestinian resistance groups are not going to unilaterally 
disarm, giving Israel the victory it could not achieve in battle.

The 1982 and 2006 Lebanon wars, like so many of Israel's aggressions, 
showed that if "winning" is measured in slaughtering civilians, Israel, 
like the United States in Vietnam, remains the champion.

But politically and strategically, Israel and its leaders may be 
realizing that they are facing another defeat in Gaza 
<http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-being-defeated-gaza-it-was-lebanon>.

-- 
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