Elite Troops Told: Prepare to Go Where We've Never Gone Before
by Gil Ronen
The newly trained soldiers of the IDF's top search and rescue unit - the Israel Air Force's Extrication and Evacuation Unit, known as Unit 669 - received their unit wing pins Sunday. In his address to the newly inducted warriors, the highly revered unit's commander, Lt.-Col. Avinoam, hinted that they would soon find themselves far from Israel's borders.
"The State of Israel is facing a multitude of challenges, and we will be required to operate in places where we have not had to operate in the past," he said. "Your opening conditions will always be tough, but you must remember - in our mission we must not fail, because there is no second chance."
While the remarks were purposely cryptic, they could be taken as referring to possible missions in Syria or Iran.
The ceremony marking the end of a grueling 74-week training course took place at the Shilat Cliffs near Modiin.
IAF Commander Major General Ido Nechushtan told the soldiers: "The wings are the finish line of a long track in which you have learned a variety of skills. You have joined us in a very meaningful time for the State pf Israel - one in which Hamas grows stronger and Iran goes nuclear; one in which the Air Force must be prepared for a variety of complex scenarios."
In an interview with the IDF Website, Nechushtan praised 669's abilities. "The unit is called up to unique missions hundreds of times a year, and the mission is always in difficult circumstances. And yet, I trust them very much. They save people from dangerous situations hundreds of times a year." (IsraelNationalNews.com
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Israel Navy Surprises Flotilla; Passengers Don Life Vests
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
The Israeli Navy late Sunday night surprised the flotilla bound for Hamas-controlled Gaza, and the activists reported that three Israeli ships are on the flotilla's radar screens. Passengers have donned life vests.
One of the crew said that one "Navy warship" contacted the six boats in the flotilla and asked them to identify themselves. They were told the Navy would board the boats if the ships's crew and passengers do not agree to head for the Ashdod port instead of the Gaza Coast, where Israel maintains sovereignty under the Oslo Accords.
"Free Gaza" spokeswoman Greta Berlin told Israel National News, "They have cut off satellite phones. It goes in and out. Just enough to let us know that they are watching. We are in international waters. They have no right to do this. That's pretty threatening as it leaves the ships without any communications."
However, international law allows for countries to ask suspicious boats to identify themselves.
Live streaming continues intermittently from the flotilla, and activists on board reported that the Navy ships "are approaching us, and we will see what happens." One of the speakers, with a life vest, said that the surprise appearance of the Navy may be a "scare tactic."
Berlin said that "someone with contacts" with the IDF translated a message stating. "Commando units will be used to stop the boats. They will use silent inflatable boats to get to our boats and both try to board our boats directly from the inflatables and by dropping divers into the water to climb onto the boats."
The IDF released a terse statement shortly after midnight Sunday, stating, "Israeli Navy soldiers left this evening in order to stop the flotilla's provocative trip to Gaza. During the last few days, the soldiers have been conducting drills to ensure the mission's success."
The flotilla is at a serious disadvantage because the ships cannot travel at night. "They must keep in formation at all times, with the smaller boats in the inside and the larger boats on the outside," Berlin explained. "They must not allow any Israeli boats to penetrate the formation."
The flotilla activists, some of whom are identified with radical Muslim groups, did not expect a confrontation with the Navy until Monday morning, when the flotilla expects to near the Gaza coast.
The flotilla sailed on Sunday, more than two days later than planned and without two of the ships that did not join because of malfunctions but which are expected to set sail after repairs.
"We fully intend to go to Gaza regardless of any intimidation of threats of violence against us," said activist Huwaida Araf. "They are going to have to forcefully stop us."
Israel is equally determined not to allow the boats to reach Gaza and set a precedent that would break Israeli sovereignty over the waters in order to prevent terrorists and arms from being smuggled from the Mediterranean Sea.
