Timing of Hamas infiltration 'not random'

A former commander of the Gaza division and the army’s operations branch, Maj. Gen. (res.) Israel Ziv, says in a conference call with journalists that the timing of this morning’s attempted attack “is not random.”

Ziv says that the 13-man squad of terrorists that emerged from a tunnel near Kibbutz Sufa, some 250 yards inside Israel on Gaza’s southern border, is an expression of “how cynical Hamas can be,” since the attack, directed against civilians, was launched several hours before the onset of a five-hour humanitarian ceasefire.

He notes that the central challenge in combating this form of cross-border infiltration is in detecting the tunnel and its many branches. The army, he says, often lacks “the visual of the tunnel itself.”

— Mitch Ginsburg