Two IDF soldiers were killed and seven injured during clashes in Gaza on Monday afternoon, the military cleared for publication overnight Monday-Tuesday, bringing the death toll of military personnel since Israel launched a ground incursion into the Strip last Thursday to 27.
The toll is greater than the number of soldiers who died in the two previous major Israeli efforts to thwart Hamas terrorism in 2008-2009 and 2012.
The IDF said one of the soldiers, Sgt. First Class Oded Ben-Sira, 22, from Nir Etzion in northern Israel, who served in the Nahal Brigade, will be laid to rest at 5 pm on Tuesday at the military cemetery in the moshav.
He was killed by sniper fire in Gaza. The name of the second soldier was not immediately released.
Troops from the Nahal Brigade converged and killed 10 of the Hamas gunmen. Two of the gunmen may have escaped back into Gaza.
Part of the incident was filmed in footage later released by the IDF.
“We paid a heavy price, but we averted a grave disaster,” said Sami Turgeman, the general in charge of the IDF’s Southern Command. “There is no Iron Dome protection against tunnel infiltration.”
The three other Israeli soldiers were killed in Shejaiya. Two were hit by an anti-tank missile fired into a building. Like the 13 IDF soldiers killed there overnight Saturday-Sunday, they were members of the Golani Brigade. The third may have been killed by IDF forces in error.
Military sources said Monday night that Hamas was trying to utilize the “attack tunnels” it had spent years building before the IDF discovered them and blew them up. They said some 18 of the sophisticated tunnels had been discovered since the ground offensive began on Thursday.
Number of Palestinians killed in Gaza passes 600
The number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip has passed 600, a spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry says.
According to Ashraf al-Qudra, 604 people have died in the 14 days since Operation Protective Edge began, with 46 killed today.
He adds that 3,700 have been injured.
UN chief to land in Israel at 2 p.m.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is currently in Cairo trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, is scheduled to land in Tel Aviv today at 2 p.m. He will drive directly to the Defense Ministry’s headquarters for a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.
In the afternoon, Ban will travel to Ramallah for meetings with the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
Tomorrow morning, he is scheduled to visit outgoing President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, followed by meetings with Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and opposition leader Isaac Herzog.
The Israeli army should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for its “unimaginable restraint” in Gaza, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said Tuesday.
During an address at the Christians United for Israel Summit in Washington, Dermer was interrupted several times by hecklers, but delivered a passionate and warmly received speech in defense of Operation Protective Edge, calling Iran the “Great Evil” and accusing the United Nations and human rights groups of inadvertently aiding Hamas in its war against Israel.
During World War II, the British army responded to German attacks with the “carpet bombing of German cities,” Dermer said. While he was unwilling to criticize the United Kingdom for doing so, he continued, “at the same time, I will not accept, and no one should accept, criticism of Israel for acting with restraint that has not been shown and would not be shown by any nation on earth. I especially will not tolerate criticism of my country at a time when Israeli soldiers are dying so that innocent Palestinians can live.”
At that point in Dermer’s speech, given to a packed auditorium of Christian Israel supporters, he was interrupted by hecklers. “There is a section for moral idiots at the back of the room,” he responded, according to a transcript of the speech posted to his Facebook page.
“Israel did not have to send its soldiers into many of the places they are fighting today. We could have given people time to evacuate these areas — which we did anyway — and then bombed from the air all the buildings that were being used by fighters to store and fire weapons. But we didn’t. As we have done time after time, we are sending our soldiers into this hornet’s nest of Palestinian terror that is booby-trapped with mines and riddled with subterranean tunnels.”
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he has stopped talking to US President Barack Obama on the phone, amid growing strains between Ankara and Washington over Syria and the Gaza conflict.
Turkey, a fierce opponent of Syrian President Bashar Assad and an open supporter of armed rebel fighters, felt betrayed when the United States backed away from military action against Damascus in September.
“I expect justice in this process. I couldn’t imagine something like this from those who are championing justice,” Erdogan added without elaborating, in an apparent jibe at Washington.
The last phone conversation between the two leaders took place on February 20 after which the White House released a statement accusing Erdogan of misrepresenting the content of the conversation.
A staunch advocate of the Palestinian cause, Erdogan has recently been at loggerheads with Washington over Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 580 Palestinians in two weeks. Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on July 8 in an effort to halt the rocket fire from Gaza that threatened the country’s south and center, and find and destroy cross-border tunnels used by Hamas fighters to infiltrate and attack Israeli communities.
Erdogan accused the Jewish state of carrying out “state terrorism” and a “genocide” of Palestinians and criticized the United States for defending Israel’s “disproportionate” tactics.
