IRIS Blog

Clearly he has a point with his "get over it" message to Israelis. Given that he defines security in terms of releasing terrorists who sign abstinence pledges, think of the overcrowding in Palestinian 12-step programs alone that would ensue if all were let go at once:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Thursday that he had no intention of providing maximal protection to all residents of Gaza periphery communities. "A country cannot protect itself ad infinitum, because there would be no end to it."

Olmert was addressing the Caesarea Conference.

The prime minister added that stepping up protection would be "just as [ineffective] as the demand to solve Sderot's Kassam problem by wiping Beit Hanun and other towns in Gaza off the face of the earth.

Nice straw man argument. Well, since we can't "wipe them off the face of the earth," let's release them from our prisons, and pretend we aren't paying the salaries of thousands of terrorists via Abbas. Hamas solved its Fatah problem permanently (and probably the dreaded armed clan threat as well) in Gaza with probably less than 100 deaths.

The prime minister appealed to the residents of the Gaza periphery: "In the short term we cannot supply you with all of the personal security that we would like to provide, because such protection would draw from expensive resources that are needed for other critical security needs."

Olmert also addressed the media, asking that they "not encourage, even mutely, demands of citizens that no normal government could accept." He added that "life in Israel entails a certain security risk, and anyone who chooses to live in the Jewish state is accepting this risk." And yet, "the risk in Israel is lower than the risk threatening Jews in other parts of the world."

This makes perfect sense. What could push a reformed terrorist off the wagon faster than being punished?

Israel and the Palestinian Authority are discussing implementing a clause from a 2005 understanding whereby Israel would stop pursuing wanted terror suspects in the West Bank if they forswear terrorism, government officials said Thursday.

This was one of the many agreements Fatah signed forwearing terror. Perhaps they can be pursued in small claims court for breach of contract?

The officials' comments came as Israel went after Fatah terror suspects in Nablus.

Even though Israel was making gestures to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement, it would continue to pursue those actively involved in terrorism, regardless of their organizational affiliation, the officials said.

The idea of forgoing the pursuit of wanted men if they renounce terrorism was part of the Sharm e-Sheikh understandings that were reached between Abbas and then-prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2005. It was agreed then to discuss the issue, but nothing was ever implemented.

Following Monday's meeting in Sharm e-Sheikh, this issue was again placed on the agenda for security-level discussions that have started up again between Israeli and PA officials.

Israelis have been attacked by terrorists who were set free twice after twice signing a pledge renouncing terrorism. Olmert is now proposing to release 250 more, but only after they sign a pledge renouncing terrorism.

A bomb was found and made safe in Haymarket, London on Friday morning, Sky News reported.

Sky sources said that the explosive device, which was found in a car, was potentially "massive."

The area was cordoned off and anti-terrorist police were at the scene.

Now who would want to do a thing like that?

Here is a Saudi TV clip which illustrates the genocidal anti-Semitism which is an integral part of mainstream Islam worldwide:

Interviewer: Would you, as a human being, be willing to shake hands with a Jew?

Interviewee 1: Of course I wouldn?t be willing to shake hands with a Jew, for religious reasons and because of what is happening now in Palestine, and for many reasons that don?t allow me to shake a Jew?s hand.

Interviewee 2: No. Because the Jews are eternal enemies. The murderous Jews violate all agreements. I can?t shake hands with someone who I know is full of hatred towards me.

Interviewee 3: No, the Jew is an enemy. How can I shake my enemy?s hand?

Interviewer: Would you refuse to shake hands with a Jew?

Interviewee 4: Of course, so I wouldn?t have to consider amputating my hand afterwards.

Perhaps the Urban Dictionary could add this to its entry for coyote arm.

Interviewer: If a child asks you who ?who are the Jews,? what would you answer?

Interviewee 5: The enemies of Allah and His Prophet.

Interviewee 6: The Jew is the occupier of our lands.

Interviewee 1: The murderers of prophets. Our eternal enemies, of course.

Interviewee 2: The murderers of prophets, that?s it.

Interviewer: If a child asks you who ?who are the Jews,? what would you answer?

Interviewee 8: Allah?s wrath is upon them, as the Koran says. Allah?s wrath is upon them and they all stray from the path of righteousness. They are the filthiest people on the face of this earth because they care only about themselves: Not the Christians, not the Muslims, nor any other religion.

