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‘Gaza Buffer Zone Is No Substitute for Preventing Buildup of Terror Armies’
An armored personnel carrier (APC) maneuvers near the Israel-Gaza border, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Israel, March 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
JNS.org – As reports continue to emerge about efforts by the Israel Defense Forces to set up a kilometer-wide buffer zone in Gaza to protect southern communities, a leading Israeli military strategist has told JNS that the broader goal of preventing the re-emergence of a terror army in the Strip should be a far more important, long-term Israeli objective.
Brig. Gen. (res.) Eran Ortal, former commander of the Dado Center for Multidisciplinary Military Thinking, an IDF military studies department, who is today a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, noted the dominant thinking within military circles today about the need to establish such a zone, complete with multiple barriers.
He added, however, that this is merely the latest in a series of Israeli ventures to set up defensive structures, most of which were not successful.
“Why do we think that this time the obstacle will work? Each one of these past obstacles was state of the art in its time,” said Ortal.
“I am not against barriers, but the real question in my eyes is not whether a kilometer of a buffer zone will provide sufficient space to generate a warning before attacks occur,” he added.
Ortal said that for example, over time it will become increasingly difficult for Israel to enforce a “kill zone” within the buffer area, as terrorists will continuously test Israel’s responses by approaching the border, mingled among civilians or under the guise of civilian activities.
Instead, he argued, Israeli long-term strategic efforts in Gaza should be focused on the primary goal of preventing the re-emergence of a terror army anywhere in the Strip, which would mean that a buffer zone would not even be necessarily required to protect the south.
In a paper to be published soon by BESA, Ortal writes that developing a sustainable defense strategy should be based on competitive thinking, meaning not only providing solutions to enemy threats, but enabling Israel to proceed with military efforts over a long term, and to “deal with the fact that the enemy responds.”
Automatic responses to failures, which occurred both after the 1973 Yom Kippur War (such as enlarging the military to an unsustainable size), and currently, by creating new and improved border obstacles and by (once again) enlarging the IDF, could turn out to be little more than “technical lessons,” Ortal cautioned.
A deeper strategic mistake, he argues, has been the repeated pattern of allowing terror armies in Lebanon and Gaza to gradually build up large arsenals of ballistic projectiles and anti-tank missiles, and accepting a reality in which Israeli decision makers became deterred by the paralysis these arsenals could cause to the Israeli home front. Ultimately, this pattern that generated a vicious cycle of further enemy force build-up and Israeli passivity, Ortal argued.
As such, Ortal said, continuous offensive raids into Gaza by the IDF, combined with forward offensive systems that automatically strike anti-tank missile cells and rocket launchers immediately after these attack Israel, would go a long way towards a sustainable approach.
To enable this, he said, Israel should consider setting up on the border with Gaza a forward detection and strike system that automatically locates the source of anti-tank and other rocket fire, and returns fire within seconds.
This, he said, would pose an intolerable risk to enemy missile cells, a fact that could be highly relevant in the coming months due to the possibility that many anti-tank missiles and launchers might still be accessible to terrorists in Gaza.
Setting up such a forward automatic-strike layer would be far more effective than a buffer zone, Ortal argued, since even basic anti-tank missiles with a five-kilometer range could threaten southern communities from deeper in Gaza, behind the buffer zone.
“On the defense perspective we failed twice,” Ortal wrote in a previous paper that examined fundamental errors leading up to Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion.
“First, we allowed the Hamas and Hezbollah terror entities to build full-size military systems on our doorstep, in populated terrain that deprives us of even minimal early warning. Secondly, facing that situation, we did not fully deploy for defense. Rather, we kept our deployment on a ‘routine security’ protocol, the IDF’s version of a system of border security.”
During periods of calm, he said, Israel refrained from any significant preventive activity and allowed the enemy to entrench itself right next to Israel’s borders.
The result: “We lost the early warning buffer and did not reevaluate our defensive deployment.”
In addition to ongoing cross-border raids by the IDF in Gaza to prevent terrorists from regrouping, ensuring proper operational readiness on the part of IDF border units and the setting up of a militia-based, well-armed civilian response teams in southern communities, Ortal outlined a solution he has been advocating for several years.
This approach involves the building of mobile intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems (unlike the fixed IDF border sensors taken out by Hamas on Oct. 7) and an automatic return-fire system, operating constantly on the border, together with units that can independently activate aircraft, unmanned aerial systems and other capabilities.
Rapidly locating and automatically striking sources of enemy fire should be a key aspect of this future array, he said. “The IDF once had excellent counter-battery fire [the ability to hit the enemy’s firepower sources] capabilities, but they are now outdated. A much faster and more precise capability must be developed that can destroy launchers before they are withdrawn behind cover,” he said.
The post ‘Gaza Buffer Zone Is No Substitute for Preventing Buildup of Terror Armies’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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