The Israeli army is deploying three additional brigades to Gaza and the West Bank at the start of what Israeli security officials believe could be an extremely violent week of Palestinian protests coinciding with the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday.
The leaders of the Hamas terrorist group, which controls Gaza and seeks to destroy Israel, are encouraging Gazans to try to breach the border with Israel en masse.
“We will place a million martyrs on this land until, God willing, we liberate it,” Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, vowed at weekend. “We don’t care about [US President] Donald Trump’s moves or the indifference of the Arab world.” Hamas’s Gaza chief Yihya Sinwar said last week he hoped to see hundreds of thousands of Gazans breach the fence.
Israeli military officials said Saturday night that they were bracing for mass marches on the fences, the flying of dozens of “attack kites” carrying petrol bombs into Israel, efforts to plant explosives at the fence, and shooting attacks on Israeli troops deployed at the border. Firebomb-bearing kites sent over the Gaza border on Saturday sparked two brush fires in southern Israel, the latest in a slew of incidents in which airborne combustibles launched from the Palestinian enclave managed to set Israeli fields ablaze.
On Friday, Palestinian rioters set fire to gas pipes serving Gaza as well as electricity infrastructure and a conveyor belt used to transfer goods into the Strip. The IDF said dozens of protesters sabotaged infrastructure on the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom goods crossing, causing tens of millions of shekels of damage.
The IDF is also bracing for violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. There were two car-ramming attacks in the West Bank on Friday, with a soldier lightly injured in one of them, at a checkpoint near Nablus.
Security in Jerusalem has also been bolstered ahead of the politically tense week that will see the US move its embassy to the capital, Israel celebrate 51 years of the city’s reunification and the culmination of over six weeks of protests along the Gaza border, when Palestinians mourn the “catastrophe” of the creation of the Jewish state.
“Moving the embassy is a matter of both national and international importance, and police have been preparing accordingly in recent months,” a police official told the Ynet news site.
The official said thousands of uniformed police and Border Police officers will be deployed throughout Jerusalem starting Sunday. He said the officers will secure the perimeter of the US embassy during the Monday opening, assist in securing the visiting American officials and help direct traffic.
Part of the preparations for the embassy ceremony have included carrying out “overt and covert operations against anyone who intended to disrupt or damage the ceremony,” he said.
Concurrently, Jewish and Israeli institutions abroad are also ramping up security out of fears that Iran will launch an attack after the IDF earlier this week struck dozens of its military sites in Syria in response to a barrage of Iranian rockets launched at Israel.
According to Ynet, synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers have employed additional security measures, and Israeli diplomats have also been ordered to take caution. In a number of particularly sensitive countries where Israel has a diplomatic presence, the Foreign Ministry has requested additional security from the local government.
The report said that some officials fear that since Iran failed to launch a single rocket into Israeli territory in its attack early Thursday morning, Tehran may employ one of its proxy groups in Africa or Asia to attack Israelis or Jews in retaliation.
On Sunday, thousands of Israelis are expected to take part in the annual Jerusalem Day parade celebrating 51 years since the reunification of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War.
The Israeli military on Saturday announced the closure of the Kerem Shalom border crossing into the Gaza Strip, a day after Palestinian rioters trashed key infrastructure serving the only entry point of outside goods into the Hamas-run Strip, causing immense damage.
The crossing will be closed while the damage is repaired, and will reopen in accordance with the security situation, officials said.
The army said its recommendation to shutter the crossing, which ordinarily sees hundreds of cargo-bearing trucks pass into Gaza each day, was approved by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman.
Apart from humanitarian cases, the IDF said the Kerem Shalom crossing would remain closed until the “extensive damage” caused to the torched gas lines, electricity infrastructure and a conveyor belt used to transfer goods into the Strip is repaired.
The army estimated the damage to Kerem Shalom would cost $9 million to repair.
Earlier on Saturday, Israeli officials toured the Kerem Shalom area and said they were “astonished by the devastation and destruction Palestinians left in their wake.”
“They’re bringing a disaster upon themselves,” one unnamed official told the Ynet news site.
Friday’s vandalism at the crossing was a repeat of a similar incident on May 4, when demonstrators broke into the Palestinian side of the crossing and damaged pipelines carrying gas and oil into Gaza, which already suffers from a significant energy shortage.
“This is a cynical act that harms the welfare of Gaza residents and the humanitarian efforts carried out by Israel and many other countries,” the army said at the time.
Around 15,000 Palestinians took part in protests along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel on Friday, in the final weekly “March of Return” before next week’s Nakba Day events on May 14 and 15, when the violent demonstrations are expected to reach their peak.
The IDF said violent protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers at five major points along the border. Troops were attacked with pipe bombs, grenades, rocks, and burning tires. Rioters also attempted to sabotage “security infrastructure,” the army said.
Housing Minister Yoav Galant said Saturday Israel would seek to totally remove Iran’s military presence from Syria. “An opportunity has arisen for Israel to uproot Iran from Syria, and we’ll take advantage of this opportunity,” he said.
Speaking at a cultural event in Tel Aviv suburb Givat Shmuel, the minister, a former army general and a member of the high-level security cabinet, said, “We need to strike while the iron is hot and eradicate any trace of Iranian entrenchment in Syria. We’ll put the Iranian genie back in its bottle.”
Galant said Iran was “an imperialist terrorist nation…they’re spread out in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in an attempt to create an axis from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea…to surround us and create a war of attrition between ourselves and the Arabs.”
But he said Iran was overreaching, creating difficulties for itself. “The Iranian economy is in a bad state, and there’s an internal debate in Iran. Many understand that the focus on exporting terrorism and developing nuclear weapons is using up the resources of tens of millions of residents who need to live.”
2 comments:
The Israeli's are simply amazing! :)
"As Gaza protests continue, IDF employs new tactics to combat riots"
"The IDF is using new, small remote-controlled aircraft with knives on their wings to counter incendiary kites launched from the Gaza Strip.
Developed by the army and the Defense Ministry’s Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (MAFAT), the IDF Southern Command use the drones to cut the wires holding the kites together, in order to prevent them from reaching Israeli fields and setting them ablaze."
https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/As-Gaza-protests-continue-IDF-employs-new-tactics-to-combat-riots-556210
I saw that article as well - amazing
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