Levitt Letter Extra News

By Jonathan Schanzer
www.investors.com

A half-dozen U.S. military officers and engineers recently toured Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Maan News Agency reported.

They reportedly are working to install high-tech sensing equipment to locate the smuggling tunnels that snake beneath the sands between Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. Maan notes that the group is already training Egyptian security personnel to use the equipment.

The need for this equipment is dire. Dozens of Gaza Strip smugglers went back to work last week, openly repairing the tunnels that supply the Hamas economy, as Israel withdrew its troops.

With their help and determination, Hamas will quickly replenish the rockets and launchers destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces in Operation Cast Lead.

Egypt says it will accept equipment or aid from any nation to help combat smuggling. But, with or without help, Egypt must begin to actively identify and destroy these tunnels. If it won’t, Washington should consider revoking Egypt’s $1.7 billion in foreign aid.

Israel has complained with increasing intensity that Egypt turns a blind eye to the tunnels. Cairo originally dismissed those allegations as “old and silly.”

However, as Israeli protests grew louder, the U.S. House and Senate agreed to a 2008 foreign aid bill that would withhold about $100 million of Egypt’s foreign aid unless Washington could certify that Egypt was doing its part to stop the smuggling.

Egypt, however, still failed to deliver. In late January 2008, the Hosni Mubarak regime stood by as Hamas destroyed parts of the wall separating Gaza from the Sinai.

Tens of thousands of Gazans streamed into Egypt, stocking up on food, supplies and weapons. According to Israeli security services chief Yuval Diskin, large quantities of long-range rockets, anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and materiel for rocket production were brought into Gaza.

Predictably, the Israeli government was furious. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel stated in a BBC interview that it was “the responsibility of Egypt to ensure that the border operates properly, according to the signed agreements.”

Weapons Highway
However, it took Egypt 12 days to close the border. Once sealed, underground smuggling returned to previous levels.

One year later, despite regular diplomatic overtures from Jerusalem and Washington, the smuggling continues. The continued operation of these tunnels has wide-reaching consequences.

The tunnels are the lifeblood of the Gaza economy, enabling Hamas to circumvent international sanctions. Tunnels furnish the Hamas economy in the Gaza Strip with everything from cigarettes and car parts to erectile dysfunction pills and fresh cheese. Hamas also smuggles in Iranian cash to pay the salaries of its loyalists.

Additionally, Hamas collects revenue from the tunnels, which yield approximately $140 million per year. In some cases, Hamas charges the operators thousands of dollars to maintain them.

In short, without the tunnels, the Hamas economy would likely collapse. The power structure would quickly follow.

Notably, Egypt’s refusal to shut down the tunnels directly contributes to the bloody internecine conflict between Hamas and Fatah — the two dominant Palestinian factions. The more weaponry and goods Hamas smuggles into Gaza, the stronger it will get and the more prepared it will be to confront Fatah in another round of violence. This will only ensure future instability in the West Bank and Gaza.

Finally, and most obviously, the Sinai tunnels provide Hamas with the projectiles and ordnance that provoked Israel into the most recent conflict. This led to a re-inflammation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not to mention needless bloodshed on both sides. The resumption of tunnel activity now ensures that a future round of conflict is just around the corner.

Until now, Israeli efforts to get Egypt to take stronger action against the tunneling had potentially dangerous consequences. Specifically, Israel feared jeopardizing its cold peace with Egypt, which had ensured a tense regional calm since 1978.

However, it is now clear that Egypt has failed to live up to its obligations. The need for additional U.S. personnel to bolster Cairo’s flaccid anti-smuggling efforts is proof of this.

As calls for change and accountability reverberate throughout Washington at a time when budgets are under increased scrutiny, the U.S. Congress should take a hard look at Egypt’s $1.7 billion in foreign aid.

More than $1.3 billion of that is military aid. Those funds must be used to better patrol the Gaza border. If they are not, U.S. foreign aid should be reconsidered.
______________________
Schanzer is a former terrorism analyst at the U.S. Treasury Department.

By Susan Estrich
news.yahoo.com

On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers entered the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland and liberated the 7,000 prisoners who were still there, most of them sick and dying.