The solution is clear, not only to me but to everyone. If only [the Muslims] declared Jihad, we would see who stays home. We have a few countries... there is one country with a population of over 60-70 million people. If we let them only march, with no weapons even, they would completely trample the Jews, they would turn them into rotten carcasses under their feet. There is another country that donated money, saying, ?I am behind you, I?ll support you with weapons, just wage [Jihad].?

But the cowardice inside us, deep within our hearts was instilled by the Arab leaders, may Allah forgive them. They breast-fed us with it from the day we were born to this very day it has grown with us.

These attitudes are not limited to "extremist" Saudi Arabia; IRIS previously reported on a survey which finds the attitudes to be catholic.

Here is a must-read that typifies the revulsion of American conservative thinkers to Bush's pass in the War on Terror to the Founding Fathers of terrorism:

THE PAST WEEK has been a good one for terrorists. The birth of the world?s first truly terrorist state in Gaza was quickly followed by a Western response that, if sustained, all but guarantees that terror state?s survival.

While there are plenty of examples, past and present, of states that encourage, fund and even practice terrorism, no nations have ever been created explicitly for the sake of terrorism. Not even the Taliban. Hamas was built upon the terrorist edifice created by the organization it recently supplanted?the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), or ?Fatah? as it is has become more recently known. The PLO was created in 1964, three years before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not to create the world?s 22nd Arab state, but to destroy its only Jewish state. Hamas overthrew the PLO in Gaza not to change the PLO?s dream, but to fulfill it.

What, then, is Washington?s answer to Hamastan in Gaza? Why, another bailout of the one organization responsible for the entire debacle in the first place?the PLO. After 45 years of ground work preparing for Hamas? takeover by radicalizing Palestinian society through blood-curdling terrorism, mind-boggling corruption, and world-class inefficiency, the U.S. and Israeli governments have announced their gratitude to Fatah with a billion dollar emergency aid package.

Just a quibble here--Fatah's radicalization of Palestinians has been primarily accomplished through non-stop propaganda to children for jihad.

Worse than being just another advertisement for diplomatic incompetence, this feeble response to the Hamas takeover will achieve the opposite of what we claim to want. Force- feeding life back into the PLO will not weaken Hamas; it will strengthen it by giving the PLO another chance to demonstrate its fraudulent duplicity. Funding the PLO will not strengthen any real Palestinian moderates; it will discredit them by seeming to tie their fortunes once again to a corrupt, inept?and immoderate?organization.

Palestinian society cannot be transformed by reviving the group responsible for its degradation. How does one fight terrorism by rewarding those who invented it? Do ?Fatah first? advocates believe that financially rewarding the already heavily-armed and well-funded ?security? fighters of Fatah, who turned tail and ran at the sight of Hamas gunmen, will lead them now to fight to retake their posts, having gotten a check from Washington? Do they think the PLO?s corruption is best combated by re-upping the employment contracts for its 200,000 dysfunctional bureaucrats?60,000 of whom are the gangsters, thugs, and terrorists associated with the PLO?s 13 so called ?security services??

With Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert dutifully nodding by his side, President Bush called last week?s debacle ?a wonderful opportunity for freedom.? How exactly is the resurrection of the world?s founding terrorist organization a ?wonderful opportunity? for anything other than more terrorism and corruption?

Of course, the case is far worse than the author presents. Not only Fatah terrorists, but thousands of open Hamas terrorists have been on the Fatah payroll. And Fatah gunmen not only did not fight, they were given orders not to.

I have seen a news source which indicates that Hamas members remain on Abbas' payroll, and yet Olmert responds to the "surprise" Hamas takeover of Gaza with an instantaneous $400 million windfall to Fatah:

Israel is expected to release withheld tax funds to the Palestinian Authority in time for a Middle East summit in Sharm el-Sheikh next Monday with Egypt, Jordan, and the PA. Israel is currently in control of about $400 million in Palestinian taxes, which have not been transferred to the PA as of yet due to Hamas' rise to power. However, following the establishment of a new emergency government headed by Salam Fayyad, the U.S. and Europe have resumed financial aid to the Palestinians, prompting Prime Minister Olmert to allow the flow of funds to the PA.

