Israel’s chief of staff, Gadi Eizenkot told Israeli media that his forces were preparing for the next war with Hezbollah. He promised that when (not if) it happens, Israel will force 1.5-million Lebanese to flee for their lives while it invades the country and destroys it in worse fashion than it did in 2006 (the last time Israel came knocking). Israeli media only identified the source of this threat of war crimes as a “very senior IDF source.” But an informed Israeli source confirms that it was none other than Eizenkot himself.
A bit of background is in order. Eizenkot is one of the three military geniuses who devised the Dahiya Doctrine, (I like to call it the Israeli version of Dresden), which calls for the army to use maximum lethality to devastate entire civilian neighborhoods in which Hezbollah operates. Under this tactic Israel dropped a huge penetrating weapon in Dahiya and proceeded to celebrate the murder of Hassan Nasrallah. A bit prematurely as it turns out, as he survived, only to turn the tables and announce to the world that he’d defied the best that Israel had to offer against him.
Israel also put Dahiya to “good use” last summer when it “Dresdened” several Gaza neighborhoods.
Given this, it appears the IDF chief has hit today’s war crimes Daily Double. Decimating entire civilian residential zones and deliberately expelling 1.5-million civilians from their homes on the pretext that it is your personal war playground are without doubt war crimes.
Here is the full Hebrew report:
גורם בכיר מאוד בצה”ל אומר כי אם יהיה עימות בצפון, מיליון וחצי תושבים לבנונים יפונו מבתיהם, משום שחיזבאללה מרכז את כוחותיו בשטח אזרחי. לדבריו, בתרגיל הרב זרועי בשבוע האחרון תירגל צה”ל הגנה על גבולות המדינה, אך גם תקיפות של אלפי מטרות בלבנון. הגורם הבכיר אמר כי על אף דברי הרהב של מנהיג חיזבאללה נסראללה, ארגונו במצוקה של ממש ואיבד בַּלחימה בסוריה לפחות שבע-מאות מאנשיו. הוא הוסיף כי חיזבאללה שולח כוחות גם לעיראק, וכן יועצים לתימן. בעניין המצב בסוריה אמר הקצין הבכיר לכתבתנו כרמלה מנשה כי איראן מגייס מיליציות שיעיות כדי לסייע לנשיא אסד, אך אין בכוונתה להציב בסוריה כוחות איראניים. הוא ציין כי בטהראן מבינים שאין עוד סיכוי להחזיר את המצב בסוריה לקדמותו, וכעת מתמקדים בשמירה על האזורים העלאווים.
In a separate Israeli media report in which he was also not identified, the Israeli general said the “entire population of southern Lebanon” would be expelled from their homes to allow Israel to operate in the “most efficient manner possible.” He claimed Israel had “10,000 urban targets” of Hezbollah in its sites. Which is interesting, since there are no “urban” areas at all in southern Lebanon.
The army chief’s reasoning for turning the south into a ghost town follows closely that of war minister Bogie Yaalon, who told a conference of the lawfare NGO, Shurat HaDin that Hezbollah “forced” Israel to kill Lebanese civilians because it put its rocket launchers in Lebanese living rooms. He also warned that if Israel found it difficult to achieve its strategic objectives regarding Iran’s nuclear program with conventional means it might use nuclear weapons: but “not yet.” Thank God for that caveat. We can all breathe safely.
Eizenkot said expelling civilians would be necessary because Hezbollah “concentrates its forces in civilian areas…” Take a look at the Kirya, the IDF Tel Aviv headquarters. Smack dab in the heart of one of Israel’s biggest cities.
In a recently concluded major military exercise in northern Israel the IDF prepared for an incursion “thousands of meters into Lebanon.” Further proof that Israel is a rogue state which threatens to invade its neighbors and bullies them with promises of war crimes-to-come.
You’ll be relieved to know that the general appears to know better than Hezbollah itself the latter’s condition of military preparedness, and it’s B-A-D. The Lebanese military group lost 700 fighters in fighting in Syria. Eizenkot appears to be making the case that Hezbollah is the Great Satan of the Middle East. It’s not only fighting with Iranian forces in Syria, it’s sent forces to Iraq (if Eizenkot is to be believed–and why not–don’t we always believe what Israeli generals tell us?). The Lebanese Shia are also advising Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
He further claims that Iran has abandoned the notion that it can return Syria to the status quo that prevailed before the start of the civil war. But it’s main goal now is to preserve a balance of forces that protects the Alawite enclaves (which are loyal to Pres. Assad).
