-thousands-flee-north-gaza-after-israel-evacuation-warning
Steve Kramer – Gaza: The Hellhole & Gathering Our Forces
Gaza: The Hellhole
More than a week has gone by since the infamous sneak attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza on October 7. I have reported that Michal and I are doing ok, with no missiles striking Kfar Saba and only a few short periods in our in-house shelter. Well, we are not really ok. There are so many injured, killed, or kidnapped Israelis, and those whose home or business has been damaged or destroyed. Many businesses and services are closed, as well as schools. We are all not ok.
People suffering from losses whom we don’t know may include the people sitting near us on the train, people we see in the supermarket, people walking by on the streets – you get the picture. In a small country like Israel, things get really personal. So we Israelis are not okay, but we will prevail in this war against heinous, Jew-hating terrorists.
Right now, Israel’s army is massing on the border with Gaza and making preliminary incursions. The army is also beefed up on the northern border with Lebanon. There, the Iranian terrorist, proxy army Hezbollah sits with its 150,000 rockets hidden among hapless Lebanese civilians. (Many are not so hapless and support Israel’s destruction.) There has been already a number of incidents up there.
After the initial, late entry of the IDF into the fight, there have been many mop-up and rescue missions in the south. 1,500 dead Hamas members have been found. The word has gone out to the Gazans in the northern part of Gaza to head south immediately because the IDF will begin its onslaught against Hamas imminently. Reacting to this, Hamas has told the Gazans not to listen to the Israelis and to remain in their homes (which will likely soon be rubble.)
On October 13, the Jerusalem Post printed an article from the Reuters agency by Nidal Al-Mughrabi which describes the plight of the trapped Gazan citizens in “one of the world’s most densely populated territories.” (See Note below.) Obviously, Gazans can’t escape from Gaza to Israel. Nor will its other neighbor, Egypt, allow them into the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt doesn’t want additional terrorists in the Sinai, which already has a problem with Islamists.
The Gazans are running out of water, running out of fuel, running out of electricity, all perennial problems, and there are food shortages.. (Already water is partially available in the south.) The hospitals and pharmacies have been lacking in medical supplies and pharmaceuticals for years. Hamas has built no shelters or invested in defensive measures (those are strictly for the terrorists). In common slang, the Gazans are “up a creek without a paddle.”
Journalist Al-Mughrabi names Hamas as a terrorist force. He quotes its 1988 founding charter which calls for Israel’s destruction. He notes that the US, the EU, Canada, Egypt, and Japan all brand Gaza a terrorist organization. Nevertheless, he does not place any blame on Hamas for the situation of the Gazan civilians, many already homeless and grieving for lost relatives. Evidently, all of this must be the fault of Israel.
In 2007 Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority, which governs the so-called West Bank, the term coined in 1950 to disguise the Jewish history of Judea and Samaria. There have not been elections since the brutal Hamas takeover, which famously included throwing PA members off of apartment house roofs.
The UN, the EU, various European countries, some Arab countries, and the US all had high hopes for a “Singapore on the Mediterranean,” after Israel unilaterally left the Palestinians to their own devices in 2006. A fortune of money has been donated to Gaza since then. While the financial details are very hard to find, I did see that between 2014 and 2020, at least $4.5 billion was given to Hamas by the UN to build infrastructure and support the population, most of whom live at subsistence levels. In addition, Qatar donated $1.3-8 billion and continues to hand over cash. Probably by design, the EU doesn’t release this information, nor do many individual European countries. The US has been a major donor to the Palestinian Arab people, providing more than $5.2 billion through USAID from 1994-2021.
It’s hard to believe that so much money is injected into Gaza, the world’s highest per capita recipient of foreign aid, who uniquely “inherit” refugee status wherever they reside in the Middle East, even in the Palestinian Authority. This policy ensures that with every new generation, more “refugees” are created.
Where all this money goes is NOT infrastructure. Mostly it’s been used to buy materiel to fight Israel, or to buy dual-use products that can be used in weapons manufacture. This is the crux of the problem for the Gazans. Their terrorist masters not only don’t care about their miserable living conditions, Hamas values them mostly as corpses that they can display to Western suckers. This is happening in real time, as Hamas tries to dissuade people from fleeing the northern part of Gaza to the south. Hamas wants them to stay in place so that photographs of their dead bodies can be distributed to the media.
We Israelis already see the about-face of Western media. The initial week of sympathy, even empathy, with Israelis grieving for their dead children, fathers, mothers, and grandparents, plus missing or kidnapped Israelis of all ages, is over for the most part. Now blame is being almost universally ascribed to Israel for the plight of the “poor Palestinian” Arabs of Gaza. No context of Hamas’ Nazi-like pogrom is provided, fueling hatred of Israel. While Israelis are still suffering from rocket attacks, in the US and Europe non-Israeli Jews bear the brunt of this propaganda. From what we read, Jewish college students are being especially harassed and even sometimes attacked. As a rule, the college administrators are too scared to interdict, or worse, agree with the Jew-haters on their campuses.
What to do? Tune into the news, but not 24/7. Donate through Israeli or your favorite charities to help supply our troops with ammunition and other equipment. Communicate with your area’s political leaders to continue applying pressure on Washington to back Israel. Don’t be taken in by the propaganda.
Israel will prevail! First we must liquidate Hamas’ leadership and as many of its soldiers as we can. Then we’ll figure out what to do with Gaza, but not unilaterally. There’s no time to hesitate, pondering what Gaza’s future might be. The preeminent task is to destroy Hamas as an effective enemy. We are fighting Amalek with God’s help. After all, Israel is a land of miracles.
