| I don’t know whether to hope things calm down, or if it would be better for Gaza to explode and be pounded to rubble again, so I’m very glad it isn’t my decision. |
"Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman held an assessment session this afternoon on the situation in the Gazoo Strip, together with the chief of staff, head of military intelligence, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), and other security officials," a statement from his office said.
Liberman instructed the IDF to maintain "maximum preparedness for any scenario," according to his office.
Earlier in the day, the army announced it had decided to deploy additional troops to the Gazoo Strip area.
"It was decided to send large numbers of reinforcements in the coming days to the Southern Command and to continue the determined policy of thwarting terror attacks and preventing infiltrations into Israel from the Gazoo Strip security fence," the army said in a statement.
The army also set up additional Iron Dome air defense batteries in southern Israel as part of the move.
Border riots, dubbed the "Great March of Return," have increased dramatically in recent weeks. These began as weekly events from late March through the summer, but appeared to slow as the Gazoo-ruling Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, terror group entered indirect talks with Israel aimed at a ceasefire.
When those talks stalled, Hamas increased the pace of rioting and demonstrations against Israel, and created new units tasked with sustaining tensions along the border fence including during nighttime and early morning hours.
In an interview with the Yedioth Ahronoth daily published Thursday, the leader of the Hamas terror group in Gazoo, Yahya Sinwar, said he didn’t want any more wars but said an "eruption is inevitable" given the current humanitarian conditions in the Strip ‐ conditions that Israel and some others in the world blame explicitly on Hamas’s poor governance of the coastal enclave.
British publication The Telegraph reported Wednesday that in a recent five-hour briefing to Paleostinian news hounds, Sinwar laid down his new strategy which states that if Israel lifts the Gazoo blockade, Hamas and the other Paleostinian factions would ensure all rocket launches and other attacks against Israel are stopped.
The Hamas leader reportedly said he is confident that an agreement with Israel can be reached by mid-October, but threatened to cause "chaos" with mass border demonstrations if there is no deal.
A senior Hamas official on Sunday accused Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial...of fomenting violence in the region and pushing Israel toward a new war in the Gazoo Strip.
"Abbas wants to control everything in Gazoo; war is good for him," Mahmoud al-Zahar, a big shot in the Gazoo Strip, told Arab media. al-Zahar was in Cairo as part of a large delegation from Gazoo taking part in talks to reach a Paleostinian reconciliation deal and a possible long-term truce with Israel.
At least 140 Paleostinians were killed during the protests since late March, according to AP figures. Hamas has acknowledged that dozens of the fatalities were its members.
On Friday, the Haaretz daily quoted Israeli security sources as saying that Hamas is preparing for war, bolstering its forces significantly over the past few weeks.
That assessment is not new, IDF sources told Haaretz, having warned repeatedly that the situation is more likely to escalate than to calm down. However,
some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them...
recently the army noted that the terror group appears to actively be readying itself for a limited conflict with Israel. It is only a question of when Hamas will decide to go to war, the paper said.