In 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the liberation, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

And so it was certainly not a coincidence that the official spokesman for Iran’s government chose Jan. 27, 2009, to make a statement denouncing the Holocaust as a “big lie” used to justify the existence of the state of Israel. “The Holocaust is a concept coming from a big lie in order to settle a rootless regime in the heart of the Islamic world,” Gholam Hossein Elham told a conference on Gaza held in central Iran’s religious city of Qom.

Iranian leaders are well known for their embrace of the real “big lie.” In 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the Holocaust as “myth” and said that Israel was doomed to disappear. The following year, Tehran played host to a convention of liars and deniers; a mass-circulation newspaper sponsored a cartoon competition seeking the “best” cartoon mocking the deaths of millions; and only last September a student group got more attention than they deserved for a disgraceful book celebrating anti-Semitism and mocking the Holocaust.

Sixty-four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the generation who witnessed the barbarism first-hand is slowly passing on, many of them, like those who were liberated, sick and dying. The danger is that with the passage of that generation, the very existence of the Holocaust becomes not a matter of historic fact, but a subject of pseudo-intellectual debate, a subject about which reasonable people can differ, and a rallying cry for the ignorant and hateful enemies of Israel. News organizations will report the comments of the likes of Gholam Hossein Elham as if they were opinions, not lies. Children will grow up believing that he might be right — or at least that he is not certainly wrong.

On Monday, the eve of the anniversary, President Obama reached out to the Muslim world, granting his first network interview as president to the Dubai-based al-Arabiya network. It was an important symbol, intended to convey to the Muslim world that “the Americans are not your enemy.” The new president said America had made mistakes in the past, but “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.”

I do not believe America is the enemy of the Muslim world. But we are, and should be, the enemy of those who would deny the slaughter of six million Jews and denounce Israel as a nation doomed to disappear. I don’t know exactly what “mistakes” the president was referring to, but supporting Israel’s right to exist and defend itself is not, at least in my book, among them.

It is right, and appropriate, to reach out to the Muslim world diplomatically. It is right, and appropriate, for the new president to reach out personally, to remind Muslims of his many relatives who share their faith and of his commitment to find common ground.

But the common ground must include recognition of the lessons of history. It must include respect for the suffering of those who died at the hands of Jew-haters. It must include support for the security of the state of Israel. January 27 is an appropriate day to remember and reaffirm that.

By Aaron Klein
www.WorldNetDaily.com

HERZLIYA, Israel – In the aftermath of Israel’s three-week offensive targeting Hamas in the Gaza Strip, reports are emerging of how the terrorists used civilians during the conflict.

“Entire families in Gaza lived on top of a barrel of explosives for months without knowing,” stated Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg.

Eisenberg charged Hamas sent civilians, including women and children, to transfer weapons to gunmen engaged in battles with Israeli forces, and he accused Hamas of booby-trapping many of the civilians’ homes. He labeled Hamas’ alleged use of civilians as “monstrous” and “inhumane.”

Similar reports were provided to WND during previous Israeli battles with Hamas. During one battle focusing largely on the Hamas infrastructure in the city of Jabaliya, about one mile into the Gaza Strip, an Israeli commander said Hamas drew Israeli forces into populated civilian areas, shooting at Jewish fighters from occupied civilian homes while women and children were inside.

In another case, Israel’s Haaretz daily quoted an Israeli commander describing how Hamas sent a 10-year-old boy into the battlefield in full view of the Israeli military to remove a gun from a felled terrorist and then pass the weapon to another terrorist. The commander at the scene said he ordered his troops to halt their fire as the Israeli military watched.

Another commander speaking to WND said Hamas snipers used the windows of a Jabaliya house that was clearly occupied by women and children to shoot at his unit.

“The aim is to draw us into killing civilians to bring about international pressure to end our operation,” the commander said.

The international community and much of the world media constantly berated Israel for purportedly killing more than 1,250 Palestinians during the conflict.

Many media members claimed those numbers were mostly civilians. WND reported the media was parroting Hamas casualty counts with no independent verification.

Now the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera quoted what it said was a Palestinian doctor at Gaza City’s main Shifa Hospital disputing the Hamas casualty numbers.

“It’s possible that the death toll in Gaza was 500 or 600 at the most, mainly youths aged 17 to 23 who were enlisted by Hamas – who sent them to their deaths,” he said.

