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t's been almost a year since St.-Sgt. Dvir Emanuelof became the first casualty of Operation Cast Lead, losing his life to Hamas mortar fire just as he entered Gaza early in the offensive. But sitting with his mother, Dalia, in her living room last week, I was struck not by loss, but by life. And not by grief, but by fervent belief. And by a more recent story about Dvir that simply needs to be told, especially now at Hanukka, our season of miracles. This past summer, Dalia and some friends planned to go to Hutzot Hayotzer, the artists' colony...

Repentance by Ari Bussel The year is 5770, 2009 in the general count. The day is the tenth of the Month of Tishrei, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is a day of reflection, a day in which broken promises, wrong deeds and language spoken in haste are being erased, forgiven, forgotten, and a new year begins. But can we forget? The world stood by uninterested when, for eight years, residents of a small city near the Gaza border could not rest. During the day, their children playing outside or at school were unprotected from a constant rockets bombardment. During...

When it was launched last December, Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. 'snip' But today, Operation Cast Lead, as the three-week operation is known in Israel, is generally regarded by the country's military and political elite as a success. The reasons for that are worth examining now that a new and even more hawkish Israeli government is weighing whether to flout Washington's prevailing opposition to a military attack on Iran. Israel's satisfaction starts with a simple set of facts. Between April 2001 and the end of...

IDF notes 'more motivation to join combat units' Jul. 29, 2009 Yaakov Katz , THE JERUSALEM POST Amid growing efforts to curb the rising numbers of draft dodgers, the IDF on Wednesday noted a slight increase in motivation among youth to serve in combat units. The IDF started the August draft on Sunday. It will continue throughout next week, sending new recruits to almost all IDF field units. The draft-dodging numbers remained the same, with close to 25 percent of youth born in 1990 not enlisting - some dodging the draft, and others not serving due to religious and medical...

Israel Air Force aircraft late Sunday bombed a Hamas security building in the central Gaza Strip and two other targets in the southern coastal territory, Palestinian witnesses said. Witnesses in the central Gaza village of Mughraqa said a missile struck after dark in a cluster of caravans that served as a Hamas security headquarters.

RAMALLAH: After nearly two weeks of showing a united front in the face of Israel’s war in Gaza, some Palestinians are starting to slam Hamas for dragging its feet on a truce as the death toll mounts. With Hamas maintaining a tight grip on the Gaza Strip, most of the critical voices are coming from the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, whose forces the Islamists routed from the coastal enclave in June 2007. Those close to the Fatah party of moderate president Mahmoud Abbas accuse Hamas of trying to extract political gains from the Gaza offensive all the...

GAZA CITY – Israel killed a top Hamas leader on Thursday as tanks pressed into the heart of Gaza City setting landmark buildings ablaze, including a hospital filled with refugees that was engulfed in a ball of flames. Said Siam , interior minister in Gaza's Hamas government, was slain along with his brother and son in an air strike on the brother's house north of Gaza City, Hamas said, as its armed wing vowed to avenge his death. His sister-in-law, bodyguard, and four neighbors also died in the strike, according to Gaza medics, who said more than 40 Palestinians were...

Go here: Freepers Stand Their Ground, Charged By Hamas Radicals, Wash. D.C. Jan. 10,2009 --- PIC HEAVY There are lots of additional pictures in the links of the main story.

To Israel’s critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel’s war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped. Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way. Since Israeli warplanes opened the assault on Gaza 17 days ago, about 900 Palestinians have been reported killed, many of them civilians. Red Cross workers were denied access to scores of dead and wounded Gazans, and a civilian crowd...

For those individuals -- such as nearly all members of the world news media -- who, in light of Israel's invasion of Gaza -- see moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, here are some clarifying thoughts. First, it would be difficult nearly to the point of impossibility, to find Israeli or other Jews who celebrate the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Jews both within and outside of Israel cringe when they see pictures of dead Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. For thousands of years at their Passover seders, Jews have removed wine from their cups to ceremonially weep...

