SOUTHERN ISRAEL, NEAR GAZA - On June 25, 2006, eight armed Palestinian men emerged from an underground tunnel through a hard-to-see hold in the ground, fired an RPG at an Israeli tank, killed two soldiers, snatched another young soldier, Gilad Shalit, and stole him away into Gaza. The attack lasted seven minutes. The Israeli Defense Forces then launched Operation Summer Rain against the kidnappers, against those who fire Qassam rockets at Israeli civilians, and against those who dig tunnels under the earth so they can smuggle weapons out of Egypt and carry out terrorist attacks inside Israel.
Soldiers keep watch on the border at a small military outpost just south of Kibbutz Nir Am.
There I met Major Tal Lev-Ram, Spokesman for the IDF Southern Command. He unfurled an enormous map of Gaza and asked me please not to take any pictures of it. Code names for villages and neighborhoods were hand-written with red ink in Hebrew.
“When we left the Gaza Strip we didn’t think the terrorism would stop," he said. "We understood that there would no longer be any legitimacy for them to act. A year after they continue to re-arm. The terrorist groups -- Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad -- they did not turn the areas we left into schools, factories, and so on. They became training camps for the terrorist groups.”
The major knows passable English, but he chose to speak to me in Hebrew through a translator. I had hoped for an interview with an English-speaking officer. But none of the spokesman for the Southern Command are fluent in English. All the English speakers were sent to the Northern Command so they could talk to foreign media during the Lebanon war. Only Israeli journalists who write and broadcast in Hebrew showed much interest in the military confrontation in Gaza.
the israeli soldiers are masters of blaming everything on the palestenians or labanese, to cloud people from the truth of their own brutality and terrorism. They will track you, hit you with a few bold terms like war, Muslims, terrorism, just to prove Muslims guilty, so that the truth disappears into thin air. How long will they continue this bloody feat of theirs!?
Alcohol,
The people who control how long this goes on are the Palestinians and the Shi'ite terrorists like Hezbollah. The Israelis did not force Lebanon to allow Hezbollah to make south Lebanon into an armed camp of terrorists. The Israelis did not force Hezbollah to rocket northern Israel and the Israelis did not force Hezbollah to raid into Israel and the Golan Heights to attack IDF soldiers and kidnap one.
Hezbollah's justification for its campaign against Israel, the Shebaa farms, is a fraud as its Syrian territory occupied by Israel not Lebanese.
Likewise, Israel did not force Hamas to continue to fire rockets and send suicide bombers into Israel.
Hezbollah and the Palestinians could end it today by adopting a policy of peace but they refuse.