Netanyahu Vows To Topple Hamas If Elected

Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu on Tuesday promised that a government under his leadership would topple the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

“[Kadima leader] Tzipi Livni and the people of Kadima scoffed at the predictions regarding rocket fire. A government under my leadership will overthrow the Hamas rule in Gaza and bring about a cessation of rocket fire,” Netanyahu said during a tour of Ashkelon following the first Grad rocket attack since the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead some two weeks ago.

“The policy of blindness followed in the past years has brought us to this situation,” Netanyahu continued. “Residents can no longer count on miracles and Kadima policy.”

Livni herself hinted that Hamas may come up against another IDF operation should rocket

fire continue hitting the south of Israel.

“My opinion on this matter is clear: Every attack must be met with a response,” the foreign minister told Jerusalem Radio Tuesday, rejecting out of hand the possibility of diplomatic contact with Hamas.

“Any negotiations with Hamas, whether direct or indirect, are harmful. From a strategic standpoint […] I think that we should make peace with the moderate elements,” Livni said.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister and Labor leader Ehud Barak said that despite the continued rocket fire, Hamas was still interested in maintaining a state of calm in Gaza.

“We hit Hamas very hard, and it is picking up the pieces right now,” Barak said during a tour of the North. “It is really interested in quiet, but the rocket fire is a fact, and we cannot ignore facts.”

Barak also warned that continued rocket fire would be met with a harsh response, “harsher even” than Operation Cast Lead.

via Bibi vows to topple Hamas if elected | Jerusalem Post.

Gaza Rockets Put Israel’s Dimona Nuclear Plant In Battle Zone

There were growing fears in Israel last night that Hamas missiles could threaten its top-secret nuclear facility at Dimona.

Rocket attacks from Gaza have forced Israelis to flee in ever greater numbers and military chiefs have been shaken by the size and sophistication of the militant group’s arsenal.

In Beersheba, until a few days ago a sleepy desert town in southern Israel, there is little sign of the 186,000 inhabitants. Schools are closed and the streets of shuttered shops echo with the howl of sirens warning of incoming rockets.

Israeli planes, meanwhile, began a new stage yesterday in their offensive on Gaza, killing Nizar Rayyan, a senior Hamas official. The one-tonne bomb in Jabaliya is also understood to have killed two of his four wives and four of his twelve children. More than 400 Palestinians have been killed in the six days of Israeli attacks.

Despite a diplomatic mission by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Foreign Minister, to Paris, the Israeli army continued to muster thousands of troops and scores of tanks along Gaza’s border for a possible ground offensive. Israel’s airstrikes are designed to blunt Hamas’s capacity to fire its new Grad missiles deep into its territory. The weapons are smuggled in through tunnels and by sea, replacing homemade Qassam rockets.

Israeli officials say that Hamas has also acquired dozens of Iranian-made Fajr-3 missiles with an even longer range. Many fear that as the group acquires ever more sophisticated weaponry it is only a matter of time before the nuclear installation at Dimona, 20 miles east of Beersheba, falls within its sights. Dimona houses Israel’s only nuclear reactor and is believed to be where nuclear warheads are stored.

via  – Times Online.

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• Leaflets warn Gazans to get out of harm’s way

Report: Obama Favors Saudi Initiative, Dividing Jerusalem

United States President-Elect Barack Obama will support the Saudi Initiative for peace between Israel and Arab nations, the British Sunday Times reported Sunday. Obama told Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, “The Israelis would be crazy not to accept this initiative,” according to the Times.

The initiative calls on Israel to withdraw completely to its 1949 borders in exchange for normalized relations with Arab League countries. It includes a full retreat from the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, and from the strategic Golan Heights in northern Israel.

The Saudi Plan has won limited support from President Shimon Peres, who says it could be used to launch negotiations. Other senior politicians and defense officials have dismissed the plan, saying it wold compromise Israel’s security.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the heads of the Kadima and Labor parties, have not ruled out the Saudi Initiative completely. However, neither has expressed willingness to give away the Temple Mount or major Israeli population centers located east of Israel’s 1949 borders. Approximately 600,000 Israeli citizens live in the areas, including eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem, demanded for the PA under the Saudi plan.

The plan also calls on Israel to find a solution for the plight of millions of foreign Arabs who claim descent from those who fled Israel during the War of Independence. They are considered refugees by Arab governments and continually have been denied citizenship in their countries of birth.

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Tzipi Livni – The Woman Who May Lead Israel

Israeli Foreign Minister and contender for the Kadima party leadership Tzipi Livni has a 20 percent lead over her closest rival ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz, a poll released on Monday reported.
Livni secured 48 percent backing of Kadima members asked, compared with 28 percent for Transport Minister Mofaz, according to the survey broadcast by private television channel 10 two days before the actual vote on Wednesday.

The two other candidates, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter and Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit, garnered only six percent support each.

Livni and Mofaz are the top two candidates to take over the leadership of the ruling centrist Kadima party after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is being investigated over several corruption allegations, stands down.

Some 70,000 registered Kadima members are eligible to vote and about 100 polling stations will be set up across the country.

Under Kadima’s charter the winner of the vote needs to garner more than 40 percent to avoid going into a second round run-off which would take place on September 24.

By law, should Olmert make good on his pledge to resign after the party election, he will remain premier of a caretaker administration until the new Kadima leader forms a new government.