You could change the dates and it would read like today -- except for the loss of life that can never be replaced.
I was all over Cast Lead I in 2008 but failed to follow up in 2012; fortunately, I saved the drafts knowing they would be needed at some point. Maybe it is just me but Israel seems to need to draw massive amounts of Arab blood every two years or so.
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Two reasons I was reluctant to even post this. I'm tired of being mocked in one form or fa$hion. That would explain why I am really not reading much of it any more.
"Activist: Pro-Palestinian boat en route to Gaza" by DANIEL ESTRIN | AP, October 10, 2012
JERUSALEM — A boat carrying pro-Palestinian advocates from eight countries is en route to Gaza in the latest attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade on the territory, an activist on board said Tuesday.
Is that what caused the attack back in 2012?
Dror Feiler, an Israeli on the boat, said it left Naples on Sunday and aims to reach Gaza in mid-October. He said the boat is carrying items such as cement, basketballs, musical instruments, and theater lighting equipment.
This is a follow-up to the boat that was pirated by Israel in 2010 when nine people were killed.
Israel imposed the blockade after the militant Islamic Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from their rival, the more secular Palestinian Fatah.
Okay, they didn't seize it, they won elections, and for the AmeriKan media to repeat that distortion and lie over and over when they know it is a distortion is unforgivable.
"Hamas overwhelmingly won Palestinian Parliament elections in 2006.... Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections in early 2006.... In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections.... Hamas won the last parliamentary elections in 2006.... Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006.... Hamas won a majority in 2006 elections"
Oh, btw, Hamas also foiled a COUP ATTEMPT!!!!
How can one ever believe anything my media says regarding Israel and Gaza now?
Palestinians and their backers consider the blockade illegal collective punishment against the people of Gaza. A September 2011 UN report upheld the legality of the naval blockade, calling it a ‘‘legitimate security measure,’’ although it criticized land restrictions. Other legal experts at the United Nations, along with the Red Cross, have said the blockade is illegal.
That's why we sometimes call it the JU.N.
Under heavy international pressure, Israel eased the closure in 2010 after a naval raid killed nine Turkish activists on another Gaza-bound flotilla.
While many consumer goods now flow into Gaza through an Israeli-controlled crossing, some restrictions remain in place.
Israel says the closure is needed to keep Hamas from obtaining weapons. Gaza militants smuggle weapons into the area through tunnels under the border with Egypt.
The Israeli military would not say whether it plans to stop the boat, saying in a statement only that it will ‘‘continue to ensure that the maritime restrictions near the Gaza Strip, instituted to prevent weapons transfers, are maintained.’’
--more--"
They did reroute to an Israeli port, but my ma$$ media never did follow up.
"Israeli forces exchange fire with Gaza militants" by Isabel Kershner | New York Times, October 09, 2012
Is that what caused the attack back in 2012?
Dror Feiler, an Israeli on the boat, said it left Naples on Sunday and aims to reach Gaza in mid-October. He said the boat is carrying items such as cement, basketballs, musical instruments, and theater lighting equipment.
This is a follow-up to the boat that was pirated by Israel in 2010 when nine people were killed.
Israel imposed the blockade after the militant Islamic Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from their rival, the more secular Palestinian Fatah.
Okay, they didn't seize it, they won elections, and for the AmeriKan media to repeat that distortion and lie over and over when they know it is a distortion is unforgivable.
"Hamas overwhelmingly won Palestinian Parliament elections in 2006.... Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections in early 2006.... In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections.... Hamas won the last parliamentary elections in 2006.... Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006.... Hamas won a majority in 2006 elections"
Oh, btw, Hamas also foiled a COUP ATTEMPT!!!!
How can one ever believe anything my media says regarding Israel and Gaza now?
Palestinians and their backers consider the blockade illegal collective punishment against the people of Gaza. A September 2011 UN report upheld the legality of the naval blockade, calling it a ‘‘legitimate security measure,’’ although it criticized land restrictions. Other legal experts at the United Nations, along with the Red Cross, have said the blockade is illegal.
That's why we sometimes call it the JU.N.
Under heavy international pressure, Israel eased the closure in 2010 after a naval raid killed nine Turkish activists on another Gaza-bound flotilla.
While many consumer goods now flow into Gaza through an Israeli-controlled crossing, some restrictions remain in place.
Israel says the closure is needed to keep Hamas from obtaining weapons. Gaza militants smuggle weapons into the area through tunnels under the border with Egypt.
The Israeli military would not say whether it plans to stop the boat, saying in a statement only that it will ‘‘continue to ensure that the maritime restrictions near the Gaza Strip, instituted to prevent weapons transfers, are maintained.’’
--more--"
They did reroute to an Israeli port, but my ma$$ media never did follow up.
"Israeli forces exchange fire with Gaza militants" by Isabel Kershner | New York Times, October 09, 2012
JERUSALEM — Gaza militants fired a barrage of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli territory Monday, causing no casualties but some property damage, after an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza on Sunday killed one Palestinian and wounded at least nine others.
Like I said, erase the dates and put new ones on and we are in today.
Israeli warplanes responded immediately, striking a number of rocket-launching squads as they fired toward Israel, according to the military, and hitting several facilities belonging to Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza. The military said the sites were being used to store weapons....
