Israel ground war in Egypt?

[Peter Lemkin]

Just hours before Israel assassinated Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari on Tuesday, he received the draft proposal of a permanent truce agreement with Israel. But Israel approved the airstrike anyways, choosing escalation over resolution.

Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who helped negotiate the release of Gilad Shalit and maintained contacts with Hamas leaders, said the truce agreement included protocols for maintaining a cease-fire in the case of cross-border violence between Israel and Gaza.

Baskin told Haaretz that senior officials in Israel knew about the pending truce agreement, but nevertheless approved the assassination, presumably knowing it would terminate the truce and escalate the conflict with Gaza.

"I think that they have made a strategic mistake," Baskin said, "which will cost the lives of quite a number of innocent people on both sides." He added that Jabari's assassination "killed the possibility of achieving a truce."

"This blood could have been spared. Those who made the decision must be judged by the voters, but to my regret they will get more votes because of this," he added.

"According to Baskin," Haaretz reports, "during the past two years Jabari internalized the realization that the rounds of hostilities with Israel were beneficial neither to Hamas nor to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and only caused suffering, and several times he acted to prevent firing by Hamas into Israel."

Even when Hamas was pulled into participating in rocket fire, its rockets would always land in open spaces. "And that was intentional," Baskin said.

[Magda Hassan]

BREAKING FROM GAZA : Dr. Ashraf
Al-Qedra, from Al-Shifa Hospital
in A Press release : "The Latest
death toll is 39 Deaths ( 5 of
them are Children under the age
of 2 years ) and 340 injuries , 80% of them are civilians. and
our Palestinian Hospital are now
suffering the lack of Medicine and
medical supplies, asking Gazans
to Donate blood and volunteer in
Nursing. We also found that Israel is using chemical and
perhaps biological weapons in
Gaza, we saw shrapnels that has
toxic properties in the bodies of
injured and dead children and
that there are strange smells in the air". -Dr. Ashraf Al-Qedra-

[Jan Klimkowski]

Israel targeting journalists again, and justifying it with YouTube psyop video porn.

The propaganda video can be seen at the link.

A cameraman had to have his leg amputated. Israel is calling it a surgical strike.

Israeli air strikes hit media centres in Gaza City

Six injured as strikes target buildings housing media organisations including Sky News, al-Arabiya and al-Quds TV

Harriet Sherwood in Gaza City

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 November 2012 10.14 GMT


Video released by the Israeli Defence Forces shows an air strike on a building housing international media organisations including Sky News, al-Arabiya and al-Quds TV. Link to this video
Israeli military planes struck two media headquarters in Gaza City in the early hours of Sunday morning, injuring six people including a cameraman, who lost a leg.

A number of media organisations are based in the al-Shawa building, including al-Quds television, which is associated with Islamic Jihad. Khader al-Zahhar, a cameraman with al-Quds TV, had his leg amputated as a result of injuries sustained in the attack.

A second air strike struck another media complex in the city, the al-Shuruq building. It houses Sky News, the al-Arabiya news network, Dubai TV and an office of al-Aqsa TV, which is affiliated with Hamas.

Sky News reporter Sam Kiley was sleeping in the offices when the missile struck shortly before 7am. "The missile hit the floor above us. There was a big flash of light and the sound of breaking glass."

In a statement, the Israeli Defence Forces said: "A communications antenna used by Hamas to carry out terror activity against the state of Israel, was … targeted."

"The second site was targeted at approximately 6.50am and was also part of Hamas's operational communications that was deliberately located on the roof of the building, in which several international media bureaux reside.

"The IDF calls on international journalists and correspondents who operate in the Gaza Strip carrying out their duties, to stay clear of Hamas's bases and facilities which serve them in their activity against the citizens of Israel."

The Palestinian death toll since the war began last Wednesday topped 50 after a night of sustained bombing. Seven civilians including five NEW children were killed in overnight bombing, a Gaza health official said. Two of the children were killed and 12 people injured when two houses were struck in northern Gaza.

Shells fired from Israeli gunboats positioned off the coast pummelled Gaza for an hour in the middle of the night, causing massive explosions.

There appeared to be a lull in rocket fire out of Gaza overnight, but air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Ashdod on Sunday morning. Israel's Channel 2 reported that rocket fire aimed at Tel Aviv was intercepted by an Iron Dome defence battery.

[Magda Hassan]

Israeli air strikes hit media centres in Gaza City

Six injured as strikes target buildings housing media organisations including Sky News, al-Arabiya and al-Quds TV

The ethnic cleansing will not be televised.

In and of itself a war crime.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Israeli air strikes hit media centres in Gaza City

Six injured as strikes target buildings housing media organisations including Sky News, al-Arabiya and al-Quds TV

The ethnic cleansing will not be televised.

