Middle East News
Goal of Gaza assault is not to topple Hamas: military (Extra)
Jan 1, 2009, 11:44 GMT
Tel Aviv - The goal of Israel's ferocious offensive in Gaza is not to topple the Hamas regime ruling the strip, the Israeli military said Thursday.
Instead, the offensive aimed at creating a deterrent, which would seriously harm Hamas' motivation to fire more rockets in the future, Israel Defence Forces' (IDF) official spokesman Brigadier-General Avi Benyahu said.
'We are not acting against the rockets but against the motivation of Hamas to fire them,' he told Israel Army radio.
'At the end of the operation we will have created a new security reality for the communities in the south - that is our goal. We have no intention whatsoever to reconquer the strip or to topple Hamas,' he said.
Benyahu said Israel's relentless air strikes in Gaza had delivered a 'harsh blow' against the arsenal of rockets in the strip and their launching sites, but it would not be able to destroy every single rocket.
'This operation has no intention of getting to the last missile and that is also not possible,' he said.
He also said it would 'take time' until the operation was completed. 'Don't stand with a stop watch in your hand,' he warned.
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Back-Pedalling on original Stated GoalsJan 2nd, 2009 - 08:48:07
This is a clear example of back-pedalling on the part of the Israeli Leadership: These people stood up on international television channels and said clearly that their aim was to de-capitate the Hamas leadership, to uproot Hamas and variations on the 'total annhilation' theme, now, three days later they've changed their story entirely: We're hearing variations on 'change the reality on the ground', 'convince hamas leadership to stop rocket attacks' and a host of other watered down variations of the original stated objectives.
It's clear that, just as in the 2006 Lebanon war, Israel's goals will drift, merely resulting in mindless massacres of civilians and a complete failure to achieve stated military/political goals.
In the meantime, a generation of more than half-a-million young gazans will will be imprinted with images of Israeli warplanes dropping bombs on their fathers and mothers and sibilings, a guarantee that 5, 10, 20 ,100 years from now Israel will still be fighting this war, possibly without the USA and EU to pump arms and cash into it's war-coffers.
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