Note: Just about every article you read about the Israel-Hamas war will include this phrase describing the Gaza Strip: “one of the most densely populated places on earth.” I and many others have written numerous letters to the editor disputing this claim – which evidently is never fact-checked. Just to set the record straight, Gaza’s 2.2 million residents live on 139 sq mi of land. For the sake of comparison, Brooklyn’s 2.65 million residents live in an area about half the size of Gaza (71 sq mi). Has anyone ever described Brooklyn as “one of the most densely populated places on earth?” If you look at a list of the most densely populated places, Gaza is far down the list. Many smaller, more densely populated places have prospered. But those places don’t have a citizenry that would allow itself to be ruled by a terrorist organization.
Gathering Our Forces
Many times Israel has “won” in Gaza and then soon found itself fighting Hamas again. Deterrence and “mowing the grass” doesn’t defeat Islamic terrorists; you must liquidate them, one way or another. The Islamists who run Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon have a total disregard for the citizens of their respective communities. Do the Islamic terrorists hesitate to use their fellow Arabs as human shields in defending Gaza? Not at all.
So far, Israel has failed to stop our unflagging enemies. It’s the fear of winning (with the collateral damage that would accompany victory) that allows Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran to continue to grow and become more powerful. Israel has had many victories since the 1967 Six-Day War but still lost the political narrative.
Israel must attack its enemies long and hard rather than depending so much on defensive measures. A powerful defense is not the way to win. The deadly Hamas incursion proves that without a doubt. The hi-tech border fence is a case in point. The highly touted Iron Dome system saves lives when rockets and missiles are in midair, but has the Iron Dome stopped Hamas from firing many thousands of rockets in the years since 2011 when the Iron Dome was first deployed? No. On the first day of the recent Hamas invasion alone, 2,200 rockets were fired into Israel, and in the confusion, hordes of terrorists occupied more than twenty Jewish communities in the south with devastating, horrific results..
Yes, In the short run defensive weapons protect us. But in the long run, their efficacy will be reduced by the enemy’s countermeasures. And the ingenuity that provides countermeasures is mostly low-tech.
Motorized hang-gliders, hand grenades, bulldozers, cutting tools, drones, and other methods sufficed to overcome Israel’s electronic fence, the just-completed underground barrier, sophisticated cameras, drones, and other methods. The Intelligence Corps soldiers whose eyes are riveted on their computer screens monitoring the border seemed to have taken the holiday off. The first reaction to the invasion by Hamas came five or six hours after the initial attacks! These attacks were evidently not coordinated via digital methods or mobile phones, so high-tech surveillance failed. Obviously, human intelligence also failed, as we were caught flat-footed.
Journalist Lazar Berman wrote that the technological wizardry of the Iron Dome and the high-tech border fence that provided Israel with a hermetically sealed bunker has been horribly discredited as an illusion. While Israel felt that Hamas was deterred, it chose to let the Gaza problem fester. “The fence creates an illusion and gives a false sense of security to both the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the residents near the fence.” (https://www.timesofisrael.com/why-did-israel-think-a-border-fence-would-protect-it-from-an-army-of-terrorists/)
Israel must have the appropriate respect for our enemies’ capabilities because none of them are pushovers. They have zeal, they have experience, and they train incessantly. And perhaps most important, they are religious fanatics.
So far, the US has hardly impeded Iran’s march to nuclear weapons. Israel has been handicapped by the American hesitance. A while ago Israel passed the “red line” Prime Minister Netanyahu drew at the UN in 2012. A change in a strategy that relies on a weak style of deterrence must be transformed into a fervent push toward victory. Otherwise, we may face imminent defeat. (See my article on the need for victory written earlier this year: https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2023/02/20/victory-not-stalemate/)
History shows that any defensive line can ultimately be breached, therefore it must not be completely relied upon. Examples include the Bar Lev Line on the eastern side of the Suez Canal, considered impenetrable by the Israelis until it was overrun during the 1973 Yom Kippur War in less than two hours by the Egyptian military. The technologically sophisticated Maginot Line was built by France in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany and was impervious to most forms of attack – except the Germans went right around it. While Israel recovered from its initial losses in the Sinai Peninsula in 1973, it rallied and pushed the Egyptians back. The French were not so successful; France surrendered to the Nazis after just six weeks of warfare.
In the four days of tough fighting in Israel’s south, the IDF pushed Hamas terrorists back into Gaza, where the bulk of the fighting is now taking place. 300,000 reservists are being brought up to destroy the Hamas machine in Gaza. An assault into Gaza is almost a certainty, unlike recent encounters where troops remained outside of Gaza and the Israel Air Force attacked from the sky. Israel has already lost many soldiers and will lose many more in the assault on Gaza. The Gazans, of course, will have many more casualties and their towns will be destroyed. We don’t know how long Israel will be able to face the inevitable backlash from the West. Not only that, it’s possible that Hamas leadership will survive in their hiding places, often below schools, mosques, hospitals, and in undiscovered tunnels.
Then there’s Hezbollah in Lebanon. If it opens a second front, that will be an even more onerous task for the IDF. It helps that the US has sent a large, formidable naval task force just off our northern shores. It might deter Hezbollah. If not, the US may get involved in destroying the Lebanese arsenal, which is Iran’s strongest force outside of its boundaries. So far, the State Department has minimized Iran’s danger to it and Israel. Israel’s declared war against the Islamists may be the factor that awakens the US to Iran’s malevolent scheme. This is an alarming, dynamic conflagration which will not be quickly extinguished.