If you look at all of this in logical terms, none of it makes sense. Hezbollah is completely absorbed in the Syrian campaign. Iran is about to sign a major nuclear deal with the P5+1 powers. Neither one has any interest in entering into a military adventure against Israel.
The only explanation I have is that Israel is setting down markers regarding what it expects in Syria. It is telling Hezbollah to back off its destabilizing activities in the Golan and allow Israel to establish a protective zone as it maintained in southern Lebanon for decades. The saber-rattling may also be meant as background music for the Iran nuclear talks. Warnings from Israel about wars against Hezbollah (and by implication its sponsor, Iran) will put the negotiators on notice that Israel still has the power to upset this apple-cart–or at least to send it hurtling toward disaster if it chooses.
NOTE: I’ve published three important stories in various media publications in the past week. A week ago, I published a criticism of Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s pinkwashing trip to Israel in Middle East Eye. This week, I broke a major story published by Mint Press News (my first piece there) naming Avera Mengistu, the Israeli-Ethiopian who traveled to Gaza and has been imprisoned there since last October. He’s been abandoned by the Israeli government which refuses to acknowledge him or his capture. I salute the Israeli blog, HaKol Shekarim (“All Lies”) for having the courage to report that an “imaginary Israeli” named Mengistu is being held captive in Gaza. Israeli security law turns all such brave publications into old-fashioned Soviet-era samizdat. It is the first Israeli publication to break the gag order against publishing this story (in Hebrew). If only the gag order was imaginary too!
Finally, I responded to a New Israel Fund whitewash of Mayor Murray’s Israel trip which was published in the Seattle Times. My Times op-ed was published a few hours ago.
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“Israel’s chief of staff, Gadi Eizenkot told Israeli media…” – can you please provide a link to an article or video?
No, it was a radio report. I will add the text of the original Hebrew.
Which radio station? When? Surely someone must have reported on this.
@ Syd Nestel: Kol Yisrael.
“He promised that when (not if) it happens” vs. “כי אם יהיה עימות בצפון”. So he did say ‘if’!
Israel would probably have the same amount of ‘refugees’ (haifa+northen districts are over 2 million). Most ‘refugees’ on both sides go back to their homes as soon as ceasefire is declared.
The Hebrew does not mention whom you stated to be Eizenkot and the attribution was anonymous.
The million and one-half residents was for their safety which you grossly interpreted as refugees a priori.
According to international law if an army uses civilians and their houses as weapon depots they can be fired upon as an enemy.
Bad journalism and perversion of facts. You are about as sick as they come.
@ Journalist: You have violated several comment rules. First, you’ve commented before as ‘Tankist’ and now are using a new nickname. This is not permitted according to the comment rules. Second, you have attempted to force Wikipedia to delete an article about Avera Mengistu falsely claiming that the information in the article is false. Though you refused to sign your contribution with your Wikipedia ID, your comment revealed your IP address. Commenters here also reveal IP addresses they use to publish comments here.
I view this as a bad faith, hostile act. Until now you were only moderated and I published comments by you that respected the comment rules. But due to your bad faith, you are now banned entirely.
Hey Richard, welcome to Israelistan, y’day there was an item in the news that indicates that high schoolers (those NOT in the half education religious) that 54% of them wants an Israel more religious than democracy. those teenagers will be of voting age at next election, even if Netanyahu is no longer present the right wing will be a splintered majority, majority nonetheless
It showed that those NOT of that idea are barely 32 and ABOVE ALL= COWERING TO EVEN MENTION IT.
Netanyahu’s doctrine has taken root and the next war will not be Israel/Lebanon it will be Jews/Islam –
Another item in Reuters today indicates to constant chipping at jews praying in the Holy Mount.
Add all that and dear Richard nothing good will come out – This will come to pass within 20 years max.
What will America or Europe do. It will be a free for all not for territory anymore but for religion. This is fodder for ISIS. What do you think Saudi Arabia will do if god forbid that dogma seeds in the west bank. Will the mighty weak Jordan king send his formidable army to recover what was originally his or will the Saudis bomb the hell out of the mountain rather than let ISIS plant their flag. It is not farfetched not at all. a fight is brewing in Gaza between Hamas and the brotherhood, that’s the reason for the latest rocket rain. do you not think that ISIS friends will come to support their friends in hardships against Hamas.