Egypt is considering a range of proposals on how to stop weapons smuggling through tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor into Gaza, including the construction of a moat along the border that separates the Sinai desert from the Gaza Strip, The Jerusalem Post has learned. Israel has destroyed close to 150 tunnels since the beginning of Operation Cast Lead but estimates that there are at least another 150 tunnels along the 14-kilometer corridor. On Sunday, the Air Force bombed close to 30 tunnels that it said were used by Hamas to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip. Amos Gilad, the head...

A senior Israeli military commander involved in Operation Cast Lead said on Saturday that Hamas militants are suffering from exhaustion and are deserting battle. The commander told reporters that Amir Mansi, the commander of Hamas's rocket-launching program in the Gaza City area who was killed by the IDF on Saturday, fired mortars himself after junior Hamas operatives refused to go outside, fearing an Israeli strike. The IDF official estimated that more than 300 Hamas operatives have been killed since Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza one week ago.

Here are some facts that the western media might just possibly by some strange and uncharacteristic oversight fail to report. The Israel Defence Force blog shows what it says is a captured Hamas map showing how Hamas are using the inhabitants of an entire neighbourhood as human shields by lacing it with a web of explosive devices. The Israel Foreign ministry says: The map shows that snipers are positioned at the entrance of the A-Tawil mosque and in the mosques next to it and describes the directions the snipers are aiming. It indicates that explosives are planted in the entrances...

DUBAI: The Palestinian group Hamas has claimed that its rockets have attacked an Israeli air base located 27 km from Tel Aviv as the conflict in Gaza entered its third week on Saturday. The Izzeddine Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, said on its website that its rockets had landed at the Tel Nof air base where Israeli fighter jets and helicopters are stationed. This is the longest distance that Hamas rockets fired from Gaza into Israel have covered so far. The Qassam Brigades also said its fighters had killed 12 Israeli Special Forces soldiers on Friday during an...

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israel pounded rocket sites and tunnels Saturday while its planes dropped leaflets warning of an escalation, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas predicted a "waterfall of blood" unless all parties adhere to the U.N.'s call for a durable cease-fire. Hamas fighters kept up attacks on southern Israel, launching 15 rockets. And with neither side ready to step down, the death toll in two weeks of fighting rose to more than 800 Palestinians, according to Palestinian medical officials, and 13 Israelis. Flames and smoke rose over Gaza City amid heavy fighting. Diplomacy was not finished, but it...

Is Hamas falling apart? A senior IDF officer estimated Saturday that roughly 300 Hamas men have been killed since the army launched its ground incursion in the Gaza Strip. The military official said IDF troops were able to wipe out whole battalions belonging to the Gaza terror group. "Hundreds of people were killed in the various combat sectors," the officer said. "Some Hamas companies and battalions were simply wiped out. We also see cases of desertions and unauthorized leaves, while some terror activists are scared to undertake moves that would jeopardize them vis-à-vis IDF troops." Gaza Operation IDF warns Gaza...

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!”, and a protestor complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.” In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!” In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!” In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from January 1st 2009 but from 2005, and, while the corpses are...

CHAMAN: Thousands of people rallied against Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip near the Afghan border on Friday, cheering support for Al Qaeda's Osama Bin Laden, police said. The rally in Chaman was organised by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam and was the biggest yet in Pakistan against the Israeli campaign in Gaza, which has killed hundreds of Palestinians. "Our estimate is that there were more than 3,000 people at the rally," local police station chief Abul Latif said. "Long live Osama Bin Laden," protesters chanted as they marched through the town, carrying placards that read: "Jihad is the only treatment for...

In Sderot, a correspondent summarized the concerns of residents that the government would agree to a cease-fire too soon, without definitively crippling the militant group Hamas' ability to fire rockets. The people of Sderot, he said, "would rather the [army] continue and finish this story once and for all." Israeli public opinion overwhelmingly supports the Gaza campaign, buttressed by frustration over years of rocket attacks on southern communities and by the widespread belief that Hamas has brought the bloodshed on its own people. Israeli media coverage has largely reflected that sentiment. "This is something we needed to do for a...

Hamas is and always has been a rabid Islamist terrorist organization whose principal goals are to completely destroy Israel and to kill all Jews in the Middle East. Its charter is a virulent document and should be reviewed by anyone interested in the situation. Hamas' sponsor, Iran, and its allies Hezbollah, Syria and Al-Qaeda share the goals of destroying Israel, effecting a radical Islamist takeover of the world from Gibraltar to India and inflicting as much harm as possible on America. There is no negotiating with Hamas. They do not share the now widely held view that Israel and a...