The flotilla includes three ships of passengers and three cargo ships with aid. The Israeli military and Foreign Ministry have accused the activists of being more interested in trying to stage an anti-Israel stunt and strengthen Hamas rather than trying to help Gaza Arabs. Government spokesmen have pointed out that aid always can be shipped to Gaza through the Ashdod port, and that the alleged "humanitarian crisis" is a ruse because Israel oversees daily shipments of hundreds of tons of food, merchandise and supplies. (IsraelNationalNews.com)
Gaza flotilla changes course
By YAAKOV KATZ AND JPOST.COM STAFF
05/31/2010 03:55
Ships prefer confrontation with Israeli navy take place in daylight
The Gaza protest flotilla changed course to gain distance from the Israeli navy boats which had hailed them, demanded they identify themselves and warned them they would not be allowed to reach Gaza, an Al-Jazeera reporter with the flotilla said just past midnight on Monday. According to the report, the flotilla organizers wish any confrontation to occur during daylight hours rather than in the dark.
The IDF contacted the boats by radio, clarified that the Gaza Strip is a closed military zone and offered the sailors two options: to follow the navy to Ashdod Port or be commandeered by commandos, according to flotilla organizers.
The initial contact took place about 200 km. off the Gaza Coast. Flotilla organizers said they detected three Israel Navy ships on the radar.
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Passengers on the ships were instructed to don life vests as organizers warned of potential Israeli violence.
Israel Radio quoted the flotilla's organizers as saying they did not expect the navy to meet them so far out at sea.
International activists promised to send more aid ships to the besieged Gaza Strip late Sunday night, as the Israel Navy moved to intercept a flotilla of international vessels that were attempting to break the blockade of the Strip.
Israeli Navy ships set sail earlier Sunday night for what was expected to be a dramatic showdown out at sea as they try to prevent a flotilla of international aid ships from breaking the blockade on the Gaza Strip.
The nighttime standoff occurred after the six-ship flotilla's departure was delayed for several days by diplomatic and mechanical difficulties. The boats finally set sail on Sunday afternoon with the aim of arriving at 2 p.m. on Monday.
Mary Hughes, one of the founders of the Free Gaza Movement, told The Jerusalem Post from Cyprus that the group was determined to reach Gaza.
"They have stopped us before in various ways and we do not intend be intimated," Hughes said. "We have so many people who want to go to Gaza so it doesn't matter what the Israelis do to us. As long as people want to go and to send boats it will continue."
The three cargo ships and three passenger ships are carrying materials that Israel bars from reaching Gaza on a regular basis, like cement and other building materials, because they can be used by Hamas to build bunkers. The activists said they also were carrying hundreds of electric-powered wheelchairs, prefabricated homes and water purifiers.
The navy plans to stop the ships and sail them to the Ashdod Port where their cargo will be unloaded, inspected and then transferred, via land crossings, to the Gaza Strip. The passengers are to be deported. Those who refuse to leave the country would be arrested.
Some 700 pro-Palestinian activists are on the boats, including 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Máiread Corrigan-Maguire, European legislators and a Holocaust survivor.
The mission has experienced repeated delays, both due to mechanical problems and a decision by Cyprus to bar any boat from sailing from its shore to Gaza. The ban forced a group of European lawmakers to depart from the Turkish Cypriot northern part of the island late on Saturday.
Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade on Gaza after Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon responded to what he called "anti-Semitic chants" that came from the ship's passengers and were broadcast on Israel Radio.
Some of the passengers on the ships were recorded shouting chants to remember Haifa since the army of Muhammad will soon return.
"Israel condemns the anti-Semitic chants that were publicized this morning," Ayalon said. "The fact that participants on the flotilla would chant such things shows the true nature of some of the participants and its real motivation. This amply demonstrates that many are not against a particular policy of the Israeli government, but have very real and dangerous hatred for Jews and the Jewish state."
AP contributed to this report
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Report: Hate Chants from Flotilla
by Maayana Miskin
Witnesses reported Sunday morning that they had heard hate chants from those on board a flotilla of ships heading from Cyprus to Gaza. The ships bear hundreds of foreign activists who plan to challenge Israel's control of the sea off Gaza's coast.
The chants, which were recorded, included, "Khaybar Khaybar ya yahud, jaish Mohammed saya'ud." The cry means, "Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Mohammed is returning." The reference is to the seventh century, when Mohammed, revered by Muslims as a prophet, led an army that slaughtered Jews in the town of Khaybar in what is now Saudi Arabia.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon condemned the chants. "The fact that participants on the flotilla would chant such things shows the true nature of some of the participants and its true motivation," he said.
