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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Militants employ new tactics |
| 2008-03-07 |
| Palestinian militants in Gaza staged a daring raid into Israel, detonating a roadside bomb and then ambushing the emergency response team sent to deal with the blast. The relatively sophisticated attack on Thursday, which killed an Israeli soldier, was the first of its kind by Palestinian militants. It appeared to have been inspired by the tactics of the Iranian-trained Lebanese group Hezbollah. Israel has long complained that militants from Gaza have been smuggled out to receive military training in Iran, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. But such an attack bearing Hezbollah's hallmarks will prove deeply alarming for Israel. It was the first time since June 2006 that militants have penetrated Israel from Gaza in significant numbers. The Hezbollah-style strategy of pre-positioning an ambush team had not been used by Palestinians before. In spite of last weekend's bloody incursion into Gaza by the Israeli army that killed scores of gunmen and civilians, militants continued to pile pressure on Israel by firing rockets out of Gaza. The growing sense of crisis led Israel's Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, to postpone a trip to Washington next week. The early-morning explosion came as an Israeli army vehicle moved along a patrol road on the Israeli side of the frontier with Gaza. The detonation was large enough to blow the vehicle to pieces and set it alight. One soldier died and three were injured, one seriously. Culvert mines are a favourite tactic of Hezbollah and were used to devastating effect in the late 1990s to pressure Israel to withdraw from Lebanon. But it was the ambush of the other Israeli army vehicles and troop carriers that deployed to the scene that made the incident stand out. It is not normal Palestinian militant practice to set up secondary ambushes. The attack, which both Islamic Jihad and Hamas claimed responsibility for, was reminiscent of the Hezbollah raid into Israel from Lebanon in July 2006 that sparked that summer's 34-day conflict. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 I suppose all this is because the Egypt fence got blown down by Hamas a bit ago. |
| Posted by: gorb 2008-03-07 14:17 |