The latest flare-up began with the missile strike Sunday against two men Israel said were members of jihadist groups involved in terrorist activity against Israel. Some Palestinian news outlets identified them as radical Salafi militants....
A spokeswoman for the Israeli military said up to 30 mortar shells had fallen inside Israel on Monday morning, and the military said a number of rockets also struck Israeli territory near the Gaza border.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group, claimed responsibility for the rocket and mortar fire, saying that they were aiming at Israeli military bases near the border.
A spokesman for the military wing of Hamas, known only by his nom de guerre, Abu Obeida, said Monday’s attacks were meant as a message that ‘‘the Palestinian resistance will not allow unilateral aggression’’ from Israel.
He warned of ‘‘stronger, expanded responses’’ if the Israeli raids continued.
Most of the rockets and mortars fell in uninhabited areas in Israel, but the military said some buildings were damaged. Several goats were killed in a petting zoo in an Israeli communal farm near the border, according to the news website Ynet.
Related: The Gaza Rocket Squads
Israelis were marking the last day of the Sukkot holiday Monday, and schools and offices were closed. Israelis near the Gaza border were advised to remain close to bomb shelters and protected areas. The Education Ministry in Gaza said four schools in southeast Gaza were evacuated because of Israeli shelling.
Hamas has largely adhered to an informal, if fragile, cease-fire with Israel and has acted in the past to rein in smaller groups, but this was the second time in less than four months that Hamas joined in firing rockets at Israel.
It's all been one-sided because Israel did not observe it at all.
In June, the armed wing of Hamas joined Islamic Jihad in firing barrages of rockets into Israel after a number of deadly Israeli airstrikes.
Analysts said at the time that Hamas was acting out of a sense that Islamic Jihad was gaining ground, and after Gaza residents criticized Hamas for not avenging Israeli strikes.
Then, three days of cross-border fighting ended when Egypt brokered a restoration of the cease-fire and Hamas renewed its commitment to the truce.
--more--"
It didn't last long as this thing is going to get going!
"Israeli strike kills Islamist militant leader in Gaza Strip; Al Qaeda says it expects that death will be avenged" by Ibrahim Barzak | Associated Press, October 15, 2012
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel claimed a significant blow against Al Qaeda-inspired militants in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing one of the most influential leaders from an extreme branch of Islam that has targeted Egypt and Gaza’s Hamas rulers as well as Israel....
Related:
--MORE--"
Also see: Fake al-Qaeda Arrested in Jerusalem
Almost August, isn't it?
Salafi militants emerged in Gaza around 2005, after Israel withdrew from the territory.
Meaning it is the residual intelligence operation Israel left behind!
Members of one such group, the Army of Islam, cooperated with Hamas in the abduction of an Israeli soldier the following year. But after Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, the sides parted ways.
Related:
Hamas, Son of Israel
Israel's Dirty Secret
Don't tell anyone.
Several hundred Salafi militants are now believed to be in Gaza.....
In response to Hisham Saidani’s death, Al Qaeda’s media arm, the Global Islamic Media Front, a European group that supports Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations, warned Israel that its ‘‘joy will not last long.’’
Pfffft!
*******************
Over the past year, Israel has targeted militant Salafi militants with airstrikes in Gaza, seeing them as a new threat to its southern border.
On Sunday, Israeli airstrikes killed three more militants, said Palestinian health spokesman Ashraf al-Kidra. In all, five militants were killed in weekend fighting.
Israeli officials believe the militant Salafis sometimes cross between Gaza and Sinai, using the lawless Egyptian territory as a base to conduct attacks or to flee after carrying out attacks elsewhere.
They are considered a threat not only to Israel, but to Hamas and Egypt as well.
Militant Salafis consider Hamas, which itself is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, to be too moderate because it seeks to establish a Palestinian state.
Related:
"Hamas would respect any peace deal reached between Israel and Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, provided it is approved in a global Palestinian referendum"
Hey, what is one more distortion and lie in service to Israel in a sea of them before or since, right?
--more--"
"Jimmy Carter says Mideast peace is ‘vanishing’" by Lauren E. Bohn | Associated Press, October 23, 2012
He tried, wrote a great book and got hammered down for it.
And he's a FRIEND of Israel!
JERUSALEM — President Carter said Monday during a visit to Jerusalem that the prospect of an Israel-Palestinian peace accord is vanishing, blaming Israeli settlement of the West Bank.
Carter, a longtime critic of Israeli policies, called the current situation catastrophic and blamed Israel for the growing isolation of east Jerusalem from the West Bank. He said a Palestinian state has become unviable....
I've been saying that for years.
That map on the right was back in 2005. That means there is even less
green now. I don't see how you create a two-state solution, even with
land swaps.
Related: Memory Hole: Future Vision of Israel
Looks like the only solution to me.
Carter criticized him for not doing enough.
‘‘Up until now, every prime minister has been a willing and enthusiastic supporter of the two-state solution,’’ he said.
The Palestinians say they will return to the negotiating table only if Israel freezes settlement construction on occupied lands claimed by the Palestinians.
Israel said talks should resume without preconditions.
As president, Carter brokered the historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But since he left office, he has become increasingly critical of Israel.
His 2006 book, ‘‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,’’ asserted that Israel’s settlement of Palestinian land was the primary obstacle to Mideast peace. The book sparked widespread outrage in Israel.