Salam Fayyad, universally reported as "widely respected for his integrity" was nominated for his post of Finance Minister by Hamas.

The withheld tax funds will be transferred to the Palestinians in installments, through a mechanism that will ensure none of the funds reach terror organizations, or any groups associated with terror, including Hamas.

This is an outrageous falsehood, and it is difficult to believe that this is only negligence on the part of the journalist. Thousands of terrorists in both the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades and Hamas have consistently been on the PA payroll. Every recent transfer of money to the PA has included this claim, later followed by reports of funds transfers to Hamas.

One would think that if the precipitous Hamas takeover was really a surprise, Olmert would need to study the situation and deliberate with his advisers before responding with such dramatic largesse. He might want to ask why Fatah fighters consistently claimed that they were denied bullets to respond to Hamas attacks when they were not ordered outright by their commanders not to fight. He might want some information on how much of his past millions went to Hamas.

Liberals will never lose faith in their religiously dogmatic ideal of the Palestinians, so Youssef Ibrahim's eye-opening piece could only be published in one of America's three-and-a-half conservative newspapers:

Why is America trying to pour new money and more weapons into Palestinian Arab hands barely days after the Gaza debacle? It is an ill-considered policy, both premature and useless. The only sure result will be that warring gangs in the West Bank will use every new weapon to continue the mayhem and that the money will end up in the pockets and bank accounts of the same crooks who lost Gaza.

America and Israel may want to wait for what may turn out to be a changing of the guard: Arab voices, both expert and popular, are rising in vociferous denunciations of the once sacrosanct Palestinian Arabs. A widely read opinion commentator for the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, Mamoun Fandy, thundered on Monday. "We need to tell the [Palestinians] the only thing they have proven over 50 years is that they are adolescents who cannot and should not be trusted to run institutions of state or any other important matters."

While it could be argued that the outrage in Saudi Arabia reflects resentment over the collapse of the much-vaunted reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah - which was personally brokered by King Abdullah earlier this year in Mecca - the anger expressed across the Muslim Arab world reflects deep embarrassment at the discredit Hamas has brought, in the name of Islam, through its savagery against Fatah.

For its part, the Egyptian press has become unhinged, spewing vile denunciations of what is universally known as "the cause" - support for the Palestinian Arabs - and describing it as dead.

Palestinian journalist Abdelbari Atwan, writing in the London-based Al Quds International, argued that "the cause" may have lost its legitimacy: "I never thought the day would come when we would see Palestinians throwing other Palestinians from the tops of buildings to their death, Palestinians attacking other Palestinians to tear their bodies with knives, Palestinians stripping others naked to drag them through the streets."

An important article in preparation for the next battleground in Olmert's corrupt giveaway of his nation's assets:

It is almost politically incorrect, practically heresy, to claim today that the Golan is not Syrian in the least nor a deposit or bargaining chip for negotiations. The Golan is a lot more "Israeli" than "Syrian." It has been Israeli for 40 years, double the time it was in Syria's hands. It has been under Israeli sovereignty for 26 years. It has neither a foreign people nor a demographic problem. The Golan has become a part of Israeli life. It is the most frequently visited part of the country, dotted with dozens of Jewish communities, agricultural fields, industrial areas and tourist resorts, nature reserves and wild landscape.

Whoever talks about "returning" the Golan to Syria is being misleading. The Golan was placed under a French mandate in the colonialist agreement that divided the region; Syria won independence only in 1946. In the brief period it was in the Golan - 0.5 percent of its territory - Syria turned the region into a launching pad for its attempt to conquer and decimate Israel. The Syrian army shelled the Israeli communities along the border, attacked the Lake Kinneret fishermen, tried to divert the course of its waters and made life "down below" a Sderot-style hell. The Golan was conquered in a justified defensive war. We paid for it with blood. The Syrians lost it fair and square.

In previous eras as well, the Golan was not considered a part of Syria, and it is replete with findings of Jewish heroism and sovereignty, starting with the reign of Solomon, through the Second Temple period, the heroic battle of the city of Gamla and the Talmudic period. It was no foreign land that we conquered. The results of the Second Lebanon War greatly increased the Syrian appetite and led it to threaten a war against Israel unless the Golan is handed over. This is exactly the time to tell the Israeli story of the Golan Heights.

