Hamas digging in and building up in Gaza

NY Times:

Hamas, the dominant faction in the Palestinian government, is building its military capacity in the Gaza Strip, constructing tunnels and underground bunkers and smuggling in ground-to-air missiles and military-grade explosives, senior Israeli officials say.

The officials, including a top military commander who spoke in an interview on Friday, said that Hamas had learned tactics from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, which brought in and stored thousands of rockets in bunkers near the northern Israeli border before its war with Israel last summer.

In Gaza, the Israeli commander said, Hamas has now recruited 10,000 fighters to its so-called Executive Force, a parallel police force intended to counter the control its rival Fatah exercises over the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. The Executive Force is now divided into five “so-called brigades, with battalion leaders” and is receiving more military training and sharing a common headquarters, he said, with the Qassam brigades, Hamas’s military wing.

The commander, who gave the briefing at the request of The New York Times and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Hamas’s improved rockets had a range of about 10 miles, which would allow them to hit the Israeli town of Ashkelon.

But he emphasized that despite Israel’s growing concerns about Hamas, “we’re not going to start a big operation in Gaza.”

Still, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is under increasing pressure from the political right and from parts of the security establishment to deal with the Hamas buildup sooner rather than later. And no one rules out a major Israeli response if a rocket from Gaza produces significant Israeli casualties.

Yuval Diskin, the director of the Shin Bet internal security service, said recently in a briefing for journalists that “if the Hamas buildup continues, and the rockets and tunnels continue, at the end of the day we will have to do something about it.”

He said that Egypt needed to do more to stop the smuggling of weapons, explosives and rockets into Gaza, and he said that Hamas had been able to send out “tens” of men for extensive military training in Iran, “with the promise of hundreds,” which worried him more, he said, than any smuggled weapon.

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This is a result of leaving Gaza without a commitment from the Palestinians for peace, not that they will ever give one in good faith. The Hezballah test last summer will turn out to be practice for the next Gaza operation. Gaza will also look a lot like Fallujah after its next conquest by the Israelis. Israel is going to have to destroy Hamas if it wants peace with the Palestinians.