The IDF’s own estimate, which is not based on verification of deaths, puts the toll at about 1,000, two-thirds of which it says were gunmen.

The Gaza doctor continued: “Perhaps it is like Jenin in 2002. At the beginning they (Palestinians) spoke about 1,500 dead, and at the end it turned out to be only 54 – of whom 45 were militants.”

The doctor was referring to a 2002 Israeli anti-terror raid in the northern West Bank town of Jenin after which Hamas and the PA claimed hundreds of Palestinian civilians were murdered.

Chief PA negotiator Saeb Erekat claimed on CNN that “more than 500 people” were killed. He repeated the charge on CNN a day later, adding that 300 Palestinians were being buried in mass graves.

It was later determined 54 Palestinians were killed, mostly terrorists, while the IDF lost 23 troops while they engaged in house-to-house combat “instead of massive air raids” in order to limit civilian casualties.

By David Solway
www.FrontPageMagazine.com

The eruption of violence in Gaza temporarily obscured some of the underlying concerns in the region. These will re-emerge now that a “ceasefire” has been declared. Primary among these issues is the question of a two-state solution, subsumed under the rubric of the “road map to peace,” to resolve the political and military impasse between Palestinians and Israelis.

Unfortunately, the road map will prove to be nothing more than a roadblock. To begin with, many Palestinians are not interested in a two-state solution to their predicament. Palestinian political behavior and a myriad of polls and studies strongly indicate that the majority of Palestinians do not want a state of their own alongside a Jewish state. They want Israel to disappear. Hamas and Fatah have made it abundantly clear that their agenda is the complete eradication of Israel—Israel is the “occupied territories.” The Hamas charter declares that “Israel will exist only until Islam destroys it.” The Fatah charter pledges that “Our struggle will not cease until the Zionist state is entirely eliminated.”

The only difference between Hamas and Fatah is that the latter is more flexible in its strategy, pursuing not the thunderbolt policy of Hamas but the road map to serialized conquest. Hamas, like Iran, wishes to obliterate Israel militarily, Fatah to dismember it through negotiations.

For Fatah, Israel need not be reduced to ashes but annihilated bit by bit in all its aspects—economic, political, martial, demographic, and cultural. This program should be seen for what it is, a rejuvenated version of Yasser Arafat’s “strategy of slices” or “phases,” originally recommended by Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba and by Mohammed Heikal, the former editor of the Eygptian newspaper Al Ahram.

This is precisely the goal that would be attained by implementing a second proposal that has been gathering momentum of late, namely the creation of a “single bilateral state.” Indeed, many prominent figures have abandoned the two-state policy. Leila Farsakh, a professor at the University of Massuchesetts, has published an article on the Palestinian advocacy site The Electronic Intifada, reprinted in Le monde diplomatique for March 7, 2007, blaming stalled negotiations on “Israeli apartheid” and opting for a “one-state solution.” Her position is by no means anomalous; it is widely shared by many of her peers and colleagues, both in the Middle East and the West. In fact, her article merely reprises PLO legal advisor Michael Tarazi’s op-ed piece in The New York Times for October 4, 2004 in which, speaking in his master’s voice, he put paid to the notion of a two-state political settlement and proposed that Israel and the Territories merge into a single state.

In an article in The New York Review of Books for October 23, 2003, entitled “Israel: The Alternative,” historian Tony Judt, by now a leading figure in the ideological constituency of the anti-Israeli Left, had already called for the dissolution of Israel, arguing for “a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs.” The recently retired Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, has also picked up the cudgels, objecting to Israel as a Jewish state and opting for a “political, normal state for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.” Sabbah is plainly of one mind with Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat who, two weeks before the Annapolis peace conference, articulated the position that “no state in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity.”

This, of course, is pure nonsense. The Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law declares that “Islam is the official religion in Palestine,” just as the Contitution of Pakistan establishes Islam as the State religion and Saudi Arabia requires by law that all its citizens be Muslims.