THE Israeli army has fired into northern Lebanon after rockets were fired at the Jewish state. "We carried out direct fire at the source of the rocket fire from Lebanon," an Israeli army spokeswoman said. The army fired five shells, a military source said without clarifying the type of ordnance used. Two people were slightly wounded, he said, adding that police sappers and bomb disposal units were working on the scene. The rockets fell around the area of the northern town of Nahariya, where residents were called to stay inside their homes, Israeli media reported. The rockets fell a day...

Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip has resumed after a three-hour truce to allow in humanitarian aid, with border tunnels apparently the main target. Israeli planes leafleted southern Gaza by day, warning of imminent attacks, and the sounds of war could be heard from the border by nightfall. Nearly 700 Palestinian and 11 Israeli lives are said to have been lost since the offensive began 12 days ago. Peace efforts move to Cairo shortly, with an Israeli envoy due in the city. But Israel is prepared to go even deeper into the Gaza Strip in the coming hours, BBC...

At a Hanukkah candle-lighting at the Shin Bet security services headquarters two weeks ago, Yuval Diskin spoke with former heads of departments about the organization's preparedness to confront Hamas. The head of the Shin Bet sounded quite cautious. Perhaps even he was surprised by the quality of the intelligence that he and his people had succeeded in providing the Israel Defense Forces during the months of planning that preceded Operation Cast Lead and in the days prior to its launch. Even those who object to the war in the Gaza Strip will find it hard not to agree that this...

ISRAEL HAS BEEN receiving considerable criticism around the nation and world for its recent attacks against Hamas forces in Gaza. Demonstrators in many places, including the Bay Area, have condemned Israel for its air strikes, which are designed to halt Hamas rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. Anyone blaming Israel for the recent violence is grossly misinformed and plays into the hands of terrorists. After Israel abandoned Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and Hamas came to power, there have been relentless rocket and mortar attacks against the people of Israel. Since 2007, more than 5,500 rockets have been launched from...

Israel on Wednesday approved an even tougher war on Hamas, warning residents to flee southern Gaza ahead of planned bombing of cross-border tunnels, as the Palestinian death toll passed 700. After a brief lull to allow Gaza's beleaguered population to hunt for food and fuel, Defence Minister Ehud Barak was given the green light by the security cabinet to order a deeper offensive into Gaza towns as part of the campaign to halt Hamas cross-border rocket attacks. But Barak has also decided to send an envoy to Cairo on Thursday to get details on an Egyptian ceasefire plan, which secured...

The current fighting between Israel and Gaza should be no surprise. The people of Gaza set this conflict in motion when they elected Hamas members as their political leaders. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and is a terrorist organization. Being elected to a position of political power did nothing to dissuade Hamas from its murderous path. If anything, the legitimacy because of their election emboldened the Hamas leaders’ actions. They are now reaping the fruits of their labor. Naturally there are a number of people who have condemned Israel for attacking Gaza. Some people have condemned Israel...

(IsraelNN.com) The IDF reported that two well known Hamas terrorists were among the dead in the IDF strike on a school Tuesday which also killed over 40 civilians. According to the IDF, the terrorists were using the school to fire mortar shells at troops. The dead Hamas operatives were Imad Abu Askhar and Hassan Abu Askhar. The IDF said, “We face a very delicate situation where the Hamas is using the citizens of Gaza as a protective vest.”

Dozens of American and Canadian Lutheran bishops arrived in Jerusalem on Tuesday for their annual Academy, a meeting for theological discussion. Planned many months in advance, they gathered in the shadow of the war in Gaza. Bishop Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, called for a cease-fire ahead of his visit, urging "officials of both parties to the conflict to... refrain from all violent acts, which only bring destruction and tragedy, and urge them instead to work to resolve their differences through peaceful and nonviolent means," the church said in a statement. The church believed...

