Posted on 02/19/2003 2:08:56 PM PST by anotherview
Feb. 19, 2003
Israeli man lightly wounded as Palestinians fire rockets into southern town (UPDATE)
By THE JERUSALEM POST INTERNET STAFF
An Israeli man was very lightly wounded Wednesday afternoon when four Kassam-type rockets were fired into the southern Israeli town of Sderot from nearby Gaza.
One of the rockets landed near a factory, wounding the man. He was treated by Magen David Adom workers on the site. Since only lightly wounded, he was not evacuated to hospital.
The rockets were fired from the Gaza City neighborhood of Beit Hanoun, following the IDF incursion into the area earlier Wednesday, in which 11 Palestinians were killed.
Is that like being kinda pregnant?
"sending 'em back in" will only expose IDF conscripts to getting killed. There already a certain amount of bad morale within the IDF. Why make it grow in useless 'search and destroy' missions ?
So far the IDF and associated security units have lost around 320 KIA. The PLO appears to have lost perhaps 500 KIA'd. Not a winning ratio for Sharon.
Any detached analysis of the PLO vs. IDF military campaign would conclude that the PLO is slowly getting the upper hand.
Much of Judea and Samaria are effectively no-go areas for the IDF. In Gaza, the IDF can't even hold any ground. They merely do ineffective hit-and-run raids.
The individual responsible for this state of affairs is Sharon. Sharon is waging a war of attrition. It is a strategy which plays right into the PLO South Lebanon Redux strategy.
Sharon needs to change his military strategy pronto.
As far as I can tell the IDF hasn't held back so far. The IDF are professionals soldiers and realize that wholesale slaughter of civilians only generates more homicide bombers. So, I'd say the IDF has maximized its attacks on the enemy combatants. The IDF can't really be much more aggressive than it already has been.
The IDF can't occupy every square inch of Gaza, Judea, & Samaria. It simply doesn't have the manpower nor the funds. The IDF does a pretty darn good job of fighting the PLO given the strategy dictated by the Politicans.
But the Politicians have forced the IDF into fighting a war it can not win. In the last 2 years the PLO has gone from pure homicide bombing solely against civilians to now engaging in pitched firefights with the IDF's best units. In the latest IDF search-and-destroy episode the PLO fought against a IDF tank battalion.
The PLO is clearly getting better organized & more disciplined as time goes by. No longer are their "units" simply a couple of looney guys with a AK-47. From what I can tell, the PLO has developed company and platoon sized groups which can actually fight coordinated actions.
The lastest search and destroy mission was notable for not producing any IDF KIA.
The PLO knows the more its own people starve the more recruits they have. They also know that the Israeli economy can not afford full occupation. Therefore, there will always be some little hole where the PLO can hide until the IDF leave.
Note, that the since the PLO (re)started its war 2 1/2 years ago, its demands have not changed one iota. It even still wants 100% right-of-return. This is not the behaviour of a team that thinks it is losing. The PLO kbelieves it is winning.
On the other hand, Israeli society is deeply divided and pretty worried. People realize that something is going deeply wrong. What the average citizen doesn't yet know is how bad it actually is. They don't know that the IDF has lost some 320 soldiers.
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