Word: israelie
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Several senior Israeli officers provided TIME with a detailed account of the military campaign. "There was never a single incident in which a unit of Hamas confronted our soldiers," one Israel Defense Forces (IDF) official says. "We kept waiting for them to use sophisticated antitank and antiaircraft missiles against us...
So what happened to Hamas? Israeli military officials offer a triumphalist explanation in which the Islamist militants simply wilted in the face of Israel's overwhelming firepower. By this reasoning, Israel had overinflated the Hamas threat. The militants are able to lob dozens of crude, badly aimed rockets into southern...
Not surprisingly, Hamas disputes the Israeli account. One Gaza commander in the Izzedin al-Qassam brigades, Hamas' fighting force, said the Islamists' plan had been to draw Israeli troops into the crowded urban neighborhoods of Gaza City, where the Israelis would lose the protection of helicopter gunships circling overhead. "We...
Israel halted its advance on the edges of Gaza City, calling a cease-fire on Jan. 18, and Hamas' guerrillas - if indeed they were waiting in ambush - went unchallenged. Still, Israeli war strategists are at a loss to explain why Hamas failed to use the antiaircraft missiles that Israeli intelligence...
Israel may have confounded Hamas' plans to defend Gaza by entering the territory from three directions, avoiding the main roads which Hamas had mined and booby-trapped. Officers say Hamas and other Gaza militant groups had prepared a defensive wall using "hundreds of explosives, mines and booby traps." But for...