Carter and the delegation also expressed concern about the divisions between the main Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, and vowed to back a Palestinian bid for observer state status at the UN General Assembly in November.
So they finally form a unity government and within two days Israel concocts some false flag regarding teens and off we go!
The group departs on Tuesday for Egypt, where it will meet with newly elected Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
He's long gone, and I need to return to Egypt soon.
In a separate development Monday, Israeli aircraft struck the northern Gaza Strip, killing three Palestinian militants after mortar attacks targeted Israeli troops earlier in the day, officials said.
As usual, when any U.S. official visits the Israelis in one way or another shit in their face. This time they gave Carter the gift of Palestinian blood rather than a settlement expansion announcement.
--more--"
"4 dead in Gaza, Israel border attacks" by Isabel Kershner | New York Times, October 25, 2012
JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants from Gaza fired dozens of rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel overnight Tuesday and into Wednesday morning, critically wounding two Thai workers in an Israeli border community, Israeli authorities said.
Israel has immigrant labor in its settlements?
Four Palestinian militants in rocket-launching squads were killed in Israeli airstrikes, according to Palestinian officials.
The surge in cross-border violence came hours after a landmark visit to Gaza by the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who pledged $400 million for projects there.
Related: Qatar’s emir will visit Hamas-ruled Gaza
Once again I'm told Hamas seized Gaza when they know they did not.
It also came as a major American-Israeli joint military exercise was underway in Israel, underlining the volatility and potential for escalation in the area at a delicate time before the US elections in November and Israeli elections scheduled for January.
Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, warned Wednesday that Israel would not be deterred from carrying out action required to restore quiet in the south.
‘‘If a ground operation will be necessary, there will be a ground operation,’’ he told Israel Radio....
When was this written and reported?
The emir was the first head of state to visit the Gaza Strip since Hamas, the Islamic militant group, took full control of the coastal enclave in 2007, and the gesture was hailed by Hamas as an important breach of the political and economic blockade that has kept Gaza largely isolated.
But early Wednesday, Israel closed the Erez crossing point, the gateway for individuals and aid workers passing between Israel and Gaza, and also shut down the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing for goods, citing the danger from rocket fire. Maher Abu Sabha, the director of crossings in Hamas-run Gaza, said a Hamas police checkpoint near Erez, at the northern end of the territory, was evacuated after an officer was injured by shells that landed there.
The siege is nothing new for Gazans.
A medical spokesman in Gaza also said the Israeli strikes had wounded seven people.
--more--"
"Israel arrests Hamas activists in West Bank" Associated Press, October 30, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israel’s intelligence service has arrested dozens of Hamas members in the West Bank who had been setting up infrastructure for the militant Islamic group there, according to a government statement Monday.
In Hamas-controlled Gaza, militants fired volleys of rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel, triggering an Israeli airstrike....
Yeah, right, Israel is always retaliating.
In Hamas-controlled Gaza, militants fired volleys of rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel, triggering an Israeli airstrike....
Yeah, right, Israel is always retaliating.
Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction.....
Hamas violently took over Gaza in 2007 in bloody street battles from the rival Palestinian group Fatah.
The Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah, has limited powers in the West Bank under Israel’s overall security control and has launched its own crackdown against Hamas.
Makes one wonder how anything could have happened to those teens.
Israel and much of the West deals with the Palestinian Authority, while shunning Hamas.
Israel needs to be shunned by the world.
Also Monday, Israel said its aircraft struck a Palestinian rocket launching pad and an unidentified militant site in the Gaza Strip, in response to persistent rocket and mortar fire from the coastal territory.
Gaza militants launched 21 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel earlier in the day, accord ing to the military’s count. No casualties were reported on either side.
--more--"
"After patrol hit, Israeli army kills 4 in Gaza" by Ibrahim Barzak | Associated Press, November 11, 2012
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinian militants fired an antitank missile at an Israeli jeep patrolling the border with Gaza and the Israelis fired back into the Palestinian territory, killing four civilians, officials and witnesses said.
Israel’s military said four of its soldiers were wounded in the missile attack, including one seriously. Ashraf al-Kidra, a Gaza health ministry spokesman, said all four Palestinians killed were civilians between the ages of 16 and 18 and that among the 25 wounded were children.
The military wing of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took responsibility but it still remains unclear who was behind the attack. The PFLP often takes credit for attacks that later turn out to be the work of Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants....
Or it was more likely an Israeli false flag and provocation.
Later Saturday, a pair of Palestinian rockets landed in an open field in southern Israel....
Witnesses said that after the large explosion that started the incident, Israel retaliated with tank and machine gun fire toward residential areas at the al-Muntar hill in the central part of the territory, hitting people who were returning from a funeral east of Gaza City.
Rami Harra said his 17-year-old brother Muhammad Harra was killed in the strike. ‘‘Why did they kill him?” he said. “I can’t believe my eyes that I am seeing his dead body.’’
--more--"
"Israel and Gaza militants trade fire in escalation; Violence grows as election looms" by Aron Heller | Associated Press, November 12, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israeli forces struck targets in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing one Palestinian and wounding more than 30 others as militants launched dozens of rockets in some of the heaviest fighting the area has seen in months.