Naturally, in such a single-state scenario with its Palestinian majority, the very real likelihood that those Jews who had not been purged would be marked as dhimmis does not ruffle the single-stater’s serenity. “How anyone in their right mind,” marvels Menachem Keller in the essay collection The Jewish Divide over Israel, “could believe that…this mooted ‘state of all its citizens’ would respect the rights of minorities (or of majorities for that matter) is beyond comprehension. People who hold this view are either cynical in the extreme or naïve in the extreme. In the former case they knowingly condemn my family and me to persecution and probable death; in the latter case, they insouciantly and casually condemn us to the same fate.”

In the event, the Palestinians would then get their state ready-made, without having to endure the labour of building it for themselves. The Israelis will have done all the work, developing a nonpareil scientific and academic establishment, forging a strong industrial base, devising irrigation techniques to reclaim the desert, draining the malarial marshlands, and making world-class discoveries in cybernetics, medical technology, and research paradigms. The Palestinians would then inherit what they do not deserve and what they have, up to now, done everything in their power to thwart—and, if their performance in Gaza is any indication, would more than likely run into the ground in no time flat. Israeli society may be far from perfect, but Palestinian society is not even close to being far. We might put it this way: Israel is a land that looks old and works new; Palestine is a land that looks old and doesn’t work at all.

In the present context, a return to the status quo ante may be the only way to keep the lid on the boiling cauldron. The counterproductive peace sham must be put out of its misery and new and different initiatives undertaken. With regard to the “peace process,” we might reverse the old maxim: if it’s not fixable, break it—and try something more “creative.” The prolonged and anticlimactic “peace” negotiations are like a mumblecore film: improvised, scriptless, heavy on verbiage, camera-reliant, and second-rate actors like Olmert, Livny, Abbas, and Mashaal pretending to be stars.

Thus it may be politically expedient to apply a clause of prudential revocation to a peace process that is all process and no peace, and engage rather in a “mediatorial process” that envisages the return of the Gaza Strip to Egypt and most of the West Bank to Jordan. After all, Gaza was Egyptian territory by force majeure until 1967 and the West Bank, originally mandated as part of the Jewish “national home” by the League of Nations in 1922, was formally annexed by the Hashemite emirate of Jordan in 1950.

Threatened by a zymotic Palestinian enclave, Jordan is profoundly involved in an effort to bring political chaos under control. An independent Palestine may pose a greater threat to Jordanian security than a closely monitored internal province. Similarly Egypt, despite having walled Gaza off, is distinctly uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing a border with an expansionist Islamic state, closely allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is precisely what Hamas-controlled Gaza would become.

The only viable way of dealing with so explosive a situation is to opt for what we might call a “three-state solution”: Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, bound to date by peace treaties. Forget Gaza and the West Bank. Otherwise, Gaza will remain a simmering brew of semtex and ideology, stirred by the Iranian ladle, and the West Bank will persist as a mafia of kleptocrats and terrorist cartels. Under these circumstances the day might come when there are no states at all in the region.

By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich www.JPost.com

The volunteer organization Ezer Mizion is holding a drive on Wednesday for blood samples to find a compatible donor for a six-year-old Kfar Saba girl named Amit, who has leukemia.

Six year old Amit awaits a bone marrow transplant

People between 18 and 50 years old and in good health who have never donated a sample to any bone marrow registry are invited to give a small sample to see whether they have a compatible type for stem cell transplants.

In addition to Amit, other cancer sufferers in Israel and around the world could benefit, especially Jews who have related tissue types. Thousands of new potential stem cell donors are expected to join Ezer Mizion’s registry.

The organization is also raising money to process the blood samples, each of which costs $46. Donations can be made and more information is available on the Web site at www.ezermizion.org.

The union of Jewish Agency staffers announced Tuesday that it was donating $4,600 to process 100 samples. Union head Yona Bezaleli and Jewish Agency chairman Ze’ev Bielski asked all staffers to join the project and find a compatible donor for Amit.

By Khaled Abu Toameh www.jpost.com

Hamas militiamen have rounded up hundreds of Fatah activists on suspicion of “collaboration” with Israel during Operation Cast Lead, Fatah members in the Gaza Strip told The Jerusalem Post.

They said the Hamas crackdown on Fatah intensified after the cease-fire went into effect early Sunday morning.

The Fatah members and eyewitnesses said the detainees were being held in school buildings and hospitals that Hamas had turned into make-shift interrogation centers. Hamas has also renewed house arrest orders that were issued against thousands of Fatah officials and activists in the Gaza Strip shortly after the military operation started.

