The Thomas Chronicles

… if this Palestinian Civil War spills outside of the Gaza Strip, that is. And such a calamity would not just be a hypothetical possibility either.

Just so that we can have a valid frame of reference toward understanding the level of hostility in Palestine, I’ve heard accounts of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip wanting Israel, the enemy of their blood, to invade. This is on par with us inviting al-Qaeda to invade California because the situation there has become so awful. And lacking an Israeli invasion at the moment, it was just reported today that Gazans are fleeing the Gaza Strip toward Israel.

For the moment at least, it seems both the Fatah faction and the Hamas faction has slowed down hostilities in favor of consolidating their power. Hamas in the Gaza Strip can’t influence Fatah in the West Bank, and vice-a-versa, but the situation is far from stable.

People forget that next door is the Kingdom of Jordan, a key US ally. About half of their population is Palestinian, and many of the ones inside refugee camps support Hamas.

As odd as this sounds, one almost pines for the return of the Fatah Party to the Gaza Strip because, as bad as Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party and their cronies were, they never really had the level of state sponsorship that Hamas enjoys. Hamas is armed and funded by the Iranians, whose President has said on numerous occasions that he’ll “wipe Israel off the face of the map.”

Reports are spreading since late Saturday that the Israeli government is drawing up plans to invade Gaza.

ISRAEL’s new defence minister Ehud Barak is planning an attack on Gaza within weeks to crush the Hamas militants who have seized power there.

According to senior Israeli military sources, the plan calls for 20,000 troops to destroy much of Hamas’s military capability in days.

The raid would be triggered by Hamas rocket attacks against Israel or a resumption of suicide bombings.

Barak, who is expected to become defence minister tomorrow, has already demanded detailed plans to deploy two armoured divisions and an infantry division, accompanied by assault drones and F-16 jets, against Hamas.

The Israeli forces would expect to be confronted by about 12,000 Hamas fighters with arms confiscated from the Fatah faction that they defeated in last week’s three-day civil war in Gaza.

Details of the plan emerged as Fatah forces in the West Bank stormed Hamas-run buildings, including the parliament in Ramallah, where they tried to seize the deputy speaker.

Israeli officials believe their forces would face even tougher resistance in Gaza than they encountered during last summer’s war against Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

A source close to Barak said that Israel could not tolerate an aggressive “Hamastan” on its border and an attack seemed unavoidable.

“The question is not if but how and when,” he said.

It is clear that a Hamas dominated Gaza Strip is intolerable for Israeli national security, yet simultaneously, Israel’s invasion can spark a larger regional war. In a separate but perhaps not unrelated event, rockets are being fired from Southern Lebanon into Israel.

ADAYSSEH: Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers were on full alert in Southern Lebanon Monday, a day after rockets were fired into northern Israel for the first time since the August 14, 2006, UN-brokered cease-fire that ended the summer war. Armored vehicles from both the Lebanese Army and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) patrolled the road running parallel to the border with Israel.

The army and police also set up snap checkpoints in the border zone a day after unidentified militants fired two rockets into northern Israel, causing no injuries and minor damage in Kiryat Shmona.

The attack, the first since Israel’s devastating invasion last year, raised tensions in Lebanon, which since May 20 has suffered a string of deadly bombings and further shaken by battles with Islamist forces in the North.

One day after the rocket-fire, Southerners voiced concerns about the renewal of violence with Israel, which forced hundreds of thousands from their homes last summer.

Fatmeh Sheet, a resident of the border town of Kfar Kila, said she was worried because the source of the rocket fire still had not been identified. The attack was a “negative development because now all of us Southerners will be accused,” she added.

Another Kfar Kila resident, Zeinab Bazzi, said she was not particularly worried, “as the army is now deployed in the South and we fully trust it to protect us and our land.”

Lebanese security sources told The Daily Star the incident was “extremely dangerous,” adding that it carried “internal as well as external messages.”

“Those responsible for the incident wanted the Lebanese to [believe] that the launching of rockets on Israel was tightly connected with bombings in Beirut and battles between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militant group at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in the North,” one of the sources said.

UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmine Bouziane described the incident as a “serious breach” of a nearly year-long truce and urged all parties to exercise restraint.

No matter how you look at this, from which angle, when you scratch bare the surface of these events you’re going to see Iran standing there at the side.

Israel is almost fully bracketed by Iran now. Iranian-backed Hezbollah is directly north of them in Southern Lebanon. To the Northeast of the them is Iran’s staunch military ally, Syria. To the direct east of them are all the Palestinians in the Kingdom of Jordan who support Hamas.

Buckle up your seatbelts, ladies and gents. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

For more coverage, you can check out these commentaries here and here and here and here and here and here.

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