So many questions based on RELIGION. we are no longer talking about land THE NEXT WAR TO BE WILL NOT BE ABOUT LAND IT WILL BE ABOUT RELIGION.
i do not wish to live long enough to see this – JEWS OF AMERICA WAKE UP, TO OPPOSE ISRAEL’S DOGMA IS NOT ANTISEMITISM IT IS POLITICAL DIALOGUE IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORLD THAT THE RIGHT CHOOSES TO PAINT IT ANTISEMITISM “DOES NOT MAKE IT SO” RAISE YOUR VOICE AND STOP FUNDING NEXT RELIGIOUS WAR
Thanks, Nessim Dayan. After your long comment, your personal wish not to live long enough to see it has resonance. I’m beginning to hope that I will not see much of the effects of Global Warming (Climate Change) and am daily filled with pain at the news from Israel/Palestine/Lebanon/syria/Iraq (and Egypt and Yemen). Awful, all of it. I attribute much (not all) of this horror to the USA’s leadership in making the world “safe” for illegal aggressive warfare and in its own smashing of Iraq, leaving Israel “safe” to smash Gaza, Lebanon, and whatever it wants to. A horrible picture, indeed. And the role of religion is no pro-peace or pro-justice but (or so it seems) pro-war, pro-torture, etc.
[Comment deleted. You’ve been banned.]
The weapons behind Eizenkot are actually M-302 rockets captured en route to Gaza.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/03/10/israel-displays-weapons-from-seized-ship/
@ A Reader: And I trust Algemeiner to know the difference between an M-302 & a slingshot as much as I trust Alan Dershowitz to make French pastry (as opposed to sausage, for which he has a great deal of experience).
There is a multitude of pictures of the M-302 available for comparison.
http://militaryedge.org/armaments/302mm-khaibar/
Reader could you Israelis finally explain how a Iranian ship “delivers a Iranian weapons shipment to Gaza”? Not a single ship from outside world has entered the port of Gaza for ages. The second possibility would be that the ship enters some Egyptian port and the weapons would have been smuggled to Gaza. Would Egyptians take the risk and allow it to happen? Come-on. The third option is that the weapon ship was on the way to Sudan. But then the relevant question is that were the weapons ever intended to be transported from Sudan to Gaza or were they simply for the Sudanese army which has such arms and the need for supplements. The distance from Sudan to Gaza is thousands of kilometers and the likelihood to mange to get many truckloads of weapons unnoticed through the whole Egypt to Gaza is astronomically small. It would be more easy to smuggle such weapons to the West Bank than to Gaza which without doubt is the most monitored small region in the world. And Gaza is guarded closely by two armies and their allies and separated by walls and all imaginable high tech gadgets.
Why on earth would Iran deliver with enormous costs and trouble weapons which are extremely difficult to be used in Gaza? Heavy artillery rockets demand equipment, launchers and lifts to be positioned and fired successfully. These Khaibar-1 artillery rockets are each 6 meters long and weight over 700 kg. This Israeli picture gives a better picture of their dimensions. In Gaza, where Hamas has at the best some tens of seconds to position and fire the rockets, heavy artillery rockets are rather useless. Only an army which has relative good air defense can effectively use such weapons. Heavy artillery rockets are a weapon for relative equal fighting armies or for a superior army. But certainly not for encircled small and weak guerrilla army like Hamas which has to stay hidden in small formations and can not use heavy weapons and where the enemy has complete air superiority.
It would be more easy and effective for Iran to give cash to Hamas and say that buy the weapons and ammunition from Egypt’s and Middle East’s black markets. Hamas needs completely different weapons than heavy artillery rockets. Developed shoulder fired anti-tank and air defense missiles plus effective sharp shooting systems would be much more useful.
Exactly, it’s just more Israeli propaganda, but unfortunately the value of propaganda is that it does full damage as soon as it hits a mainstream media outlet, where noone bothers questioning it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/hamass-deadly-reach-new-missiles-make-a-dent-in-israels-iron-dome/article19541944
As Richard would say, asked and answered before.
Well no, that’s actually just more of the same Israeli propaganda, even if the details are true, which I doubt seeing as they once again come from the IDF (“Israeli officials have suggested…”) , the whole presumption is that Palestinians have no right to defend themselves. Propaganda, not news.
Some people are too indoctrinated to consider alternatives.
