Inside the War on Hamas

[LastDemInIdaho]

The order came in at midnight. The soldiers were at their base in Beit Lid, at the edge of the West Bank in northern Israel, preparing to launch an assault against wanted Palestinian militants. As the elite unit reviewed its plans, Israeli intelligence officials phoned the commanders with an updated mission. A suspected terrorist had been tracked to a residential building in Nablus, the densely populated Palestinian city known to Israelis as the West Bank's capital of terror. In the past year Israeli forces claim to have caught or killed 120 Palestinians with plans to head from Nablus to Israel to carry out a suicide bombing.
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A senior Israeli intelligence official says that, far from laying down its arms, Hamas used the cease-fire to reorganize, restock its bombmaking arsenal and plot a new wave of suicide attacks. Israel has responded by broadening its offensive against Hamas to include strikes aimed at killing the group's ideological and political leaders.
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To many Israelis, frayed by the constant threat of suicide bombers, the war against Palestinian terrorism has become a fight for personal survival. At the spearhead of that war are the soldiers charged with hunting suicide bombers and their paymasters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — Israelis like the men from the Nahal Brigade's reconnaissance unit, one of the army's most active terrorism-fighting groups.
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The danger is rising. The number of alerts of possible terrorism attacks inside Israel climbed last week to 40 a day, up from an average of 15 a day in August. Israeli commanders in the West Bank say they have taken steps to seize the offensive. A senior Israeli intelligence official says security forces have widened the focus of their raids from "ticking time bombs"--the suicide bombers — to the entire "ticking infrastructure," including the strategists, bombmakers and paymasters.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030922-485741,00.html?cnn=yes