A War Full of Traps and Trickery

The grinding urban battle unfolding in the densely populated Gaza Strip is a war of new tactics, quick adaptation and lethal tricks, writes STEVEN ERLANGER, The New York Times.

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.

In one apartment building in Zeitoun, in northern Gaza, Hamas set an inventive, deadly trap. According to an Israeli journalist embedded with Israeli troops, the militants placed a mannequin in a hallway off the building’s main entrance. They hoped to draw fire from Israeli soldiers who might, through the blur of night vision goggles and split-second decisions, mistake the figure for a fighter. The mannequin was rigged to explode and bring down the building.

In an interview, the reporter, Ron Ben-Yishai, a senior military correspondent for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, said soldiers also found a pile of weapons with a grenade launcher on top. When they moved the launcher, “they saw a detonator light up, but somehow it didn’t go off.”

The Israeli Army has also come prepared for a battle both sides knew was inevitable. Every soldier, Israeli officials say, is outfitted with a ceramic vest and a helmet. Every unit has dogs trained to sniff out explosives and people hidden in tunnels, as well as combat engineers trained to defuse hidden bombs.

To avoid booby traps, the Israelis say, they enter buildings by breaking through side walls, rather than going in the front. Once inside, they move from room to room, battering holes in interior walls to avoid exposure to snipers and suicide bombers dressed as civilians, with explosive belts hidden beneath winter coats.

The Israelis say they are also using new weapons, like a small-diameter smart bomb, the GBU-39, which Israel bought last fall from Washington. The bomb, which is very accurate, has a small explosive, as little as 60 to 80 pounds, to minimize collateral damage in an urban area. But it can also penetrate the earth to hit bunkers or tunnels.

And the Israelis, too, are resorting to tricks.

Israeli intelligence officers are telephoning Gazans and, in good Arabic, pretending to be sympathetic Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians or Libyans, Gazans say and Israel has confirmed. After expressing horror at the Israeli war and asking about the family, the callers ask about local conditions, whether the family supports Hamas and if there are fighters in the building or the neighborhood.

Karim Abu Shaban, 21, of Gaza City said he and his neighbors all had gotten such calls. His first caller had an Egyptian accent. “Oh, God help you, God be with you,” the caller began.

“It started very supportive,” Mr. Shaban said, then the questions started. The next call came in five minutes later. That caller had an Algerian accent and asked if he had reached Gaza. Mr. Shaban said he answered, “No, Tel Aviv,” and hung up.

Interviews last week with senior Israeli intelligence and military officers, both active and retired, as well as with military experts and residents of Gaza itself, made it clear that the battle, waged among civilians and between enemies who had long prepared for this fight, is now a slow, nasty business of asymmetrical urban warfare. Gaza’s civilians, who cannot flee because the borders are closed, are “the meat in the sandwich,” as one United Nations worker said, requesting anonymity.

It is also clear that both sides are evolving tactics to the new battlefield, then adjusting them quickly.

To that end, Israeli intelligence is detaining large numbers of young Gazan men to interrogate them for local knowledge and Hamas tactics. Last week, Israel captured a hand-drawn Hamas map in a house in Al Atatra, near Beit Lahiya, which showed planned defensive positions for the neighborhood, mine and booby trap placements, including a rigged gasoline station, and directions for snipers to shoot next to a mosque. Numerous tunnels were marked.

A new Israeli weapon, meanwhile, is tailored to the Hamas tactic of asking civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings so Israeli pilots will not bomb. The Israelis are countering with a missile designed, paradoxically, not to explode. They aim the missiles at empty areas of the roofs to frighten residents into leaving the buildings, a tactic called “a knock on the roof.”

But the most important strategic decision the Israelis have made so far, according to senior military officers and analysts, is to approach their incursion as a war, not a police operation.

Civilians are warned by leaflets, loudspeakers and telephone calls to evacuate battle areas. But troops are instructed to protect themselves first and civilians second.

Officers say that means Israeli infantry units are going in “heavy.” If they draw fire, they return it with heavy firepower. If they are told to reach an objective, they first call in artillery or airpower and use tank fire. Then they move, but only behind tanks and armored bulldozers, riding in armored personnel carriers, spending as little time in the open as possible.

As the commander of the army’s elite combat engineering unit, Yahalom, told the Israeli press on Wednesday: “We are very violent. We do not balk at any means to protect the lives of our soldiers.” His name cannot be published under censorship rules.