The flare-up increased pressure on the Israeli government to put an end to the violence, which escalated over the weekend and could turn into a major conflagration just two months before the country’s general election.
Yeah, right. Looks like a campaign tactic to me.
Israeli leaders quickly amped up their rhetoric, warning Gaza’s Islamist Hamas rulers they will pay a heavy price should they allow rocket fire toward Israel to continue.
‘‘The world must understand that Israel will not sit idly in the face of attempts to attack us,’’ said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. ‘‘We are prepared to intensify the response.’’
Oh, we got the message!
Low-level cross-border fighting is common in the area, but clashes escalated Thursday night when an explosives-packed tunnel under the Gaza-Israel frontier blew up, in what the Israeli military called an attempt by Palestinian militants to kill or kidnap soldiers.
Palestinians said the blast was a roadside bomb to avenge the death of an 11-year-old boy who was shot dead earlier in the evening during an exchange of fire with Israelis.
Then on Saturday, militants fired an antitank missile into an Israeli military jeep patrolling the border fence, wounding four soldiers — one critically. Casualties of that order are rare for the Israeli military in clashes with Gaza militants.
In response, Israel launched airstrikes that have killed six Gazans and wounded almost 40.
Different AP writers must account for the missing information from the day before along with the distortions.
Palestinian rocket and mortar barrages have wounded four Israeli civilians and kept a large swath of the country running for cover.
The military said more than 80 rockets had landed in Israel, and 12,000 Israeli students stayed home from school on Sunday. Later in the day, the military said a Palestinian rocket made a direct hit on an Israeli home in the town of Sderot. No injuries were reported....
Finally a hit!
Nearly four years ago, before the last national election, Israel carried out a broad military offensive in Gaza to stop years of rocket fire. Some 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the operation, including hundreds of civilians. Since then, sporadic rocket fire has continued, but Gaza’s Hamas rulers have largely refrained from major rocket attacks.
Once is an error, twice a pattern I was once told. Three strikes, out!!
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was assessing the situation. He rejected the suggestion that Israel’s upcoming Jan. 22 elections could affect the government’s response to the current round of violence.
‘‘I don’t think the elections have to have any effect on our response,’’ he said. ‘‘It shouldn’t cause us to refrain from acting, it’s not handcuffing us. But it shouldn’t provoke us to take an opportunity to launch an operation.’’
Later, following more rocket attacks, he struck an even stronger tone....
Israel holds Hamas responsible for all violence that comes from Gaza, but Hamas’s active participation in the fighting could prompt Israel to respond more harshly to the attacks.
In a precautionary measure, Hamas evacuated major security installations in fear of an Israeli attack. But political leaders and government officials worked in their offices as usual.
While it remains virulently anti-Israel, Hamas has largely refrained from major attacks over the past four years. It has also sought to keep things quiet as it consolidates control in the territory, which it seized five years ago in a violent takeover.
Again, they won elect.... never frikkin' mind.
It is under pressure, however, from smaller militant groups in Gaza to prove it continues to uphold its armed resistance to Israel, and it sometimes joins the hostilities.
And if Israel always has an enemy then.... chi bono?
--more--"
"Gaza rocket fire increases pressure on Israel to hit back" by Ian Deitch | Associated Press, November 13, 2012
The narrative is always poor Israel and its splendid military under attack from an open-air concentration camp that has no army, navy, or air force.
JERUSALEM — Gaza militants pummeled southern Israel with rockets for a third day in a row Monday, increasing internal pressure on the Israeli government to retaliate.
A million Israelis are in range of the rockets. Israeli leaders have warned they will not tolerate continued barrages and have threatened a more forceful response.
Oh, a million Israelis (magic number that million) under threat -- yet not one dead yet.
Ever notice the ramping up of the Jews under threat narrative coincides with the rising level of Palestinian dead?
Six Palestinians have been killed in Israeli counterstrikes, Palestinians said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told foreign ambassadors Israel would defend itself....
Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with the Israeli military chief of staff and other senior officials Monday evening to determine how to respond to the rocket fire.
Some Israelis are demanding a military operation similar to Israel’s bruising incursion into Gaza four years ago. Others believe Israel should target Hamas leaders, a method it used to kill dozens of top militants nearly a decade ago.
Palestinian health official Ashraf al-Kidra said six Palestinians, including two members of the Islamic Jihad, have been killed and dozens injured in Israeli strikes since the latest fighting began over the weekend.
The Israeli military said it struck rocket launcher squads and a weapons warehouse.
More than 110 rockets have hit Israeli towns since the latest round began, the military said.
At least a dozen rockets slammed into Israel Monday. One rocket hit a house, and another smashed into a factory on Monday, the military said.
Three civilians were injured by shrapnel and dozens were treated for shock when rockets exploded in residential areas, Israel’s emergency rescue services said.
The latest round of violence began when Gaza militants fired an antitank missile at an Israeli jeep patrolling on the Israeli side of the border Saturday, wounding four soldiers.
Actually, it began when Israel killed a teenaged boy, but in a pos jewspaper filled with distortions who notices anymore?
--more--"
"Israel considers assassination tactics; Would target militant leaders over rocket attacks" by Amy Teibel | Associated Press, November 14, 2012
What do you mean considers? They have been doing it all along anyway!