"This amply demonstrates that many are not against a particular policy of the Israeli government, but have very real and dangerous hatred for Jews and the Jewish state," he added.
Israel is planning to intercept the boats before they reach Gaza and divert them to the port of Ashdod, where the goods they are carrying will be checked and transported to Gaza by land. The foreign activists will be deported to their home countries, officials say.
Israel has lawfully controlled traffic into and out of Gaza from the Negev and the Mediterranean sea since Hamas, a declared enemy of the Jewish state, gained control of the area after elections in 2007. Humanitarian goods are allowed into the region.
Egypt has closed its border with Gaza as well.
The flotilla to Gaza has encountered several setbacks, among them mechanical failures that caused two of the ships to slow to a stop on Sunday. The ships are scheduled to arrive on Monday.
Hamas is a terror organization which purposely targets Jewish civilians and which has also cruelly murdered many Arabs who supported rival factions or were suspected of collaborating with Israel. Its method of warfare involves provoking Israel into military action and hiding behind civilians in the hope that Israel will inadvertently strike them. (IsraelNationalNews.com)
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'Obama gave PM concrete guarantees'
By DAVID BRINN, TORONTO AND HAVIV RETTIG GUR
05/31/2010 01:39
Officials: US-Israel ties upgraded; Netanyahu: Israel won't disarm.
President Barack Obama gave Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "concrete guarantees" that the US will strengthen Israel's strategic capabilities, sources in Jerusalem said late Sunday evening.
Top government officials said there has recently been a "significant upgrade in ties" regarding security understandings between Washington and Jerusalem.
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Over the weekend, Israeli officials were angered and surprised by the Obama administration's decision to support the vote at the UN by 189 member states of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to single out Israel for its alleged possession of nuclear weapons, The Jerusalem Post was told on Sunday.
The vote Friday garnered an unusually harsh Israeli retort over the weekend, in which the Prime Minister's Office said the resolution "ignores the realities of the Middle East" and focuses "on the only country in the world that is actually threatened with annihilation."
Netanyahu seemed to reiterate the point in a speech in Toronto on Sunday, in which he told some 7,000 people gathered at the city's Ricoh Coliseum ahead of the annual United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto Walk for Israel that "the establishment of the State of Israel has given the Jewish people the power to repel the attacks on the Jewish people.
"There are those who want to strip Israel of that power," he warned. "I promise you that will never happen. Israel will never give up the power to defend itself."
Referring to Iran as the number one threat to Israel, Netanyahu said, "We have to ensure that this regime, the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, does not acquire the weapons of mass death."
The American vote in support of the resolution on Israel's nuclear facilities has cast a shadow over the Tuesday meeting in the White House between Netanyahu and Obama.
That meeting, which was originally intended to deal with recent advances in the diplomatic process as US-mediated proximity talks with the Palestinian Authority began, will now deal also with the nuclear issue.
"This vote left us feeling that the White House is saying that Israel's needs are expendable in the search for international consensus," a diplomatic source said on Sunday.
Intelligence Services Minister and security cabinet member Dan Meridor added that Israel had believed that the US was working toward a "much more balanced proposal" at the UN parley.
Speaking to Channel 1 on Sunday, Meridor said "the issue will come up [in Tuesday's Netanyahu-Obama summit] in all its seriousness, and I hope we'll be able to find ways to correct the damage."
Obama criticized the resolution over the weekend, saying, "We strongly oppose efforts to single out Israel, and will oppose actions that jeopardize Israel's national security."
But Netanyahu is expected to use Tuesday's meeting to ask why the US allowed the resolution to pass in the first place.
The answer may reflect a confused American policy, according to Middle East scholar and former ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovich.
"The Americans were trapped in a contradiction - the commitment to Israel's nondisclosure policy alongside Obama's desire to enact a larger reform on the nuclear issue. They couldn't sustain that contradiction," he explained in an interview on Israeli television Sunday, so the administration was forced to sacrifice Israel's interests on that issue in order to obtain a consensus resolution on non-proliferation.
"I wouldn't call this a betrayal, but it was a misstep," Rabinovich said.
