UPDATES 9 am Israel time, Wednesday, October 1 2014:
**Remember all of those 32 tunnels that the IDF claimed were destroyed as IDF fighting with Hamas ended a mere 5 weeks ago?
Guess what? They weren’t really destroyed after all.
This morning the IDF has issued an alert to all IDF soldiers stationed along the border (there are actually very few of them) to be on the lookout for terrorists emerging from tunnels. It turns out that Hamas is hard at work creating bypasses to the sections that were damaged.
Also, it was revealed yesterday to no one’s surprise that Hamas is busy replenishing its missile arsenal and has even carried out 5 “test firings” towards the Mediterranean in recent days.
**Who’s telling the truth?
As we reported several days ago, Israeli strategy in the recent war was not to dismantle Hamas but to “return to the status quo” before the war began–with so-called “calm in the south” and “Hamas still in power.”
Netanyahu’s Cabinet has claimed that the central strategy of the recent Hamas war was presented to them on July 7th in a document formulated by the IDF Planning Division. The Cabinet then unanimously approved the document.
Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Nimrod Shefer, the head of the IDF Planning Division, said that was not true at all–that in fact the “operation’s objective” was “formulated by the Cabinet.”
Whatever the case, Shefer was amazingly candid in regard to the complete lack of adequate planning in his own Planning Division.
According to Shefer:
—“Each side misread the other’s intention and there was miscommunication between the sides. We failed to understand Hamas as a system.”
How in the world was it possible to misread Hamas’ intention? A kindergarten student could have told the IDF what Hamas wanted to do.
—“In a sense the challenge posed by the tunnels was new to us, despite the fact we knew they existed. I’m not ashamed to say we learned a lot about neutralizing tunnels during the operation, and developed new methods under the assumption it would take four days, but it took much longer.”
How in the world could the IDF not anticipated the problems with the tunnels?
And neutralizing them? As you read in the first update this morning, the tunnels have not been neutralized.
There really is no other way to look at the IDF planning in regard to the war except as a massive failure.
**As predicted yesterday, the Obama Administration through the State Department of John Kerry continued on the attack against the remarks of PM Netanyahu.
Here were some of the lowlights as sarcastically delivered by State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki:
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—the U.S. rejects the harsh Netanyahu criticism of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
—the U.S. rejects Netanyahu’s characterization of Iran’s endless stalling on its nuclear program as a “manipulative charm offensive.”
—the U.S. rejects Netanyahu’s lumping Hamas, IS, Iran, Hezbollah, and other extreme Islamic organizations into the same category.
TODAY’S BLOG:
Yesterday in Tel Aviv, Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe “Boogie” Ya’alon continued his current round of speechmaking designed to absolve himself from all failures in the recent war, and offered the following bizarre gem:
“It would have been mistaken to give the army the directive of toppling Hamas, not even in retrospect. The moment it evolves into Hamastan then it won’t be just Hamas. It will be an Iranian branch for the global jihad. Who can accept such a situation in Judea and Samaria?”
Could one of you dear readers please explain this gobbledygook to me?
The best your humble servant can do is: “we (read Ya’alon, Gantz, and Netanyahu) were correct not to get rid of Hamas because if we had, Gaza would have evolved into Hamastan, an Iranian branch of global jihad. And this is a situation we cannot accept in Judea and Samaria. So, voila, we could not get rid of Hamas in Gaza because we cannot accept a Hamastan in Judea and Samaria!”
Excuse me?
It is precisely this lack of logical thinking that characterizes the Israel Defense establishment, in particular the IDF General Staff.
Perhaps if Ya’alon were capable of rational thought, he could be reminded that:
–Gaza has been Hamastan for the last 7 years. There are more than 30 separate terror groups under Hamas’s unbrella operating there, many of which are directly funded and supplied by Iran.
–PM Netanyahu made the excellent point at the U.N. the other night that Hamas and IS are both parts of the same “poisonous tree”, the tree of militant Islamic jihad.
–Hamas is already in Judea and Samaria. If an election were held in Areas A and B of Judea and Samaria tomorrow, Hamas would win in a landslide.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.