Word: gaza
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...Israel continues its air offensive against Hamas in the Gaza strip, one unsettling specter has emerged from the recent past: the failed campaign to crush the Lebanese militants of Hizballah in July 2006. Lebanon was clearly on the minds of Israel's military planners. Even as Hamas targets were pounded in Gaza, Israeli jets flew low-level saber-rattling sorties over southern Lebanon, a warning to militants not to launch reprisal attacks along Israel's volatile northern border. (See pictures from Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon...
...Hellfire missile. Another ball of smoke, smaller but just as black, rose half a mile north of the first target. Later on, the spectators listened to radio reports that Israeli helicopters had attacked Qassam launchers, the weapons that Hamas militants have been using to terrorize Israeli towns along the Gaza Strip. The choppers attacked immediately militants had fired a Qassam towards the town of Netivot, six miles east of the Gaza Strip. Hamas claims that the attacks have killed nearly 300 people over the course of two days...
...attacks on Gaza have won widespread approval among Israelis - and have rubbed off on politicians hoping to win big in elections scheduled for early February 2009. In a concrete, bunker-like hall in Sderot, one of those hopeful politicians, the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, came by on Sunday afternoon to show solidarity with the residents of the area as well as to address a few dozen foreign diplomats brave enough to come to a community under threat of Qassam rockets. "Now we need your support to increase international pressure on Hamas. Enough is enough...
...locals need no convincing. Itay Avni, 32, who lives in the nearby Kibbutz of Nir-Am (population 400) is overjoyed at the Israeli assault on Gaza. He was among the crowd watching the Apaches launch their missiles. "Yesterday more then a hundred people from all around were here on this hilltop enjoying to the scene of dozens of aerial raids on Hamas military targets inside the Gaza strip," he says. "If I had opened an ice-cream stand here I would have made a lot money." He adds, "Exultation is the word to describe my feelings. At last, after eight...
Meanwhile, Israeli ground forces seemed to be mobilizing for a fight. Two hours before the Apaches opened fire, some seven Merkava tanks gathered 10 miles north of the hilltop, right next to Erez crossing to the Gaza Strip. They were part of a full battalion of 35 tanks, ready to penetrate the northern part of the Gaza Strip as part of a ground operation. The soldiers were awaiting orders...