“Urban warfare is the most difficult battlefield, where Hamas and Islamic Jihad have a relative advantage, with local knowledge and prepared positions,” said Jonathan Fighel of Israel’s International Institute for Counter terrorism. “Hamas has a doctrine; this is not a gang of Rambos,” he said. “The Israeli military has to find the stitches to unpick, how to counterbalance and surprise.”

Israeli troops are moving slowly and, they hope, unpredictably, trying not to stay in one place for long to entice Hamas fighters “to come out and confront them,” Mr. Fighel said.

Today, he said, “the mind-set from top to bottom is fight and fight cruel; this is a war, not another pinpoint operation.”

Israeli officials say that they are obeying the rules of war and trying hard not to hurt noncombatants but that Hamas is using civilians as human shields in the expectation that Israel will try to avoid killing them.

Israeli press officers call the tactics of Hamas cynical, illegal and inhumane; even Israel’s critics agree that Hamas’s regular use of rockets to fire at civilians in Israel, and its use of civilians as shields in Gaza, are also violations of the rules of war. Israeli military men and analysts say that its urban guerrilla tactics, including the widespread use of civilian structures and tunnels, are deliberate and come from the Iranian Army’s tactical training and the lessons of the 2006 war between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Hamas rocket and weapons caches, including rocket launchers, have been discovered in and under mosques, schools and civilian homes, the army says. The Israeli intelligence chief, Yuval Diskin, in a report to the Israeli cabinet, said that the Gaza-based leadership of Hamas was in underground housing beneath the No. 2 building of Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza. That allegation cannot be confirmed.

While The New York Times and some other news organizations have local or Gaza-based Palestinian correspondents, any Israeli citizen or Israeli with dual citizenship has been banned for more than two years from entering Gaza, and any foreign correspondent who did not enter the territory before a six-month cease-fire with Hamas ended last month has not been allowed in.

Israel has also managed to block cellphone bandwidth, so very few amateur cellphone photographs are getting out of Gaza.

But Israeli tactics have caused civilian casualties that have created an international uproar, both in the Arab world and the West. In one widely reported episode, 43 people died when the Israelis shelled a street next to a United Nations school in northern Jabaliya where refugees were taking shelter. The United Nations says no militants were in the school.

The Israelis said they returned fire in response to mortar shells fired at Israeli troops. Such an action is legal, but there are questions about whether the force used was proportional under the laws of war, given the danger to noncombatants.

The backlash from the school attack is another potent example of the risks in an urban-war strategy: Israel may in fact be able to dismantle Hamas’s military structure even while losing the battle for world opinion and leaving Hamas politically still in charge of Gaza.

(Source)

Enough is enough !

The bloodshed in Gaza is escalating while diplomats talk -- the death toll now stands at over 600 people and rising, almost half of them civilians and over 100 children dead.

As Israeli tanks, airplanes and artillery bombard thickly populated urban areas, hitting UN schools yesterday, thousands more have been injured and 1.5 million terrified civilians have no escape from this prison-like enclave -- the borders have been sealed. Hamas continues to fight and fire rockets deep into Israel: 11 Israelis have died, including from friendly fire.

Israel is rejecting a truce for now and escalating its offensive, while US President Bush is blocking a negotiated UN ceasefire, trying instead to impose a skewed alternative that could legitimize Israel's suffocating isolation of Gaza.

Israeli bombings and incursions as well as the rockets Palestinian factions fire into southern Israel.

International supervision is desperately needed at the borders, to reopen Gaza's borders and crossings for food, fuel, medicine and goods, to prevent weapon-smuggling which has only grown under the blockade, and to monitor and enforce the ceasefire on both sides.

Sources say Israel could soon agree to such a ceasefire, and Hamas, which won elections in 2006 and now runs Gaza, has suggested it could do so too. Both should be challenged to abide by a fair deal. There is no military solution for either side -- it's time for world powers to step in, advancing arrangements to protect civilians on all sides and let them live their lives in peace and security.


Media Eyeless in Gaza at Key Moment

By Jim Lobe and Ali Gharib

WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (IPS) - Consumed by coverage of the Nov. 4 presidential election, U.S. mainstream media ignored a key Israeli military attack on a Hamas target that some Palestinians claim marked the effective end of the ceasefire between the two sides and set the stage for the current round of bloodletting.

While the major U.S. news wire Associated Press (AP) reported that the attack, in which six members of Hamas's military wing were killed by Israeli ground forces, threatened the ceasefire, its report was carried by only a handful of small newspapers around the country.

The Nov 4 raid -- and the escalation that followed -- also went unreported by the major U.S. network and cable television new programmes, according to a search of the Nexis database for all English-language news coverage between Nov. 4 and 7.

