Along with many others, I participated in an Israel Project news conference today with the international media advisor to Israel's Prime Minister, Mark Regev, on an array of topics arising from the IDF "Operation Cast Lead" in Gaza against Hamas.  A recording of the news conference and a transcript will be posted shortly on their website. See here.  There were more than 600 journalists and bloggers on the call, with many questions from British publications and even  from China Radio. Some of the more challenging questions came from American participants.

Regev is basically communicating the following on behalf of Prime Minister Olmert, who leaves office after a Knesset general election on February 10th.

• Hamas started the violence on Christmas with the crescendo of rocket, missile and mortar attacks on the South of Israel and Western Negev which left Israel no choice under international law, other than to defend itself and protect more than 250,000 of its citizens;
• Hamas "tore up" the understandings negotiated with Egypt with  rocket attacks that demonstrated clearly that the 'hudna' (period of calm) or cease-fire was over;
• The people of Gaza are not the enemy, but rather the extremist Hamas leadership seeking to replace the civil order with a Taliban-like tyranny;
• Israel security services briefings to the cabinet have indicated that Gazans do not understand the logic of Hamas leadership in fostering the violence;
• The Arab world is divided and the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Saudis do not understand the objectives of Hamas in continuing this eruption of violence and they are concerned that both Hamas and Hezbollah have become allies, as they are now both proxies of Iran; 
• Providing open border crossings and delivery of food and other humanitarian aid demonstrates that Israel does not target Gaza civilians;
• Hamas's media strategy is to focus on 'spin' that the IDF operations in Gaza is killing 9 civilians for each Hamas security cadre killed in the IDF operations there. However, there is no way of independently verifying the information given Hamas media control;
• Israel's media strategy is to focus on Hamas's abrogation of the 'understandings', that Israel is targeting extremist Hamas leadership and its military machine and in the process creating a new reality, one of security for Israeli citizens in the South so that they will not have to live with the daily fear of loss of life;
• The IDF attacks over the past three days have demonstrated Israel's ability to effectively target, degrade  and weaken the Hamas command and control net, military machine and security apparatus;
• Iran's 'fingerprints' are all over the longer range missiles and mortars and other weaponry; and,
• Hamas has copied Hezbollah in its fortification of tunnels for weapons and goods smuggling on the  border with Egypt, tunnels that were hit hard yesterday by the IAF.