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Israel Calls Up 1500 Troops as Tensions Mount With Hamas - New York Times

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Middle East |Israel Calls Up 1,500 Troops as Tensions Mount With Hamas



http://nyti.ms/1rGyB5y


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Play Video|0:37

Hamas Vows Vengeance for Israeli Strike



Hamas Vows Vengeance for Israeli Strike



Hundreds of mourners gathered in Gaza on Monday for the funeral of two of the militants killed in an Israeli airstrike earlier the same day, and a Hamas spokesman pledged to avenge their deaths.


July 7, 2014. Mohammed Salem/Reuters










JERUSALEM — Israel and the militant group Hamas seemed set on a collision course on Monday, with an escalation of cross-border clashes around the Gaza Strip, Hamas vowing to avenge the deaths of six of its fighters, and preparations underway for a possible large-scale Israeli operation in the Palestinian coastal territory.


Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the army was completing the deployment of two infantry brigades along the border with Gaza and the government had approved the call-up of 1,500 reservists, mainly Home Front Command and aerial defense units.


“If last week we were talking about calm being answered by calm,” Colonel Lerner said, “we are now talking about preparing for an escalation.”



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Capitalizing on broader Israeli-Palestinian tensions in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank last month and the grisly revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem last week, Hamas also called for a mass demonstration Monday night in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron. Hundreds of protesters scuffled with Palestinian Authority security forces and threw stones at them. The developments were likely to further undermine Hamas’s recent reconciliation pact with the more moderate Palestinian Authority leadership based in the West Bank, which has been urging calm rather than protests. Intended to heal a seven-year split between the West Bank and Gaza, the pact resulted in a new government, but little else so far.




An Israeli missile strike hit Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza Strip, early Monday. Hatem Moussa/Associated Press

The tit-for-tat Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes continued through Monday. Hamas said that five of its fighters were killed by an Israeli airstrike on a tunnel used for “resistance” against Israel in southern Gaza, and another was killed in a separate air attack. Another militant who was trapped in the tunnel and presumed dead was found wounded but alive.


Colonel Lerner said that the air force attacked the tunnel a couple of days ago and that when the Hamas militants entered it on Sunday night, possibly to use it for an attack on Israeli forces, it collapsed or exploded on them.


These were Hamas’s heaviest losses in months. Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the movement, said Israel “will not go unpunished for this crime.”


Two more Gaza militants, believed to belong to a radical Salafi group, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Sunday night. Israel said they had been involved in the recent rocket fire.


Ashraf al-Qedra, a spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza, said that 15 people, including five children, were also wounded in Israeli airstrikes late Sunday and early Monday.


About 80 rockets and mortar shells fired from Gaza struck southern Israel on Monday. One reached deep into Israeli territory, crashing into open ground near Beersheba, about 25 miles from the border with Gaza. A soldier was wounded by shrapnel from one of the rockets, according to the military.




Play Video|1:51

Mood in Israel After Kidnappings



Mood in Israel After Kidnappings



Israelis and Palestinians are caught in another cycle of violence with little hope for a political solution.


By Mona El-Naggar and Tamir Elterman on July 3, 2014. Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Hamas’s military wing claimed responsibility for firing dozens of rockets into Israel for the first time in this latest round of hostilities that began three weeks ago.



In a short video clip, the Hamas military wing accused Israel of bringing death and destruction to Gaza and warned the residents of Beersheba to flee “before it is too late.”


Yaakov Peri, an Israeli government minister, told reporters on Sunday that there had been efforts by Egypt and Jordan, and a little by Turkey, to restore an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire that went into effect after eight days of fierce cross-border fighting in November 2012. “Unfortunately it does not work,” he said.


Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas official in Gaza, told reporters that his movement had received no cease-fire request from any side.


Talal Okal, a Gaza-based political analyst, said that the shift in Israel’s aerial bombings from empty training sites and other open locations to targets where people were present was meant as a message to Hamas.


Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, compared the situation to a “Greek tragedy in which both Israel and Hamas are running toward something that neither wants.”




Israeli soldiers gathered at a military staging area outside the southern Gaza Strip. Baz Ratner/Reuters

Both, he said, were unable to resist internal pressures — in Israel’s case from the public and the right wing of the government; and in Hamas’s case from other, more radical Islamic organizations in Gaza, who have fanned the flames.


In other political fallout, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and leader of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, broke off his 20-month alliance with the conservative Likud Party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, citing “fundamental disagreements” between the two. Mr. Lieberman has urged much tougher action against Hamas and Gaza, the source of increasing rocket fire against southern Israel.


The partnership between the two parties had been a kind of marriage of convenience to help both in the 2013 elections. Mr. Lieberman said he would remain in the governing coalition, for now preventing the government from falling. Analysts said that Mr. Lieberman had simply left before the Likud could throw him out, and that Gaza gave him an excuse.


“The debate with Netanyahu may be authentic,” Gideon Rahat, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in an interview of Mr. Lieberman, “but he waited for an opportunity.”


The tensions along Israel’s border with Gaza began with the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers — Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Fraenkel, 16 — on June 12. Israel blamed Hamas for their abduction and conducted a broad clampdown against Hamas’s infrastructure in the West Bank. After the killing on Wednesday of the Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, street clashes between young Arab protesters and Israeli security forces flared in parts of East Jerusalem and in Arab towns across Israel, though the West Bank had remained largely quiet.


Mr. Netanyahu spoke by telephone with the youth’s father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, on Monday, a day after the Israeli authorities arrested six suspects, all Israeli Jews and three of them minors, in the killing.


“I would like to express my outrage and that of the citizens of Israel over the reprehensible murder of your son,” Mr. Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his office.


“We acted immediately to apprehend the murderers,” he continued. “We will bring them to trial and they will be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law. We denounce all brutal behavior; the murder of your son is abhorrent and cannot be countenanced by any human being.”



Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza, Said Ghazali from Jerusalem and Nayef Hashlamoun from Hebron, West Bank.




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