JERUSALEM, Dec. 13 (Xinhua) -- As the third anniversary of a major Israeli assault on Gaza nears, a senior Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officer said Monday that the army may soon be forced to reenter the coastal enclave to thwart a new upsurge of rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militants.
"I think we can't avoid another confrontation; there's a lot of weapons in the Gaza Strip, a lot of terror groups," Southern Command Deputy Division commander Col. Jonathan Bransky told reporters during a tour of the border area.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak and several other senior officials have in recent weeks backed up Bransky's warning of the necessity of ending incessant barrages, which have placed some one million southern residents under threat.
Over the weekend, Israeli Air Force (IAF) aircraft struck at what the army said were Hamas and other militant targets in the Strip, in a bid to quell the rocket salvos.
The latest violence erupted last Thursday when an IAF bombing killed a militant the army said was preparing for an upcoming attack against Israelis.
The coastal enclave contains more than 1.5 million residents, and 40,000 of them work for Hamas, an Israeli military official that deals with the Palestinian economy told Xinhua. The Islamist group wrested the 365-square-kilometers area from West Bank - based Fatah after a bloody battle in 2007, and since then, "is investing only in its military capacity for the next round with Israel," the official said.
Bransky said the militants aimed the rockets to "try to hit civilians. Just in the past days 39 rockets and mortar shells were shot into Israeli territory trying to hit civilians, and that's something we can't let [happen]."
Operation Cast Lead, which lasted from Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 18, 2009 aiming at ending eight years of intermittent but increasingly lethal rocket attacks on southern towns and cities, have killed two dozen people and wounded scores of others. An opening aerial campaign battered Hamas strongholds, and was followed by a limited entry of ground forces to search out and destroy rockets, and other weapons and munitions.
Palestinians and others in the international community, however, slammed the foray as the indiscriminate use of force against non- combatants, culminating in the United Nation's Goldstone Report which accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes. Palestinians said Israeli forces killed close to 1,400 non- combatants. Israel sharply disputed the figure, charging that the great majority of casualties were non-uniformed militants.
But while Bransky and other military officials have said that Hamas and other militants have increased and improved their war- making capabilities since Operation Cast Lead - including longer- range Grads that can reach Israeli cities upwards of 60 kilometers away - so has the IDF.
"Our duty is to be ready all the time for every kind of operation, and that's what we do. If there's an escalation, we're ready for it. We know exactly what to do and where to hit Hamas and the other terror groups in the Gaza Strip," Bransky said.
A senior official told reporters that Hamas may be waiting to renew hostilities after the release later this month of 500 Palestinian prisoners, the second batch to be freed in a deal reached in October that saw 1,027 security prisoners released in return for an abducted Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.
"The IDF has improved in many ways, including intelligence- gathering, and understanding what's happening in Gaza; their intentions and capabilities, their fighting style, their arms and training - however you look at it, we've gotten a lot better in the last three years, and that improvement will be put to the test the moment the decision is made (by the political echelon)," Bransky said.
He made the statements during a tour for reporters along a tree- lined, two-lane stretch of road near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which faces southern Gaza. In April, Hamas took responsibility for firing a laser-guided anti-tank rocket at a yellow school bus travelling along the highway, which killed a 16-year-old Israeli student.
At the site, the IDF has since then erected some two hundred meters of five-meter-high tan camouflage netting, strung along a gap in the trees in order to visually block the road from Gazan surveillance from less than a kilometer away.
Bransky, standing in front of the netting, said that the army was trying to "defend the civilians and to allow them to live as normal a life as they can, using the roads that are not immediately threatened by anti-tank missiles; that's why this fence is here and a part of the road is in the news," Bransky told Xinhua.
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