But the military action, which was followed up by an aerial attack that killed at least one other Palestinian, appears to have dealt a fatal blow to the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire that had taken effect Jun. 19 and largely held for some four and a half months.

In retaliation for the attack, Hamas launched some 35 Qassam rockets into Israeli territory Nov. 5 which, in turn, provoked Israel to severely tighten its then-17-month-old economic siege of the Palestinian territory.

"While neither side ever completely respected the ceasefire terms, the Israeli raid was far and away the biggest violation," said Stephen Zunes, an expert on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the University of San Francisco.

"It was a huge, huge provocation, and it now appears to me that it was actually intended to get Hamas to break off the ceasefire," he added.

When Israel launched its current military offensive against Hamas-controlled Gaza Dec. 27, most major U.S. media outlets -- and particularly television and newspaper commentators -- blamed Hamas for breaking the ceasefire by continuing rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli territory and refusing to extend the ceasefire on its current terms beyond its formal Dec. 19 expiration.

"Israel's air offensive against the Gaza Strip yesterday should not have been a surprise for anyone who has been following the mounting hostilities in the region," said the lead editorial in the Washington Post the day after Israel began its massive air assault, "least of all the Hamas movement, which invited the conflict by ending a six-month-old ceasefire and launching scores of rockets and mortar shells at Israel during the last 10 days."

This explanation of events corresponded to a major Israeli public-relations effort that placed top government officials on U.S. network and cable news programmes. In an appearance on NBC's widely viewed Sunday morning talk show 'Meet the Press', as the military offensive got underway, for example, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, also a candidate for prime minister in the Feb. 10 elections, set forth her government's basic narrative.

"About a half a year ago, according to the Egyptian Initiative, we decided to enter a kind of a truce and not to attack Gaza Strip," Livni said. "Hamas violated, on a daily basis, this truce. They targeted Israel, and we didn't answer."

But that narrative omitted any mention of the critical Nov. 4 raid, and no Palestinian guest, such as Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian lawmaker and human rights activist from Ramallah, appeared on the programme to rebut her claim.

In an interview on CNN two days later, on Dec. 31, however, Barghouti charged that Livni's version of events was "incorrect". He accused Israel of breaking the truce and pointed directly to the Nov. 4 operation in Gaza as the catalysing incident.

"Two months before (Dec. 19), Israel started attacking Rafah, started attacking Hamas..." he declared, adding that Israel's failure to lift its commercial embargo against Gaza also violated the Palestinian understanding of the original truce terms.

Indeed, Barghouti's focus on the Nov. 4 attack as the main cause of the ceasefire breakdown was implicitly supported by a lengthy report released the following day by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, a private Israeli group. It divided the ceasefire into a "period of relative quiet between June 19 and November 4", when "Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire," and "the escalation and erosion of the ...arrangement" which it dated to "November 4 (when) the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) carried out a military action close to the border security fence on the Gazan side..."

It further noted that Hamas began firing rockets and missile shells "in retaliation" to which Israel responded by closing its border crossings and sharply tightening its siege against Gaza. From that point, the ceasefire that had effectively held for the previous four and a half months was never fully restored.

That version of events was not entirely missing from the U.S. press. Indeed, a New York Times "analysis" published Dec. 19 acknowledged that "(w)hile this (escalation) did not topple the agreement, Israel's decision in early November to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border drove the cycle of violence to a much higher level."

But the Times itself, like virtually all of the U.S. media, had missed the likely impact of the Nov. 4 attack on the ceasefire's fate at or even shortly after it took place. In its late edition Nov. 5, the newspaper ran a 422-word article datelined Jerusalem that reported Israel's military operation and the fact that Hamas had retaliated with mortar fire.

One day later, the Washington Post devoted a similar amount of space to a Reuters report whose headline suggested that the truce had been put at risk by the previous day's exchanges.

But while the U.S. media, distracted by an historic election at home, largely skipped over the significance of the Nov. 4 Israeli raid, several English-language foreign news organisations did publish articles on the event, suggesting that the raid could very well have doomed the ceasefire.

A story in the British newspaper the Guardian on Nov. 6 said the truce was "in jeopardy" after the strike. Another British paper, the Independent, said on the same day that the ceasefire "was foundering yesterday after Israeli special forces entered the besieged territory and fought Hamas."

A piece for the Canadian news service Canwest on Nov. 6 said that "the fragile peace [of the ceasefire] was shattered overnight by an Israeli raid in Gaza." The Age newspaper of Australia also headlined its story on the raid itself as "Ceasefire in danger of collapse."