The official said that the perpetrators belonged to Hamas’s armed wing, Izaddin Kassam, and to the movement’s Internal Security Force.

According to the official, at least three of the detainees had their eyes put out by their interrogators, who accused them of providing Israel with wartime information about the location of Hamas militiamen and officials. A number of Hamas leaders and spokesmen have claimed in the past few days that Fatah members in the Gaza Strip had been spying on their movement and passing the information to Israel.

Two Hamas officials, Salah Bardaweel and Fawzi Barhoum, accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his “spies” in the Gaza Strip of tipping off the Israelis about the movements of slain Hamas interior minister Said Siam, who was killed in an IAF strike on his brother’s home in Gaza City last week.

The Fatah official in Ramallah said that, apart from being baseless, the allegations were aimed at paving the way for a ruthless Hamas attack on Fatah activists in the Gaza Strip. “They were afraid to confront the Israeli army and many Hamas militiamen even ran away during the fighting,” he said. “Hamas is now venting its anger and frustration against our Fatah members there.”

Eyewitnesses said that Hamas militiamen had turned a number of hospitals and schools into temporary detention centers where dozens of Fatah members and supporters were being held on suspicion of helping Israel during the war. The eyewitnesses said that a children’s hospital and a mental health center in Gaza City, as well as a number of school buildings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, were among the places that Hamas had turned into “torture centers.”

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas’s house-arrest orders. “What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah,” he said. “Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?”

The activist said that Hamas’s security forces had also confiscated cellular phones and computers belonging to thousands of local Fatah members and supporters.

Relatives of Abed al-Gharabli, a former Fatah security officer who spent 12 years in Israeli prisons, said he was kidnapped by a group of Hamas militiamen who shot him in both legs after severely torturing him. Ziad Abu Hayeh, one of the commanders of Fatah’s armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, is reported to have lost his sight after Hamas gunmen put out his eyes. According to Fatah activists, Abu Hayeh was kidnapped from his home in Khan Yunis by Hamas militiamen.

The Fatah men said that in a number of incidents, Hamas militiamen had kidnapped Fatah activists while they were attending the funerals of people killed during the war. In other cases, activists were detained and shot in the legs after they were spotted smiling in public – an act interpreted by Hamas as an expression of joy over Israel’s military offensive.

Last week, three brothers from the Subuh family were abducted by Hamas militiamen and taken to the Abdel Aziz Rantisi Mosque in Khan Yunis, where they were shot in the legs, a local journalist told the Post.

In a more recent incident, Hamas gunmen shot and killed 80-year-old Hisham Tawfik Najjar after storming his home and beating his four sons – all Fatah activists.

Fahmi Za’areer, a Fatah spokesman in the West Bank, revealed that at least 16 Fatah activists had been executed by Hamas in the past few days. He strongly condemned the Hamas clampdown on Fatah and warned against a bloodbath in the Gaza Strip.

A leaflet distributed by the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in various parts of the Gaza Strip called on Hamas to “respect the blood of the Palestinian martyrs” and stop pursuing Fatah members. The leaflet said that Hamas had placed hundreds of Fatah men under house arrest in the past 48 hours and was warning that anyone who failed to comply with these orders would be shot.

By Alex West www.TheSun.co.uk

The al-Qaeda cell wiped out by Black Death may have infected ITSELF while developing biological weapons, it emerged last night. The terrorists planned to wreak havoc on Western targets but fell victims to their own weapon, a leading expert on chemical warfare believes.

The Sun revealed yesterday [see LLX post 1-19-09] that Black Death, also called the Plague, killed at least 40 fanatics at a terror training camp in Algeria earlier this month. It was thought they caught the disease through poor living conditions in their forest hideouts. But Dr. Igor Khrupinov, of Georgia University, said: “Al-Qaeda is known to experiment with biological weapons. And this group has direct communication with other cells around the world. Contagious diseases, like Ebola and anthrax, occur in northern Africa. It makes sense that people are trying to use them against Western governments.”

Dr. Khrupinov, once arms adviser to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, added: “Instead of using bombs, people with infectious diseases could be walking th rough cities.”

