The Times of Israel is liveblogging events as they unfold through Thursday, August 20, the 45th day of Operation Protective Edge. Hamas breached a truce on Tuesday afternoon and fired some 200 rockets at Israel through Tuesday and Wednesday. The Cairo ceasefire talks are over for now. Hamas is vowing more attacks Thursday, after Israel tried to kill its military chief Muhammad Deif in an air strike that killed his wife and son. Netanyahu vowed Wednesday to hit back “seven times as hard” at Hamas attacks, and said all military options were open.
Palestinian site claims Deif killed
A Palestinian website posts an article stating that Hamas leader Muhammad Deif is killed by Israeli fire, and claims Hamas’s armed wing covered up the incident by erasing hospital files.
The website also features a picture that it says is of Deif’s body.
The photo could not be immediately authenticated.
The article was taken down from the Saham News website shortly after it was posted yesterday.
According to Globes, which managed to screenshot the article before it was removed, it also featured the alleged death certificate for Deif, which may or may not have been fabricated.
“The bodies arrived at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, after the occupation planes attacked the al-Dalo home, in the Rimal neighborhood in the north, in Gaza City, last night,” it reports. “The document we obtained was confiscated by an armed squad of the Al-Qassam brigade from Shifa’s archive, and also changed the check-in information in the hospital to erase Deif’s name from the list.”
We at Saham News are forced to tell the Palestinian nation, “with great sadness,” of the death of Deif, it concludes. “We belong to Allah, and to him we return.”
Israel will pay, Hamas says
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri warns Israel will “pay a heavy price for the assassination of Al-Qassam commanders.”
“The Israeli crimes won’t break the Palestinians’ resolve, and will not weaken the resistance,” he says, according to the Walla news website.
Israel confirms assassinations of Hamas leaders
The Shin Bet confirms it targeted two Hamas leaders, Raed Al-Attar and Mohammed Abu Shamaleh.
“The strike was the result of intelligence and operational activities, which led to the detection and attack on two central operatives from the heart of Hamas’s military leadership,” it says in a statement.
A third Hamas member, Mohammed Barhoum, was also killed in the Rafah airstrike.
Israeli Communications Minister Gilad Erdan, a member of the Security Cabinet, told Army Radio on Thursday that the resumption of Hamas rocket fire had brought Israel closer than ever to a decision to fully reconquer the Gaza Strip.
Erdan said that Hamas decided to break the tenuous ceasefire on Tuesday because Israel refused to meet a single one of the terrorists’ primary demands during talks in Cairo.
Over the past 24 hours, Hamas and allied terror groups have fired dozens of missiles into southern and central Israel, causing widespread damage and at least one injury.
Israel has thus far confined its response to targeted aerial strikes. But Erdan warned that Israeli military operations could expand dramatically if Hamas continues to attack.
“Will this happen tomorrow? It’s not certain, since the price for this will be high, but we are closer today to a ground operation than we have been at any point since the start of the operation,” said the minister.
Israel’s aerial strikes have also become somewhat less restrained. In the first weeks of the Gaza war, Israeli forces issued several warnings of the occupants of targeted buildings, even if that meant missing the targeted terrorist.
Now, these warnings seem to be coming less frequently, as Israel is more determined to actually eliminate Hamas leaders.
The terror group confirmed on Thursday that three of its senior field commanders had been killed, along with members of their families, in Israeli air strikes.
The number of calls to an anti-Semitism hotline in the United Kingdom have jumped nearly fivefold since the beginning of Israel’s conflict with Gaza, according to a British Jewish organization.
In July, the hotline of the Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s watchdog on anti-Semitism, received 240 calls, according to the Independent, a British publication. The hotline averaged 50 calls a month during the first half of 2014.
The volume was the highest since the hotline was launched except for January 2009, when Israel conducted its last ground invasion of Gaza. Many of the calls concerned verbal attacks that compared Jews to Nazis or accused them of being child killers.