AP's Nov. 5 and 6 stories used similar wording in its stories, but they went largely unpublished in the U.S. where media attention was focused virtually exclusively on the historic election results.

The Nexis search found no reference to the raid in the transcripts of any television public-affairs broadcast during the period, a particularly significant omission given the fact that about 70 percent of U.S. citizens say their main source of international news comes through that medium.

"(T)hat Nov. 4 raid, in very real sense, hardly exists in the mainstream media's collective memory," said Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)'s activism director Peter Hart, noting that Israel may have been aware that the election would drown out coverage of its raid.

"It does not take much effort to go back and find it, but reporting contextual information that would undermine Israel's rationale for these attacks is not exactly the kind of thing the U.S. corporate media do very often. The fact that there are only a handful of exceptions is telling -- the dominant narrative in the press is unsurprisingly one that supports the Israeli position."

For Israel, Chance to Strike Before an Ally Departs

For nine days, as European and United Nations officials have called urgently for a cease-fire in Gaza, the Bush administration has squarely blamed the rocket attacks of the Palestinian militant group Hamas for Israel’s assault, maintaining to the end its eight-year record of stalwart support for Israel.

Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address on Saturday, said the United States did not want a “one-way cease-fire” that allowed Hamas to keep up its rocket fire, and Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday echoed the point, declaring that only a “sustainable, durable” peace would be acceptable.

Many Middle East experts say Israel timed its move against Hamas, which began with airstrikes on Dec. 27, 24 days before Mr. Bush leaves office, with the expectation of such backing in Washington. Israeli officials could not be certain that President-elect Barack Obama, despite past statements of sympathy for Israel’s right of self-defense, would match the Bush administration’s unconditional endorsement.

“Obviously Bush, even by comparison with past U.S. presidents, has been very, very pro-Israel,” said Sami G. Hajjar, a longtime scholar of Middle East politics and a visiting professor at the National Defense University. “Despite Obama’s statements, and his advisers who are quite pro-Israel, the Israelis really didn’t know how he’d react. His first instinct is for diplomacy, not military action.”

Mr. Hajjar said that in addition to relying on the backing of Mr. Bush, Israeli officials may not have wanted to begin their relationship with the new president by forcing him to respond to their military action. On Dec. 19, just one month before Mr. Obama’s inauguration, Hamas declared an end to an Egyptian-mediated truce with Israel that had taken effect in June, and rocket attacks from Gaza have been increasing since then.

Mr. Obama has disappointed many commentators in the Muslim world by steadfastly declining to condemn the Gaza operation, and he maintained his silence over the weekend as Israel began a ground invasion. “President-elect Obama is closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” said Brooke Anderson, chief national security spokeswoman for Mr. Obama, repeating what has become a mantra for the incoming administration.

Mr. Obama’s stance has been interpreted by Hamas spokesmen and others as tacit assent both to Israel’s actions and to the Bush administration’s policy. Aides to the president-elect say he has spoken with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the situation in Gaza but they do not expect him to carve out a distinct position before his inauguration.

In the meantime, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while expressing concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians, have offered unqualified understanding for Israel’s assault.

In an interview Sunday with Bob Schieffer of the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Cheney said Israel “didn’t seek clearance or approval from us” before beginning a ground invasion on Saturday. But he said that in previous discussions, Israeli officials said they would respond forcefully to rocket attacks, “and if they did, they would be very aggressive in terms of trying to take down Hamas.”

Asked whether sending troops into Gaza was a mistake, the vice president replied that “it’s important to remember who the enemy is here,” adding, “You haven’t had a conflict between two U.N. charter-member states, you’ve got a U.N. member state being attacked by a terrorist organization.”

Leading Democrats, including Senators Harry Reid of Nevada and Dick Durbin of Illinois, both of whom appeared on programs on Sunday, have also expressed support for Israel. “I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away,” Mr. Reid said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas comes as a dismal coda to the Bush administration’s second-term push for Middle East peace, which has occupied much of Ms. Rice’s tenure as secretary of state. For Mr. Obama, who flew to Washington on Sunday to join his family, it adds a new crisis to an agenda already packed with challenges, beginning with the economy.

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised a new, positive approach to the Muslim world, including “America Houses” offering English lessons in Muslim countries and an “America’s Voice Corps” to spread the truth about American values. Mr. Obama’s aides have said he will unveil the new approach with a speech in a Muslim capital during his first 100 days in office. But Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and Mr. Obama’s studied silence about it, threatens to short-circuit his plans for an American image makeover.

