Ramping up pressure on Hamas, Hamas leaders, and the Palestinian Authority, eleven Palestinian human rights organization are demanding that they endorse the U.N. Goldstone Report recommendation to investigate Palestinian violations of international law allegedly committed during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead offensive in Gaza from late December 2008 through January 2009.

According to the report in Ha’aretz, the Palestinian organizations urging the probe include:

• Adallah
• the Arab Association for Human Rights
• the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights
• Al-Haq
• the Adameer prisoner’s rights group, and
• the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counselling.

The Goldstone Report criticized, in part, terror attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups on Israeli civilians, violent attacks and internal repression, like summary executions in the Gaza Strip, as well as arrests and torture in the West Bank

Israel hit Hamas targets in Gaza on Sunday, including some of the terrorist group’s security caravans in the central Gaza village of al-Mughraqa (see map below):

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According to Haaretz, the caravans served as Hamas’ security headquarters.


The IDF says that the attack on Hamas was a response to “the barrage of Qassam rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel today, which wounded an Israeli civilian and two IDF soldiers.”

Also hit were Hamas smuggling tunnels coming from Egypt into Gaza. Last year, Hamas reportedly took in $20 million U.S. dollars per month from Gaza tunnel smuggling operations.

A Japanese reporter and his cameraman shot this video of a Gaza smuggling tunnel operation between Rafah and Egypt:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised that if Hamas continued its Gaza-based deadly rocket attacks on Israel, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would respond with ‘disproportionate’ force.


After a cabinet meeting Sunday morning, Olmert stated that:

The Cabinet’s position from the outset was that if firing continues against residents of the South, there would be a sharp Israeli response that would be disproportional vis-a-vis the firing at residents of the State of Israel and at our forces. We will not go back to the rules of the game that the terrorist organizations tried to dictate in the past. We will act according to new rules that will ensure that we are not dragged into an unending shooting war on the southern border that denies southern residents a normal life.

Meanwhile, IDF Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin believes that Hamas is currently acting in a defensive posture, concluding that the terrorist group “has been deterred, and is honoring the ceasefire, but is not deterring [other terrorist groups] enough.”

Former Lt. General Thomas McInerney told the Jerusalem Post that Israel was “too restrained and could have gone deeper into Gaza.”