JERUSALEM — Israel is considering resuming its contentious practice of assassinating militant leaders in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in an effort to halt intensified rocket attacks on Israel’s south, according to defense officials.
Yeah, then they scream bloody murder when it boomerangs back on them.
That Israel might renew a practice that brought it harsh international censure is evidence of the tight spot Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in.
Poor Bibi. He is in a tight spot -- while Gaza is the most packed place per mile on the planet.
With Israeli elections two months away, rocket barrages from Gaza are disrupting the lives of 1 million residents of southern Israel, pressuring the government to come up with an effective response.
In the latest flare-up, Gaza militants have fired more than 100 rockets at Israel in recent days, triggering retaliatory Israeli air strikes that have killed six people in Gaza.
Some Israelis are demanding a harsh military move, perhaps a repeat of Israel’s bruising incursion into Gaza four years ago.
This all sounds so familiar.
Others believe Israel should target Hamas leaders, a method it used to kill dozens of militants nearly a decade ago.
Advocates say targeted killings are an effective deterrent without the complications associated with a ground operation, chiefly civilian and Israeli troop casualties. Proponents argue they also prevent future attacks by removing their masterminds.
Critics say they invite retaliation by militants and encourage them to try to assassinate Israeli leaders.
The last guy to do that was a hard-line Zionist zettler.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday visited the southern city of Beesheba, where he told municipal officials that Israel will strike back against the Palestinian attacks.
‘‘Whoever believes they can harm the daily lives of the residents of the south and not pay a heavy price is mistaken. I am responsible for choosing the right time to collect the highest price and so it shall be,’’ Netanyahu said.
Defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the assassination of Hamas leaders is shaping up as the preferred response to the stepped-up rocket fire.
They have the backing of two former military chiefs with experience in the matter.
Opposition lawmaker Shaul Mofaz served as military chief of staff and defense minister when Israel began a wave of assassinations against Hamas and other militant leaders in the early part of the past decade.
Those look like crimes against humanity to me. Certainly against international law in some form.
He and other former senior defense officials contend these assassinations left the Hamas leadership in disarray and put a halt to the rash of Hamas suicide bombings that killed hundreds of Israelis.
‘‘I’m in favor of targeted killings,’’ Mofaz told Army Radio on Monday. ‘‘It is a policy that led Hamas to understand, during the suicide bombings, that they would pay the price should [the bombings] continue.’’
Now all Gazans are doing it for something that happened in the West Bank.
Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff at the time targeted killings surged, is convinced the practice worked.
You can talk yourself into believing anything, right?
‘‘Clearly over these past 13 years there has been an ongoing war, but there have also been extended periods of calm,’’ Yaalon told Army Radio on Monday. ‘‘When I was chief of staff, the targeted killings against Hamas led to extended periods of quiet.’’
Hamas dismissed the threat of targeted killings as ‘‘psychological warfare,’’ and its political leaders were not in hiding. The group’s military commanders tend to keep a low profile anyway, for fear of Israeli assassination attempts.
Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, visited a Gaza hospital on Tuesday and met with Palestinians wounded in the latest fighting.
Israel has been bombing hospitals this time.
‘‘Threats of assassination and killing do not scare us and will not break our morale or our steadfastness,’’ he told reporters.
When you live under something for so long....
--more--"
"Israeli strikes on Gaza kill Hamas official" by Fares Akram and Isabel Kershner | New York Times, November 15, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israel launched its most ferocious assault on Gaza in four years Wednesday after persistent Palestinian rocket fire, hitting at least 20 targets in aerial attacks that killed the top military commander of Hamas, damaged Israel’s fragile relations with Egypt, and escalated risks of a new war in the Middle East.
The Israel Defense Forces coupled the intensity of the airstrikes with the threat of a ground invasion of Gaza similar to its three-week operation in the winter of 2008-09, shifting infantry brigades and calling up some specialist reserves.
They did it in 2014.
The Israelis also warned all Hamas leaders in Gaza to stay out of sight or risk the same fate as the Hamas military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, who was killed in a pinpoint airstrike as he was riding in a car down a Gaza street.
‘‘We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead,’’ the Israel Defense Forces said in a Twitter message. Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, the military spokesman, said, ‘‘If I were a senior Hamas activist, I would look for a place to hide.’’
Can't go in the tunnels this time!
The escalation in hostilities between Israel and Hamas, the militant organization regarded by Israel as a terrorist group sworn to its destruction, prompted Egypt to recall its ambassador and demand meetings of the UN Security Council and the Arab League.
Repeat it enough I might start believing -- NOT!
Israel had already been facing growing tensions with its Arab neighbors. Israel has confronted lawlessness on its border with Sinai, including cross-border attacks. It recently fired twice into Syria, which is caught in a civil war, after munitions fell in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and it has absorbed more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel this year. The rockets have hit homes, caused injuries, and frightened the population.
Yeah, yeah, poor Israel under attack from all sides, but none killed.
It is both the rocket fire and the buildup of advanced weaponry in Gaza that has increasingly tested Israeli officials and prompted such an intense attack, according to military experts in Israel.
Man, this narrative is getting dull.
‘‘Deterrence has to be maintained,’’ said Gabi Siboni, a colonel in the reserves who leads the military and strategic affairs program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. ‘‘It was only a question of time until this moment arrived.’’