In and of itself a war crime.

I was wondering why Bibi & his henchmen were threatening their quisling leader, Abbas. Apparently, if Abbas' move to get Palestine "observer status" at the UN succeeds, Israeli war crimes could be referred to the International Criminal Court.

That said, I still don't know why Bibi is worried. The International Criminal Court just revealed itself as totally bought and paid for by declaring the Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina, masterminded by American private military contractors, as legitimate:

War crimes convictions of two Croatian generals overturned

Croatia celebrates release of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, but Serbian prosecutor calls appeal ruling 'scandalous'
Julian Borger in The Hague

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 November 2012 12.50 GMT



Ante Gotovina, left, and Mladen Markac. Photograph: Bas Czerwinski/AFP/Getty


An appeal court at The Hague war crimes tribunal has overturned the convictions of two Croatian generals for the expulsion of ethnic Serbs in 1995, in a ruling hailed in Croatia as a vindication of its war of independence but denounced in Serbia as evidence of bias.

The court ordered the immediate release of Ante Gotovina, a former military commander, and Mladen Markac, a former head of special police, who had been serving jail sentences of 24 and 18 years respectively.

The verdict revealed deep divisions inside the tribunal. It threw out last year's trial verdict on the two men, but only by a 3-2 majority. The two dissenting justices were scathing. One called it "simply grotesque" and contradictory to "any sense of justice".

The two generals remained impassive as the verdicts were read out but the decision was greeted with cheers and applause in the public seats in the chamber and with celebrations around Croatia, where Gotovina is seen as a national hero and an embodiment of the country's fight for independence. Thousands of people took to the streets and children were sent home from schools. After collecting their prison possessions, the two generals were driven in Croatian government cars to Rotterdam airport for the flight back to Zagreb.

Croatia's president, Ivo Josipovic, said: "The verdict confirms everything that we believe in Croatia: that Generals Gotovina and Markac are innocent."

Gotovina's defence lawyer, Greg Kehoe, said the appeal verdict demonstrated that Croatia's Operation Storm in 1995 to regain control over the last Serb-run enclaves on its territory had been entirely legitimate under international law.

"This judgment vindicates that operation as a proper and just attempt to bring back that land into Croatia. More importantly, it vindicates what kind of soldier General Gotovina was," Kehoe said.

The appeal verdict caused outrage in Serbia, where President Tomislav Nikolic condemned the verdict as "political" adding it "will open old wounds."

Early reports suggested Serb officials may boycott an event planned by the Hague tribunal next week in Belgrade.

By mostly majority verdicts the judges said the original trial had erred significantly in ruling that Croatian artillery had illegally shelled four Serb-held towns Knin, Benkovac, Gracac and Obrovac. In particular, it found that the criteria used that any shell that landed more than 200 metres away from a military target must have been fired indiscriminately was arbitrary and "devoid of any specific reasoning".

More controversially, the majority verdict said that there had been no "joint criminal enterprise", or conspiracy, to force out the Serbs from the Krajina region. An estimated 20,000 fled their homes and 600 were killed, many in summary executions.

In one of the two dissenting verdicts, Fausto Pocar, argued there was much more evidence presented at last year's trial to suggest that one of the aims of Operation Storm was to force the Serbs out, including transcripts of a meeting on the island of Brijuni just before it was launched, presided over by the then Croatian leader, Franjo Tudjman.

Pocar wrote that the majority view on the Brijuni meeting was "simply grotesque."

The defence lawyer, Kehoe said. "There were crimes, very heinous crimes that need to prosecuted." But he said that by vindicating the conduct of Operation Storm, the tribunal had "put itself on the right side of the rule of law".

The tribunal, set up by the UN in 1993, has been repeatedly criticised for the slow pace of its proceedings. The fact that Gotovina spent almost seven years in prison in The Hague between his arrest by Spanish police in Tenerife and Friday's ruling islikely to bring fresh scrutiny.

Croatia's 'war crime' is no longer a crime after UN tribunal verdict

Successful appeal in The Hague exonerates 1990s regime of Franco Tudjman and has huge significance for international law

Ian Traynor, Europe editor

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 November 2012 16.42 GMT

Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac hugging their lawyers after being acquitted at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Photograph: Ho/AFP/Getty Images


In almost 20 years of amassing evidence on the rights and wrongs of the Balkan wars, the UN tribunal in The Hague has delivered several verdicts shaping modern international law and informing the identities of the countries that emerged from Yugoslavia.

That the Serbs perpetrated an act of genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995 is the biggest. That rape is a war crime and was an instrument of Serbian terror against civilians is another landmark. And the successful appeal of two former Croatian military and police officers will go down as a third.

