Israeli forces prepare for war as troops mass on Gaza border
Anxiously scanning the skies for the vapour trails of Hamas rockets flying overhead towards their homes, Israel’s tank crews were preparing on Saturday for an invasion of Gaza.
Israeli forces on the Gaza border Photo: AFP/GETTY
By Phoebe Greenwood, Gaza City, Damien McElroy in Tel Aviv and Nick Meo
7:19PM GMT 17 Nov 2012
Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles were at muster points, as speculation mounted that Israel was to launch a ground offensive against the Islamists who control the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli cabinet called up 75,000 reservists on Saturday – many soldiers checking their weapons by Saturday night were at work in offices and factories on Friday morning.
"Morale is high. We are currently training and preparing for ground possibilities," said Lt Col Avital Leibovich of the Israel Defence Forces. "This is isn’t like any other operation. This is to defend 3.5 million Israelis who are under rocket attack."
An Israeli strike on Gaza City (Reuters)[/SUP]
Israel’s generals claim that four days of precision bombing in Operation Pillar of Defence have knocked out many rocket sites, with the toll of accidental civilian deaths relatively low, unlike similar operations in the past. Even so, by Saturday night 40 Palestinians had been killed and more than 300 injured.
At a petrol station at Yad Mordechai, just north of the Gaza frontier, soldiers sat eating pasta and salads as their colleagues fired mortars at targets in the combat zone. Fighter jets flew dozens of missions overhead. Anticipation was high that an order to advance was imminent.
"I suppose this is it. We have done all the preparations we need," said one captain in olive fatigues. "I thought that if I’m away for some days I should get the taste of some Italian salad before I go. My team is here, they are relaxed. They are good guys, they are going to Gaza for their families’ safety, not to kill people."
Israelis run to the shelters in the coastal town of Ashdod (EPA)
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In Gaza, only a few miles to the south, the thunder of bombs and wail of sirens sounded early on Saturday, as F-16 jets launched 180 air strikes in just a few hours, killing nine people. Palestinians were preparing for another Israeli incursion, less than four years since the last one in which at least 1,400 died.
"We only have rockets. Israel has F-16s, Apache helicopters, tanks," said Mohammed Abdullah, 38. "If Israel decides to enter by land, all we will have is God on our side."
He was planning to move his family into the centre of Gaza City to stay with his wife’s relatives, hoping they would be a bit safer there. The family was woken in the early hours of Saturday by the sound of a bomb falling next to their home and on to the headquarters of Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister.
A wounded Palestinian girl in hospital after a strike in Beit Lahia (AFP/Getty)
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The blast blew in glass from his windows and petrified Mr Abdullah’s young children, although none was injured.
Police stations and the homes of Hamas commanders were also hit. Huge bombs were dropped on open fields which could be used as rocket-launching sites or to blow up landmines on possible invasion routes for Israel’s 63-ton Merkava battle tanks.
The streets of Gaza, usually a chaotic mass of noisy humanity, were empty. Only a few furtive-looking figures hurried through the streets, glancing up nervously towards the constant whine of circling Israeli drones.
Without air raid sirens, bomb shelters, an open border to escape through or a conventional army to protect them, families could only put their faith in God and hope it would be over quickly.
In public, there was defiance. "This is different to last time in 2008, there is bombing throughout the night, targeting government offices," said Abdullah Mohammed, 30, one of the lucky few with a permit allowing him to flee into Egypt.
"This time they are fiercer, they are targeting infrastructure and government offices," said Sami Mohammed, an architect. "But resistance is fiercer."
Children near the Israeli Iron Dome missile defence system outside Tel Aviv (EPA)
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In private, many people were prepared to admit to dismay that it was happening again. Some of those with homes near strategic points that might soon become battlefields, or targets for Israeli bombers, admitted to feelings of dread at what could be to come. A few even said they had pleaded with Hamas not to launch rockets from near their homes — a sure-fire way to summon up an Israeli airstrike in response.
But there were signs on Saturday that not all the Palestinian casualties have been the result of Israeli air strikes. The highly publicised death of four-year-old Mohammed Sadallah appeared to have been the result of a misfiring home-made rocket, not a bomb dropped by Israel.
