Weather is not the reason
Ground offensive delayed due to civilians
October 16, 2023, 4:17 a.m
The expected invasion of Israeli troops into the Gaza Strip has not yet begun. But it’s not supposed to be because of the weather, but rather because there are still too many civilians between the Hamas positions. Apparently there are still efforts to get Egypt to open its borders.
According to an Israeli army spokesman, unfavorable weather is not the reason for the postponement of the ground offensive against the Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “No, absolutely not,” said Arye Sharuz Shalicar, one of the spokesmen for the Israeli Army (IDF) on the ARD program “Anne Will.” He suggested that one of the main reasons for the postponement was to allow more Palestinian civilians to reach the south of the Gaza Strip so that they would not be endangered by a ground offensive in the north of the coastal strip.
The New York Times, citing several officers, reported that the ground offensive had actually been planned for this weekend, but was then postponed due to cloudy skies and the resulting poor visibility for pilots and drones. After Israel called on the population of the northern Gaza Strip to flee to the south on Friday morning, it was expected that the offensive was imminent. On Sunday, the IDF said that 600,000 people had now made their way south. Hamas had described the evacuation call as “propaganda” and urged civilians to stay in the north. In the southern Gaza Strip – unlike in the blockaded north – there is now water again.
IDF spokesman Shalicar called for even more pressure to be put on Egypt to accept refugees on its own border with the Gaza Strip. “We don’t care about hurting innocent people – especially women or children or old people. What we care about is that we want to destroy Hamas and punish them for this act of last Saturday.” Eliminating the terrorist group Hamas, which was responsible for Saturday’s attacks, is a “big goal, a difficult goal,” emphasized Shalicar. In this context, he recalled the attack by a Palestinian terrorist organization on the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich: All the terrorists involved there were sooner or later brought to justice. The same will happen to the Hamas leadership and all terrorists involved in the attacks, he said.