Until Friday Operation Storm the military offensive in August 1995 that ended four years of war with the Serbs and gave Croatia victory and independence had been termed a war crime. The foundation myth of Croatian statehood was sullied.

Generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were last year sentenced to 24 and 18 years.

Gotovina, the commanding officer of the 10-week military operation, had been on the run for years with the connivance of the Zagreb authorities until they handed over his mobile phone number to international prosecutors, enabling him to be traced to a hotel restaurant in Tenerife. The fugitive held up Croatia's efforts to join the EU for years. Ultimately he was sacrificed in the national interest.

At stake in his trial was much more than the fate of one man. The guilty verdict incriminated the entire 1990s regime of President Franjo Tudjman and destroyed Croatia's founding myth: the liberation war. The key players Tudjman, his defence minister, Gojko Susak, and the army chief, Janko Bobetko had died in the meantime and could not face justice. The Gotovina case became a proxy trial of the Tudjman regime.

The guilty verdict found the same regime deliberately plotted a systematic campaign of terror and violence aimed at ridding Croatia of its large Serbian minority, triggering the flight from Croatia of around 150,000 Serbs.

The Serbian insurgency, plotted from Belgrade, had left Croatia crippled and partitioned for four years, the medieval wonders of Dubrovnik battered, the pretty Danube town of Vukovar levelled by relentless Serbian shells. Croats were incredulous at the Gotovina guilty verdict.

Friday's ruling changes all that radically. Resting on an argument as to whether Croatian shelling of four Serb-held towns in the Dalmatian hinterland was lawful or not whether civilians were deliberately targeted or not the appeal judges found against the previous prosecution and verdict, a debacle both for the judges in the earlier trial who accepted the arguments and for the prosecution service in The Hague.

Because the appeal judges found that the shelling was not unlawful, they also concluded there was no planned deportation of the Serbian minority and no "joint criminal enterprise" or political conspiracy by a leadership cold-bloodedly planning an ethnic pogrom.

The previous trial heard plenty of evidence to support the planned pogrom, including transcripts of meetings of the Croatian political leadership on the Adriatic island of Brioni plotting the operations, which were strongly supported by the Americans, with retired Pentagon generals and advisers ensconced in the Croatian defence ministry at the time.

The Tudjman regime had been incriminated. Now it is exonerated. The result is joy in Zagreb and rancour in Belgrade. There was also bitterness from the dissenting two judges in the panel of five.

The arguments will rage, but there is unlikely to be another verdict reversing Friday's, allowing Croatia to argue that they beat the Serbs fair and square.

[Magda Hassan]

Israel killed its subcontractor in Gaza

The political outcome of the operation will become clear on January 22, but the strategic ramifications are more complex: Israel will have to find a new subcontractor to replace Ahmed Jabari as its border guard in the south.

By Aluf Benn | Nov.14, 2012 | 10:44 PM | 21

[TABLE]
[/TABLE]