Answered by a Canadian journalist living in Washington? Paul Koring, who which high likelihood is a pro-Israeli concluded on the tone of his articles around the Israel/Palestine question. An example of his journalistic skills and neutrality “Ads posted in New York subways test limits of free speech”. Koring seems to write articles in style Israeli elite wants to hear, giving so support to the “Jewish State” project. That can easily validated using Google and reading his past articles. Paul Koring is certainly no neutral military expert with close ties to and reliable sources on the “Muslim side” in Egypt, Sudan, Hamas in Gaza etc. He obviously writes what he is commanded to write using the ready “fixed” data and opinions given to him – guess by whom.
This rather funny article you linked doesn’t answer the core questions. It doesn’t tell us how in reality the heavy artillery rockets are transported to Gaza from Sudan. It doesn’t convincingly tell us how the heavy artillery rockets are positioned and fired. The article rightly mentions that these rockets are unguided after launching. It means that they have to be aimed exactly to the target. Claiming that a shed or building is built around the rocket is rather funny. Especially knowing that in Gaza are numerous spies for PLO and Israel and every new building project is certainly monitored by IDF. Especially buildings aimed directly towards Israeli airports and Dimona’s WMD factories.
As said before Hamas’ army has in Gaza no possibility of using heavy weapons like artillery, large caliber artillery rockets, tanks etc. Lets take a tank for example. How many seconds would a tank exist if it would attack IDF troops? The flying metal tubes which Hamas and others fire towards Israel are simply intended to give the Palestinians the illusion of strong resistance. Of course the Palestinian leaders as well as Israeli leadership know that these home made small rockets have no military meaning besides their propagandist value. In the last slaughter these hundreds flying metal tubes caused the financial damage equal to the costs of one very small office building. That is why Israel must constantly feed to the world news, that Hamas is getting terrible new large missiles and rockets from Iran. Most of the world’s media knows that it is pure war propaganda. These “Hamas news” are equally “hilarious” as the Israeli estimates how many missiles and rockets Hizbollah has at certain time points. Soon we are in nearing the situation in Israeli propaganda, where Hizbollah is said to have one million rockets and missiles aimed towards the poor defenseless Israel. Let us all celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the event when an Israeli leader claimed, that Iran will have ready nuclear bombs NEXT YEAR.
I wonder who the german paper got that story from. Let me guess, could it be from the IDF?
What is conspicuous here is the obvious expectation that this kind of statement will not provoke serious indignation among the Israeli public. Perhaps it does take now any amount of belligerence of its leaders for granted. – perhaps even approves of it.
Eizenkot also seems to believe that remarks like this will go unnoticed abroad. Or if they attract negative attention that a bit more money for hasbara can straighten things out.
Israelis don’t seem to have a clue what they are up against. What to think, for instance, of the recent statement by the Minister of Justice, Ayelet Shaked, that there
“are three things propelling the BDS movement: Classic anti-Semitism, radical Islam, and simple naiveté,” (Haaretz 5th June)
She had a go at the British Union of Students that is apparently afflicted by all these ills.
It is clear who is suffering from “simple naiveté” here!
She should have listened to Matthew Gould, the British Ambassador to Israel who declared in an interview on Israel’s Channel 10 news:
“The centre ground, the majority, the British public may not be expert, but they are not stupid and they see a stream of announcements about new building in settlements, they read stories about what’s going on in the West Bank, they read about restrictions in Gaza. The substance of what’s going wrong is really what’s driving this,”
Gould added that he could see a shift in the British Parliament as well:
“Support for Israel is starting to erode and that’s not about these people on the fringe who are shouting loudly and calling for boycotts and all the rest of it. The interesting category are those members of parliament in the middle, and in that group I see a shift.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/03/israel-losing-international-support-british-ambassador
Indeed, anyone who has ever listened for instance to Sir Gerald Kaufman, who was a veteran Israel observer when Ms Shaked was still in nappies, knows that whatever fuels his critique of Israel in the British Parliament, it is certainly not “simple naiveté”. Neither, one might suppose, is it anti-Semitism or “radical Islam”.
One now has “leading politicians” in Israel whose specific form of stupidity is to assume mere stupidity and malice in Israel’s critics who are supposed to thrive on a diet of slander and lies.
Richard , why do you think the hamas keeping Avera Mengistu secret ?
i understand the interest of the israeli government to keep this quiet but
why the hamas is quiet too ? , after all if they would go public with this
they could get a “second gilad shalit” , so why both sides keeping quiet ?
I think Hamas would like Mengistu to be another Shalit, but M isn’t a soldier nor is he the right color. So he has little value speaking in purely cynical terms.
today said hassan nasrallah promised more than a million israeli refugees is hizballah will attack, will this get an headline by richard? looooooool