Prime Minister Ehud Olmert continues to oppose mounting a major IDF operation in the Gaza Strip or cutting off Israeli-supplied utilities to the region, despite Tuesday's Kassam attack on the Zikim army base, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The attack wounded 69 soldiers, the highest number of casualties in a Kassam attack, including one critically, four seriously and 10 moderately. Most of the soldiers suffered shrapnel wounds. Olmert did not convene a special session of the security cabinet or any extraordinary security consultations in response to the attack, as was done last week after a Kassam rocket slammed into the courtyard of a day care center in Sderot, sending a dozen children to the hospital with trauma.
Senior government officials said that the decisions reached at last week's meeting - including preparing a plan to disrupt the fuel, electricity and water supplies to the Gaza Strip and continuing "intensive military operations against all those involved in launching rockets and in perpetrating other terrorist actions"- remained in effect and that there was no reason to meet just to reiterate them. Olmert's position on cutting the supply of utilities is that this would not be effective in stopping the rockets, and would bring in its wake a huge international outcry and harsh condemnations.
Although there was no meeting of the security cabinet on Tuesday, Olmert did hold his regular weekly meeting with Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv. Government officials said a major IDF incursion into the Strip was unlikely. "By going into Gaza," one official said, "we would be playing into their hands. That is exactly what they want. It resolves a number of issues for Hamas."