Critics abroad and at home have noted that Mr. Obama’s “one president at a time” policy did not prevent the president-elect from speaking out against the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, in November, when he condemned what he called the “hateful ideology” of militant Islam.

In the absence of any new statement, many have recalled Mr. Obama’s remarks last July in the Israeli town of Sderot, where he implicitly recognized Israel’s right to respond militarily.

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” he told reporters. The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, quoted Mr. Obama’s statement in justifying the attack on Hamas during a news briefing on Dec. 29.

Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University who studies presidential transitions, said Mr. Obama’s predicament exemplified the treacherous weeks between election and inauguration, and the way inspiring visions inevitably give way before unexpected events.

“On a campaign, you control what you talk about and when you talk about it,” Ms. Kumar said. “When you begin governing, you have to respond to what happens in the world.”

= By SCOTT SHANE
The New York imes

US Blocks UN Security Council Action on Gaza

The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and expressing concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas.

U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said the United States saw no prospect of Hamas abiding by last week's council call for an immediate end to the violence. Therefore, he said, a new statement at this time "would not be adhered to and would have no underpinning for success, would not do credit to the council."

France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, the current council president, announced that there was no agreement among members on a statement. But he said there were "strong convergences" among the 15 members to express serious concern about the deteriorating situation in Gaza and the need for "an immediate, permanent and fully respected cease-fire."

Meantime,BBC News reported that Israel has sent ground forces into the Gaza Strip after a week of air strikes to try to halt rocket attacks by Palestinian militants.

Its troops were reported to be engaged in heavy clashes with Hamas fighters in northern Gaza. Both sides have reported casualties in the fighting.

The UN secretary general called for an immediate halt to operations.

Witnesses say Israeli military convoys supported by attack helicopters crossed into northern Gaza at four separate points after nightfall on Saturday.

Advancing Israeli tanks were reported to be in battles around Gaza City and the northern towns of Beit Lahiya and Jabaliya, the Afp news agency reported. Hamas fighters replied with mortars and rockets, witnesses said.

The Israeli army said 30 of its soldiers had been wounded in the ground offensive, two of them seriously.

Palestinian medical officials said eight Gazans had been killed by Israeli troops, five of them gunmen.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said the objective of the ground operation was "to destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure in the area of operations".

Defence Minister Ehud Barak said the ground campaign against Hamas "will not be easy or short, but we are determined".

"Our aim is to force Hamas to stop its hostile activities against Israel and Israelis from Gaza, and to bring about a significant change in the situation in the southern part of Israel," he told a news conference.

"We have carefully weighed all our operations. We are not war-hungry, but we shall not allow a situation in which our towns, villages and civilians are constantly targeted by Hamas."

Mr Barak also said Israel would "keep a sensitive eye" on its northern border with Lebanon, where it fought a short but bloody war with the Shia Hezbollah movement in 2006.

"We hope the situation will remain calm. Nevertheless, we are ready and alert to face any unwanted development in that area," he added.

There are said to be some 10,000 Israeli troops and hundreds of tanks massed on the border with Gaza.

As Israel’s tanks and troops poured into Gaza on Saturday, the next phase in its fierce attempt to end rocket attacks, a question hung over the operation: can the rockets really be stopped for any length of time while Hamas remains in power in Gaza?

And if the answer is determined to be no, then is the real aim of the operation to remove Hamas entirely, no matter the cost?

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel said, “There is no doubt that as long as Hamas controls Gaza, it is a problem for Israel, a problem for the Palestinians and a problem for the entire region.”

Vice Premier Haim Ramon went even further in an interview on Israeli television, saying Israel must not end this operation with Hamas in charge of Gaza.

“What I think we need to do is to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern,” Mr. Ramon said on Channel One. “That is the most important thing.”

Israel targets Gaza mosques used by Hamas

Mosques and Muslim prayer halls have not escaped the relentless bombardment of Hamas targets in Gaza by Israel, which claims the Islamic militants misuse some of the holy sites as weapons depots and command centers.

Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet security service, told the Israeli Cabinet Wednesday that Hamas leaders were taking shelter in the mosques 'on the assumption that Israel will not attack.'

Israeli bombs have damaged at least five mosques and two prayer halls during the five-day air campaign against Hamas facilities, according to a count by The Associated Press in Gaza.

Israel historically has struck mosques when it deems them legitimate targets, although it is wary of the potential outrage from the Muslim world and sensitive to its own painful history of the desecration of synagogues.


Israel left little choice but to attack Hamas ?

