Just after I wrote Sinai was going to be a bigger problem than Gaza.
Special police forces, IDF soldiers kill 7 terrorists involved in attacks; series of bombs go off near IDF patrol along border with Egypt, gunmen fire on bus, private car; IDF soldiers among casualties.
At least six people were reported dead and at least 25 injured in a three-stage terrorist attack along Israel’s border with Egypt on Thursday, which began when terrorists opened fire at an Egged bus traveling on Road 12 near Eilat.
Several minutes later, a number of bombs went off next to an IDF patrol traveling along the border with Egypt. There were also reports of mortar fire from Egypt into Israel. The terrorists apparently then moved on to another spot and fired an anti-tank missile at another vehicle, injuring a number of passengers.
Magen David Adom said that terrorists attacked a bus and a private vehicle 20 kilometers north of the site of the first incident. Paramedics said five people there were mortally wounded in that attack.
The casualties were evacuated to Yoseftal Hospital in Eilat. A number of soldiers were among the casualties
IDF soldier target, hit 7 terrorists involved in attacks
IDF soldiers targeted and hit seven terrorists involved in the attacks, according to IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich.
“This seems like a coordinated attack,” a senior IDF officer said. There was also speculation that there may have been more than one terror cell coordinating the attacks.
Commander of the IDF’s Edom Division Brig.-Gen. Tamir Yidayi arrived at the scene of the bus attack and set up a command post to coordinate efforts to capture the perpetrators. The IDF suspects that the terrorists infiltrated into Israel after crossing into Egypt possible from the Gaza Strip.
On Sunday, the Egyptian Military launched a massive operation to capture terrorist cells operating in the Sinai.
Due to concern that terrorists had infiltrated into Israel from Egypt, security officers in Israeli communities along the border were ordered to raise the level of alert and to tell residents to remain inside their home.
Authorities set up an emergency telephone number for those affected by the attacks near Eilat: 1255175.
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DEBKAfile Special Report August 18, 2011, 4:47 PM (GMT+02:00)
Israel bus attacked near Eilat
Israel goes on highest terror alert after a string of terrorist attacks still ongoing near the Israeli-Egyptian border north of Eilat Thursday, Aug. 18 left seven Israeli soldiers and civilians dead and 33 injured. Five servicemen are in critical condition. Assailants from Sinai used automatic and anti-tank weapons, mortars and roadside bombs for attacks on two buses and civilian and military vehicles on Highway 12. All three gunmen who attacked the bus were located and killed in a firefight with Israeli police. More are sought.
Israeli goes on highest terror alert after a string of terrorist attacks still ongoing near the Israeli-Egyptian border north of Eilat Thursday, Aug. 18 left seven Israeli soldiers and civilians dead and 33 injured. Five servicemen are in critical condition. The assailants who may have crossed in from Sinai used automatic, anti-tank weapons, mortars and roadside bombs for separate attacks on two buses and civilian and military vehicles on Highway 12 near the Israeli-Egyptian Sinai border.
All three gunmen who attacked the bus were killed in a firefight with the Israeli police force. Some 20 terrorists are estimated to have taken part in the attacks. Israeli military sources estimated that 20 terrorists took part in the attacks – some reaching their targets through Israel, others providing them with mortar cover from Sinai. Four were killed. Some of their bodies were rigged with explosives.
All the highways to Eilat are closed to traffic as the entire southern region is scoured for more terrorists and bombs.
debkafile reported earlier: A special police force located the gunmen who shot up two Israeli buses north of Eilat, Israel’s southern most town and port, and engaged them in a firefight. Casualties are reported.
The gunmen first attacked an Israeli Egged bus north of Eilat, injuring at least six passengers Thursday morning. The 392 bus carrying mostly soldiers on leave from Beersheba to Eilat came under automatic fire on Highway 12 as it passed the Netafim checkpoint on the Israeli-Egyptian border of Sinai from attackers who jumped out of a private vehicle which had been trailing the bus. The second bus and other passing vehicles were attacked with an anti-tank weapon. An army vehicle was then blown up by a roadside bomb and another came under fire.
debkafile’s military sources: This week the Egyptian army launched a major counter-terror operation against Islamists terrorizing the peninsula and its borderlands.
Whether he attackers came from Sinai or the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip has not been finally determined.