(IsraelNN.com) Israel's steamroller success in its Cast Lead counterterrorist campaign against Hamas has allowed it to begin setting out conditions for a new truce, including foreign supervision at the Egyptian border. The Saudi Gazette published a report from Reuters that "Israel has conditioned any halt to its Gaza Strip offensive on international backing for new fortifications and monitoring on the Egyptian border to prevent Hamas from rebuilding tunnels and rearming." The government is determined to prevent a repeat of the failed Gaza Disengagement agreement and the ceasefire that officially ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Hamas terrorists amassed a huge...

What's unfortunate about the world-wide condemnation of Israel for invading Gaza is that there was so little condemnation of Hamas during its years of firing rockets into Israel. Had international outrage been directed at Hamas provocations, it might have dissuaded Hamas from thinking it was invulnerable to Israel's displeasure. It was the thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately at civilian targets in Israel over the years -- intensified since mid-December when the Egyptian-brokered six month ceasefire was terminated by Hamas -- that led to the air attacks and now land invasion by Israel. Despite urgings by the Pope, the UN and...

The war in Gaza is the first chapter of a new era in the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli conflict is far from the region's dominant dispute. The Arab-Islamist conflict now overwhelms it - by a large margin. Increasingly, Arab regimes know Hamas isn't their friend and, though they won't say so publicly, don't see Israel as an enemy. No wonder: Israel is politically stable and economically prosperous. It doesn't threaten to take over their countries, overthrow their regimes and stand them in front of a firing squad. Radical Islamism, Iran-style, does. That's right. Arab nations' prime 21st century enemy is...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander is calling on Islamic countries to use oil as a weapon to end the fighting in Gaza. The Iranian suggestion this week echoed a similar call made last week by lawmakers in Bahrain. The demands are unlikely to lead to an immediate embargo. They don't come from the Persian Gulf nations' top rulers or carry the support of other major producers like Saudi Arabia.

Taken directly from the UK Guardian's Gaza Diary web page earlier today.-

Three years after being evacuated from settlements in the Gaza Strip, some of the evacuees are now returning - in uniform. Aharon Cruz, a paratroops officer, lived in Netzarim for two years before the disengagement. On Sunday, he and his unit, to which he had been recalled a mere day after his wedding last Thursday, were back at the settlement's ruins in central Gaza. "On one hand, there's a feeling of 'what did we leave for?'" said his father, Rabbi Ze'ev Cruz. "On the other hand, there's joy that he is returning to a place he knows." The ground operation...

Has he said a word about this? Does he have a secret plan that will be enacted on January 20?

Israel did not seek approval from Washington before waging a ground invasion into the Gaza Strip ruled by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), said U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday. "They didn't seek clearance or approval from us, certainly," the vice president said on CBS' Face The Nation on Sunday, his first public remark on Israel's military strikes targeted Hamas. Israel's ground troops, backed by gunships and tanks, on Saturday night launched an invasion into the Gaza Strip. Reports here quoted Palestinian security sources as saying that the troops have gained control of the eastern section of the northern...

The IDF is prepared to deepen and escalate its ground operations in the Gaza Strip, defense officials warned on Sunday, as the IDF split the Palestinian territory in half and began surrounding Gaza City. Hamas, the officials said, was encountering difficulties in commanding and delivering orders to its forces. St.- Sgt. Dvir Emanuelof, 22, from Givat Ze'ev and of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion, was killed on Sunday from wounds he sustained in a mortar shell attack during clashes with Hamas terrorists near Jabalya. Another soldier was critically wounded in the attack. Earlier in the morning, 30 soldiers from Battalion 51...

President George W Bush, in his last fortnight in office, is providing Israel with the diplomatic support the country needs to continue its offensive in the Gaza Strip. Late on Saturday, America prevented the United Nations Security Council from passing a statement urging an immediate ceasefire on both sides and expressing deep concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas. Britain has moved away from America and joined the consensus of European governments, who favour a ceasefire. Deprived of Britain's support, America was isolated on the 15-member Council. Alejandro Wolff, the deputy US Ambassador at the UN, said...

IDF Soldiers In Gaza

(JTA) -- The United Nations Security Council failed to agree on a statement calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. The Security Council met in a four-hour emergency session Saturday night just hours after Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza. It was the council's third meeting since the Gaza operation, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, began Dec. 27. The United States and Britain rejected a draft statement that had been submitted earlier by Libya, representing the Arab League, calling for an immediate cease-fire and expressing concern about Israel's operation. It made no mention of Hamas rocket attacks on...

Israel's attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighbouring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialists bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for America to mobilise a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond. But the kind of response matters. Killing 500 Palestinians and wounding 2,000 others (at the time of writing) is disproportionate. Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel. And just as Hamas's indiscriminate bombing of population...

For pacifists who believe that all wars are immoral, Israel's self-defense operation against Hamas in Gaza is necessarily wrong. To such people we invoke the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Confronted by a movement that amalgamates fascism with religious extremism and a genocidal platform, our moral imperative demands Jewish self-defense. Few of the voices slamming Israel for conducting an "immoral" war in Gaza are those of pacifists. Take Riyad Mansour, Mahmoud Abbas's man at the UN. He claimed on CNN that "3,000 Palestinians had been killed...

Undoubtedly, Operation Cast Lead entails loss of life — as has every other military operation since the dawn of history. The United States itself has been engaged for almost six years in military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan that have surely taken their toll in blood. President Bush has not been amenable to ceasefires and “monitoring mechanisms” as ways of dealing with Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. The latest on Hamas, no less vicious than those groups, is that it spent the weekend murdering 35 Palestinians after breaking the legs or hands of 75 others over the course of...

BEIRUT — President-elect Barack Obama's silence on the weeklong conflict in Gaza is drawing criticism among Arabs who have grown skeptical about hopes that his administration will break with the Mideast policies of the Bush era. Obama has made no statements, either about Israel's bombing of Gaza or Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel. Arab commentators maintain that Obama did comment on foreign affairs when he condemned the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. They suggest that his refusal to speak out on Gaza — where more than 400 Palestinians have died in the Israeli airstrikes, compared to four Israeli deaths from the...

A week of aerial bombardment of Gaza left no doubt about Israel's ability to inflict serious physical damage to the Hamas leadership and its arsenals of weaponry. On Thursday, militant Hamas leader Nizar Rayan - who reportedly once sent his own son on a suicide mission that left two Israelis dead - was killed when a one-ton bomb crashed into his home, also claiming the lives of four of his wives and 11 of his children. On Friday, Israel bombed the homes of a dozen more Hamas operatives and leveled a mosque that was believed to be a weapons storage...

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday that Israel did not seek U.S. approval before a ground invasion against Hamas, the bloodiest Mideast clash in years now escalating into urban warfare. From the White House to Capitol Hill, U.S. officials remained firmly behind Israel. They urged a cease-fire, but put the onus on Hamas, as Israeli troops and tanks cut through the coastal Gaza strip. U.S. lawmakers defended Israel's ground incursion as a justifiable response to Hamas rocket fire on Israel. Cheney said Israel "didn't seek clearance or approval from us, certainly" before thousands of soldiers pushed into Gaza...

Israel has confirmed the first death of a soldier in its offensive in the Gaza Strip. The army says the soldier was killed by mortar fire earlier today in northern Gaza. The confirmation comes as explosions continue to pound the Strip as Israeli forces push further into the Hamas-run territory after launching a ground assault overnight.

The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a Security Council statement calling for an immediate Israeli-Hamas cease-fire in Gaza and southern Israel and expressing serious concern at the escalation of violence. US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said the United States saw no prospect of Hamas abiding by last week's council call for an immediate end to the violence. Therefore, he said, a new statement at this time "would not be adhered to and would have no underpinning for success, would not do credit to the council." France's UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, the current council president, announced that there was...

The government's decision on Friday to approve a major ground incursion into the Gaza Strip came as diplomatic efforts aimed at putting together a cease-fire that would end the rocket fire on Israel and arms smuggling into Gaza failed to come to fruition. Intensive diplomatic efforts led by US President George W. Bush and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and Egypt did not succeed in putting a proposal on the table that Israel was satisfied with. The cabinet on Sunday will hear both security and diplomatic briefings regarding Operation Cast Lead, as Saturday...

Israel entered the second week of its offensive against rockets from Hamas-ruled Gaza on Saturday evening by launching a much-expected ground operation into the coastal strip.