Black Death HAS been researched as a biological weapon before. And al-Qaeda boss Osama bin Laden’s fanatics were experimenting with anthrax in Afghanistan in 2001. Last year it was revealed that 100 suspected terrorists tried to become students in Britain, giving them access to labs.

In 2006 a plot to poison London’s water was unmasked. Ian Kearns, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, said: “The biological weapons threat is not going away. We’re not ready for it.”

By P. David Hornik
www.FrontPageMagazine.com

The hollowness of the “ceasefire” the Israeli cabinet declared on Saturday evening is all too easy to point out. No sooner was it declared than Hamas fired eight rockets at Israel. On Sunday it fired about 15 more before announcing at 2 p.m., along with Islamic Jihad, a ceasefire of its own conditional on Israel’s evacuating Gaza within a week. Four hours later two more rockets hit Israel. During last year’s “ceasefire” from June 19 to December 19, a total of over 500 rockets and mortars hit Israel from Gaza.

In announcing Israel’s latest ceasefire on Saturday night, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that “our targets, as defined when we launched the operation, have been fully achieved, and more so.” The proclaimed targets were to put an end to the rocket fire and to Hamas’s smuggling of weapons across the Gaza-Egypt border. The first, clearly, was not achieved; what about stopping the smuggling?

On Friday afternoon Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a remarkably hasty Memorandum of Understanding under which the United States is supposed to work together with the whole international community to halt the smuggling of Iranian weapons into Gaza. On Sunday European and Arab leaders converged at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh ostensibly to discuss the smuggling among other issues.

Since the early 1990s successive Israeli governments have been consumed with the idea that Israel need no longer defend its own borders because other parties will do so instead. The last few days, though, have seen a new milestone: now it is not just the likes of UNIFIL, the Lebanese army, or Egyptian border guards who are supposed to protect Israel, but the whole international community—the same community that races to slap ceasefires on it the minute it lifts a finger to defend itself and whose media, NGOs, governments, and institutions fiercely condemn it with words and imagery evoking classic anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile at Sharm el-Sheikh, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed that “Israel should state immediately and clearly that if rocket fire will stop, the Israeli army will leave Gaza. There is no other solution to achieve peace.” As for Egypt, its president Hosni Mubarak had already made clear on Saturday that “I demand from [Israel’s] leaders an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and I demand from them a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Strip.”

He said further that “Egypt will never accept any foreign presence of monitors on its land. I say this is a red line I have not and will not allow to be crossed.” His foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit added that Egypt had “no commitment toward this [U.S.-Israeli] memo [of understanding] whatsoever” and that “Israel is drunk with power and violence.” He also said the U.S. and Israel could “do what they wish with regard to the sea or any other country in Africa, but when it comes to Egyptian land, we are not bound by anything except the safety and national security of the Egyptian people and Egypt’s ability to protect its borders.”

The head of Israel’s General Security Service, Yuval Diskin, told the cabinet on Sunday that Hamas would resume the smuggling within a few months and would soon rebuild the tunnels that Israel destroyed during Operation Cast Lead—these having numbered in the hundreds although a large quantity still remain.

Regarding both goals of Operation Cast Lead, then—the rocket fire and the smuggling—the outlook was bleak.

And by Sunday night Israel was already complying with Hamas, Sarkozy, and Mubarak’s wishes—though without Sarkozy’s proviso of a stoppage of the shelling—and starting to withdraw from Gaza. It was doing so without having secured the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and held—presumably—in Gaza ever since without visits by the Red Cross or anyone else. Olmert and other top officials told a perturbed Israeli public that dealings were afoot on the matter of Shalit and it was best to keep these hushed; few if any were convinced.

Israel could resume the fighting if the provocations get intolerable. At this point, though, its abandonment of the campaign appears propelled mainly by (1) the international pressure that became monolithic with the U.S. failure on January 9 to veto UN Security Council Resolution 1860 and (2) fear of incurring the displeasure of the incoming Obama administration. It is true that this time Israel, particularly the Foreign Ministry and the army’s PR machine, made a determined effort to show the justice of Israel’s cause, emphasizing the long years of rocket fire on Israelis and Hamas’s abuse of the civilian population of Gaza for its military and propaganda purposes.

