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GAZA CITY (AFP) — Israeli warplanes carried out intensive raids on Hamas targets on Monday as ground troops surrounded Gaza's main city, while Israel faced mounting diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire.
The senior Hamas leader in Gaza promised "victory is coming" for the Islamist group, but Israel's defence minister said "we have hit Hamas hard" while insisting the operation to halt Hamas rocket attacks would continue.
Palestinian group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, has announced it will send a delegation to Egypt for ceasefire negotiations as diplomatic efforts to end the fighting in Gaza intensified.
Ayman Taha, a Hamas official told the Reuters news agency on Monday that a group would head to Cairo "answering an Egyptian invitation to hold discussions".
Taha did not say whether the delegation would include Hamas members from Gaza or exiled leaders.
As Israeli forces attacked Gaza by land, sea and air, residents living in the congested coastal strip faced a fateful question: Flee the shelling and shooting, or hole up inside their homes and hope for the best?
The five-member al-Jarou family decided to make a break for it around midday Sunday. They abandoned their home in the Shaaf neighborhood east of Gaza City and dashed by car to a relative's house a mile and a half away, thinking it would be safer, according to interviews with family members and neighbors.
Reporting from Gaza City and Jerusalem -- As Israeli forces closed in on Gaza City, Mohammed Barbari joined the scramble by its most intrepid residents Sunday for dwindling supplies of food they would need while hunkering down at home.
The first explosion tore through the central Firas Market at 11:30 a.m. as he approached from adjacent Palestine Square. Unable to turn his yellow Volkswagen Golf around in traffic, he kept driving toward the hail of shrapnel and the screams of scattering shoppers.
Three hours after the Israel Defense Forces began their ground operation in the Gaza Strip, at about 10:30 P.M. Saturday night, a shell or missile hit the house owned by Hussein al A'aiedy and his brothers. Twenty-one people live in the isolated house, located in an agricultural area east of Gaza City's Zeitoun neighborhood. Five of them were wounded in the strike: Two women in their eighties (his mother and aunt), his 14-year-old son, his 13-year-old niece and his 10-year-old nephew.
The bloodied children are clearly civilians; men killed as they launch rockets are undisputedly not. But what about the 40 or so young Hamas police recruits on parade who died in the first wave of Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza?
And weapons caches are clearly military sites – but what about the interior ministry, hit in a strike that killed two medical workers; or the money changer's office, destroyed last week injuring a boy living on the floor above?
The eastern outskirts of Gaza City was where the Israel Defense Forces encountered the most serious resistance yet since the Gaza ground incursion began Saturday. Troops who raided the home of a Hamas man in the area Sunday discovered that the house served as cover for the entrance of no fewer than three underground tunnels, from which Hamas gunmen fled to nearby houses and fired.
For nine days, as European and United Nations officials have called urgently for a cease-fire in Gaza, the Bush administration has squarely blamed the rocket attacks of the Palestinian militant group Hamas for Israel’s assault, maintaining to the end its eight-year record of stalwart support for Israel.
Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address on Saturday, said the United States did not want a “one-way cease-fire” that allowed Hamas to keep up its rocket fire, and Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday echoed the point, declaring that only a “sustainable, durable” peace would be acceptable.
Reporting from Washington -- Israel's ground invasion of the Gaza Strip has abruptly increased the stakes for Washington at an awkward moment when President Bush's power is ebbing and his successor is choosing to remain on the sidelines.
The ground assault that began Saturday raises the chances of a sharp increase in casualties, perhaps on both sides, that would heighten international pressure on the United States to intervene in an attempt to end the conflict. World powers are already clamoring for Washington to play its traditional lead role in finding a way out of the crisis.
Dennis Ross said the United States should back a cease-fire in Gaza only if it ensures that Hamas "can't rebuild."
"We want some stability," said Ross, a former top Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration, in a talk at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, Md.
"If Hamas is left with the capability to rearm," he said, then the current conflict will have been "just a prelude" to the next round. He hoped that some sort of "enforcement mechanisms" to restrain the terrorist group could be developed in any kind of truce.
The images of two women on the front page of an edition of The Washington Post last week illustrates how mainstream US media has been reporting Israel's war on Gaza.
On the left was a Palestinian mother who had lost five children. On the right was a nearly equally sized picture of an Israeli woman who was distressed by the fighting, according to the caption.
As the Palestinian woman cradled the dead body of one child, another infant son, his face blackened and disfigured with bruises, cried beside her.
The Israeli woman did not appear to be wounded in any way but also wept.
It is a war on two fronts. Months ago, as Israel prepared to unleash its latest wave of desolation against Gaza, it recognised that blasting Hamas and "the infrastructure of terror", which includes police stations, homes and mosques, was a straightforward task.
When demands are made of Israel to halt its military activities in Gaza, a brief historical reminder is in order.
In September 2005, Israel vacated Gaza, dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and did not leave a shred of a presence there.
There is a clear difference between the 1.5 million people that make up the population of the Gaza Strip, and the few hundred which comprise the leadership and activists which fill the Hamas movement's ranks.
Whatever differences one might have with the movement, one must realize that Gaza is not Hamas; and that the Gaza Strip is not owned by the Hamas movement, and its people are not Hamas soldiers, yet it is being punished in place of the movement.
The Israeli military’s ground incursion into the Gaza Strip is a tragic but unsurprising development in the current conflict, with the ostensible goal of stopping the rocket fire into Israel. An aerial bombardment was never going to be enough to eliminate the highly mobile rocket teams employed by Hamas and other militant groups based in Gaza. But because the escalation of violence was so readily apparent, the continued refusal of the United States to allow a UN Security Council mandated ceasefire to pass is inexcusable.
The virtual holocaust Israel is now waging against the Gaza Strip is taking its toll on innocent civilians. The shocking scenes speak for themselves. The gruesomeness transcends reality; it exceeds by far the most eloquent of words.
Gaza-2008-9 is very much like Dresden-1945. And as Dresden was annihilated by the RAF toward the end of the Second World War, the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza are being decapitated and thoroughly terrorized by the Israeli army, the Wehrmacht of our time.
Links:
[1] http://www.americantaskforce.org/print/1720
[2] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printmail/1720
[3] http://www.americantaskforce.org/printpdf/1720
[4] http://www.americantaskforce.org/rss/wpr
[5] http://www.americantaskforce.org/world_press_roundup/20090105t000000
[6] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iZCONo8ygEjHolVWwW7wN50I0suQ
[7] http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/20091592350941452.html
[8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/04/AR2009010401575.html?hpid=topnews
[9] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-enclave5-2009jan05,0,4391072.story
[10] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052606.html
[11] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7811386.stm
[12] http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052597.html
[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/washington/05diplo.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print
[14] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-us-gaza5-2009jan05,0,1574085.story
[15] http://jta.org/news/article/2009/01/04/1001985/ross-hamas-cant-be-allowed-to-rebuild
[16] http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/20091585448204690.html
[17] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/04/israel-gaza-hamas-hidden-agenda
[18] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/31/AR2008123102772.html
[19] http://www.asharqalawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=15274
[20] http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090105/OPINION/458122200/1001
[21] http://www.ikhwanweb.com/Article.asp?ID=18983&LevelID=2&SectionID=0
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