Egyptian President Abdel Fatteh El-Sisi, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have lined up in a solid phalanx against the Islamist Hamas-Islamic Jihad alliance.
Their lineup, backed from the wings by Saudi King Abdullah and Russian President Vladimir Putin, set itself five objectives:
1. To confront Hamas with a solid political-security front which is beyond its power to break.
2. To corner Hamas into accepting the Egyptian ceasefire proposion unchanged and unconditionally.
3. To compel Hamas to disarm, i.e. dismantle its rockets and tunnels, so pulling the teeth of its military wing, Ezz e-Din al-Qassam.
4. To distance the Obama administration from the triple bloc’s dealings with the Palestinian Islamist factions.
5. To keep the Europeans from interfering in those dealings.
The foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy meeting in Brussels offered Friday to take charge of Gaza’s border crossings and work to prevent illegal arms flows.
Saturday, Cairo, Jerusalem and Ramallah politely informed Brussels that they preferred to handle this situation on their own and no European diplomatic or security assistance was needed.
The proposition the three partners have formulated puts Hamas and Jihad on the spot. The Arab world has abandoned them and their only source of funding is Tehran. So their choices are grim: Face an escalated war that Israel will fight until the bitter end, or swallow hard and accept the only proposition on the table which is tantamount to disarmament and capitulation.
Their isolation is complete. The Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have managed to cut Hamas away from any backing in Washington, Qatar and Turkey as well as blocking its path to Moscow.
To encourage Hamas to choose the right path, the Israel Air Force is cruising around-the-clock over Hamas bases and command centers in the Gaza Strip, ready at a signal to switch to the offensive if the Palestinian fundamentalists make the wrong choice in Cairo.
Mahmoud Abbas, who appeared to be sitting on the sidelines of the Gaza conflict during Israel’s month-long military operation, finally threw in his lot with Sisi and Netanyahu when it came to the crunch.
Israel will not agree under any circumstances to a ceasefire deal that doesn’t meet the country’s security demands, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday, as an Israeli delegation landed in Cairo to discuss an Egyptian proposal aimed at ending hostilities in the Gaza Strip and across the Israeli border.
“The delegation in Cairo is operating under clear guidelines to stand by Israel’s security needs,” Netanyahu said at the beginning of Sunday’s cabinet meeting. “Only if there is an answer to these security needs will we reach an understanding.”
Netanyahu vowed that the IDF would retaliate forcefully to any Hamas provocation.
“We are a strong and determined nation,” he said.
“If Hamas thinks that it can cover its military defeat with a political achievement, it is mistaken. As long as the quiet does not return, Hamas will continue to suffer very serious blows,” he said.
The comments came as time ticked down on a truce, set to expire at midnight Monday, that was declared to allow Israel and Hamas to come to terms to end over a month of fighting.
Ahead of the meeting, Finance Minister Yair Lapid said that Israel was committed to the protection of its civilians and the army would not back down until safety was restored.
“We must demand protection for the residents of Israel,” he said before entering the cabinet meeting, according to Ynet.
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardliner from the Jewish Home party, called for an immediate end to the ceasefire talks in Cairo, Ynet reported.
“This situation in which we are biting our fingernails as we wait for an answer from a murderous terror organization must end,” he said. “We must stop the negotiations with Hamas immediately and take our fate into our own hands according to a simple formula: Humanitarian [aid] yes, terror no.”
The talks resumed Sunday morning on the basis of an Egyptian proposal which calls for a lasting ceasefire beyond Monday midnight, and new talks on the thorniest issues, including demands for a seaport and airport in Gaza, to begin in a month’s time.
Hamas officials appeared to reject the proposal. Spokesman Osama Hamdan said Saturday that Israel must either accept its demands or face “a war of attrition, and Hamas’s military wing in Gaza declared, “We are continuing our struggle.
The Times of Israel is liveblogging events as they unfold through Sunday, August 17, the 41st day of Operation Protective Edge. A five-day truce began amid rocket fire midnight Wednesday, but held through Thursday, Friday and Saturday. An 11-point Egyptian ceasefire proposal, leaked to the press on Friday, was rejected by Hamas leaders Saturday. Negotiators are due back in Cairo Sunday for more talks.
