CNN reports: The major concern of the United States in the current Israeli-Hamas conflict is a potential Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, U.S. officials said Friday.
That would be a disastrous escalation that could trigger a larger conflict, a senior U.S. official told CNN.
“Escalation is what we are concerned about. We don’t want it to escalate to the point where Israel feels it has to take additional action, specifically ground force action,” the official said.
So, if Israel continues bombing and in response, rockets continue being fired from Gaza, President Obama will not be too concerned. He will no doubt periodically insist that Israel takes care to avoid killing civilians, but the line he has drawn is no ground troops. Kill the enemy without risking the lives of your own troops — this seems to be the Obama doctrine. It looks like Netanyahu might be quite happy to oblige with that particular external constraint.
Matthew Bell, Middle East Correspondent for the BBC, asked Amos Yadlin, who was head of Israel’s defense intelligence from 2005-2010, whether Israel will send ground troops into Gaza.
Ynet reports: In discussions held between Home Front Command Chief Major-General Eyal Eisenberg, regional commanders and heads of local authorities in the center and in the south, authorities have been instructed to prepare for a seven-week period of combat as part of Operation Pillar of Defense and to prepare emergency supplies, accordingly.
Israel feels that it is a waging a professional war on Gaza, which is somehow more legitimate than the Palestinian retaliation attacks. ,
http://www.idfblog.com/2012/11/15/how-does-the-idf-minimize-harm-to-palestinian-civilians/
In reality the decades old –script intimating that this is a continued war with Gaza and it’s peoples -continues to go nowhere. There is no sovereign Gaza, no country of Gaza but it is, as Glenn Greenwald alerts, an occupying power using disproportionate force against a place which it has held under occupation since 1967.
Of course this is not the story that continues to be trumpeted by Western media and government voices that support Israel’s reasoning through their unbraided political and economic support for Israel.
Israel boasts that this is only the beginning and not the end; “Pillar of Cloud”, a Biblical reference to God incarnating himself as a cloud to confuse and terrorize Egyptians in order to protect the children of Israel.”
Hamas reports that “The Gates of Hell will be opened.”
In Buddhist thought hell is not a place or a future post life situation but right here and now as the gates for ‘heaven’ and hell are all in thought/mind and can open to us at anytime. We the people might do well to reflect on this as our thoughts reside in hell on this tragedy.