The international community, though—which is also indifferent to much larger-scale atrocities in Darfur or the Congo—has never cared about the shelling of Israeli towns and there was no reason for this to change. What does get this community riled up is TV images of Palestinian civilian casualties, and these were of course served up aplenty by the same terror-friendly media that worked so smoothly with Hezbollah in 2006. Israel’s moral arguments took a distant back seat to an oil-dependent world’s anxiety to get the embarrassing images off the TV screens as fast as possible.

Even if the Olmert government had relatively clear aims for the war, it had no clear idea of how to go about achieving them—let alone enough backbone to face the fact that the only effective force against the smuggling is a restored Israeli presence along the border with Egypt. Though all the assessments concur that Hamas suffered a considerable blow, fanatic movements with powerful state sponsors can recover surprisingly fast. The one lasting positive outcome may be the manifest improvement in Israel’s military performance compared to Lebanon in 2006—amounting, according to the more optimistic readings, to a restoration of deterrence.

The geopolitical implications, however, are grim, since even proficient armies usually cannot achieve their goals—or anything close to them—when the international community gives them a timeline of a few weeks at most. Could a tougher Israeli government have better withstood the pressure? With Israeli elections scheduled for February 10, and with the problem of Hamastan hardly solved, we may soon find out.

By Alex West
www.TheSun.co.uk

At least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly after being struck down with the disease that devastated Europe in the Middle Ages.

The killer bug, also known as the plague, swept through insurgents training at a forest camp in Algeria, North Africa. It came to light when security forces found a body by a roadside.

The victim was a terrorist in AQLIM (al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb), the largest and most powerful al-Qaeda group outside the Middle East. It trains Muslim fighters to kill British and US troops.

Now al-Qaeda chiefs fear the plague has been passed to other terror cells — or Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. One security source said: “This is the deadliest weapon yet in the war against terror. Most of the terrorists do not have the basic medical supplies needed to treat the disease. It spreads quickly and kills within hours. This will be really worrying al-Qaeda.”

Black Death comes in various forms.

Bubonic Plague is spread by bites from infected rat fleas. Symptoms include boils in the groin, neck and armpits.

In Pneumonic Plague, airborn bacteria spread like flu. It can be in the body for more than a week — highly contagious but not revealing tell-tale symptoms.

The al-Qaeda epidemic began in the cave hideouts of AQLIM in Tizi Ouzou province, 150km east of the capital Algiers. The group, led by wanted terror boss Abdelmalek Droudkal, was forced to turn its shelters in the Yakouren forest into mass graves and flee. The extremists supporting madman Osama bin Laden went to Bejaia and Jijel provinces — hoping the plague did not go with them.

A source said: “The emirs (leaders) fear surviving terrorists will surrender to escape a horrible death.”

AQLIM boss Droudkal claims to command around 1,000 insurgents. Training camps are also based in Morocco, Tunisia and Nigeria. AQLIM bombed the UN headquarters in Algiers in 2007, killing 41. Attacks across Algeria last year killed at least 70 people.

In an interview last July, Droudkal boasted his cell was in constant contact with other al-Qaeda “brothers”.

By Aaron Klein
www.WorldNetDaily.com

JERUSALEM – Wars are won or lost based on which side achieves its goals. In the case of Israel’s three-week offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Jewish state made many impressive gains but largely failed to achieve its major objectives.

At the beginning of the conflict, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced two main goals for waging war on Hamas – to decisively smash the terrorist group’s ability to attack Israel; and to stop Hamas’s rocket attacks from Gaza aimed at nearby Jewish communities. Neither goal was met.

Olmert later announced a third goal – to change the situation on the ground so that Hamas will not be able to continue smuggling weapons into Gaza from neighboring Egypt. This goal is on the road to failure.

With regard to denting Hamas’s capabilities, during the past 23 days, Israeli air strikes targeted both symbolic Hamas institutions, such as government buildings, and the group’s military infrastructure, including rocket caches, police stations, explosives factories, and about 200 of an estimated 600 smuggling tunnels between Gaza and neighboring Egypt. Although the IDF will not confirm the percentage of Hamas’s military infrastructure wiped out, defense sources said Hamas lost about 30 percent of its rockets and a sizable portion of its explosives development program.