As Israel bombards Islamic Hamas military targets in Gaza, much of the world screams in protest that Israel has overreacted. Within minutes of the first Israeli air strike, the Arabs were screaming “massacre” and the media had all but forgotten the missile assaults that provoked it. Despite thousands of missiles reigning down on Israeli cities, towns and villages over the past seven years, the majority of which were fired after Israel withdrew from Gaza in August 2005, the European Union finally broke its silence long enough for its current President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to condemn Israel's "disproportionate use of force" against Hamas.

This is the same EU that, in March 2008, issued a communique urging Israel to "refrain from all activities that endanger civilians" as "such activities are contrary to international law”. Human Rights Watch went further. It is on record for having suggested that civilians acting as human shields do not pose a direct threat to opposing forces and therefore retain their legal immunity from attack because they are not directly engaged in hostilities against an adversary.

Let’s translate this into practical terms. If the EU and Human Rights Watch are correct in their interpretation of international law (and they are not*), Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders and its destruction of Hamas’s terror infrastructures in Gaza constitute a violation of international law because such actions, by definition, “endanger civilians”. If so, we have handed our enemies virtual immunity from attack because no war can be conducted without endangering (or even killing) civilians – especially those being used as human shields to protect that enemy.

What is at issue here is our enemies’ intentional blurring of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Hamas consciously engineers human tragedies by placing civilians in harm’s way to protect themselves and their assets. Terrorists are fanatics, but they are not fools. If the tactic of using human shields assists them in achieving their military objectives by eliciting mass media sympathy and forcing us to refrain from attacking their terrorist assets, they will certainly utilize them. Lacking our respect for human life and often mocking it, such organizations perceive our sense of humanity as a major tactical advantage.

If the military assets of Hamas are deemed invulnerable because they are protected by human shields, Israel is presented with a true conundrum. By failing to destroy these assets, Israel endangers its major war objectives and, in the end, its citizenry. But, if it chooses to respond, it runs the risk of killing civilians, reaping international media censure, and inviting diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire before it has achieved those military objectives. In a nutshell, that’s what happened in its 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Our enemies understand this. That’s why, in many regions of the world including Gaza and Lebanon, militias use human shields as a viable military tactic. They wage war using high-density residential areas as launching pads for missiles and heavy-caliber weapons, embed themselves in towns and villages, deliberately place missiles in private homes and apartment buildings, use children to retrieve used missile launchers knowing they will be not be targeted by retaliatory strikes (or, if targeted, that their deaths will be condemned by the mass media), construct additions to existing civilian structures to house their missile launchers and place military equipment in schools, playgrounds, hospitals and even mosques.

Bosnian Serbs used human shields against Muslim and Croat forces to immunize themselves from indirect and direct fire. Cambodian government forces used ethnic Vietnamese civilians as human shields as they advanced on Vietnamese positions. Throughout the civil war in Sierra Leone during the 1990s, members of the Revolutionary United Front routinely abducted children and used them as human shields against government forces. Chechen rebels used ethnic Russian civilians as human shields during the brutal war in Chechnya.

In 1993, the United States attempted to apprehend Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in order to restore order to that country. Somali gunmen engaged U.S. forces by stepping out of large crowds of civilians, firing, then retreating into the crowd using their own people as human shields. They also used hospitals, orphanages, and other civilian buildings as places from which to direct fire at U.S. forces. And during the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, Hezbollah prevented civilians from leaving their villages anticipating Israeli military strikes; used their mosques to stockpile weapons and used civilian residences as their bases of operations arguing all the while that the use of human shields is a legitimate tactical strategy under Islam - Geneva Conventions be damned.

As a matter of course, Hamas uses children as human shields on rooftops to prevent Israeli air strikes against the homes of its jihadist leaders, and uses civilian residential dwellings to hide the openings of tunnels used to smuggle arms, missile launchers and weapons into Gaza from Egypt. In effect, rather than protect non-combatants, post-modern terrorists have incorporated them into their tactical war strategy, and in the case of jihadists like Hamas, these “civilians” willingly sacrifice themselves to become shahids or “martyrs” for Allah. Hamas' calculation is simple, cynical and evil - If innocent Israelis are killed - good. If innocent Palestinians are killed - even better.

As Alan Dershowitz wrote several years ago: “The Geneva Conventions have become a sword used by terrorists to kill civilians, rather than a shield to protect civilians from terrorists…Terrorists who do not care about the laws of warfare, target innocent non-combatants. Indeed, their goal is to maximize the number of deaths and injuries among vulnerable civilians for propaganda purposes. The terrorist leaders - who do not wear military uniforms - deliberately hide among non-combatants. They have also used ambulances, women pretending to be sick or pregnant, and even children as carriers of lethal explosives.”