“The actual data is bad enough but cannot convey the mood of the Jewish community, with many people telling us that they have never felt so bad, have been under such pressure, nor worried so much about what the future may hold,” said the Community Security Trust’s communications director, Mark Gardner, according to the Independent. “British Jews, like those elsewhere, will continue to suffer local anti-Semitic impacts from overseas events and global ideological trends.”
The vicious Islamic State group now is vowing to broaden its war campaign to include killing Americans wherever and whenever it can.
Tuesday’s horrific videotaped beheading of American photojournalist James Foley was packaged with a new Islamic State posting on social media threatening the United States: “We will drown all of you in blood.”
A visibly angered President Obama gave a stern reply Wednesday afternoon, saying in a televised address that the U.S. and its allies will work together to “extract this cancer” that is the Islamic State.
“ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents,” Mr. Obama said. “No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings.”
Just hours after Mr. Obama spoke, the White House revealed that the president had authorized a secret military mission this summer to a site in Syria in a bid to free Mr. Foley and other Americans held by the terrorist group, but the hostages were not there.
“The U.S. government had what we believed was sufficient intelligence, and when the opportunity presented itself, the president authorized the Department of Defense to move aggressively to recover our citizens,” said Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. “Unfortunately, that mission was not successful because the hostages were not present.”
Mr. Spencer said there is ample evidence that the terrorist group — which controls large portions of Iraq and Syria and has committed mass executions — is gearing up for attacks against the U.S.
The U.S. government believes some Americans have joined the Islamic State and, programmed to conduct suicide bombings, will pose risks upon their return.
While the nation was preoccupied with angry protests in Ferguson, Mo., explosive new developments are emerging at the U.S. southern border. A news story surfaced today indicating that there are signs pointing to a direct ISIS terror connection at the U.S. border with Mexico. Citizens who have constantly warned that the lack of attention to the illegal alien crisis would lead to Islamic terrorists crossing the border into the United States from Mexico are expressing alarm at the latest developments.
Breitbart is reporting that U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, stated during a news forum that Mexican drug cartels are in regular talks with the dangerous Islamist terrorist organization ISIS. In the Middle East, ISIS has seized large sections of territory in Iraq and Syria. The group is so brutal that even Muslims who are part of al Qaeda express alarm over their tactics. In the areas they have seized, ISIS has slaughtered, abused, enslaved, and beheaded hundreds of Christians and Jews living in the region. The latest victim of ISIS barbarism was American journalist James Foley, whom the U.S. confirmed today was beheaded by ISIS in a gruesome video.
Illegal alien watchdog groups and concerned citizens have been warning for several years that the lax U.S. policy toward immigration and its non-enforcement of border security laws would eventually lead to a major crisis given the ease with which drug cartels, human traffickers, and Islamic terrorists can move across the southern border into the United States. Many believe that at least some of these terrorists are already in the country, lying in wait for the right time to strike.
Members of Congress have already seen signs at the southern border within the extreme northern end of Mexico that terrorists may have collaborated with drug cartels. Poe states,
Since 2009 the tactics of the drug cartels have grown more brutal in the wake of evidence that the Mexican criminals have used Jihadists to advance their agenda. Numerous reports have emerged indicating that over the last six years the drug cartels have beheaded dozens if not hundreds of Mexican citizens caught in the crosshairs of these dangerous criminals. The cartels have certainly shown no reticence about engaging in brutality. Thus, it is difficult to imagine that the cartels would have any hesitation at all about engaging in talks with ISIS, even to the point of launching collaborative efforts.
It seems clear that Islamic State is raising the stakes, aware that the gruesome death of an American and the image of another one at the mercy of an executioner who is taunting a US president could invite retaliation – heavier air strikes at least.
But the United States and other Western powers may now be diverting their attention away from the Sunni insurgents innorthern Iraq to what they are capable of doing overseas.
The group can draw on hundreds if not thousands of foreigners with Western passports that can keep them below the radar, like the British-sounding man who appeared to have killed Foley, to carry out its threats.
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