Egozi’s Fury – Air Campaign

Egozi’s Fury – Air Campaign

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18315594_m egozi featureBack in America, they made quite a discovery: official sources in the US Army admit the coalition airstrikes have resulted in only minimal progress. Intelligence agencies and the DoD claim the assault, which has been taking place these past three months, has not gotten close to achieving the goal set by President Obama: “to destroy ISIS”.

You really do not need any intelligence reports to be able to tell that. Any corporal in the Israeli Air Force, or in the IDF at large, for that matter, would have told them in Washington long ago that they were making fools of themselves.

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In the Gaza Strip, Hamas has been re-stocking on rockets. They are perfecting existing models and developing new ones. All this has arisen from tracking Hamas test launches into the Mediterranean.

Hamas rocket workshops are working full steam, while Israel is waiting for the “oversight mechanism” to give the go ahead to Gaza’s reconstruction. This mechanism is tasked with making sure that the cement that reaches Gaza is not used for building new tunnels and that other building materials would not be used for making new weapons.

What a joke. No mechanism could pull this off. The moment cement and metal pipes pass the border checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza strip, the shipment would disappear somewhere along the tunnels or in the armories.

Israeli must not allow such a move, which would legitimize Hamas rearming itself. But Israel is busy with internal squabbling between government ministers, army chiefs and General Security Service chiefs.

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Tomorrow, November 24, is the deadline for the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. But as is the case with any show, the director can always introduce changes in case of bad reviews.

iHLS Israel Homeland Security

Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif met last Friday, their third meeting in 24 hours. They met only a few hours it was reported they had left Austria, Zarif for Teheran and Kerry to Paris, but things have changed. The White House said that evening: “the gaps are still significant, we are in a race against time, and the teams are working hard to reach an agreement.”

There will be an agreement. At any price. The US needs a victory, but his will be a pyrrhic victory.

At any rate, with or without an agreement, Iran continues to race towards achieving nuclear weapons.

The UAS will do nothing, if even an agreement is not signed. In the face of weakness in Washington, countries like Russia and Iran do as they please. There are sanctions against Iran, and perhaps they will continue, but Iran has learn to live with them and effectively circumvent them.

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Israeli shall be able to withstand the threat posed by Hezbollah rockets only if Israel’s leaders would realize this is a whole different ballgame, and they need to “lose it” at the very first rocket, not even on day one of a new round of fighting.

Over the weekend, the story broke that Iran supplied Hezbollah with rockets capable of hitting the nuclear reactor at Dimona. This was reported by the Fars news agency. These Fatah missiles have a range of 250 to 300 km, warheads weighing 500kg and a speed of 4500 kmh.

If such rocket begin hitting Israel, then the rocket fire Israelis experienced during Operation Protective Edge would be child play by comparison. Against such a threat, only heavy-duty fire against Hezbollah and Lebanon, which is under its control, could stop destruction and casualties in Israel.

But this would take determined leaders who are not concerned by “what will the world say”.

Arie Egozi i-HLS Editor-in-Chief
Arie Egozi
i-HLS Editor-in-Chief