International law governing the use of human shields must be well-defined and understood both by the media and all parties to a conflict. Those who voluntarily assume positions at or in close proximity to legitimate military targets must understand that they have assumed the risk of combat and forego their non-combatant immunity. Furthermore, high-value targets protected by non-voluntary human shields can still be attacked under international law so long as every effort is made to minimize civilian deaths. In Gaza, the Israel Defense Force has taken the unprecedented measure of amassing the complete list of cellular telephone numbers of Palestinians living there and is warning civilians to take cover prior to Israeli air strikes.

Nevertheless, the United Nations, the mass media, foreign universities, non-governmental and human rights organizations constantly play into the hands of terrorist organizations like Hamas by slanting their coverage to evoke public passion and sympathy regardless of Israel’s having acted in accordance with international law. Had the Allies been required to fight World War II under the same rules of engagement selectively applied to Israel, it is questionable whether we would have won that war. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive power against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long, drawn out and unsustainable war of attrition with Hamas which, by any standard in the Middle East, would be considered both an Israeli defeat and a Hamas (read jihadist) victory.

Israel's current military operation constitutes a legitimate act of self-defense against an Iranian terrorist proxy. The Israeli military response was not merely a necessary one. It was the only one left. The fact is, there will be no peace in the Middle East and no prosperity for the people of Gaza so long as Hamas remains in power. And if we want to live in a world where civilians are never used as human shields, there must be unequivocal international condemnation of those who use them as a deliberate military tactic. Unless and until the above organizations recognize the use of human shields as a war crime and prosecute those who place them in harm’s way, our enemies will continue to use human shields as they see enormous advantages in doing so. Failing to recognize this reality will place any future war effort we undertake in peril.

-By Mark Silverberg, Spero News.

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Mark Silverberg writes for FamilySecurityMatters.org is a foreign policy analyst with the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel) and the author of "The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad." He has lectured extensively on subjects of counter terrorism, Jihadism, homeland security issues and intelligence matters.

* Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention provides that: "The presence of a protected person (i.e.: a civilian) may not be used to render certain …… areas immune from military operations." To this was added Article 51 of the 1977 amendment to the 1949 Geneva Convention that elaborated on the latter by adding: "The presence of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain ..... areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objects from attacks or to shield, favor or impede military operations." Nevertheless, the European Union, many international human rights organizations and much of the international media, for purely political reasons, choose to overlook this provision.

Statement on the Israeli Invasion of Gaza

The Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War is shocked and angered over the Israeli invasion of Gaza since Saturday 27 December 2008. Our hearts go to the people of Gaza in this time of great distress.

We call upon the international community to immediately act in concert to call upon Israel to stop the bombing of Gaza and the slaughter of innocent lives forthwith. We support the call by the United Nations for an immediate ceasefire and an end to all military operations to facilitate relief work and delivery of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.

The Foundation also calls upon the governments of the United States, Britain and other major powers to put necessary pressure on Tel Aviv to stop the inhuman slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza with bombs and other weapons.

DR MAHATHIR BIN MOHAMAD

Chairman

Kuala Lumpur Foundation To Criminalise War

Meanwhile, Israel is likely to reject 48-Hour Cease-Fire Plan in its military onslaught in Gaza, saying it would keep up pressure on Hamas but was open to ways of increasing humanitarian aid.

With its punishing air attacks on Gaza in their fifth day, and with 10 more rockets fired by Hamas militants landing in southern Israel, including three in the city of Beersheba, Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said the country’s leaders “view it as important to keep up the pressure on Hamas.”

“We cannot give them a respite to rearm and regroup. We need a real, sustainable solution, not a Band-Aid,” he said.

He and other officials said Israel was continuing to talk to American and European leaders on ways to build a longer-term cease-fire to end the fighting.

The idea of a 48-hour cease-fire emerged from a conversation between Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner of France and Defense Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. It was supposed to establish at least a temporary pause in the fighting that would allow humanitarian relief to be delivered to the besieged coastal strip. Aides to Mr. Barak said he was interested in exploring it with Prime Minister Olmert and the rest of the cabinet at a security meeting on Wednesday.

“The leading option right now is still a ground invasion, but the target of this operation is an improved cease-fire, and if that can come without the invasion, fine,” a close aide to Mr. Barak said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not Mr. Barak’s authorized spokesman. “But, of course, Hamas has to agree, and there has to be a mechanism to make it work.”