Vignettes from the Hamas takeover of Gaza:

....The near-perfect public order that reigned in Gaza this week can be attributed, at least in part, to the fear Hamas struck into residents' hearts last week, during the Strip's civil war. Testimony collected from the days of fighting indicates that Hamas imposed a methodical system of terror and scare tactics intended to deter, shock and frighten Fatah operatives and Gaza residents in general.

It began on a Monday 11 days ago, when a Fatah man was tossed off a multi-story building in the Strip; it subsequently came to light that Hamas operatives managed to shoot him in the legs before throwing him to his death. Although this method was used on only one other Fatah operative, it had the desired effect and became the talk of the town. A number of Fatah leaders, who knew that their names appeared on Hamas hit lists, decided to make their exit, with some heading to Ramallah and others crossing into Egypt.

"It's very easy to criticize the senior officials who disappeared," says a Gazan journalist. "But you have to remember that they wanted to stay alive. People had already tried to assassinate them in the past and they knew that Hamas wanted their heads. Someone like that wants to survive."

Hamas was not using a random hit list. Every Hamas patrol carried with it a laptop containing a list of Fatah operatives in Gaza, and an identity number and a star appeared next to each name. A red star meant the operative was to be executed and a blue one meant he was to be shot in the legs - a special, cruel tactic developed by Hamas, in which the shot is fired from the back of the knee so that the kneecap is shattered when the bullet exits the other side. A black star signaled arrest, and no star meant that the Fatah member was to be beaten and released. Hamas patrols took the list with them to
hospitals, where they searched for wounded Fatah officials, some of whom they beat up and some of whom they abducted.

Aside from assassinating Fatah officials, Hamas also killed innocent Palestinians, with the intention of deterring the large clans from confronting the organization. Thus it was that 10 days ago, after an hours-long gun battle that ended with Hamas overpowering the Bakr clan from the Shati refugee camp - known as a large, well-armed and dangerous family that supports Fatah - the Hamas military wing removed all the family members from their compound and lined them up against a wall. Militants selected a 14-year-old girl, two women aged 19 and 75, and two elderly men, and shot them to death in cold blood to send a message to all the armed clans of Gaza.

No mainstream news source has reported the clear truth about the Fatah-Hamas 'war'--there wasn't any. Fatah never fought.

It has been common knowledge that journalists in Palestinian areas do not report on stories that gunmen do not want publicized, either because of intimidation or ideological affinity. However, one brave blogger wrote up his interviews with Fatah gunmen who were given orders not to fight at all.

Whether the cause was conspiracy or not, two facts are certain:

1) The enormous resources provided to Fatah to resist the Hamas takeover of Gaza were essentially unused and are now in the hands of Hamas to attack Israel.

2) Enormous resources are now being provided to Fatah to fight Hamas in the West Bank.

We left Gaza yesterday with a Red Cross aid convoy, but I want to post some thoughts on Fatah?s collapse. We spoke with nearly a dozen Fatah fighters and soldiers from the various branches of the security services, all of whom were around in the president?s compound, the intelligence headquarters, the Preventative Security headquarters and even in Khan Younis until the final hours of the battle. We came with a pretty damning indictment of the political and military leadership.

Fatah never fought. Gaza was essentially handed over to Hamas. Soldier after soldier said they felt betrayed and abandoned by their leadership. There was a seemingly willful lack of decision making by the senior most political leadership. Up and down the Gaza Strip from the first moments of fighting, the military leadership disintegrated while the political leadership remained eerily silent.

Ousted Fatah loyalists in Gaza widely suspect a political decision was made early on in Ramallah to surrender the Gaza Strip to Hamas in order to extricate Abbas, Israel and the US from the seeming intractable pickle they were facing as infighting spiraled, living conditions worsened, and the peace process seemed hopelessly stuck. With the Palestinian territories now split, the US, Israel and Abbas suddenly have way forward, without compromising to Hamas.

I don?t mean to sound conspiratorial, and I think the likeliest scenario is that all the parties involved simply accepted what was essentially a fait accompli some time in the course of the fighting and set about finding whatever silver lining could be salvaged.

