Heavy clashes between IDF and Hamas

Major clashes between IDF troops and Hamas gunmen reportedly took place late Monday evening in the northern Gaza Strip.

The clashes marked the first time the IDF extended its ground operation into the densely populated Gaza urban centers.

Live footage from Al-Jazeera showed numerous explosions and fires in the area where the soldiers were said to be operating. Heavy firepower could be heard, and reports told of dozens of artillery shells, as well as air support which had been concentrated in the area.

Just over an hour earlier, the IAF bombed at least 40 smuggling tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. There were no immediate reports of casualties in the strikes.

Meanwhile, seven IDF soldiers were wounded Monday afternoon, four moderately and three lightly, in exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and Hamas gunmen in the northern Gaza Strip. The soldiers were evacuated for medical treatment.

In the early hours of Monday morning, five IDF soldiers and an officer were lightly to moderately wounded in the tenth day of Operation Cast Lead.

Source: Jerusalem Post

Filed under: MidEast, Gaza, Gaza raids, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, The Terror Journal

Ruined remains of LTTE ‘capital’

Attack helicopters flew overhead, tanks spluttering black smoke squealed and rattled through town on tracks rusty from the last monsoon, and soldiers with bandoliers of bullets slung around their necks posed for photographs in front of Tamil Tiger war memorials.

Two days after the fall of Kilinochchi, the town that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had used as their de facto capital was firmly under military control.

Almost all journalists have been refused access to much of northern Sri Lanka for a year and a half.

But the government was keen to show off its greatest prize so far in this phase of the war, so reporters were crammed into an Mi-17 transport helicopter for a ride to the front.

It was so full some had to stand.

The pilots flew very low and very fast, at treetop height over jungles recently captured from the Tigers, a precaution against being shot down.

Wild peacocks on the ground below staggered to get away in the down force as we rushed overhead.

The helicopter landed south of Kilinochchi and we drove into the town in armoured personnel carriers, up the main A9, dubbed the Highway of Death in Sri Lanka because so many have been killed fighting for its control.

Source: By Roland Buerk BBC News

Filed under: Analysis, LTTE, Sri Lanka, The Terror Journal, Velupillai Prabhakaran

Hamas continues to fire rockets

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Monday fired a barrage of 30 Qassam and Katyusha rockets at southern Israel, after a night of relative calm.

One of the rockets, fired mid-afternoon, exploded in a kindergarten in Ashdod. The playground was empty at the time of the attack, and no casualties were reported, though the attack did cause extensive damage to the structure.

The kindergarten, which is affiliated with the Shas educational network of schools, was completely destroyed as a result of the attack. “The hand of God was here,” Ben Zur said. “We witnessed a huge miracle. This is a kindergarten that holds 36 students age three-to-four years old, and since Hanukah we have not resume our activities as per the instructions of the Home Front command.”

At least four rockets hit the Ashkelon area and another two struck Be’er Sheva in the early afternoon. About an hour before, 3 Qassam rockets hit the western Negev town of Sderot, one exploding in the yard of a local home.

Two rockets exploded Monday morning in open fields near the northern Negev city of Ashkelon. Just before that, two Grad rockets exploded in the lower central town of Yavneh and another rockets launched in the direction of Kiryat Malachi struck an open field nearby. Earlier Monday morning, two rockets exploded in fields in the Eshkol Regional Council and another three struck the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional council.

Source: Hareetz

Filed under: MidEast, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Kassam Rockets, Operation Cast Lead, Qassam Rockets, The Terror Journal

UN urges Israel to let Gaza Aid

Aid agencies say Gaza’a 1.5 million population are in dire need of food, water and medical supplies but Israel’s round-the-clock bombardment is hampering relief efforts.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres urged Israel on Monday to allow civilians in Gaza to flee Israeli-Palestinian fighting by crossing the border into Egypt.

In a statement issued from his Geneva office, Guterres also implicitly told Egypt — and other countries that do not have frontiers with Gaza — that they had a duty to give shelter to refugees from the conflict.

Israel has allowed some foreign passport holders living in Gaza to leave but borders have been sealed to all but limited humanitarian aid shipments.

Source: Reuters

Filed under: MidEast, Aid, Gaza, Gaza raids, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, The Terror Journal

Iraq at the crossroads

The level of violence in Iraq has fallen during 2008, raising hopes of a calmer 2009. The BBC’s Andrew North, who has reported from the country through the year, looks at what lies in store for a still-troubled country.

A sharp wind kicks up the dust in the empty dead-end street beside Baghdad’s main morgue. A solitary woman in a brown headscarf turns quickly into the building.

Two years ago, at the height of the sectarian fighting, this was a scene of almost biblical misery.

Crowds of desperate, tear-lined faces filled the street, hoping to find the remains of loved ones inside.

Every few minutes yet more bodies would arrive, in flimsy wooden coffins or wrapped in carpets, often mutilated beyond recognition by torture or torn apart by blasts.

There were often 100 corpses a day coming into the morgue, week after week – so many that officials were using one of the parking bays as overfill storage when we visited in the summer of 2006.

“We usually receive about 10 to 15 bodies a day now,” says Ra’ouf Rasoul, deputy director of the morgue.

Car crashes now make up more of the morgue’s caseload. Baghdad’s is starting to become a typical big city morgue once more.