IDF could have conquered Gaza in days, says ex-NSC official
The army’s attack plans in Gaza were predictable, says a newly retired defense official in the National Security Council, adding that the IDF could have taken Gaza in a matter of days.
“I am stating unequivocally, and not just based on my military experience as a colonel, but in general, that there is a military option, and that the IDF is capable, if it wants and if it is so ordered, to take over – not conquer, but take over – Gaza in two days and to conquer it, in its entirety, in seven days,” Col. (res) Roni Bert, a former department head at the National Security Council, tells Channel 10′s Moav Vardi.
‘Hamas sticking to its blockade demands’
A Palestinian source says Hamas still refuses to agree to a ceasefire that would keep Israel’s blockade in place, Israel Radio reports.
Why both Israel and Hamas may reject a truce
ToI’s Avi Issacharoff lays out the reasons why Israel and Hamas — who both would like a return to quiet — might not agree in the end to a truce based on the Egyptian proposal.
“The proposal is broadly favorable to Israel,” he writes, “though it does give certain international legitimacy to Hamas and will likely strengthen the group’s position among the Palestinians in the near future. The agreement would also restrict Israel’s ability to operate in the Gaza Strip and would allow Hamas to continuously arm itself as it pleases.
“Another ‘problem’ the proposal poses for Israel is the return of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas from the sidelines to the forefront of the political scene, including in Gaza itself. It is doubtful that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman would be excited to see such a development. While to many in Israel Abbas’s return may sound more like a solution then a problem, it is unlikely this trio of politicians share that point of view.”
As talks resume in Cairo Sunday morning, the chances that the negotiations will yield a long-lasting ceasefire, according to both Israel and the Palestinians, are low, maybe even faint. One of the main difficulties is the problematic nature of the Egyptian proposal – for Hamas, and to a lesser extent for Israel.
As for Hamas, it too understands the Catch-22 situation the Egyptian agreement would place it in. With the deal deliberately glossing over such issues as the construction of a seaport and an airport, and with even the exact date for the opening of the Rafah border crossing unspecified, the Egyptian proposal does not include any obvious significant gains for the organization.
Initially, Hamas might boast of having “lifted the blockade,” in light of the clauses in the Egyptian deal that would see an easing of terms at the border crossings and a widening of the area off the Gaza coast open to fishermen. But in the long term, the proposal does not change the situation in Gaza significantly, at least not in favor of Hamas.
The organization would be limited in terms of its ability to construct tunnels and to attack Israel. The agreement would give Abbas a foothold in Gaza as well. In some ways, it would simply render Hamas irrelevant. Hamas would be seen as the organization that destroyed Gaza, the Palestinian Authority as the organization that rehabilitated it. This may explain the combative interview given by Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashaal on Saturday — in which he insisted there would no resolution of the conflict without the full lifting of the blockade and the opening of a seaport and an airport — as well as the fact that the group seems in no hurry to sign the agreement.
The headlines on Arab television have in recent days focused, naturally, on the fighting between the Islamic State and Kurdish forces in Iraq. The Peshmerga forces are conducting a counterattack 50 kilometers away from Mosul, with American air assistance.
Interest in Gaza, even on Al-Jazeera, has slowly waned, replaced by the terrible impact of the Islamic State’s massacres. The reduced focus on the Strip, however, may allow both sides to end the fighting without an agreement. Hamas may occasionally fire rockets and mortar shells into Israel, but such a move would not likely prompt a further escalation in Gaza. Israel is not really striving to topple Hamas or demilitarize Gaza either.
One more point. The Palestinian Authority and Israel have a shared understanding about at least one issue: the lack of relevance of the American government to a political solution in the region. By contrast, both Jerusalem and Ramallah have enormous respect for Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and for the way he is operating. Therefore, it may be Sissi, not John Kerry or Barack Obama, who will be able to broker a resumption of peace negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Maybe in a few months, after things calm down in Gaza, the Egyptian president will invite the two leaders to a conference in Cairo and announce a new peace effort.
After Netanyahu said Hamas lost and was trying to cover up its military defeat through ceasefire talks, Hamas officials hit back; meanwhile Cairo talks underway, but chances of deal seem slim.
Hamas has responded to comments made earlier by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who said Hamas lost the conflict and is now attempting to make a political win in compensate for their loss.