Namby pamby slappy wristy. Israel doesn’t deserve to be saved. At least the Arabs are attacking their enemies. The Jews don’t have that much character.
What moderated comment? The one you can’t see.
Maybe I should post it on another Israeli blog and direct traffic there. [Play evil laugh track: “BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!”]
I’ll try posting it again:
Numerous Grad (Katyusha) rockets have been and are still being fire toward Ashkelon, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva and Gan Yavneh.
Israel needs its own arsenal of 10s of 10,000s of easy to make and cheap to keep Katyushas, to fire them on Gazan population centers, killing 100s of people in every barrage. No sending in troops. No scrambling expensive F16s or Apaches into the air or firing $80,000 at-a-pop missiles.
Then the Gazans can make a better decision whether they want to continue this game.
Everything else is a waste of time, life and money.
@ Shy Guy:
Shy Guy Said:
What moderated comment? What solution? Based on the content and size of my moderated comments there seems to be no rules and no logic.
LT COL HOWARD Said:
That is failure by design. Here it’s failure by implementation and rules logic.
Back to the morning news:
Ashdod: Rockets fired from Gaza leaves 1 seriously injured
By JPOST.COM STAFF AND REUTERS
08/19/2011 08:47
1 moderately injured, 4 treated for shock; light damage caused to Yeshiva building; at least 10 other rockets land in South; fire comes after IDF strikes 7 Gaza targets following Eilat attacks.
My moderated comment, way up above, provides the simple solution even my kids can come up with.
Sisters, Husbands Among Eilat Victims
Two sisters and their husbands were murdered by terrorists near Eilat. Terrorists fired at their bodies to confirm slayings.
by Maayana Miskin
Published: 19/08/11, 8:45 AM
Four victims of the deadly attacks Thursday in Eilat have been identified as husband and wife Moshe and Flora Gaz, and Flora’s sister Shula Karlinsky and her husband, Dov Karlinsky. Both couples lived in Kfar Saba.
The four took off for a vacation in Eilat on Thursday, but never arrived. As they approached the city they were ambushed by terrorists, who fired an anti-tank missile at their car.
After the missile hit his target, a terrorist approached the car and fired on the four to make sure they had all been slain.
Flora, 52, and Shula, 54, both worked in daycare centers for three- and four-year-old children in Kfar Saba. “They were very well-known and respected educators,” Mayor Yehuda Ben-Hamo said of the two sisters. “This is a big tragedy for all of us.”
The Gaz family was expecting their first grandchild in another three months. They are survived by three children. The Karlinskys are survived by two children and two grandchildren.
“Flora and Moshe were excited for the birth of their first grandchild, but they will never see him,” one of the couple’s friends said Friday.
@ yamit82:I urge you to read the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles & you’ll find a lot that you would want to dispute. http://www.jewishjournal.com/, they limit you to 700 characters & their character count program tends to over count your actual characters, forcing you to do a lot of editing which distorts meaning and prevents giving documentation. Etc. etc. By the standards of most publications Ted is an angel. He and I certainly disagree on certain matters and he has always been a gentleman. I note that both Yamit and shy guy are frequent posters. The Washington Post without announcement limits the number of posts one could make. Fortunately, I had established my credentials with them and was exempt from this arbitrary and aggravating limitation.
I look forward to reading what you have to say. However,I believe that Ted
runs a first-rate operation and I’m amazed that he does it with so little manpower support and so little financial backing. Thus, it is more appropriate for us to express appreciation for having a form and for having access to the many fine articles that he posts.
@ Shy Guy:If you feel frustrated try the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. they have a 700 character limit with which you have to reply to thousands of characters of misstatement. Somehow the character count seems to disagree with those of Safari, Firefox, etc. etc. also when they moderate the posting never sees the light of day. Try a link and often they will reject it as spam. I urge you to read the Jewish Journal and respond to what you may regard as misleading and/or false information.http://www.jewishjournal.com/
@ LT COL HOWARD:
Complicated:
Hamas has more extreme opposition in Gaza than Hamas and they would like to eliminate them. If Israel does it for them all the better.
Hmas allowed and supported this operation by allowing if not using surrogates then claiming innocence.