But the sources said Hamas’ estimated 6,000-man force trained in Hezbollah-like guerrilla tactics is still largely in place along with the majority of the group’s underground bunkers. In addition, 60 percent of its rocket arsenal and most of its weapons caches are well-stored. Crucially, many components of Hamas’s military wing are stored underground and remain safely tucked away.

The IDF only launched two portions of a planned, three-stage assault on Gaza. The first stage was Israel’s continuing aerial bombardment of Hamas targets, which the terror group admits dented its government infrastructure and which Israeli sources said resulted in some damage to the group’s military capabilities. The second stage began about two weeks ago, with some ground troops entering Gaza, taking up peripheral positions in central and northern Gaza and mounting some small offensives and special operations within Gaza City and select northern Gaza camps.

But defense sources say to deal a decisive blow to Hamas’s ability to attack Israel, the IDF must embark on an extensive, large-scale ground operation that would clean out central and northern Gaza of Hamas’s intact military wing. Now that a ceasefire has been announced, it seems Israel will not continue its offensive – meaning Hamas’s military infrastructure is largely still intact.

Still, Israel destroyed so many Hamas buildings (the Israel Air Force almost ran out of targets), the group’s ability to govern on the ground has been badly damaged, since it doesn’t have many government compounds from which to rule. Hamas’s government infrastructure, including office buildings, police headquarters, even financial institutions, was badly damaged. Hamas will find it difficult to immediately assume the kind of authority it boasted in Gaza starting in 2007, when Hamas seized control of the territory from the U.S.-backed Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel also scared into hiding some Hamas leaders with its eliminations of top Hamas members, including Siad Siam, the chief of Hamas’s executive force, a Hezbollah-like guerrilla militia heavily involved in terrorism. But Hamas leaders are quite used to living under assassination threat. When the IDF fully withdraws, Hamas’s military wing chiefs will come out from their shells. Some already have.

Olmert’s stated goal of destroying Hamas’s ability to rocket Israel fell short. This is obvious since Hamas fired an average of 33 rockets per day every day during the entire conflict, and reportedly shot at least 20 rockets and eight mortars since making its cease-fire declaration yesterday.

Hamas’s rocket arsenal is depleted by about half, and many of its rocket factories were taken out by the IDF. Crucial to bleeding Hamas dry is for Israel to find a way to halt the rampant weapons smuggling from Egypt to Gaza. Indeed, this was one of Olmert’s stated goals. But it will not be achieved.

Israel is negotiating an international monitoring mechanism it hopes will stop Hamas from smuggling weapons from neighboring Egypt into Gaza. But previous international monitors stationed along the Egypt-Gaza border fled their duty and repeatedly failed to stem Hamas’ weapons smuggling. The monitors were stationed at the border following Israel’s 2005 evacuation of the Gaza Strip.

Even if a beefed-up international force is established inside Gaza – and this is not the plan – it is not clear whether such a force would do its job. Currently, a 13,000-strong UNIFIL force in southern Lebanon has done little as the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has rearmed in the area, many times in full view of the international troops, according to Israeli defense officials.

Meanwhile, Olmert today made some farcical claims, telling the Israeli media Hamas would find it difficult to continue smuggling weapons into Gaza and that the IDF controlled the northern Gaza Strip – the area from which most rockets are launched into the Jewish state. On the ground, the IDF does not control the entire northern Gaza, as clearly evidenced by Hamas’s continued ability to fire rockets from that zone.

Hamas of course has declared “victory,” which is overstating things. Hamas’s “victory” was by default since its only goal was to survive the IDF beating. It achieved this not due to its might but because the IDF will not be launching the third stage of its attack, which would have devastated Hamas.

One real Hamas victory, though, is the international legitimacy the group received during the past few weeks. According to WND’s Hamas sources, the group was in direct contact with Italy, France, the EU and U.N. representatives, many of whom, the sources said, expressed willingness to bring Hamas into the fold and out from isolation.

In the outcome of this war, a clear winner or loser cannot be determined. Both sides gained and lost. But if we are to judge based on which side achieved its objectives, Israel clearly did not win.

Hamas for now will probably scale back its rocket attacks against Israel, since it’s in the group’s best interests not to provoke any further IDF operations. But when the time is right and when its arsenal has been replenished, Hamas will resume its war to destroy the Jewish state.