The child’s death on Friday figured prominently in media coverage after Hisham Kandil, the Egyptian prime minister, was filmed lifting his dead body out of an ambulance. "The boy, the martyr, whose blood is still on my hands and clothes, is something that we cannot keep silent about," he said, before promising to defend the Palestinian people.
But experts from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights who visited the site on Saturday said they believed that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian rocket. In the chaos, it is highly unlikely that Mr Kandil or anyone else at the hospital suspected that the death was the result of anything but an air strike.
Sharif Khalah, 26, was standing at the end of the alleyway by the road when the explosion happened.
"Suddenly there was this whistling noise, a whoosh and then bang," he told The Sunday Telegraph."I couldn’t see anything for about 10 minutes because there was so much dust and smoke. Then I saw the little boy."
Iron Dome is deployed near Beersheba (Reuters)
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Less than 24 hours after her youngest son’s death, Esmat Sadallah, Mohammed’s mother, was too bereft to apportion blame. It was possible he was struck by a rocket fired by Palestinian fighters, she said. It was also possible he was killed in an Israeli strike, she added, although nobody had heard the sound of a drone or plane in the sky just before the explosion.
Meanwhile, radio messages from Hamas commanders sought to reassure their supporters. Few dared to show themselves in public — Israeli drones are constantly searching the streets for them, ready to direct laser-guided bombs on to their heads.
To stoke fear, the Israeli military sent out text messages in Arabic to residents across the Gaza Strip warning that a "second phase" is coming, and urging them to hide themselves in a safe place; an impossibility in Gaza, where there are no shelters or bunkers.
Hamas in turn sent out blood-curdling messages to Israeli mobile phones warning that soldiers fighting their way in would be entering a "cemetery". On the home front, Hamas made it clear that it was still in charge, exhorting the population to be brave and warning looters that they would be punished.
There were growing signs of paranoia. On Friday, an alleged traitor, hands tied behind his back, was bundled out of a van on to a main street in front of shoppers and shot repeatedly in the back of the head – punishment for giving information to the Israelis that had helped them to kill militants, his executioners said.
Hamas was desperate to show it was still in the fight. On Saturday afternoon, after Israeli officials had said they were confident that most rocket stockpiles had been eliminated, it fired two more long-range Fajr 5 missiles at Tel Aviv. The Iranian-supplied weapons carry 200lb of explosive, enough to destroy a block of flats, although so far none has killed civilians.
A chief reason for that has been Israel’s Iron Dome, a new radar-directed missile interception system that has shot down about a third of the rockets fired out of Gaza. On Saturday Iron Dome was set up for the first time outside Tel Aviv.
"I’m 19 and they give me all this responsibility for people lives," one of the soldiers manning it said. "You can’t believe the pressure. The system tracks the rocket and sets the impact point but I’m the one who presses the button to save lives." Hours later it was his battery that shot down the latest Fajr 5 to be launched at Tel Aviv. The other landed harmlessly short.
For Israelis, most of whom are attempting to live normal lives even under the risk of rocket attack, this has been a surreal and sometimes terrifying week. "This country seems normal, everyone is relaxed, but they are relaxed and playing one minute and in uniform the next," one said. "It’s way of life that you can’t compare or escape. Then you are mobilised and everything you care for is on the line."
Away from the rockets and preparations for invasion there were frantic diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis. Rafik Abdessalem, Tunisia’s foreign minister, entered Gaza through Egypt’s Rafah crossing on Saturday morning. Like the Egyptian prime minister who visited on Friday, he toured Shifa hospital in Gaza City to meet the injured and saw the sites of destruction. But Palestinians who hoped he would secure a ceasefire had their hopes dashed.
"We expected him to bring peace but he brought nothing," said Sharif Kalah, from Gaza City. "My neighbours were killed during the three hours he was here."
Israeli leaders were stressing last night that no decision had yet been taken about an invasion. They were painfully aware that Israel’s recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon have started well before becoming bogged down.
A Gaza invasion would be Israel’s eighth war, and could it into uncertain political waters weeks before a general election; there has been broad international support so far for the bombing campaign against rocket sites, but that could wane if a ground invasion led to a sharp rise in the number of people killed.