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza said the Israeli attacks killed at least five others besides Jabari, including a baby and a 7-year-old girl, and had wounded at least 40.
The ferocity of the airstrikes provoked rage in Gaza, where Hamas said the campaign amounted to war and promised a harsh response. It quickly launched dozens of rockets into southern Israel. Several barrages struck the city of Beersheba, shattering windows and damaging cars but causing no injuries.
Civil-defense authorities in Israel, anticipating retaliation, instructed residents within a 25-mile radius of Gaza not to go to school or work Thursday. Many remained indoors or congregated in bomb shelters.
Mordechai said the operation ‘‘would continue and grow.’’ The military said it was designed to ‘‘severely impair the command and control chain of the Hamas leadership.’’
By targeting Jabari, 52, the Israelis said they had killed the mastermind of virtually every attack to come from Gaza in recent years, including the kidnapping in 2006 of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Jabari was involved in the negotiations to release Shalit, whose five years as a prisoner was a source of national anguish. When he was finally released through Egypt, Jabari made a rare public appearance alongside him.
I'm starting to think it was Israel and their allies holding him the whole time.
The attacks on Gaza were undertaken at a delicate time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, nine weeks before elections, and may have partly reflected his administration’s own sense that it needed to send a message of deterrence beyond Gaza....
In Washington, the White House issued a carefully worded statement saying that President Obama had spoken with both Netanyahu and President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, reiterating to both that the United States supports Israel’s right to self-defense from the rocket attacks.
The statement said that Obama had urged Netanyahu to ‘‘make every effort to avoid civilian casualties,’’ and that Obama and Morsi ‘‘had agreed on the importance of working to de-escalate the situation as quickly as possible.’’
Morsi long gone because he flung that border wide open.
--more--"
"Tensions mount along Gaza border" by Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone | New York Times, November 16, 2012
KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — Israel and Hamas brushed aside international calls for restraint Thursday and escalated their lethal conflict over Gaza, where Palestinian militants launched hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, targeting Tel Aviv for the first time, and Israel intensified its aerial assaults and sent tanks rumbling toward the Gaza border for a possible invasion.
All the lethality has been on the Palestine side!
Oh, as today that is pure psyop mind manipulation of the Israeli public!
He authorized the call-up of 30,000 army reservists if needed, another sign that Israel was preparing to invade Gaza for the second time in four years to crush what it considers an unacceptable security threat from smuggled rockets amassed by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs the isolated coastal enclave and does not recognize Israel’s right to exist.
It was not clear whether the show of Israeli force on the ground in fact portended an invasion or was meant as more of an intimidation tactic to further pressure Hamas leaders, who had all been forced into hiding on Wednesday after the Israelis killed the group’s military chief in a pinpoint aerial bombing....
Killed a couple of kids and a mom, too, but.....
Although Tel Aviv was not hit Thursday and the rockets heading toward the city of 400,000 apparently fell harmlessly elsewhere, the ability of militants 40 miles away to fire those weapons underscored, in the Israeli government’s view, the justification for the intensive aerial assaults on hundreds of suspected rocket storage sites and other targets in Gaza.
It's the same script every time!
Health officials in Gaza said at least 19 people, including five children and a pregnant teenager, had been killed over two days of nearly nonstop aerial attacks by Israel, and dozens had been wounded. Three Israelis were killed Thursday in Kiryat Malachi, this small southern Israeli town, when a rocket fired from Gaza struck their apartment house.
For those who say I do not highlight Israeli dead.
In a sign of solidarity with Hamas as well as a diplomatic move to ease the crisis, President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt ordered his prime minister to lead a delegation to Gaza on Friday.
Now you know why, among other things (like rejecting the IMF austerity program), Morsi is in prison.
In another diplomatic signal, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, also planned to visit Jerusalem, Cairo, and Ramallah, the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, in the coming days.
In Washington, Obama administration officials said they had asked friendly Arab countries with ties to Hamas, which the United States and Israel regard as a terrorist group, to use their influence to seek a way to defuse the hostilities.
At the same time, however, a State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, reiterated to reporters the US position that Israel had a right to defend itself from the rocket fire and that the ‘‘onus was on Hamas’’ to stop it.
There was no sign that either side was prepared, at least not yet, to restore the uneasy truce that has mostly prevailed since the last time the Israelis invaded Gaza in the winter of 2008-09, a three-week war that left 1,400 Palestinians dead and drew widespread international condemnation.
Denunciations of Israel for what critics called a renewal of its aggressive and disproportionate attacks spread quickly on the second day of the aerial assaults. The biggest criticism came from the 120-nation Nonaligned Movement, the largest bloc at the United Nations. In a statement released by Iran, which holds the group’s rotating presidency and is one of Israel’s most ardent foes, the group said: ‘‘Israel, the occupying power, is, once more, escalating its military campaign against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip.’’ The group made no mention of the Palestinian rocket fire aimed at Israel but condemned ‘‘this act of aggression by the Israelis and their resort to force against the defenseless people’’ and demanded ‘‘decisive action by the UN Security Council.’’
I think it is the DEATH TOLLS that are the TELLING FACTORS here!
For his part, Netanyahu accused Hamas of placing thousands of smuggled rockets into civilian areas, including near schools and hospitals, and firing them randomly into Israel without regard to where they landed....
