-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 16, 2007 8:52:58 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Israel Blames IRAN for Palestinian Civil War, Says "Wider"
War Inevitable
After Hamas’s bloody triumph, showdown with Israel looms
The Palestinian civil war is about to become a wider conflict
Uzi Mahnaimi
The Times (UK), June 17, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/
article1942875.ece
... On Friday morning, Hamas announced the “liberation” of Gaza and
began changing well known place names into Islamic ones. The Tal-al
Hawa, or the Hill of Winds, as it was known for hundreds of years,
is now officially Tal al-Islam.
While his people were being slaughtered in Gaza, the Palestinian
president was sitting in his well protected compound in Ramallah on
the West Bank. The co-founder of Fatah, Abbas, Arafat’s heir, saw
part of his movement crushed.
In Gaza, looters swarmed through his offices and a laughing gunman
sat in his chair, picked up his phone and pretended to call
Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state. Abbas was being
humiliated.
Israel and the US moved fast to prop him up. Abbas, who was
choosing a new government yesterday, immediately denounced by
Hamas, was boosted by an announcement that Washington was prepared
to lift its embargo on aid, clearing the way for Israel and Europe
to follow suit. But a cash infusion may be too little too late. His
defeat has greatly diminished his authority.
Matti Steinberg, an Israeli analyst, claimed Israel itself was
partly to blame. “Israel systematically destroyed the Palestinian
Authority’s institutions,” he said. “Those who didn’t want to deal
with Arafat and said he was irrelevant have now got Hamas. And, if
they don’t help Abbas, they’ll get Al-Qaeda.”
“Going into Gaza is inevitable,” said Brigadier-General Moshe
Yaalon, a former chief of staff of the Israeli army. “No one will
do the job for us, we should prepare for a land attack in Gaza, and
the question is not if but how and when.”
Yaalon said he was aware of the heavy price Israel might pay for a
major land incursion into Gaza. But that was the army’s job, he
insisted.
Military sources said three Israeli divisions amounting to 20,000
soldiers stood ready for an onslaught. An attack is not imminent,
but the troops are on standby for a possible incursion later this
summer.
Earlier this year, in the remote Negev desert, the army rehearsed a
full-scale offensive into Gaza. A giant Palestinian “refugee camp”
was built to help troops practice assault methods in the tightly
packed camps.
Since its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Israel has lost control
of the southern border separating Gaza from Egypt. As a result,
tons of explosives and arms have been smuggled in. “We even know
about Iranian instructors who’ve arrived in Gaza,” said the
commander of the southern sector, Brigadier-General Aluf Yoav Galant.
Palestinian security sources claim that hundreds of Hamas militants
returned recently from weeks of training in Iran. “They left Gaza
for Cairo, then flew to Tehran without anyone to stop them,” said a
Palestinian official.
A warren of tenement flats, camps and shanty towns strung among the
desert sands along the coast, Gaza is a perfect laboratory for the
street fighting skills that Iran perfected in the ruins of
Khorramshahr and Abadan during its own war against Iraq.
Israeli military intelligence says Gaza’s 115 square miles have
been turned into a giant arms warehouse, honeycombed with
strongpoints, booby traps and tunnels.
Having learnt from last summer’s conflict in Lebanon, the Israelis
will go for a quick onslaught, aimed at killing as many militants
as possible in a matter of days. Hamas will try to bog down the
Israeli army in close-quarter fighting.
“We won’t have more than a week for the fighting,” said an Israeli
source familiar with the plan. “We’ve been instructed to cause as
little damage as possible to the local population.”
So enormous are the political and diplomatic sensitivities that
Israel’s prime minister is flying to Washington this weekend to
outline his plan at the White House.
America does not want another summer of gruesome television
pictures showing its ally at war with an elusive Muslim foe in a
landscape of shattered homes and dead civilians. It also knows that
if Gaza is to remain cut off, short of food and denied money from
overseas, this could prompt a humanitarian crisis that will be
quickly exploited for propaganda throughout the Middle East.
Israel move swiftly yesterday to announce it would allow food and
humanitarian aid into Gaza, and in London Gordon Brown promised new
investment.
Tel Aviv knows it will have to show it has been goaded beyond
endurance - perhaps by an esca-lated Hamas campaign of rocket
attacks or, worse, a resumption of suicide bombings - before it can
show it has no alternative but to storm Gaza.
The US will urge caution. Officials close to Rice fear a raid on
Gaza could deal another blow to American influence. Against this,
the Israelis will argue that Hamas will only get stronger with
every passing day unless it is defeated.
Among Palestinians, of whom Henry Kissinger, the former US
secretary of state, remarked that they never lost an opportunity to
lose an opportunity, many will complain of another self-inflicted
wound in Gaza.
Long wedded to the dream of unity, Palestinians are confronted with
the truth that their society is fractured by clan, by religion, by
ideology and by political loyalty.
Last week, witnesses in Gaza told of celebrating Hamas fighters who
sent small boys to distribute sweets to passers-by. Previously, it
was a gesture made only when Israelis were killed by a suicide
bomb. This time the sweets were offered to celebrate the killing of
Fatah men.
Down on the Gaza shore, the fleeing intelligence man, Fadi, jumped
into his waiting boat. An Israeli gunboat signalled to the crew as
he and his men scrambled aboard – Palestinian fugitives on an
Israeli vessel saving them from the Hamas hit squads.
There are many strange allies in wartime, and, if Hamas has
anything to do with it, the covert British and American alliance
with Palestinian “moderates” is about to be made embarrassingly
public.
Ransacking Fadi’s office, the masked gunmen will have found a
treasure trove of intelligence files. “We’ve discovered documents
that will shock the world when published,” the movement proclaimed.
The propaganda war, at least, has already started.
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