Media gets first hand look at Hamas booby trapped village

NY Times:

To the west, the Mediterranean sparkled and winked. To the east, columns of black smoke rose and gunfire pounded. In between, Israeli Merkava tanks plowed through potato and strawberry fields on Thursday as paratroopers guarded their ground, a mix of ruins that once were handsome two-story houses and farm fields that had been turned into rocket-launching pads against Israel by Hamas.

On a day of unusually harsh Israeli attacks inside the center of Gaza City to the south, this neighborhood of Atatra, in northwest Gaza, was a scene of devastation on Thursday, filled with impromptu tank-track roads, rusting greenhouses and blown-up houses that had been booby-trapped with mannequins, explosive devices and tunnels.

The area was a major site for Hamas launchers over the past eight years. But for the past 10 days, it has been a ghost town inhabited only by Israeli soldiers, many of them from a paratroopers’ unit, the 101, founded in 1953 by Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister, as the first elite Israeli unit aimed at striking Palestinian guerrillas infiltrating from Gaza.

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Israelis face harsh censure abroad for their tactics, but a visit by 10 foreign reporters to this position arranged by the Israeli military showed an army that feels serenely confident that it is doing the right thing. The army, which has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza on their own, has begun taking small groups to outer positions for briefings with commanders in the field.

“It is a very righteous war and has the full support of public opinion,” said Brig. Gen. Avi Ronzki, the military’s chief rabbi, a West Bank settler who spends most of his time these days on the battlefield encouraging the troops and who happened to be at a military campground in Israel earlier on Thursday. “Our army is showing the way to stop terrorists. And in order to win against terror we need to use a lot of force like the Americans are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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Colonel Herzi said the soldiers found improvised explosive devices in the houses and, on Wednesday, in a mosque. The typical ruse for the houses was a mannequin with an explosive nearby and a hole or tunnel covered by a rug.

“I can say that one-third of the houses are booby-trapped,” he said. “You get into the houses and you see many I.E.D.’s....

Colonel Herzi showed large glossy pictures of what had been seen and captured, including mannequins and tunnels with ladders, I.E.D.’s and rocket launchers.

The idea behind the setups in some of the houses, he and other officers said, was that Israeli soldiers would shoot the mannequin, mistaking it for a man; an explosion would occur; and the soldiers would be driven or pulled into the hole, where they could be taken prisoner.

None have yet suffered that fate.

That may be partly because shortly after taking this neighborhood, the soldiers found a hand-drawn map with the booby traps laid out.

The elaborate nature of the snares impressed Colonel Herzi, but he and his men said they had grown increasingly less impressed with the Hamas fighters themselves.

“They are villagers with guns,” said Sergeant Almog, a gunner on an armored personnel carrier. “They don’t even aim when they shoot.”

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Hamas fighters are some of the most cowardly on earth, starting with their leaders. Their primary targets are Israeli noncombatants and their primary defense is Palestinian noncombatants. The reporters got a brief look at the Hamas way of making war. Those calling for a unilateral Israeli ceasefire should also see it. They might begin to comprehend why what they are asking is so unrealistic.