Whine, whine, whine.
The Israel Defense Forces said that within hours of the Tel Aviv air raid warning, they had attacked 70 underground rocket-launching sites in Gaza, and ‘‘direct hits were confirmed.’’ There were also unconfirmed reports that Israeli rockets had struck near Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt, forcing the Egyptians to close it.
Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said its aerial assaults had hit more than 300 sites in Gaza by late Thursday, and ‘‘we’ll continue tonight and tomorrow.’’ He also said militants in Gaza had fired more than 300 rockets into southern Israel and at least 130 more had been intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system.
We will be going under the dome above.
Southern Israel had been the target of more than 750 rockets fired from Gaza this year that hit homes and caused injuries.
Among the dozens fired Thursday was one that smashed into a four-story apartment building in Kiryat Malachi, which resulted in the first Israeli civilian deaths.
It was just after 8 a.m. when the sirens blared in Kiryat Malachi, a largely working-class town of 20,000 about 15 miles north of Gaza, which had not suffered a direct hit by rockets from Gaza before.
Ever notice the articles always end with Jewish suffering?
--more--"
"Israel readies Gaza invasion as Hamas rockets zero in" by Karin Brulliard | Washington Post, November 17, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israel prepared for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip on Friday as Hamas militants continued to lob rockets into Israel, one of which landed near Jerusalem for the first time since 1970.
The rocket strikes outside Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel’s main population centers, sharply raised the stakes in the ongoing standoff between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, providing sobering evidence that Palestinian militants possess weaponry that can strike deeper inside Israel than ever before. In particular, the strike on Jerusalem — a city both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital — was viewed as a major provocation that made an Israeli ground invasion seem ever more likely.
While Israeli officials maintained that they did not seek war, the intent to send a loud warning to Hamas was evident. By nightfall, the Israeli military said it had closed three roads leading to Gaza, in a further sign of a possible ground invasion, and a spokesman said paratroopers and infantry soldiers were in southern Israel awaiting orders from political leaders.
‘‘Israeli citizens, like any other people, deserve peace and quiet, so they can go about living their lives,’’ Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told CNN on Friday. ‘‘If we will see in the next 24, 36 hours more rockets launched at us, I think that would be the trigger’’ for a ground operation, he said.
How about Gazans?
A ground operation might be seen as necessary to hobble Hamas’ still-potent military capabilities in Gaza, the stated goal of the three-day-old Israeli operation. But it is a risky proposition, particularly two months before national elections in Israel.
In 2014 it is not risky. Off-year elections just concluded.
While the air offensive has won support from the public and opposition politicians, buttressing Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s already strong security credentials, a ground war could be protracted and messy.
Oh, this bolstered them in the polls right before the election, huh?
After an initial announcement that Israel had called up 16,000 reservists, Barak said Friday that he had authorized additional call-ups, and local news reports said the new figure was 75,000 troops.
Four years ago, Israel sent ground troops into Gaza one week after the start of an operation also intended to halt unremitting rocket attacks on Israeli population centers by Hamas, an Islamist movement that the United States and Israel consider a terrorist organization. It ended two weeks later amid loud international criticism and left 13 Israelis and more than 1,000 Palestinians dead, hundreds among them civilians.
More than 1400, but who wants to quibble over numbers when it comes to unique souls?
Casualties have been far lower in the current operation, suggesting that Israel is highly motivated to avoid a repeat of Cast Lead, as the 2008-2009 operation was code-named. By Friday night, Gaza medical officials said 30 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli airstrikes. Three Israelis have been killed by the rocket fire coming out of Gaza.
Friday began with a temporary truce between Israel and the Gaza militants to accommodate a visit to the coastal strip by Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil. But the cease-fire quickly crumbled, as the Palestinians launched new waves of attacks, and Gaza residents said Israel responded with renewed airstrikes. The Israeli military denied that....
Even if the rocket missed by a handful of miles, targeting Jerusalem was a surprisingly risky move that carried the potential of a major backlash — not just from Israel, but from the Palestinian public and Hamas’ Arab allies. East Jerusalem is home to hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and the al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City is Islam’s third-holiest site.
Which immediately raises the question WHY would PALESTINIANS DO IT?
‘‘We are sending a short and simple message: There is no security for any Zionist on any single inch of Palestine, and we plan more surprises,’’ Abu Obaida, a spokesman for the Hamas militant wing, told the Associated Press.
So AP says.
Odd seeing Cast Lead and Zionist, too.
Earlier Friday, Kandil and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh toured Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. As a scrum of photographers and camera crews recorded the moment, Kandil placed his hand on the head of a young boy killed in a recent strike.
‘‘I have seen now Gaza, and the hospital, and the martyred child Mohammed Yasser,’’ Kandil said, pausing as he choked up with emotion.
Related: Reporter breaks into tears live on air
Must be why their offices were shot at.
Flanked by guards in olive flak jackets, he lifted his arms to show reporters spots of blood on the sleeves of his suit jacket. ‘‘These are the signs, the blood spatters of our brethren,’’ Kandil said. ‘‘This tragedy cannot be ignored, and the whole world has to shoulder the responsibility to stop its aggression. We are standing with you.’’
What I want is the NATO powers and United States to do is confront Israel militarily. Have the warships start bombing Tel Aviv.
