Hamas forces are damaged but intact, Israel says

[Fozzledick]

By Steven Erlanger and Michael Slackman
Published: January 13, 2009

TEL AVIV: As Israeli forces tightened their circle around Gaza City on Tuesday, the 18th day of the war on Hamas, senior Israeli intelligence officials said Hamas military forces had been damaged but remained substantially intact.

The military wing of Hamas has been hit "to a certain extent" with "a few hundred" Hamas fighters killed during the ground offensive that began midway through the war, the intelligence officials said, speaking in return for customary anonymity. Hamas is still able to launch 20 to 30 rockets a day, including 5 to 10 missiles of ranges longer than 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, down by a third from the start of the war, they said.

Greater damage has been done to Hamas's capacity to run Gaza, with a large number of governmental buildings destroyed over the course of the operation, the officials said.

They asserted that Hamas forces were losing cohesion and that Hamas leaders in hiding inside Gaza were more eager for a cease-fire than the Hamas political leaders in exile. They said their assessment was based on hard intelligence, presumably telephone intercepts. A senior Egyptian official in Cairo concurred, saying that representatives of the two groups sometimes openly disagree when talking to Egyptian negotiators.

...

An Egyptian official, describing the talks with Hamas, agreed with the Israeli assessment, saying that the representatives from Gaza were eager to negotiate a cease-fire, but were being blocked because all political decisions are being made by the group's leadership in Damascus.

The official said that when holding talks, the Hamas delegates from Damascus sometimes openly disagree with the delegates from Gaza. "They disagree even on the principles. The guys inside are holding their ground, but they don't want to continue the confrontation," the official said.

Israeli officials said they were holding off on an expanded military operation in Gaza until the negotiations succeeded or failed, but journalists and photographers along the Israeli border with Gaza said they saw large numbers of Israeli reservists moving into the territory.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/13/mideast/mideast.php

[Vegasaurus]

1. Let's hope that Hamas shows some sanity and compassion soon

before more people die as "martyrs" for Hamas's goal of terrorizing Israel.