[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ERUSALEM — The grinding urban battle unfolding in the densely populated Gaza Strip is a war of new tactics, quick adaptation and lethal tricks.

Hamas, with training from Iran and Hezbollah, has used the last two years to turn Gaza into a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs. Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli intelligence officials say.

Unwilling to take Israel’s bait and come into the open, Hamas militants are fighting in civilian clothes; even the police have been ordered to take off their uniforms. The militants emerge from tunnels to shoot automatic weapons or antitank missiles, then disappear back inside, hoping to lure the Israeli soldiers with their fire.

[Nickel]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Israelshero', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', '
')
"We are not your problem. The Palestinians are your problem."

[hermit]

<snip>

[mattduke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Nickel', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Israelshero', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', '
')
"We are not your problem. The Palestinians are your problem."

[complexburp]

c'mon. Just google Israel covert operations.
you could read all year.

[wisconsin_cur]

Urban Assault about to begin?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Israel has confirmed sending thousands of army reservists into Gaza, raising concerns that a deadly "third stage" of its offensive - targeting urban centres - could soon begin.

And as the offensive entered its 17th day on Monday, Al Jazeera's Zeina Awad reported from the Israel-Gaza border that Israeli air craft had kept up a sustained bombardment all night and a huge explosion was witnessed over the northeastern part of strip.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said his troops were close to meeting their objectives in Gaza, but stopped short of giving a timeline for ending the conflict.

[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'J')ERUSALEM — Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south on Sunday in fierce fighting, and senior Israeli officials said for the first time in the two-week-old war that they believed that the Hamas military wing was beginning to crack and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza were looking for a cease-fire.

[Borokrom]

The video below could be funny at Jay Leno, but it's no fun at all.



Pro-Israel Rally Attended by Big-Time NY Dems Descends into Calls for 'Wiping Out' Palestinians


http://www.alternet.org/audits/119372

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')o one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel’s war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world’s most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it.

The rally made me think of a passage in “The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes,” a powerful new book by former Israeli Knesset speaker and Jewish National Fund chairman Avraham Burg:

“If you are a bad person, a whining enemy or a strong-arm occupier, you are not my brother, even if you are circumcised, observe the Sabbath, and do mitzvahs. If your scarf covers every hair on your head for modest, you give alms and do charity, but what is under your scarf is dedicated to the sanctity of Jewish land, taking precedence over the sanctity of human life, whosever life that is, then your are not my sister. You might be my enemy. A good Arab or a righteous gentile will be a brother or sister to me. A wicked man, even of Jewish descent, is my adversary, and I would stand on the other side of the barricade and fight him to the end.”

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', '
')So, Israel decimates the Gaza strip. And completely loses the 'war for hearts & minds.'

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', '
')So, Israel decimates the Gaza strip. And completely loses the 'war for hearts & minds.'

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Israelshero', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('strider3700', 'I')'m getting awfully disappointed with Israel. As was pointed out earlier the genocide I keep hearing about is pathetic.

[snowbow]

Well you know, in the united nations, who sits next to the united states?


America's next door neighbor

and who tells them how to vote?

Israel and the US engaged in a rare and uncharacteristic public spat Tuesday over events leading to the US abstention in last Thursday's UN Security Council resolution vote on the Gaza crisis.

Both the State Department and White House spokesmen said that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's claim that he had essentially gotten US President George W. Bush to twist Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's arm and abstain on the measure was simply untrue.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Olmert's story of what happened in his conversation with Bush was "just 100 percent, totally, completely not true," while White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said "there are inaccuracies."

During a speech to local authority heads in Ashkelon on Monday, Olmert said that Rice had been embarrassed when she was ordered to back down from supporting the resolution she had prepared, after Olmert intervened with Bush.

Olmert said he had called Bush and interrupted a lecture he was giving in Philadelphia to ensure that the US not vote for the resolution.

"I said: 'Get me President Bush on the phone,'" Olmert said. "They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care: 'I need to talk to him now.' He got off the podium and spoke to me."

According to Olmert, he told Bush that the US should not vote for the resolution, and Bush then directed Rice to abstain.

"She was left pretty embarrassed," Olmert said.

McCormack said that Rice had decided as early as Wednesday that she would not veto a resolution, after Arab ministers rejected an initial effort by the US to push for a weaker presidential statement from the Security Council. That left her with the option of either voting for the final text or abstaining.

"So you have two possibilities left: voting for it, or abstaining, and she decided, given where the state of the negotiations were in terms of the Mubarak initiative, that abstaining would give the best possibility for those negotiations to move forward and actually resolve the situation on the ground," McCormack said.

He said Rice had spoken with Bush both before and after his conversation with Olmert, but insisted "with 100% assurance that her intention, again, going into the conversation with the president was that she was going to abstain."

An official in the Prime Minister's Office tersely responded to the comments from Washington, saying "the Prime Minister's comments on Monday were a correct account of what took place."

The official downplayed the incident, saying it was "over" and would have no lasting impact.

The official said he was not aware of any conversation Olmert had had with Rice on Tuesday to clarify the matter, or that any messages had been relayed from Jerusalem to Washington.

Washington's account of the events, however, seemed to have been indirectly confirmed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who was quoted as saying earlier in the week that she had held seven "difficult" phone conversations with Rice on the day of the vote, and Rice had told her that while the US would not veto the resolution, it would abstain.

Rice spent three days in New York shuttling between conference rooms at United Nations headquarters, meeting with Arab ministers and her British and French counterparts. She said after Thursday's vote that she had abstained because she felt a resolution "might have been a little premature."

Israeli officials said it was unlikely that the spat would have any lasting impact, primarily because Rice would be leaving office in less than a week.

Olmert's comment, said in an off-the-cuff manner and not read from a text, is widely believed to reflect the degree of Israeli disappointment at Rice's handling of the Security Council resolution.

Middle East expert Steven Spiegel described the episode as "the worst faux pas by an Israeli prime minister in history."

"You really do wonder what the prime minister was thinking - if it's true, you'd really want to keep it as quiet as possible, and if it's not true, why would you want to make up a story that would embarrass both the Bush administration and the Israeli government and draw criticism from those who are antagonistic to Israel?" asked Spiegel, director of the Center for Middle East Development at UCLA.

"No matter how you play it, exaggeration, falsehood, whole truth, the whole thing makes them all look bad," Spiegel told The Jerusalem Post.

[Nickel]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', '
')So, Israel decimates the Gaza strip. And completely loses the 'war for hearts & minds.'

[Borokrom]

Maybe we should change the subject on this topic in:

Re: Israel vs Hamas Heating gas up

check this out:



http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=11680
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', '
')So, Israel decimates the Gaza strip. And completely loses the 'war for hearts & minds.'

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Borokrom', 'M')aybe we should change the subject on this topic in:

Re: Israel vs Hamas Heating gas up

check this out:



http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=11680
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

[Nickel]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', 'W')hy does Palestine get such a narrow piece of the pie? Oh, I forgot, they're NOT GOD'S CHOSEN F**KING PEOPLE.

[Fredrik]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Borokrom', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves.

This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline.

[hermit]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fredrik', '
')If the gas reserves were already discovered in 2000, why did Israel withdraw from Gaza in 2005?

[Borokrom]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'a')) The Oslo agreement already gives Israelis access to gas. They don't have to murder 5000 people to get it.

b) Israel never really "Withdrew". They just redeployed to the edges of Gaza in order to seal it off and starve the population. Plus it's easier to drop the really, really big bombs when you're own people are out of the way.