The paragraph at the bottom of this first article is key. ISIS is closing in around Israel and will soon be in a position to attack. Make no mistake about it - the ultimate goal is Israel; it always has been and it always will be. Now, it is just a matter of time.
To the south of Lebanon, Israel’s unusually mild military retaliation against “terrorist targets” in Gaza for the swelling hail of rockets aimed day by day at Ashkelon, Hof Ashkelon and the Eshkol District , points to a decision by Israel’s government military leaders to avoid being dragged into the cauldron boiling up around its borders.
Israel’s armed forces and three intelligence services, the Shin Bet, Mossad and AMAN, are in fact nursing the blow to their prestige from the failure of their massive, all-out hunt of two weeks discover the three teenagers abducted on June 10.
Some serious soul-searching is taking place about the wisdom of throwing all of the IDF’s deterrent strength against the kidnappers, who have since been identified as a pair of Hamas operatives, who outsmarted Israel’s mightiest resources and vanished off the face of the earth with their captives.
Israel’s conduct in this episode appears in retrospect to have been ruled less by sense than by emotions.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was sidetracked by his fixed desire for a reckoning with Hamas and with the Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for dealing with this extremist group – notwithstanding their near-irrelevance to the main stream of events in the region.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was sidetracked by his fixed desire for a reckoning with Hamas and with the Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for dealing with this extremist group – notwithstanding their near-irrelevance to the main stream of events in the region.
Three months after Israel’s National Intelligence Estimate judged the prospect of a conventional war close to nil, Al Qaeda’s cohorts are grabbing wide stretches of Iraq and knocking on the doors of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Iran, Hizballah - and now ISIS - must be wondering what makes Israel tick in view of this behavior. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s jihadis are fighting under the flag of the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant. For them, the Levant is not just Syria and Lebanon and Jordan, but also “Palestine” i.e. Israel.
Jerusalem had better wake up fast. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have deployed tank divisions on their borders against ISIS encroachments. The two kingdoms are Israel’s eastern and southern next door neighbors.
Residents in the Sdot Negev Regional Council took cover Saturday night as another barrage of rockets was launched from the Gaza Strip, following a direct hit on a Sderot paint factory earlier in the evening.
The two rockets in the second salvo likely landed in open territory, according to initial reports, bringing the total amount of projectiles launched at Israel Saturday night to four.
Four people were injured in Sderot after the factory was set ablaze by the rocket. Four employees were reportedly inside the factory at the time, but managed to escape unharmed.
Sderot mayor Alon Davidi said after the incident that the residents of Sderot would not be “deterred by the atrocious acts of terrorists, who fire rockets at population centers.”
“We stand firmly behind the aims of the prime minister, the defense minister and the army chief who are operating to bring the boys back home as well as a sense of normalcy to us all,” he said.
The latest series of attacks came amid an escalation of hostilities along Israel’s southern border with the Palestinian enclave as IDF troops scour the West Bank for three missing Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrach and Gil-ad Shaar. Israel has accused Hamas of carrying out the June 12 abduction of the teens and named two Hamas men as being the masterminds.
The rocket that hit Sderot marked the first direct hit on an Israeli target since the recent escalation in rocket fire on Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
The rocket fire came after Israel and Gaza operatives were engaged in a series of retaliatory attacks over the past 48 hours.
Early Saturday morning, Israel planes struck Hamas military targets in the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire from the Palestinian territory hours before.
Residents of the coastal enclave reported multiple explosions, and the IDF said in a statement that it targeted “two terror activity sites and a weapons manufacturing facility in the central Gaza Strip, and a weapons storage facility in the southern Gaza Strip.” The Israeli military confirmed direct hits.
On Friday evening, Israel’s Iron Dome system intercepted two rockets launched at southern Israel from the Gaza Strip following the targeted assassination by Israel of two Gaza operatives.
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