Source: BBC News

Filed under: Analysis, Iraq, The Terror Journal

Gaza: 300 Yards Between Life And Death

Mathematically, it’s not a tricky equation. Politically, though, it’s a complete conundrum. I’m talking about the scenes on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing Sunday.

It was the morning after the start of the Israeli ground assault on Gaza. In the dark, a few hours earlier, I’d been able to make out the sound of Israeli tank tracks grinding through southern Gaza; the whoosh of missiles fired by Apache attack helicopters into targets just a few hundred yards away and the rat-a-tat of assault guns as Hamas and Israeli fighters closed in on one another.

Now, it was light, and around 30 trucks lined up at the Rafah border gates. They were piled high with much needed medical supplies for the teeming hospitals of Gaza and the mounting casualties. The aid had come from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egyptian NGOs and even Scotland. There was even an eight-strong team of Greek trauma surgeons ready to go in and rescue the dying.

It would have been a heartening sight after the madness of the night except for one major detail — the border was closed, the gates firmly shut. That medicine was going nowhere.

And that’s the simple equation. Three checkpoints and 300 yards separated life-giving supplies from the Palestinian wounded and dying. There was fuel in the trucks, drivers at the wheel and politics in the road.

Source: Karl Penhaul CNN Blog

Filed under: Voice, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Rafah, The Terror Journal

Hamas official defiant over rocket strikes

Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said Monday that the Gaza leadership has no intention of stopping its rocket attacks on Israel, despite claims from Palestinian sources that more than 500 people have died during Israeli reprisals.

“We salute the resistance men,” al-Zahar said in a televised address from an undisclosed location in Gaza.

“They (Israeli forces) shelled everyone in Gaza … they shelled children and hospitals and mosques and in doing so, they gave us legitimacy to strike them in the same way,” he said.

“Our demands are clear: the problem is not in the Qassam rockets. The problem is in the aggression and the troops and the siege imposed on us.”

Al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, served as the Palestinian foreign minister under the Hamas-led government before it was dissolved by President Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007.

He is believed to be the mastermind of the takeover of Gaza, in which Hamas fighters battled Palestinian forces loyal to Abbas’ Fatah movement.

Source: CNN

Filed under: MidEast, Gaza, Gaza raids, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

Israel will no longer show restraint when attacked – Livni

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Monday that the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip was intended to “change the equation” in the region, whereby Hamas fires at Israel and Israel responds with restraint.

She defended Israel’s incursion into the Hamas-ruled coastal territory as a form of “legitimate self-defense,” adding that Israel has no choice but to retaliate when attacked.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak earlier Monday defended Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, saying any nation seeking to survive would have taken the same form of action.

“Hamas has so far sustained a very heavy blow from us, but we have yet to achieve our objective and therefore the operation continues,” Barak said.

“The fundamental objective is to change the reality of security for the south,” Barak said, referring to Israeli towns that have come under continuous Palestinian rocket attack from Gaza.

“We are striving for a new reality in which there won’t be activity from Gaza against Israeli civilians or our soldiers, a situation which will dramatically change the state of smuggling and in which quiet will prevail in the south,” Barak added.

Source: Haaretz

Filed under: MidEast, Gaza, Gaza raids, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, Terrorism, The Terror Journal, Tzipi Livni

Egypt to demand Hamas accept immediate truce in Gaza

Egyptian officials said Monday that Cairo was set to demand an immediate cease-fire from Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as Israeli forces moved into their 10th day of a military offensive on the coastal territory.

Hamas plans to send a delegation to Egypt on Monday for the first diplomatic talks since the launch of a 10-day-old Israel Defense Forces offensive in the Gaza Strip, an official of the Islamist group has said.

Hamas official Ayman Taha said a Hamas delegation would head to Cairo “answering an Egyptian invitation to hold discussions.” A senior Palestinian official said on Friday that Egypt had launched contacts with Hamas to achieve a truce.

The Hamas visit to Egypt would coincide with the expected visit there of French President Sarkozy, who has also launched a European-backed diplomatic push for a cease-fire. Taha did not say whether the delegation would include Hamas members from Gaza or from elsewhere.

Source: Haaretz

Filed under: MidEast, Egypt, Gaza, Gaza raids, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, Terrorism, The Terror Journal

We lost our homes in Gaza for nothing – Israeli reservist

‘We lost our homes for nothing,’ says reservist from former Gaza settlementThree years after being evacuated from settlements in the Gaza Strip, some of the evacuees are now returning – in uniform.

Aharon Cruz, a paratroops officer, lived in Netzarim for two years before the disengagement. On Sunday, he and his unit, to which he had been recalled a mere day after his wedding last Thursday, were back at the settlement’s ruins in central Gaza.

“On one hand, there’s a feeling of ‘what did we leave for?'” said his father, Rabbi Ze’ev Cruz. “On the other hand, there’s joy that he is returning to a place he knows.”

The ground operation has aroused strong feelings among the evacuees. Some see it as a first step toward returning to their former homes. But most simply want to shout “we told you so!” And the feelings are intensified among those who have sons serving in Gaza.

“It’s a very difficult feeling,” said Ami Shaked, former chief security officer of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, whose son is a paratrooper. “This is the first war in which my son is defending me instead of me, him.”

Source: By Nir Hasson Haaretz

Filed under: Analysis, Gaza, Gaza raids, Hamas, IAF, IDF, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, Terrorism, The Terror Journal, Turkey