IRIS Blog

The initial assumption, that the terrorist was an Arab laborer and had therefore not aroused suspicion...

The IDF said the possibility that the terrorist was holed up in one of the houses in the settlement had not been ruled out...

...A Bat Ayin resident who saw the younger boy running from the terrorist stepped in and disarmed the man.

"I saw a boy, aged 7 or 8, running past my house, and then I saw a 20-year-old man running after him," a man who identified himself as Avinoam told Channel 10. "I approached him, and he turned to me and tried to attack me with the axe."

"I grabbed his hand, we struggled, and I yelled for people to call for help and the police," he continued.

"At a certain point, I managed to get the axe out of his hand," Avinoam said. "I was on the ground, and at that point the man managed to escape.

"I heard a little later that somebody tried to shoot him but missed," he said. "I saw in his eyes the lust to kill. I didn't see what happened before I got outside, but I saw the wounded boy screaming, yelling to his mother that he was hurt."

Magen David Adom officials who rushed to the scene said that despite desperate attempts by paramedics to save his life, the soul of 13-year-old Shlomo Nativ slipped away shortly after the terrorist attacked him...

A second, younger boy who was also attacked suffered serious head wounds and was evacuated by helicopter to Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center. A spokesperson for the hospital said that Yair Gamliel, who arrived fully conscious despite his grievous wounds, would soon undergo surgery to repair his broken skull. He is listed in serious, but stable condition...

Gush Etzion Regional Council head Shaul Goldstein denied that the terrorist was an Arab worker in the community. "No Arab workers are allowed in Bat Ayin," he explained, pointing out that the residents prefer to support Jewish labor.

• "I don't think Israel can accept an Iranian terror base next to its major cities any more than the United States could accept an al-Qaeda base next to New York City."


• "Notwithstanding the blows to Hamas, it's still in Gaza, it's still ruling Gaza, and the Philadelphi corridor [which runs along Gaza's border with Egypt] is still porous, and... Hamas can smuggle new rockets unless it's closed, to fire at Israel in the future."


• Iran is the "mother regime" both of Hamas, against which Israel has just fought a war, as well as Hezbollah, against which it fought a war in 2006. "The arming of Iran with nuclear weapons may portend an irreversible process, because these regimes assume a kind of immortality....[This] will pose an existential threat to Israel directly, but also could give a nuclear umbrella to these terrorist bases."


• "Most of the approaches to peace between Israel and the Palestinians have been directed at trying to resolve the most complex problems, like refugees and Jerusalem, which is akin to building the pyramid from the top down. It's much better to build it layer by layer, in a deliberate, purposeful pattern that changes the reality for both Palestinians and Israelis."


• "We're not going to redivide Jerusalem, or get off the Golan Heights, or go back to the 1967 boundaries....We won't repeat the mistake...of unilateral retreats to merely vacate territory that is then taken up by Hamas or Iran."


• "Peace is purchased from strength. It's not purchased from weakness or unilateral retreats. It just doesn't happen that way. That perhaps is the greatest lesson that has been impressed on the mind of the Israeli public in the last few years."

Operation Cast Lead was a failure and a waste because the government repeated the same mistakes it made in the Second Lebanon War by not explaining clear objectives.

He predicted it is only a matter of time before Israel will be forced to conduct another campaign to stop attacks on Israel. However, he advised that next time, Israel must establish the objective of taking over the Philadelphi smuggling route and stopping the flow of weapons into Gaza.

“We will have to go in to Gaza because have no choice... We have to be prepared to take over the Philadelphi smuggling route, which can be done in one day. The objective is to stop the smuggling of arms and explosives..."

He disagrees with the common view that Israel learned lessons in Lebanon because it lost relatively few soldiers in Gaza.

“What did we learn from Lebanon? In both wars, we started with a strong aerial bombardment to create a good impression...” but left with the same situation as before, he maintains. Dr. Gordon explains that rocket attacks continue, kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit remains captive and Hamas retains the same demands it made before, for the opening of Gaza crossings.

Hamas achieved its two objectives of preserving its political and military organization and continuing to rule in Gaza, said the researcher, a reserve colonel in the IDF. A lecturer at Hebrew University, he has published two books, one of them recently published and covering the decision-making process in the Second Lebanon War...

Dr. Gordon maintains that if the Olmert administration had ordered the IDF to stop the campaign after two days, "the results of the counterterrorist operation would have been the same as today - with Shalit remaining in captivity while rocket attacks and the smuggling of weapons continue."

Instead, Israel withdrew from Gaza while depending on the Western world to stop smuggling of weapons. “The IDF is the only body that can do it,” he said in the interview...

He recalled that Israel has a long history of stopping military operations only after being pressured by the international community...

He said the 2006 Second Lebanon War was a failure, with Israel sending ground troops into Lebanon, losing more than 100 soldiers, failing to bring back kidnapped IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev and winning no positive results.