There are of course a dozen reasons why Fatah was so ineffective. Fatah was unpopular and the vast majority of the security forces were not really Fatah loyalists. They were merely after a steady salary, not some messianic belief in Fatah or the rightness of the Palestinian Authority. They were doing it because it was their job and they hadn?t been paid more than a fraction of their salaries in 18 months. Fatah was also divided into disparate bickering factions.

All that being said, the total surrender of the security forces is striking. Keep reading.

Fatah fighters? accounts

Abu Qusay is a 23 year old police officer from the Nuseirat camp. He?s a die hard Fatah loyalist and says he was inside Abbas? presidential compound until late Thursday evening.

We handed Gaza over to Hamas. We don?t understand why our leaders betrayed us like this. We fought back against orders because if we had followed orders, we would have given ourselves up? [Our leaders] received orders from Abbas to give up bases but some military commanders couldn?t accept this.

Abu al Majd, 23, fought along side Abu Qusay the entire time and corroborated many of the details of Abu Qusay?s account.

It was a story of surrender. The bases were given up. I feel psychologically destroyed. It really hurt. I understood that there was an order to evacuate the bases. We were betrayed.

A.R. was a major in the Presidential Guard and has served in the elite highly selective force since the days of Arafat. He is educated, bilingual and comes across as a well disciplined career soldier. In the midst of interviewing him in the garden of the Marna Hotel, Gaza City?s oldest, Al Arabiya began broadcasting a live interview with Dahlan and we all gathered around to watch. After the interview we continued.

?Funny,? A.R. said. ?Despite all that has happened in Gaza, Dahlan?s spirits seem pretty high.?

?What do you think that means?? I asked.

?He knew. Dahlan knew this was coming and he was planning for this scenario,? A.R. said.

A.R. continued, describing the total lack of resistance by the Fatah security services. The only order they ever received was to surrender bases if Hamas wanted them badly enough, he said.

The only order we ever heard coming from Abbas in Ramallah was that he didn?t want a blood bath and if Hamas wanted the security bases, let them take it. We understood that there was not supposed to be any resistance.

The presidential guard were the most highly trained and professional soldiers in the security services? ranks and they were dismayed when rudimentary and repeatedly drilled steps to respond to the Hamas onslaught were never taken.

No state of emergency was ever declared, curfews were never imposed, contingency counter attack plans were ever drawn up, heavy weapons were never mounted on the roofs of the security bases, and extra ammo stocks were never dragged out of storage.

Abu Mohammad, a 26-year-old barrel chested soldier in Force 17, spoke to me at Gaza?s Al Shifa Hospital:

This was a total betrayal by the political leadership. We were only told ?don?t fire back,? and a lot of people didn?t like this? When the clahses first started, when a soldier was being attacked the officers would give him two or three clips max. When they were finished and he asked for more they?d say no more? they only brought out the heavier weapons and ammo on Thursday when it was too late. By then most of the soldiers had run away.

The battle for the Preventative Security Services headquarters in Gaza City was the decisive turning point, when it became clear that nothing could save Fatah?s remnants in Gaza. But even that climactic battle was little more than a symbolic stand by only around 30 remaining soldiers, fighters said. Everyone else had long since jumped ship. They put on civilian clothes, dropped their weapons and scampered home. Some soldiers were dragged away from the trenches by frantic mothers who had heard Hamas? threats to kill any fighters who didn?t surrender.

Hatem Iki, 22, a presidential guardsman with a gruesome story all his own:

The forces saw their leaders had all fled and so everyone else just ran away too.

Hatem?s brother, Mohammad Iki, 29, a sargent in the presidential guard:

When your leaders disappear and run away of course you will be defeated. Until the moment I left the presidential compound, there was never any orders or commands at all. Who would have expected the Muntada could fall without a single bullet being fired. It?s a total betrayal by our leadership.

We spoke with Abu Shaban, 37, a general intelligence officer as he waited at Erez to flee to the West Bank. This is what he had to say:

They decided to deliver Gaza to Hamas to put them in trouble and isolate them from the world. The way the fighting went leaves no doubt that they really gave it up to Hamas.

Abu Abdallah, 31, also a general intelligence officer, was in Khan Younis for the fight:

The decision came from high levels to withdraw from our compound because they didn?t want a blood bath. We were totally surprised.

Most of the stories of Hamas brutality are not reported by cowed Gaza journalists, but the ones who make it to Israel do get to speak freely:

In Israel, Palestinians Tell of Hamas Butchery

Fatan al-Hinawi, 9, was hospitalized in the children's ward of Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv after being wounded in Gaza. A bullet punctured her side, hit her spine, bowels, a kidney and came out the other side, hitting her arm.

Al-Hinawi is one of five Palestinians, three of them children, who were caught in Hamas-Fatah cross fire and taken to Ichilov. Some are in serious condition.

Shadi, a 23-year-old policemen, is one of them. He was attacked by Hamas gunmen a week ago. "There were five of them. They stood over me and shot my legs from the knee down. One of them put his Kalashnikov to my head. Instinctively I moved the barrel aside and the bullet hit my hand," Shadi told Haaretz yesterday. He arrived at Ichilov with one leg amputated and the other leg crushed.

Later yesterday, Zecharia Alrai, 39, an officer in Fatah's elite Force 17 commando unit, arrived. He had been abducted by four Hamas gunmen a week ago. They loaded him into a jeep and drove him to an isolated spot, where they shot three bullets into his leg and dumped him.

"That's not Islam. That's evil and hypocrisy. How ironic that Israel is rescuing us from our Muslim 'brothers,'" he said.

I predict that we will wake up one day to news of a nuclear attack on the West. Here's what it will probably entail:

-A 'previously' unknown Islamist group will claim responsibility

-The bad guys behind the attack will condemn it in English

Today's news is that:

-A 'previously unknown' Islamist group has fired between two and four Katyusha missiles from Lebanon

-Hamas condemned the destruction and systematic desecration of a Christian school and church in Hamas-ruled Gaza by masked gunmen using rocket propelled grenades

Both elements of the strategy were pioneered by Yasir Arafat, and most notably applied during the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking. There the PLO condemned the hijackers but were later revealed to be the perpetrators.

Yesterday we reported that the US was about to squeeze Israel to pay money to the Fatah 'moderate' terrorist organization after previous payments and arms slated to 'fight Hamas' are actually now in Hamas' hands. One astute reader, Dan Friedman, mocked the headline's assumption that Olmert and company needed pressuring prior to playing the appeasement card.

It didn't take long for this to follow:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday evening he would release frozen tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority and remove some West Bank blockades.

His words came on the eve of his visit to Washington, where the US Administration was expected to ask him to take significant steps to bolster Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, in order to show the Palestinians what they have to gain under the "moderates," as opposed to what they have to lose under the extremists.

"We will cooperate with this government," Olmert said in a Manhattan address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "We will defreeze monies that we kept under our control because we didn't want these monies to be taken by Hamas to be used as part of a terrorist action. And we will do what we can to upgrade the quality of life [in the West Bank]."

and this:

The emergency government Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas installed after Islamic militants seized control of Gaza reaped its first windfall Monday with the European Union promising to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial aid.

President Bush also lent critical support in a phone call to Abbas, who called for a resumption of Mideast peace talks. The Bush administration is expected to soon lift its sanctions on the Palestinian government now that it no longer includes the Islamic Hamas.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who offered staggering concessions to Arafat in exchange for words, has now taken over for the comically incompetent Amir Peretz. His first action has been to do what he did as Prime Minister: talk tough to appease the locals while making staggering concessions for the approval of the international community.

Here is the renewal of the Really Really Hard Doctrine:

ISRAEL?s new defence minister Ehud Barak is planning an attack on Gaza within weeks to crush the Hamas militants who have seized power there.

According to senior Israeli military sources, the plan calls for 20,000 troops to destroy much of Hamas?s military capability in days.

The raid would be triggered by Hamas rocket attacks against Israel or a resumption of suicide bombings.

Barak, who is expected to become defence minister tomorrow, has already demanded detailed plans to deploy two armoured divisions and an infantry division, accompanied by assault drones and F-16 jets, against Hamas.

A source close to Barak said that Israel could not tolerate an aggressive ?Hamastan? on its border and an attack seemed unavoidable.

?The question is not if but how and when,? he said.