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Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon today announced to the Knesset foreign affairs and security committee new offensive military measures to be launched against Palestinian terror.
According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources, that plan, “Pointed Dagger,” whose details were not announced by Sharon, will entail a two-tier effort – hitting the terrorists in their home base, in addition to the blocking tactics employed until now.
Sharon, a former general himself, has decided that at 75, he can still show the top brass and the tacticians a thing or two about military strategy.
The concept is based on positioning a combined force of intelligence, drones, helicopters, tanks and armored infantry – not simply around the terrorists’ lairs and points of exit, but deep inside their bases – even if located in dwellings, according to DEBKA.
In recent years, the axiom adopted by Israel’s high command was that terror cannot be defeated by military means but only by diplomacy. Sharon, from the moment he took office last March, told the generals to forget the diplomatic constraints and put to proper use the capabilities, the strength and the technology at the disposal of the well-endowed Israeli army.
After the Sept. 11 suicide attacks in America, Sharon summoned Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer and the members of the Israeli Defense Force general command and laid his new strategy before them, explaining that the time was right for the army to finally tackle Palestinian terrorists without incurring international wrath.
Their first task was to brush up the performance of intelligence. If a terror cell was located in a village or even in a Palestinian Authority building, a complete intelligence map was to be drawn of that location, with every inhabitant, house, vehicle, field and orchard clearly marked. Over a period of time, high-flying drones would record the life in the target location, its input used to draw the map. Special commandos disguised as Arabs would then go into the location, draw a human map and compare it with the drone’s surveillance photos. The operations officers would then divide the target location into squares for the positioning of tanks, infantry and air force – in particular, the precise placing of assault helicopters.
The new strategy was first put into effect Oct. 23 in the Palestinian village of Beit Rima, west of Ramallah, that was raided as part of the counter-terror offensive Israel launched after the assassination of its tourism minister, Rehavam Zeevi, by Palestinian terrorists Oct. 17.
Tank forces and armored infantry encircled the village before storming it. The pretext for the choice of this village was that members of the hit squad that murdered the minister had sheltered there afterwards. But, according to Debka military sources, that was not the only reason. On the same day, the United States began running a secret military airlift to the military section of Ben Gurion international airport. Giant C-17 transports landed at short intervals carrying shipments of war materiel.
Beit Rima is 22 kilometers from the airport with no built-up areas or other obstructions between the two. Israeli military intelligence discovered that the Palestinian West Bank General Intelligence service had trained squads in the use of shoulder-borne Strella anti-air missiles for hitting civilian aircraft coming in to land or taking off from Ben Gurion airport. Sharon applied his new strategy at Beit Rima to secure the U.S. airlift against Palestinian missile attack.
It was successfully repeated Wednesday, Oct. 31, in the Israeli raid of the Jihad Islami stronghold village of Arabe in the Jenin district of the West Bank, four days after that group’s gunmen left four women dead in the Israeli town of Hadera. Half a dozen terrorists were rounded up with no other casualties on either side, before the raiding force pulled out. It happened so fast and smoothly that the Palestinians had no time to put up much resistance.
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