The Times of Israel is liveblogging events as they unfold through Thursday, the 24th day of Operation Protective Edge. Wednesday saw the heaviest Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, and three soldiers killed in a booby-trapped building. The security cabinet approved ongoing strikes at Hamas, as the IDF continued tackling the Hamas cross-border tunnels.
Fifty-six soldiers and three civilians have been killed on the Israeli side in three weeks of fighting, while Gazan health officials put the death toll there at over 1,300. Israel says hundreds of those are Hamas fighters. (Wednesday’s liveblog is here.)
As Netanyahu speaks, rockets land in the south
During the prime minister’s address, the sirens in Sderot are triggered six times consecutively.
According to Ynet, two rockets explode in the southern city — one near a school, and one near a public park. A man is lightly injured.
We won’t accept truce that prevents the tunnel demolitions, PM says
At the start of the cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the IDF continues to fight in Gaza “with full force,” and is neutralizing tunnels.
The tunnels would have enabled Hamas to kidnap and kill Israeli citizens in simultaneous mass attacks, he says. “We are demolishing that capacity now,” he says. Still, just as Iron Dome does not prevent 100% of rocket impacts, there’s no 100% guarantee when it comes to tackling the tunnels, he says, possibly thinking of the five soldiers who were shot dead by Hamas gunmen emerging from a tunnel near Kibbutz Nahal Oz on Monday.
Netanyahu also hails the army’s “impressive results” in the field. “We’ve neutralized dozens of terror tunnels, and we are determined to complete that mission.”
He says Israel will not accept any ceasefire proposal that prevents the IDF from completing the task of demolishing the tunnels, and reiterates that this is only the first step in the full disarmament of the Gaza Strip. He says the US, Europe and others now recognize that imperative.
He says Hamas is suffering harsh blows: “thousands of terror targets” have been attacked — “terror command centers, rocket stores, weapons workshops, launchers, and hundreds of slain terrorists.”
Netanyahu extends condolences to the fallen soldiers’ families — he says he has spoken to the dozens of families by phone — and praises the public for its resilience.
He says there is a minority of the Israeli public that grows increasingly radical at this time — on both extremes of the political spectrum — in a reference to the hostile online and in-person clashes between left-wing and right-wing activists. “Be careful what you say; be careful what you do,” he urges.
He says the ministers must serve as a personal example to the public, and that national unity is vital.
As he speaks, sirens sound in the Gaza border towns, including Sderot.
Move will give IDF ‘some breathing room,’ military official says; 86,000 reserve soldiers recruited in total
Hours after Israel’s security cabinet voted Wednesday evening to intensify the army’s operation in the Gaza Strip, a military official confirmed that the IDF is set to call up an additional 16,000 reservists Thursday, bringing the total of soldiers called up to 86,000.
The military official said the recruitment was meant to give the army “some breathing room,” Ynet reported. “It will be decided [on Thursday] where they will be placed and under which commands,” the official added.
On Wednesday, the security cabinet instructed the IDF to continue “forcefully hitting Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza,” and to conclude its mission to destroy the tunnels leading from the Strip into Israel, a diplomatic source said.
The White House expects a “a full, prompt and thorough investigation” into Wednesday’s shelling of a United Nations-run girls’ school in Gaza, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz told reporters during an impromptu press conference aboard Air Force One. Schultz’s statement underscored similar calls from the State Department, but unlike the UN, administration officials refused to ascribe blame to Israel for the incident that Gazan sources said left some 20 people dead.
Amid mounting diplomatic pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire, the security cabinet on Wednesday instructed the IDF to continue to “forcefully hit Hamas and the other terrorist organizations in Gaza,” and to conclude its mission to destroy the tunnels leading from the Strip into Israel, diplomatic sources said.
The army’s actions in locating and destroying these terror tunnels have brought about significant strategic achievements in an area in which Hamas has invested much effort over the years, the sources said.
The US is pressing Israel to halt the fighting. On Sunday, in a phone call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Barack Obama urged an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. The UN Security Council also urged a ceasefire. On Wednesday, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond warned: “Israelis have to understand that while they are defending their security in seeking to root out these rocket launchers and deal with the attack tunnels, they are also undermining the support for Israel that exists in the West.” Netanyahu on Monday told Israelis to be braced for what he called a prolonged operation.
The Israeli diplomatic sources noted: “The IDF also has significant achievements in damaging the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas and additional terrorist groups and will continue to act and expand these operations.”
Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, is housed in a converted British army barracks. Some 126 miles north is Israel’s Ziv Medical Center in Zefat.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, is using the civilian population as human shields. The terrorist group has placed its missiles in schools and mosques and, even more deplorably, burrowed its command center underneath the al-Shifa hospital.
Hamas‘ activities are taking place in plain sight. Just two weeks ago, The Washington Post described al-Shifa as “a de facto headquarters forHamas leaders.” These terrorist facilities are of course well known not only to the foreign journalists who interview Hamas fighters there, but also to the Israelis, who would by necessity consider such a location a legitimate target for any action against Hamas.Hamas sees no downside in this arrangement. Knowing that Israelprioritizes protecting civilians, the terrorists can be reasonably confident that al-Shifa will not be targeted, and they can continue their murderous activities undisturbed. If the Israelis finally decide that these activities are intolerable and that to destroy Hamas they must target their headquarters, Hamas will have pictures of the quintessentially innocent martyrs — hospital patients unable to flee — to plaster across international media in their ongoing propaganda war to demonize the Jewish state.
Meanwhile in Israel, Ziv is a center for pediatric and orthopedic medicine. Given its proximity to Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria, Ziv has seen its share of violence, but despite taking direct rocket fire during the 2006 Lebanon war, it has remained in continuous operation.
During the past three years of the Syrian civil war, Ziv has treated more than 1,000 Syrians injured in that conflict — all free of charge.
All of this means that many of Ziv’s hospital beds and a substantial portion of its funding are not available for Israelis, but the staff has concluded it is worth it if their work can start to reverse the intractable hate that has been relentlessly leveled at Israel by its neighbors.
The chief of Iran's elite Quds Force has ridiculed calls for Hamas to be disarmed and urged the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza to "turn the land and sky into hell" for Israel.
Maj.-Gen. Qassem Suleimani's message to militant factions resisting Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip was published late Wednesday by Iran's official IRNA news agency.
Suleimani "underlined that confronting the Zionist enemy is a necessity and the Palestinian resistance movement will turn the land and sky into hell for the Zionists."
"Disarmament of resistance is a daydream that will only come true in the graveyard" for Israel, said the rarely quoted senior figure.
Suleimani's intervention follows a speech Tuesday by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Islamic world to arm the Palestinians and branding Israel's actions in Gaza a "genocide."
Half a million Christians have fled Mosul. Any who remain will be slaughtered.
Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako, head of Iraq’s Catholic Church, says that the invasion did what Moslems couldn’t do in 1500 years: destroy Christianity in Iraq.
So both parties, corrupt to the core, are silent on this holocaust.
National Review’s paymasters insist that any comments mentioning the Christian holocaust be immediately deleted (just try it, here.). Apparently, there’s no money in defending Christians. And this comes from the once-respected journal that valiantly defended the rights of Christians put behind the Iron Curtain by FDR.
If the worst Ebola outbreak in recorded history reaches the United States, federal law permits "the apprehension and examination of any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease". These individuals can be "detained for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary". In other words, the federal government already has the authority to round people up against their will, take them to detention facilities and hold them there for as long as they feel it is "reasonably necessary". In addition, as you will read about below, the federal government has the authority "to separate and restrict the movement of well persons who may have been exposed to a communicable disease to see if they become ill". If you want to look at these laws in the broadest sense, they pretty much give the federal government the power to do almost anything that they want with us in the event of a major pandemic. Of course such a scenario probably would not be called "marital law", but it would probably feel a lot like it.
"Isolation" would not be a voluntary thing. The federal government would start hunting down anyone that they "reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease" and taking them to the facilities where other patients were being held. It wouldn't matter if you were entirely convinced that you were 100% healthy. If the government wanted to take you in, you would have no rights in that situation. In fact, federal law would allow the government to detain you "for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary".
And once you got locked up with all of the other Ebola patients, there would be a pretty good chance that you would end up getting the disease and dying anyway. The current Ebola outbreak has a 55 percent percent mortality rate, and experts tell us that the mortality rate for Ebola can be as high as 90 percent.
This is not like other Ebola outbreaks.
Something seems different this time.
But instead of trying to keep things isolated to a few areas, global health authorities are going to start sending Ebola patients to other parts of the globe. For example, one German hospital has already agreed to start receiving Ebola patients...
Federal authorities seem to have been preparing for such an outbreak for quite a while. As my good friend Mac Slavo has pointed out, "biological diagnostic systems" were distributed to National Guard units in all 50 states back in April...
Also see:
