GNITN - Special Edition

Israel At War – Day 328

Rise In Terrorism Tactics

The Culture Of Violence

Apparently the terrorists fighting to kill all Jews are ready to add suicide bombers back to their tactics as we read in an article from israel365news.com:

Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashaal on Wednesday called for a return to suicide terror attacks against Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

During a video address to a conference in Istanbul, Turkey, Mashaal said, “Resistance operations in the West Bank are escalating despite the harsh conditions,” according to CNN Arabic.

Mashall then tries to justify asking people to kill themselves for the cause:

“We want to return to martyrdom operations. This is a situation that can only be addressed by open conflict. They are fighting us with open conflict, and we are confronting them with open conflict,” he continued.

“The enemy has opened the conflict on all fronts, seeking us all, whether we fight or not. The enemy says, ‘I am crazy,’ and it is up to the nation to assume its responsibilities. I reiterate my call for everyone to participate on multiple fronts in the actual resistance against the Zionist entity.”

Using a suicide bomber to kill people happened in Tel Aviv recently:

The “military wings” of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist groups took responsibility for a failed suicide bombing attack in south Tel Aviv earlier this month.

In a statement, Hamas vowed to continue to carry out suicide attacks “as long as Israel continues its massacre and policy of assassinations in Gaza.”

The bomber, who was killed in the blast, was a Palestinian from the area of Nablus (Shechem) in central Samaria.

He wasn’t a fan of the US either:

Mashaal also criticized U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, accusing the Americans of supplying Israel with “weapons of destruction.”

“America abandoned the July 2 paper [U.S. President Joe Biden’s Gaza ceasefire proposal] then blamed Hamas, knowing that the one who disrupted the agreement was [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, who has a personal agenda, in addition to the Zionist agenda that America and some Western countries unfortunately support,” he said.

If anyone thinks Mashaal wants a peace agreement, the article dismisses any hope of that:

In January, Mashaal restated his rejection of Israel’s right to exist, saying that the Oct. 7 mass murder “turned the idea of liberating Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea into a realistic idea that has already begun.”

Unfortunately a torrent of suicide bombers could be coming next and while we can and should vilify that call for deaths it is yet another sign of who the real genocidal folks are.

Majority Of Tunnels Destroyed

We learn in a report from The Jerusalem Post that the IDF is very close to defeating Hamas in Rafah although not everyone agrees on the extent:

The military has destroyed 80% of the tunnels in the Rafah area, IDF sources on Thursday claimed, while also confirming Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s announcement on August 21 that Hamas’s last battalion there had been taken apart.

As I alluded to, some don’t think the IDF is anywhere close to 80%:

Despite that claim, other senior IDF sources told The Jerusalem Post in late June it could take six months to fully chart all of the tunnels in Rafah and years to destroy them.

The IDF stands by the assertion:

Confronted by this contradiction, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stood by the 80% claim.

The report adds this from the doubters:

In addition, even in northern Gaza, which the IDF entered six months before it deployed in Rafah, there has been no indication that the army has reached anywhere near destroying 80% of the tunnels, with estimates ranging from almost 50% to just over 50%.

On August 21, Gallant said the IDF had destroyed 150 tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor alone, which makes up only a small part of the full Rafah area.

There could be explanations for the 80% number:

One possible resolution of the seeming contradiction is that the IDF has destroyed 80% of strategic tunnels – which includes those that are more critical to communications, intelligence, and weapons storage – but not all tunnels, including more minor ones.

And then it could simple be because they are only talking about known tunnels:

Another possibility is that 80% of all known tunnels to date in the area have been destroyed, but many more have not yet been explored or found.

Then it could actually be correct due to the IDF concentrating on just Rafah more than other areas:

Yet a third possibility is that the IDF really has destroyed 80% of all tunnels in Rafah – far more than in northern Gaza or than estimated in June – due to having invested more resources in destroying tunnels in Rafah than anywhere else, and this move was unknown by commanders in June.

Regardless of who it right, Rafah is important and is why Israel doesn’t want to budge on leaving it now as part of the hostage negotiations:

The Rafah tunnels, and the Philadelphi Corridor tunnels in particular, are viewed as having the greatest strategic importance to Hamas because they allow it to smuggle in weapons from Egypt.

Securing The North

When the war against Hamas started last year, Hezbollah started attacking Israel from the north with the stated goal of aiding their terrorist brothers in Gaza. They said they had no intention of starting a war with Israel themselves, but times have changed. With the looming threat of avenging the assassination of their second in command, Hezbollah is now a very strong threat to Israel from there. And now Prime Minister Netanyahu along with his Defense Minister Gallant are promising their displaced residents that they will make it safe for them to return as we read in a report from the Jerusalem News Syndicate:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Wednesday that the major flare-up with Hezbollah earlier this week wasn’t “the end of the story.”

During a tour of the country’s northern border, Netanyahu said, “[On Sunday], we foiled a surprise attack by Hezbollah against the State of Israel. We destroyed thousands of intermediate-range rockets that were aimed at the Galilee and the Golan Heights. We thwarted all of the drones that were directed against the State of Israel, at the Galilee and the center of the country, and they were destroyed.”

The PM stated that they are far from done fighting Hezbollah:

However, while the operation was “a great success, … I will not tell you that it was enough. On the contrary,” he continued. When he had said following the strike that it “is not the end of the story,” he added, “I spoke the simple truth.”

The story will only end “when we are able to restore security and the residents safely to their homes,” he said. “This is neither mere words nor a slogan—this is a national goal of the highest order. We are committed to achieving it and we will achieve it, with your help and with God’s,” he added.

I’ve said before and I say now that a total destruction of Hezbollah will make that assertion actually happen and that process started at the start of this week:

Early on Sunday morning, approximately 100 Israeli Air Force fighter jets, directed by IDF intelligence, destroyed thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers in Southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah subsequently fired more than 200 projectiles into Israel. Out of the 230 rockets and 20 UAVs that crossed into Israeli territory, 90% “were from the heart of civilian areas,” according to the military. Nearly all of the launchers were positioned near mosques, schools, gas stations and U.N. sites.

The IDF continues to decimate the terrorist leadership:

In parallel, Israel confirmed on Wednesday that it had killed a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist in an airstrike near the Syria-Lebanon border.

The IDF described Faris Qasim as a “significant terrorist in the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization’s Operations Division,” who was responsible for developing the terror group’s operational plans in Syria and Lebanon.

Additional Islamic Jihad terrorists traveling from Syria to Lebanon to carry out terrorist activities for Hezbollah were killed in the strike, according to the IDF.

Iran, as always has it’s fingerprints all over the fighting from the north. Israel knows this all too well:

Israel has for years targeted Tehran’s terror proxies in Syria and combated Iranian entrenchment there, including weapons shipments and military infrastructure.

Islamic Jihad has dispatched its Syrian-based terrorists to Lebanon to join Hezbollah, which has been waging war against Israel since Oct. 8, a day after the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people in the northwestern Negev.

As we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, these specific pieces of information should be used to tear down the plans being formed in the heavenlies against Israel. To be certain, terrorism finds its genesis there and we can do our best fighting in that realm.