Bedouin in Sinai have with the aid of the Egyptian authorities and Army allowed the Bedouins in Sinai to expand into a quasi autonomous entity and they are not loyal to Egypt or any nation. They are in it first and foremost for the money and in many cases the most extreme Jihadist forms of Islam. They are related and work closely with the Israeli Bedouin in the Negev who probably had an important hand in yesterdays and today’s terrorist attacks. Speculation here by some that the main target of the attacks was to capture a soldier and or civilian bring them to Sinai and into Gaza through the tunnels.
Almost 24 hours since the first attacks there are still some terrorist still in Israel territory as yet not caught and eliminated. The Egyptian Army just now decided to engage their Bedouin and are being decimated in the process by the same Bedouin.
Israeli preference to allow the current status quo instead of escalating our responses and extracting a high price tag is essentially appeasing terrorism. Israel is willing to pay a human price of Israelis lives to maintain that status quo and will not go much beyond the tired boilerplate statements and threats.
Israel had warning of imminent attacks and had our counter terrorism units on station ready to meet the attacks but for some reason they were ordered to stand down and the COS and others went to Eilat on vacation, They expected a nighttime attack and when it didn’t materialize they thought it was a false warning. It wasn’t it happened in broad daylight. Somebody in the IDF fucked up!!
Till now the Egyptian border some 270KM was considered a porous border for criminal activities but not strategic in a military sense. Here the writing has been on the wall even during the Mubarak years but Israel stupidly and myopically chose to ignore to obvious and relied on Mubarak. What’s a few kids blown up when the price is billions to secure the border? Cost/Threat factor and a lot of stupidity on our part won out over commonsense and the obvious. Even if Mubarak hadn’t been deposed he is old and dying of cancer. Israel knew his days in power were numbered in any event yet did nothing to prepare for worst case possibilities.
Today we have Rain known as Grad rockets! Our cities and population is being rained on by grad rockets. We have civilian casualties. I would turn Gaza into a parking lot today. Better a million Gazans are wiped out than one of our kids getting a scratch due to their aggression.
US Helps Pay PA Terrorists Who Murdered Americans
by Gil Ronen INN
Thanks America
Let’s not forget Barak, Gantz and Cohen, the Three Stooges Of Israel’s security establishment, who only a fortnight ago were recommending Jewish lives be endangered to please Jew-hating Arabs through more one-sided Israeli concessions.
In a normal country, people like them would be fired. In Israel, the inmates run the asylum!
@ Shy Guy:
I Agree!
Comment in moderation?!?!?! No links. No naughty names or words mentioned.
Ted, your system stinks. This is no way to run a serious blog.
Numerous Grad (Katyusha) rockets have been and are still being fire toward Ashkelon, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva and Gan Yavneh.
Israel needs its own arsenal of 10s of 10,000s of easy to make and cheap to keep Katyushas, to fire them on Gazan population centers, killing 100s of people in every barrage. No sending in troops. No scrambling expensive F16s or Apaches into the air or firing $80,000 at-a-pop missiles.
Then the Gazans can make a better decision whether they want to continue this game.
Everything else is a waste of time, life and money.
Ed – what you say is correct, but rather than stop at the “foot soldiers” and the real estate, the IDF, as Lt Col Howard says, should go 2 up and 2 down. I’m particularly fond of getting rid of the leaders… all of them.
And a good start would be for the Israelis to put a stop to supplies – especially food – getting from Gaza (and/or Egypt) to the terrorists operating in Sinai. They gotta eat… They have to find food…
Now is the time to put the punctuation mark on the terrorists. Level their headquarters, their city hall, every training facility, kill all known terrorist where they live, occupy the Philadelphia Corridor, blow up every tunnel and put a high dollar price on their PM. Start building immediately in all of J & S. and disregard all of the Palis hierachy, especially Abbas. Then tell the rest of the world that if they don’t like this action, they can kiss our collective ass.
29 killed in Syria, the same day. I’m surprized the world even notices. Incidentally, the attack was against Eilat, not any “occupied territories” — which ought to inform Israelis something about the ultimate aims of their “Pals”. …ought to; but Jews are pretty stupid, like the rest of us. As someone once said,
“Jews are just like the rest of us, only more so.”
@ Norman F I’m sorry I screwed up when I tried to highlight your quotation and added my comments as if they were your quotation. I attempted to cancel, but I did not get that right either, so I reposted.