On Saturday, Osama Hamdan, the head of Hamas's foreign affairs, said on Facebook: "Israel must accept the demands of the Palestinian people or face a long war."
Hamas official Izzat al-Risheq said Saturday that the organization has not agreed and will not agree to what was offered the Palestinian delegation before it left Cairo.
"We oppose any formulation that does not match the demands of the Palestinian people. There are many issues that the delegation did not agree to in what was offered," said al-Risheq, who represented Hamas in Cairo.
Muslims, all belonging to Boko Haram, entered the Christian village of Gwoza and butchered one thousand people. They were slaughtered with bullets, burned alive, and hacked to death. Nigerian relations expert Adeniyi Ojutiku received a report from a trusted colleague:
The terrorists seized a number of residents as hostages and killed nine hundred and ninety-seven an eyewitness whose mother among the women that are burying the … bodies confirmed… The insurgents took over the Emirs (mayor's) Palace as well as a Government Lodge in Gwoza, and have appointed a replacement for the town's fleeing Emir. They have hoisted their black flags with Arabic insignia all over Gwoza in a show of their total control of the territory.
Ojutiku received from Nigeria marked a phone call and was told that "an unprecedented emergency request for prayers for the inhabitants of the Christian village of Gwoza… The town has … been under siege of Boko Haram for the past nine days."
Boko Haram, seeking to establish Sharia law, had killed 4,239 Christians, moderate Muslims, government officials and civilians, in attacks targeting religious communities in Northern Nigeria advocacy group Jubilee Campaign reported July 29. Hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes.
The Islamic State group (IS) has executed 700 people from a Syrian tribe it has been battling in eastern Syria over the past two weeks, the majority of whom were civilians, a Syrian monitoring group said Saturday.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has consistently tracked violence on both sides of the three-year-old Syrian civil war have said that around 700 members of the al-Sheitaat tribe, from the Deir al-Zor province, have been executed and that many of them were beheaded by IS jihadists.
The latest IS slaughter in their battle to create a medieval style caliphate across northern Iraq and Syria, come after 80 members of the Yazidi minority were massacred by IS militants in Iraq on Friday.
A senior Kurdish official told Reuters that he believed the Yazidi men had been killed because they refused to convert to Islam.
“We believe it because of their creed: convert or be killed.”
According to BasNews, a Kurdish website, the village of Kojo came under attack by IS radicals. The entire male population of the village was slaughtered and all the women and children were abducted.
In the Syrian province of Aleppo several towns and villages were seized by IS radicals from other Islamic groups earlier in the week.
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2 comments:
Kinda guessed the first article was from Debka...take with a grain of salt site. Interesting, and kinda a red flag, the suggestion that Russia is teaming up against Hamas...ya never know...they support Iran etc. and the list goes on. Russia is deceiving, has strange bed fellows that could easily turn on them. Its ALL about, money, power, pride with them, and Gods Word tells us where that will lead to.
Russia plays both sides of the fence, and always have. Its a "whats in it for them" kinda thing. They tried to walk that fence with Iran, pressuring them a bit on the world stage a while back. Iran (who supports and funds terrorists around the world) responded by giving the green light for terrorist attacks against Russia in response.
Russia clearly is against Israel, WITHOUT question, and to suggest that they arent (as in the article) is untrue. With Syria for example, it was NK and Russia involved in the 2007 attempt at building a nuke plan. NK supplied the building stuff, and Russia happily supplied the military defense stuff. Israel went into Syria several times, even having Commandos on the ground, in coordination with the IAF that destroyed the nuke plant they were building. Just as with Iran, Russia Im sure would have supplied Syria with the personnel to run the plant. Israel absolutely humiliated Russia with that event, but even more so, cost them money. Israel showed that against the Israeli tech, Russia s supplied defense system to Syria was worthless. Israel's undetected infiltration and attack on Syria, was not a good selling point for Russia trying to peddle their stuff around the world.
Present day, and nothing has changed. Russia gladly moved right in and supplied the PA with “armored vehicles” back in 2009-2010. Then somehow, just otta no where I guess, Russian missiles were used by Hamas against Israel in this current war.
Russia is playing a deadly game...and Gods Word it very clear how it will end for them...destroyed and laying dead in the mountains surrounding Israel...
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