The 28-page resolution voted on Friday was the concluding statement of a monthlong parley of NPT member nations. It calls for the reduction of nuclear warhead stockpiles by the world's nuclear powers and urges an increase in the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu used his speech in Toronto to reiterate his long-standing insistence on a demilitarized Palestinian state as a key Israeli demand in peace talks, saying that Israel couldn't afford a third Iranian presence - in addition to Lebanon and Gaza - overlooking the hills of Tel Aviv.
"We must insure that any future Palestinian state is effectively demilitarized - not just a paper agreement. We've had a lot of paper agreements with the international community. We had one in Lebanon - it didn't work. And we had one in Gaza that didn't work. Here we must have effective arrangements on the ground, in which Israel and Israel alone can vouch for its security. We're prepared to make compromises for peace, but I'm not willing to make any compromises on our security," he said.
Netanyahu also insisted that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, to more applause.
"Just we as we are asked to recognize a nation state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians will have to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people," he said.
Oded Ben-Josef contributed to this report.
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World tries to make Israel the nuclear 'bad guy'
The international community on Friday took another step toward reversing the roles of Israel and Iran, and turning the Jewish state into the Middle East's nuclear "bad guy."
At the close of a month-long meeting in New York, the 189 member states of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed an agreement calling for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East. The document stipulates that in 2012 a conference will be held aimed at enforcing that decision.
While that may sound like a reasonable idea, Israeli officials decried the fact that Israel was mentioned repeatedly both during the meetings and in the agreement, while Iran was not directly referenced even once.
A statement released by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office at the weekend called the resolution "deeply flawed and hypocritical: It ignores the realities of the Middle East and the real threats facing the region and the entire world. It singles out Israel, the Middle East's only true democracy and the only country threatened with annihilation. Yet the terrorist regime in Iran, which is racing to develop nuclear weapons and which openly threatens to wipe Israel off the map, is not even mentioned in the resolution."
Israel announced that since it is a non-signatory state, the NPT has no authority over it, and Jerusalem will not cooperate with the resolution's implementation. It noted that the problem is not with a state like Israel that never signed the treaty and more or may not be quietly in possession of nuclear weapons for self defense, but rather with a nation like Iran, which has signed the treaty, but flaunts it in order to openly threaten its enemies.
US President Barack Obama also criticized the focus on Israel at the NPT meeting and in the resolution, but nevertheless gave his stamp of approval to the document and the 2012 summit, which will ultimately work to force Israel to declare its nuclear arsenal and open its nuclear facilities to inspection.
Ha'aretz analyst Yossi Melman noted that the NPT meeting was only able to produce such a strong resolution because the Obama Administration had essentially betrayed Israel and its security. Melman noted that the same NPT signatories had tried to hold such a meeting in 2005, but were refused the cooperation of the Bush Administration. Without US involvement, the conference never happened.
But Obama, notes Melman, is far more interested in his own agenda, even at the cost of Israeli security. Obama knew the focus of the conference would be Israel, and that it's primary aim would be to strip the Jewish state of any nuclear weapons it may possess. In light of that, Obama's criticism of the NPT's focus on Israel comes across as far more hypocritical than the resolution itself.
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Report: US stopped Israel from targeting Hizballah missile shipment
The London Times on Thursday reported on evidence it was shown revealing the existence of Hizballah-run military bases in Syria where long-range surface-to-surface missiles are received and prepared for shipment to southern Lebanon.
Security sources told the newspaper that several of the arms depots exist, and are being supplied either directly by Syria or by Iran.
According to the report, Israeli forces were planning to bomb one of the missile convoys as it entered Lebanon, but called off the strike at the last minute as a result of US pressure. Disregarding Israeli security, Washington has insisted that Jerusalem continue to let failed diplomacy lead the way.
Earlier this month, US President Barack Obama chided Syria for continuing to aid Hizballah in violation of UN resolutions, but also decided to renew diplomatic ties with Damascus. Middle East observers said the American leader's behavior sends mixed signals to Arab leaders that ultimately make him look weak and his threats empty.
Also earlier this month, Gen. Yossi Baidatz, a senior Israeli intelligence officer, told a Knesset oversight committee that it was no longer to describe the transfer of arms to Hizballah as "smuggling" since the operation is highly organized, massive and carried out in the open.
