“I’m for truth no matter who tells it. I’m for justice no matter who is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” – MARCUS AURELIUS.
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This is my view because my perspective covers a whole gamut of the geopolitical developments in that region.
Every political observer and analyst of the situation in the Mid-East, particularly the conditions obtaining in Israel, believe that Iran has a continuing hand in the Saturday Hamas attack where thousands of Israeli civilians – including women, children, the elderly and even soldiers – were murdered and slaughtered in cold blood.
PM Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to retaliate multiple times in kind, publicly pronouncing to transform Gaza where the Hamas terrorists are residing, into an “island of ruins”.
(OFWs caught in the crossfire are still being located by Philippine emabssy officials and so far none has been reported killed, save for one Pinoy who was shot and hospitalized.)
Like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this conflict will last longer even as the UN and other countries have asked both sides to talk peace and prevent it from escalating unnecessarily.
However, because Israel knows that the Tehran leadership has been backing Hamas for so long that Israel’s security is always at peril, Netanyahu has achieved the cooperation of the political opposition for the IDF to counter act, punish and erase Hamas completely.
That implies only one thing: Israel will not stop its operation against Hamas in the Gaza region until the terrorist group is obliterated so that it will never harm Israel again in the future.
A failure in intelligence.
Mossad, the highly trained intelligence agency funded by a $3B budget with 7,000 personnel, was caught napping.
The border line was breached as videos showed Hamas militants using a tractor to break down the strong concretized and wired fences. Israeli hostages were paraded in the streets like captured animals.
Hamas proved to the civilized world that their surpise dawn attacks were nothing but barbaric terrorism.
Anyway, why was Isarel caught with its pants down?
They were lulled into a confident complacency. After a truce ws called during the 2021 conflict, Hamas kept quiet for two years that seemingly gave israel a false sense of security.
The Mossad, for all its notorious popularity (an oxymoron, pardon me) as the best intelligence network that assassinated prominent figures Israel did not want to exist anymore because they were threats to its existence, failed to calculate and determine that Hamas was already compiling arms, weapons, rockets and money and digging tunnels for a bigger and wider attack.
Did Israel’s intelligence and military network not debate and assess on where the unfrozen $6 billion the US gave Iran recently might go?
Hezbollah in the north is just waiting for its turn in order to divert and distract Israel’s attention from the southern front.
Netanyahu and his IDF general staff know for sure that all Iran’s proxies are acting in coordination with the Tehran leadrship which has vowed to erase Israel from the map of the earth.
Everything seems to be a race against time.
If anything, the killing of two israeli tourists in Alexandria, Egypt might tell us another shifting story.
Nine Americans have been confirmed dead and among the early casualties in the dawn Hamas raids.
As the videos and news dispatches clearly revealed, Hamas militants went on a killing spree spread over 22 towns, shooting people regardless of nationality.
As Pres. Biden has publicly announced that the US government stands by Israel, it has sent a US cruiser, the USS Gerald Ford, to the Meditterenean Sea, just in case.
How will this conflict impact on the Philippines?
Will the Philippine government take its own sweet time before it announces a repatriation of OFWs in israel and if the situation gets worse, be blamed anew for being slow-footed?
How efficient is the DFA in assessing and evaluating the conditions obtaining in Israel to prevent another ill-prepared and frantic rescue of OFWs caught in the crossfire?
(Email feedback to fredlumba@yahoo.com). GOD BLESS THE PHILIPPINES!
