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| 03/01/2009 … And on the eighth day of the deadliest offensive against the Palestinians in the Gaza strip, the Israeli occupation ground troops have entered the Gaza Strip, announcing the start of a second stage in the deadliest offensive against Palestinians amid a suspicious Arab and international silence.
According to an army spokesman, Israeli ground units, backed by helicopters, penetrated on Saturday evening into the Gaza Strip. "I can confirm that Israeli troops have gone in," she said. Witnesses inside Gaza Strip said soldiers had entered the territory in the north.
According to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office, the Zionist entity aims to "take over" areas in Gaza from where Resistance fighters have launched rockets into Israel. "The Israel Defense Forces (army) is planning to take over rocket launching areas from where rockets have been fired over the past weeks and months," it claimed in a statement. The goals of the operation include "dealing a hard blow to the Hamas terror infrastructure and changing the security reality in the south over a long period of time," it added.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army warned Gaza residents against hiding "terrorists" in reference to Resistance fighters. "Anyone who hides a terrorist or weapons in his house is considered a terrorist," claimed an occupation army statement released after troops moved into Gaza.
Yet, Israeli tanks opened fire on random positions after entering the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday and Hamas forces replied with mortar fire, witnesses said. Residents in the Gaza town of Beit Lahiya said the tanks opened fire shortly after crossing the border late Saturday.
Only minutes following the beginning of the operation, a Palestinian child was martyred by Israeli tank fire in the Gaza Strip late Saturday, becoming the first victim of the ground offensive against the Gaza strip, medics said. Eleven other children were wounded in the strike, when a tank shell hit a house in eastern Gaza City, Gaza medics said.
However, the Resistance seemed ready to the offensive and vowed to retaliate. Hamas's armed wing vowed that Israel would pay a "high price" for the ground operation it has launched on the Resistance movement's Gaza Strip stronghold. "The enemy will pay a high price for its operation in northern Gaza Strip," said a statement from Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades read out on the movement's Al-Aqsa television station.
Earlier during the day, Israeli officials seemed perplexed over the potential move and its usefulness. In this context, Israeli daily Haaretz wondered, in an analysis, whether air strikes were enough, or is a ground op needed in Gaza.
The daily noted that the challenges faced by the Israeli officials at this stage were exactly the same they faced in the July 2006 war against Lebanon. "Two and a half years of a lull, six days of fighting, and we are almost back where we started. The dilemma faced by Israel's decision makers this week is not all that different from the one that hounded them (in some cases it's the same people) throughout most of the Second Lebanon War: To enter or not to enter?" the daily said.
"But those who sought to apply the lessons of Winograd in their entirety appear to have overlooked a few critical elements, and those lacunae are liable to have an effect on the final result, adding that "it became apparent once again that the personal element ("What will people say about me at the end of the war?" "How can I play up my part at the expense of my rival in the government/General Staff?") plays a tremendous role in the behavior of the decision makers and sometimes affects the decisions themselves."
"The dilemma, in a nutshell, is this: Is the heavy pounding from the air enough, or will Hamas simply rise out of the ruins later, shake off the dust and declare, as Hezbollah did in 2006, that it succeeded in surviving against the army that purports to be the strongest in the Middle East? And if ground forces enter, will they inflict on Hamas sufficient damage to force the organization to moderate its demands in cease-fire talks, or will the operation get bogged down, slide into mass killing of Palestinian civilians, cost the IDF dearly in casualties and erode the internal consensus in Israel?" Haaretz went on to say, proving the level of hesitation and fear it has come to. |
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