I agree: this is an act of war.
I agree: attack the leadership 2 levels up and 2 levels down (4 levels). If that doesn’t work keep escalating until you reach a “proportion” that fully deters these types of attacks. Announce that you agree with the proposition that the retaliation should be proportionate and that you are determining the exact proportion that will insure that there will be no more future attacks.
NormanF Said:
The IDF struck back and wiped out the entire PRC leadership known to have planned and launched today’s terrorist attacks. Those who murder Jews will pay the ultimate price.
Netanyahu: We Hit Back Immediately and With Force
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Israelis “The people who gave the order… are no longer living.” ?
If true these are not the mob bosses!! What about the top political Hamas and Fatah leaders?
BB said that Israel will retaliate if there are Israeli casualties which gives the terrorists free pass to fire at us and miss with no price tag. That is a policy of restraint and allows the terrorists to choose the time place and venue which will always come sooner or later.
Who ever said BB was smart is dumber than he is. BB’s policies are no less cupable for these terrorist attacks than the terrorists themselves. He was elected to protewct the people of Israel but is playing Russian Roulette with our lives too bad it wasn’t his kids who bought it instead of the two who did.
Two children amongst the dead • Five near-simultaneous, coordinated terrorist attacks on Israeli vehicles • Witnesses: Egyptian soldiers fired at us from their side of the border • Barak: Attack occurred on Egyptian border, but its source is Gaza. Seven Israelis, including four civilians from the same family and three soldiers, were reportedly killed and at least 30 wounded in a series of five near-simultaneous, coordinated terror attacks against Israeli vehicles traveling near the Egyptian border in Israel’s southern region on Thursday afternoon.
Four of the dead were reported to be from a family traveling in their private vehicle near the Egyptian border, when an RPG rocket hit their car. Two of those killed were children aged four and six. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said soldiers were amongst the seven Israelis killed in Thursdays attacks.http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=775
Bedouin: now more than ever
The bedouin are the primal arabs. They live in fiercely loyal tribal groups, usually marry their first cousins, are polygamous, and have numerous children. Their culture promotes robbing and killing their enemies.
Historically, they were nomadic, lived in the fringes of the desert, and traveled by camel. Now, they are more and more sedentary, and travel by pick-up trucks and minivans.
With the recent large drop in their infant mortality, courtesy of their civilized brethren, their numbers have been exploding. They have gone from being a nuisance, to being an ever-growing threat. There are groups of related bedouin stretching from southern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia to the Negev and the Sinai.
The British empire drew a line on a map to differentiate Gaza from Egypt. It went through the town of Rafah. The people on the southern side of Rafah are “Egyptian”, while the same people living on the northern side are “Gaza Palestinians” loyal to Hamas.
The palestinian gaza “refugees” are bedouin type arabs who moved into gaza from adjoining areas (Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beer-Sheva) when Jewish Israel came into being.
The Jordanian, Saudi, Negev, and Sinai bedouins, along with Gaza, have more in common with each other than they do with Jewish Israel or Egypt. As their numbers increase, so does the threat to Jewish Israel.
The Sinai is now in the process of seceding from Egypt and joining with Gaza. Jewish Israel must now extend its security barrier from Gaza, along the Negev border with Egypt, down to Eilat, or risk losing the Negev, Eilat, and access to the Red Sea to the bedouins.
The Negev bedouin form an ever increasing threat to Jewish Israel. They have little loyalty to Jewish Israel, and are very sympathetic to their fellow bedouin outside of Israel. They routinely steal Jewish state land, steal Jewish property, build illegally, openly practice polygamy with their first cousins, and demand free healthcare and welfare payments from the Jews.
They are strongly supported by the Jew-hating Jewish Israeli leftists, who have a stronghold in Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva. The leftist Jews routinely demonize Sephardic Jews as “hopeless, parasitic, primitives”, while they glamorize muslim bedouins as “noble, primal men full of potential”.
(The real problem with Israel has never been the Jew-hating muslims or Jew-hating christians. It is the Jew-hating leftist Israeli “Jews”, who will automatically label this piece as (drumroll:) “racist”, because it favors the rights of the Jews in Jewish Israel over the rights of the muslims.)