Posted on 09/27/2006 6:22:10 PM PDT by blam
Gaza militants 'prepare for showdown'
By Harry de Quetteville in Jerusalem
(Filed: 28/09/2006)
Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip are rearming and retraining for an imminent military showdown with the Israeli army, intelligence sources disclosed yesterday.
Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's intelligence service Shin Bet, said 19 tons of explosives had been smuggled into Gaza in the past year. Other senior Israeli officials indicated that Palestinian fighters were acquiring more effective weapons.
Palestinian militants at a news conference in Gaza on Sunday
It is understood that Israel may use the unresolved kidnapping of a soldier in June as an excuse to renew major operations in Gaza to root out the new weapons threat.
Egyptian officials applied additional pressure to Hamas by insisting yesterday that it secure the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit or risk plunging Gaza into "crisis" and a renewed military incursion.
Cpl Shalit was captured by three militant groups and taken to Gaza, prompting a major Israeli incursion that was partially interrupted by the war in Lebanon.
Brigadier General Shalom Harari, a military intelligence officer, said yesterday that Israeli forces might "go into Gaza in a big way" unless Cpl Shalit is freed. Accusing Iran of being behind the new weapons drive, he said Teheran had found willing partners in Palestinian fighters.
"Iran is a Middle East superpower. For them it is very important to get rockets into Gaza to develop a threat that surrounds Israel from all sides," he said.
"Meanwhile the war in Lebanon has renewed the will and added urgency to Palestinian efforts to upgrade their weapons systems."
He said the arsenal at the disposal of the myriad militant groups in Gaza – which include Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Popular Resistance Committees – remained less powerful than that of the Lebanese group Hizbollah.
But he said the militant groups were exchanging home-made Qassam rockets for 122mm Grad B missiles, which had a long enough range to hit the major southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.
While Palestinian groups have boasted of a home-grown anti-tank missile known as the Batar, intelligence officials in Israel dismissed it. But they revealed that militants have replaced the RPG7, the standard rocket propelled grenade, with upgraded versions that can pierce Merkava tanks. "They want to bring in weapons that 'break the equation' of our military superiority," said one intelligence official. "They want to be able to attack symbols of our power like the Merkava tank, the Apache helicopter, offshore missile boats and armoured bulldozers."
In particular, the officials said, Palestinian militants have a "real appetite" to adopt Hizbollah tactics from the war in Lebanon, when Russian-built Kornet missiles proved deadly against tanks on the battlefield while longer-range Katyushas were directed at towns inside Israel.
"The effort is to upgrade the rocket systems," said Brig Gen Harari. But he added that while some weapons experts from Lebanon and Syria had been smuggled into Gaza, the Palestinian groups were "not good at complicated weapons. You need courses to learn how to use them".
In the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis, a Hamas MP said yesterday that talk of Palestinian weapons improvements were lies. "This is a bunch of lies meant to justify Israel's attacks on us," said Yehiya Musa. "The situation in Gaza is the worst ever. Israel is the one threatening Gaza and attacking Gaza."
A very nice and wicked weapon for the wicked.
I prefer nukes, but this is a start.
Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip are rearming and retraining for an imminent military showdown with the Israeli army, intelligence sources disclosed yesterday.
Proof positive of the "Theory of Natural Selection".
A very nice place to start.
Israel should show them what hell is going to look like.
They don't need the kidnapping of their soldier as an "excuse" to root out a new weapons threat. The kidnapping of their soldier is reason enough on its own, and the new weapons threat is also reason enough on its own.
The writers aren't the sharpest tools in the toolbag.
If the Gaza arabs insist on being a threat, at some point the war has to take into account that it is the Gaza arabs themselves that must be dealt with, not merely their weapons. At some point the choice must be either slow-motion ethnic cleansing, half a kilometer at a time in response to each attack, or if the provocation or the threat is serious enough, the Gaza arabs may need to relocate to the Sinai, by force.
If they will not live in peace in their homes in Gaza, then let them wage their war from a hundred miles further down the road.
Such a thing means war, but Isael is already at war.
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