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"Step
Back From The Brink" UN Warns As Major War Looms After Overnight
Gaza Airstrikes
10
August, 2018
In
the third serious flare-up of violence in the last month, a major
escalation began between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza
overnight, which involved approximately 180
projectiles fired towards Israeli territory, and more than 150
Israeli airstrikes on targets inside Gaza,
according to statements by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Overnight
strikes on Gaza. Image source: AFP/Getty
A
number of smaller scale and sporadic tit-for-tat incidents led to
the start of the late Wednesday night massive exchange of rockets.
These escalating incidents began Monday when an Israeli tank
fired on a northern Gaza Hamas border post, killing two Hamas
members. Israel claimed Hamas had fired on Israeli positions first,
while a Hamas statement said the fighters had merely been involved in
a military exercise and not an act of aggression against Israeli
soldiers.
Another
Israeli tank attack followed on Wednesday in response to what the IDF
described as shots fired at civilian workers constructing
an underground barrier on the Israeli side of the border
wall. After
sunset, the first significant barrage of rocket and mortar fire was
unleashed from Gaza on southern Israel,
sending civilians in the town of Sderot and other close southern
settlements running for shelters while alarms across the region
sounded.
Reports citing
Israeli sources say
of about 180 projectiles launched from Gaza overnight, the Iron Dome
defense system intercepted over 30, while most hit open fields.
However, official statements also noted strikes on playgrounds,
houses, cars, and factories.
“IDF
fighter jets targeted over 20 terror sites in military compounds and
in a Hamas training camp. Among the sites targeted were a weapons
manufacturing and storage facility, a complex used for the Hamas
naval force and a military compound used for rocket-launching
experiments,” the IDF said Thursday
morning.
The BBC
reports up
to seven
Israeli civilians wounded by the rocket and mortar fire, with
Palestinian health officials confirming the
death of a pregnant Palestinian woman and a toddler. The
AFP identified the victims as 23-year old Enas Khammash and
her 18-month-old daughter Bayan, killed in the Jafarawi area of
central Gaza.
During
the daylight hours early Thursday it appears that rockets and
airstrikes have ceased, however, warning sirens have continued to
sound in various Israeli communities across the south of the country.
An
IDF statement said the overnight strikes successfully targeted "over
140 of Hamas' strategic military sites."
BREAKING: Sirens sounded in the city of Be'er Sheva and the Lakhish Regional Council
At
least one Hamas militant has been reported killed in the
fighting, and this is likely not the end of this current round of
violence.
Indeed
on Thursday a
senior Israeli army official warned that a full-blown confrontation
is coming in the Gaza Strip while further suggesting the government
is prepared to begin evacuations of
settlements along the coast and in southern Israel.
“We
are rapidly nearing a confrontation,” the
IDF senior officer said as cited by the Times
of Israel.
"Hamas is making serious mistakes, and we may have to make it
clear after four years that this path doesn’t yield any results for
it and isn’t worth it."
A
separate Israeli military official said in an ominous sign of an
escalating Israel-Gaza war
to come: The
current round of violence “is definitely not over."
Meanwhile,
a special United Nations envoy for the Middle East Peace
Process, Nickolay Mladenov, condemned the voilence, saying in a
statement, “I am deeply alarmed by the recent escalation of
violence between Gaza and Israel, and particularly by today’s
multiple rockets fired towards communities in southern Israel.”
Israeli shelling in Gaza kills toddler and pregnant mother (video)
Al-Masdar News,
10
August, 2018
BEIRUT,
LEBANON (1:45 P.M.) – Israeli shelling killed a pregnant woman and
her 18-month-old daughter in the Jafarawi area of Gaza on Wednesday
night, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Blood
stains on walls, destroyed belongings and holes from shelling were
seen in the house where Enas Khammash, 23, and her daughter Bayan
were killed.
Ibraheam
Abu-Amra, who rented the house to the family, said that Enas’s
husband was injured in the attack and is currently in the hospital.
Israeli
side claimed it struck ‘Hamas terror sites’ in Gaza ‘in
response’ to attacks launched at Israel from the strip.
Video
credit: Ruptly
From the zionist press
Israel’s cabinet decides against a new Gaza campaign to halt Hamas rocket aggression
After
250 rockets from Gaza hit Israeli locations, one a heavy Grad,
Israel’s security cabinet meeting Thursday, Aug. 9, directed the
IDF to continue to pursue “powerful action against terrorist
forces.” This was tantamount to a decision against a major Israeli
military campaign against Hamas at this time, while instead carrying
on with tit-for-tat air strikes as before, and leaving the targeted
communities to their despair. Some 19 people were injured in the last
two days. Hamas is therefore still allowed to call the shots, exactly
as it has done in the last four months, while inflicting in Israel
diverse brands of terror. It is still up to Hamas to decide whether
to stop shooting rockets at Israel or continue the barrage ongoing
for two days, as well as determining the level of its retaliation for
Israeli reprisals.
Therefore,
after an Israel air strike demolished the five-story Hamas internal
security building in the Gaza City’s Rimal district – in return
for the first Grad fired on Beersheba, a major city in southern
Israel, in four years, Hamas is expected to ratchet up its rocket
fire on Israeli civilian locations in the coming hours and days.
Israel forewarned residents of the Rimal district of the bombardment.
The building was therefore empty of Hamas officials, a repeat of the
“knock on roof” tactic the Israeli Air Force used in the past to
avert collateral civilian casualties in counter-terror attacks.
This
practice is an element in the IDF-Hamas duel which has its own
strange rules. In the heat of Wednesday’s rocket barrage, Chief of
Staff Lt. Gen. Gady Eisenkot stated that the IDF “is better
prepared than it has been in the past decades.” Prepared for what?
No answer was forthcoming from the cabinet the next day. In the
general’s judgment, Hamas has still not broken those unwritten
rules. He therefore persuaded the prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to hold back from approving a
full-scale campaign to halt Hamas’ nagging violence once and for
all.
Realizing
that this stance will offend the popular will, in the sight of the
suffering of the targeted population of southwestern Israel, both
have not been seen or heard in public for some days. Meanwhile, they
are hoping against hope that something may come of the long term
truce mediation effort conducted by the UN emissary and Egypt,
although realistic chances of this are practically nil.
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