In Paris, Mr. Kouchner met with his European Union colleagues Tuesday over the Gaza crisis and called publicly for a permanent cease-fire. A similar call came from the so-called quartet of powers focused on the region — the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made phone calls to Israeli and Arab leaders to explore prospects for halting the fighting. They emphasized that any cease-fire should be “durable and sustainable,” compelling Hamas to end its rocket attacks, a State Department spokesman said.

“That is different from the cease-fire that existed in the last six months,” said the spokesman, Gordon Duguid, noting that Hamas had routinely violated the previous agreement by firing rockets into southern Israel.

The flurry of diplomacy appeared to be mostly byplay in Jerusalem and Gaza, as Israeli officials spoke of a continuing and expanding military operation, and Hamas vowed to step up its resistance. Israeli warplanes attacked tunnels used to smuggle supplies in southern Gaza and destroyed the home of a top militant leader.

Mr. Olmert told the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, that the air strikes were the first of several planned phases, according to spokesmen for the officials. It was also clear that the number of targets available from the air was declining, making the likelihood of a ground offensive greater.

In Gaza, Hamas militants issued a taped statement vowing revenge for those killed in the Israeli air raids since Saturday and warning that a ground invasion would prove painful for Israel. Palestinian officials say that more than 370 people have been killed, among them, the United Nations says, at least 62 women and children and an unknown number of civilian men. Two sisters, ages 4 and 11, were killed in a strike in the north as concern was growing around the world that the assault was taking a terrible toll on civilians.

“It would be easier to dry the sea of Gaza than to defeat the resistance and uproot Hamas, which is in every house of Gaza,” said the statement from the military wing of Hamas. It was played on Hamas’s television station, which had been shut down by an Israeli missile but went back on the air by broadcasting from a mobile van. The statement added that if there was a ground invasion, “the children of Gaza will be collecting the body parts of your soldiers and the ruins of tanks.”

Hamas continued to fire longer-range rockets at Israel, shooting deep into the city of Ashdod for a second day as well as into Beersheba, a major city in Israel’s south, where one landed in an empty kindergarten classroom. There was a report of light injuries as well as a number of people in shock.

Israeli warplanes, returning repeatedly to the same section of Gaza City overnight, pummeled the main government complex with about 20 missiles, residents said Tuesday. The building had been evacuated since the start of the operation on Saturday, which also hit nearly all of Hamas’s security complexes, its university and other symbols of its sovereignty and power.

The Nakhala family, which lives next to the compound, was inspecting the damage on Tuesday morning and recounting the utter fear and panic they all felt as the missiles hit.

“We have no shelters in Gaza,” said the father, Osama Nakhala. “Where shall we go? I also have to worry about my mother, who is 80 years old and paralyzed.”

His 13-year-old son, Yousef, was with him. When asked his view of the situation, Yousef took an unusual stand for someone in Gaza, where Israel is being cursed by most everyone. “I blame Hamas. It doesn’t want to recognize Israel. If they did so there could be peace,” he said. “Egypt made a peace treaty with Israel, and nothing is happening to them.” (Read also, Malaysiakini, letters- " Hamas to blame for Israeli raids ")

His brother Amjad, 16, disagreed and blamed the Palestinian president in the West Bank, Mahmoud Abbas, saying that he had sided with Israel.

Gaza City was entirely without electricity for the first time, the result of an air attack that hit the system’s infrastructure. Repair workers said they were afraid to work because of the possibility of more raids.

The few open bakeries and grocery stores had lines stretching outside as people tried to stock up. But essentials, like diapers, baby food, bread, potatoes and fresh vegetables, were in short supply and costlier than normal.

Israel sent in about 100 trucks with emergency supplies of food and medicine, the military reported.

At the Hassouna Bakery near Shifa Hospital, about 100 men and 50 women waited in separate lines to buy bread. Amal Altayan was telling others in the line that she kept her cellphone in her pocket so that if an Israeli missile destroyed her house she would be able to phone for help. The other women mocked her, saying that if a missile hit her house, she would be gone. Showing familiarity with the kind of knowledge circulating in Gaza these days, Ms. Altayan replied, “It depends. If it is an F-16 I will turn into biscuits, but if it is an Apache I may have a chance.”

Osama Alaf, 41, said he spent four hours waiting in line to buy bread. “I bought flour until now,” he said. “I don’t have cooking gas, but I make a fire out of cartons and paper and make bread that way.” Asked whom he blamed, he said, “Israel, which is slaughtering us, and whoever is cooperating with Israel, like Egypt.”

Anger at Egypt has grown across the Arab and Muslim worlds because it has declined to open its border with Gaza and is seen as cooperating with Israel.