Hamas plan to 'break' Israel

 Reuters:

Israeli forces fought Palestinian militants in the north and centre of the Gaza Strip on Friday as Khaled Meshaal, a senior official in Gaza's ruling Hamas movement, said its six-month-old battle with Israel would "break the enemy soon".

Most Israeli troops have been pulled out of the Palestinian enclave in preparation for an assault on its southernmost city Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering, but fighting has continued in various areas.

Residents of Al-Nusseirat camp in central Gaza said dozens were dead or wounded after Israeli bombardment from air, land and sea that had followed a surprise ground assault on Thursday, and that houses and two mosques had been destroyed.

Health officials said earlier that six people had been killed in strikes on the cinder-block camp, which has housed Palestinian refugee families since 1948, with around 70 wounded, including three Palestinian journalists.

In Gaza City, Palestinian health officials said at least 25 people had been killed and several wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Al-Daraj neighbourhood. Gaza's health ministry said 89 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli military strikes in the space of 24 hours.

The Israeli military (IDF) said in a statement that it was pursuing "a precise intelligence-based operation" against militants and their infrastructure in central Gaza.

"Over the past day, IDF fighter jets struck over 60 terror targets in the Gaza Strip, including underground launch posts, military infrastructure and sites in which armed terrorists operated," it said. "In parallel, IDF artillery struck terrorist infrastructure in the central Gaza Strip."

In a statement, Hamas said Israel's bombardment in Al-Nusseirat targeted civilian homes and property "after failing to achieve any military accomplishment on the ground or to implement any of its criminal agendas by displacing our people".

Israel denies deliberately targeting civilians, accusing Hamas of using residential buildings for cover. Hamas denies this.
...

Israel's combined arms operations are probably more than Hamas can handle.  Israel forces have already pushed Hamas to the bottom of Gaza.  Israel is now planning to capture the remaining enclave of Hamas in Gaza. 

See also:

US military shoots down Iranian drones targeting Israel

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more