Ahmed Jabari was a subcontractor, in charge of maintaining Israel's security in Gaza. This title will no doubt sound absurd to anyone who in the past several hours has heard Jabari described as "an arch-terrorist," "the terror chief of staff" or "our Bin Laden."
But that was the reality for the past five and a half years. Israel demanded of Hamas that it observe the truce in the south and enforce it on the multiplicity of armed organizations in the Gaza Strip. The man responsible for carrying out this policy was Ahmed Jabari.
In return for enforcing the quiet, which was never perfect, Israel funded the Hamas regime through the flow of shekels in armored trucks to banks in Gaza, and continued to supply infrastructure and medical services to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Jabari was also Israel's partner in the negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit; it was he who ensured the captive soldier's welfare and safety, and it was he who saw to Shalit's return home last fall.
Now Israel is saying that its subcontractor did not do his part and did not maintain the promised quiet on the southern border. The repeated complaint against him was that Hamas did not succeed in controlling the other organizations, even though it is not interested in escalation. After Jabari was warned openly (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff reported here at the beginning of this week that the assassination of top Hamas people would be renewed), he was executed on Wednesday in a public assassination action, for which Israel hastened to take responsibility. The message was simple and clear: You failed - you're dead. Or, as Defense Minister Ehud Barak likes to say, "In the Middle East there is no second chance for the weak."
The assassination of Jabari will go down in history as another showy military action initiated by an outgoing government on the eve of an election.
This is what researcher Prof. Yagil Levy has called "fanning the conflict as an intra-state control strategy:" The external conflict helps a government strengthen its standing domestically because the public unites behind the army, and social and economic problems are edged off the national agenda.
This recipe is familiar from 1955, when David Ben-Gurion returned from his exile in Sde Boker and led the Israel Defense Forces to a retaliatory action in Gaza, and his party, Mapai, to victory in the election. (Barak recalled this period with nostalgia, when he spoke last week at a memorial for Moshe Dayan). Ever since, whenever the ruling party feels threatened at the ballot box, it puts its finger on the trigger. The examples are common knowledge: the launch of the Shavit 2 missile in the summer of 1961, in the midst of the Lavon affair; the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981; Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon in 1996, and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza on the eve of the 2009 election. In the two latter cases, the military action turned into a defeat in the election.
There is a disagreement among historians as to whether it is necessary to add the Yom Kippur War to the list. In that conflict, which broke out on the eve of the 1973 election, the Arabs fired first, but their decision to go to war was taken in the context of the increasingly extreme position of Prime Minister Golda Meir's government which had refused Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace offer and declared an expansion of Israeli settlements in Sinai.
This, for example, is the opinion of researchers Prof. Motti Golani and Shoshana Ishoni-Barri.
The current operation, Pillar of Defense, belongs in the same category. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is interested in neutralizing every possible rival, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak is fighting for enough votes to return to the Knesset. A war against Hamas will wipe out the electoral aspirations of the ditherer, Ehud Olmert, whose disciples expected him to announce his candidacy this evening and it will kick off the agenda the "social and economic issue" that serves the Labor Party headed by MK Shelly Yacimovich.
When the cannons roar, we see only Netanyahu and Barak on the screen, and all the other politicians have to applaud them.
The political outcome of the operation will become clear on January 22. The strategic ramifications are more complex: Israel will have to find a new subcontractor to replace Ahmed Jabari as its border guard in the south, and it will also have to ensure that its action in Gaza does not cause the collapse of its peace treaty with Egypt under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Hamas movement's patron.
These are not easy challenges and the results of the operation will be judged by the extent to which they are met.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-de...m-1.477886

[Magda Hassan]

[Magda Hassan]

This is a message from Anonymous Op Israel,
Greetings Citizens of the world, this is Anonymous.

Video

November 2012 will be a month to remember for the Israeli defense forces.Posted November 18, 2012

Transcript

Greetings Citizens of the world, this is Anonymous. It has come to our attention that the Israeli government has ignored repeated warnings about the abuse of human rights, shutting down the internet in Israel and mistreating its own citizens and those of its neighboring countries. November 2012 will be a month to remember for the Israeli defense forces and internet security forces.

We will strike any and all websites that we deem to be in Israeli Cyberspace in retaliation for the mistreating of people in Gaza and other areas. Anonymous has been watching you, and you have received fair warning of our intent to seize control of your cyberspace in accordance with basic humanitarian rights of free speech and the right to live. As of 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time, the number of attacked Israeli websites is approximately 10,000. The further assault on the people of Gaza, people of Palestine or any other group will be treated as a violation of the Anonymous Collectives intent to protect the people of the World. Israel, it is in your best interest to cease and desist any further military action or your consequence will become worse with each passing hour.

This is a message from Anonymous Op Israel, Danger Hackers, Anonymous Special Operations and the Anonymous Collective of the entire planet. We will treat each additional death as a personal attack on Anonymous and you will be dealt with swiftly and without warning. Our hearts are with the women, children and families that are suffering at this very moment, as a direct result of the Israeli Governments misuse of its military. Brothers and sisters of Anonymous, we urge you to protest the Israeli Government and any associated hostile forces. Now is the time for anonymous to help the people that are hurting.

Help the people that are being taken advantage of. Help the ones that are dying and it will further the collective as a whole and we can help bring a peace within the Gaza region to those people that so desperately need it. We call on the Anonymous Collective to hack, deface, docks, hijack, database leak, admin takeover, four oh four and DNS terminate the Israeli Cyberspace by any means necessary. To the Israeli Government, Anonymous has grown tired of your bullying, and now you will see the result of your actions. Cyber war has been declared on Israel cyber space and you will see exactly what we are capable of. Israel, the angel of death has been called to your cyberspace. We are Anonymous. We are legion. Expect us and Respect us.

[Mark Stapleton]

http://www.debka.com/article/22537/Israe...with-Obama


According to Debka, which is so hardline it must be taken with a grain of salt, the attack on Gaza is being carried out in order to pressure Iran into nuclear negotiations.

If it's even partly true, it shows how far from sanity the Israeli leadership resides.

[Lauren Johnson]

http://www.debka.com/article/22537/Israe...with-Obama


According to Debka, which is so hardline it must be taken with a grain of salt, the attack on Gaza is being carried out in order to pressure Iran into nuclear negotiations.

If it's even partly true, it shows how far from sanity the Israeli leadership resides.

You would have to swallow a pound of salt to ever take Debka seriously.