Israel girds for potential Iranian retaliation to targeted assassinations
By David Brummer – WND
JERUSALEM – Three hundred days have passed since Oct. 7, the day when hordes of well-trained Hamas commandos and ordinary Gazans breached Israel’s southern border fence and indulged in an orgy of blood-letting, pillage, rape, murder and kidnapping, the likes of which hadn’t been perpetrated against Jews for 80 years. Some 1,200 Israelis died.
Then on Oct. 8, Iran’s powerful proxy Hezbollah, started firing ordnance into Israel’s north, creating the environment for a potential regional war.
Now have recent events brought that possibility even closer? Following Hamas’ invasion, the Israeli military focused initially on eliminating or capturing Gazan Palestinians roaming Israel’s southern territory, and then turned its focus on dealing with the locus from which the threat emanated. Three hundred days is by far Israel’s longest war, and at least in part would be anathema to the doctrine one of the country’s founding fathers – David Ben-Gurion – initiated: Israel’s wars should be short and fought on the enemy’s territory.
This particular enemy, however, having wasted the treasure bestowed upon it to create a subterranean terrorist state is unlike anything that could have been imagined in the 1940s. And so, the IDF has painstakingly – and at great human cost on both its and the Palestinian side – determined to prevent the possibility of a repeat of the slaughter on that Black Sabbath in October.