The US State Department branded his comments on Israel “offensive and wrong” but the prime minister hit back by saying the United States needed to engage in “self-criticism.”
The situation for Iraq’s Christians has been steadily deteriorating ever since the 2003 invasion, in part because the U.S. never acknowledged that Christians were being targeted by Islamists and did not prioritize protection of Christians or other minorities.
But with the recent sweep through Mosul and other Iraqi cities by the jihadi group ISIS, Iraq’s Christians look to be on the verge of genocide.
On June 16th it was reported that ISIS had marked the doors of Christians in red. Patriarch Sako’s letter confirms that rumor. While no one yet knows what this ominous sign foretells, Sako and other Christian leaders are pleading with the world to intervene before the meaning of the sign is made clear.
Earlier this week, Iraqi human rights activist Pascale Warda came to Washington from Baghdad to raise the alarm with the State Department and members of Congress. She was accompanied by Bishop Yousif Habash, who now resides in Elizabeth, New Jersey, but who is originally from Qaraqosh, a city 15 miles from Mosul which was also recently overrun by ISIS, where the Christians still speak Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
Bishop Habash said, “Christians throughout the Middle East have been targeted, and we are on the verge of being exterminated. The West stepped in to stop the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Muslims, so we know it can be done. The West must step in now and save the Middle East’s Christians, or we will be wiped out.”
The torching of the church comes on the heels of the destruction of a number of other Christian monuments in Iraq in recent months including the tomb of biblical prophet Jonah, which was dug up by ISIL militants in the east of Mosul.
Many Christians still in Mosul also hurried to leave the city before Saturday when an ISIS ultimatum that Christians convert to Islam, pay a tax or leave came into effect.
"We left Mosul as we saw that [we] were close to being butchered, and under the threat of armed militants. It was serious and firm," a Christian named Mukhalis Yeshua told Shoebat.
"…But the issue that sparked the pain and sorrow was the checkpoints exiting Mosul as the armed men searched the families, and robbed all their money as search parties from the IS (Islamic Caliphate) searched all the women and robbed their jewelry and money, telling them that such money is Islamic property," added the Christian.
Patriarch Sako told AFP Friday that: "Christian families are on their way to Dohuk and Arbil," in the neighboring autonomous region of Kurdistan. "For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians," he said.
New World Disorder: Emerging Division Between East And West Threatens To Plunge The Globe Into Chaos
The civil war in Ukraine and the crash of MH17 have created an enormous amount of tension between the United States and Russia, and many analysts believe that relations between the two superpowers are now even worse than they were during the end of the Cold War era. In addition, the indictment of five PLA officers for cyber espionage and sharp disagreements over China's territorial claims in the South China Sea (among other issues) have caused U.S. relations with China to dip to their lowest point since at least 1989. So could the emerging division between the east and the west ultimately plunge us into a period of global chaos? And what would that mean for the world economy?
For as long as most Americans can remember, the U.S. dollar and the U.S. financial system have been overwhelmingly dominant. But now the powers of the east appear to be determined to break this monopoly. Four of the BRICS nations (China, Russia, India and Brazil) are on the list of the top ten biggest economies on the planet, and they are starting to make moves to become much less dependent on the U.S.-centered financial system of the western world. For example, just last week the BRICS nations established two new institutions which are intended to be alternatives to the World Bank and the IMF...
This comes at a time when both China and Russia are seeking to emphasize their own currencies and move away from using the U.S. dollar so much.
Even in the western media, it is being admitted that China's yuan is "a growing force in global finance", and according to CNBC the use of Chinese currency in international trade is growing very rapidly...
At this point, it seems clear that Russia plans to permanently decouple from the U.S. economy and the U.S. financial system. Just today we learned that Vladimir Putin plans to make Russia less dependent on U.S. companies such as IBM and Microsoft, and any future rounds of sanctions are likely to cause even more damage to U.S. firms that do business in Russia.
But potentially much more troubling for the U.S. economy is the startling deterioration in the relationship between the Obama administration and China. Some analysts are even describing this as "a tipping point"...
In fact, the Chinese military has grown so powerful that we are now seeing headlines such as this one in The Week: "China thinks it can defeat America in battle".
And the Russian military has made tremendous strides as well. Putin has been working hard to modernize the Russian nuclear arsenal, the Russians now have a "fifth generation" fighter jet that is supposedly far superior to the F-22 Raptor, and they have nuclear submarines that are so incredibly quiet that the U.S. Navy refers to them as "black holes".
If Russia and China stay united, they are more than capable of providing a counterbalance to U.S. power around the globe.
But even if military conflict is not in our immediate future, the breakdown in relations between east and west could still have a dramatic impact on the global economy.
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