A deployment of troops into Gaza would probably face little political opposition in Israel, where the operation has gotten widespread support and amounted to a political victory for Netanyahu, if not yet a military one.
He did win reelection!
Labor Party chair Shelly Yacimovich, a reliable Netanyahu critic, described the assassination of the Hamas military chief that opened the offensive as ‘‘amazing.’’
Yes, watching rabid Israeli MPs call for extermination of Palestinians has been most distasteful.
On Friday, President Shimon Peres, who often serves as a dovish counterweight to Netanyahu, said: ‘‘This is not the launch of a war, but a justified defense of our civilians.’’
Some range of debate there! The Zionist dove!
One of those Israeli civilians, Katya Fayngart, a 28-year-old resident of the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, said she had faith that Netanyahu was working to stop the sirens that during calm times send her racing, with her husband and baby, to their stairwell at least twice a week. These days, she said, the drill happens multiple times an hour.
‘‘We have to trust him to get us to the point when we can live our lives,’’ she said.
Many Gazans say they think politics drove the Israeli decision to strike the strip, which Israeli officials deny. According to a report in Haaretz newspaper on Friday, Barak — who is also seeking votes for his small political party — said the trigger was a rare opportunity to assassinate Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jabari. Netanyahu was already a clear favorite in the coming elections.
Some Israeli political analysts say that if the timing was motivated by the election, it was poorly calculated. Two months leaves much room for political damage if, say, civilian casualties, international opposition, or rockets on Tel Aviv rise.
Netanyahu would prefer to keep Iran’s nuclear program, not Gaza, his signature security issue, but rocket attacks from Gaza threatened to make him look weak, said Reuven Hazan, chair of the political science department at Hebrew University.
So laying out bodies of dead Palestinian civilians is making him look tough? Bombing Gaza, for lack of a better analogy, is like shooting fish in a barrel.
‘‘The prime minister is now putting his political campaign in the hands of every pilot in the air. The pilots are extremely well-trained, and they’re elite. It isn’t the same with ground troops,’’ he said, adding: ‘‘Unless we’re willing to go into Gaza and just level the place, we’re not going to win.’’
Okay, they were saying that two years ago!
Btw, this myth the Israeli government and its worldwide ma$$ media operation have promoted that Israel is somehow as unstoppable as the Nazi war machine is dangerous. Feels like it is full of hubris given Israel hasn't won a war in decades. They got the crap kicked out of them the last time when they went into Lebanon in 2006.
It's easy to pick on Palestinians. They are LITERALLY a CAPTIVE PEOPLE!
--more--"
"Israeli assault hits Hamas government buildings; Violent conflict in Gaza rages on through 4th day" by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 18, 2012
So AP says.
Odd seeing Cast Lead and Zionist, too.
Earlier Friday, Kandil and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh toured Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. As a scrum of photographers and camera crews recorded the moment, Kandil placed his hand on the head of a young boy killed in a recent strike.
‘‘I have seen now Gaza, and the hospital, and the martyred child Mohammed Yasser,’’ Kandil said, pausing as he choked up with emotion.
Related: Reporter breaks into tears live on air
Must be why their offices were shot at.
Flanked by guards in olive flak jackets, he lifted his arms to show reporters spots of blood on the sleeves of his suit jacket. ‘‘These are the signs, the blood spatters of our brethren,’’ Kandil said. ‘‘This tragedy cannot be ignored, and the whole world has to shoulder the responsibility to stop its aggression. We are standing with you.’’
What I want is the NATO powers and United States to do is confront Israel militarily. Have the warships start bombing Tel Aviv.
A deployment of troops into Gaza would probably face little political opposition in Israel, where the operation has gotten widespread support and amounted to a political victory for Netanyahu, if not yet a military one.
He did win reelection!
Labor Party chair Shelly Yacimovich, a reliable Netanyahu critic, described the assassination of the Hamas military chief that opened the offensive as ‘‘amazing.’’
Yes, watching rabid Israeli MPs call for extermination of Palestinians has been most distasteful.
On Friday, President Shimon Peres, who often serves as a dovish counterweight to Netanyahu, said: ‘‘This is not the launch of a war, but a justified defense of our civilians.’’
Some range of debate there! The Zionist dove!
One of those Israeli civilians, Katya Fayngart, a 28-year-old resident of the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, said she had faith that Netanyahu was working to stop the sirens that during calm times send her racing, with her husband and baby, to their stairwell at least twice a week. These days, she said, the drill happens multiple times an hour.
‘‘We have to trust him to get us to the point when we can live our lives,’’ she said.
Many Gazans say they think politics drove the Israeli decision to strike the strip, which Israeli officials deny. According to a report in Haaretz newspaper on Friday, Barak — who is also seeking votes for his small political party — said the trigger was a rare opportunity to assassinate Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jabari. Netanyahu was already a clear favorite in the coming elections.
Some Israeli political analysts say that if the timing was motivated by the election, it was poorly calculated. Two months leaves much room for political damage if, say, civilian casualties, international opposition, or rockets on Tel Aviv rise.
Netanyahu would prefer to keep Iran’s nuclear program, not Gaza, his signature security issue, but rocket attacks from Gaza threatened to make him look weak, said Reuven Hazan, chair of the political science department at Hebrew University.
So laying out bodies of dead Palestinian civilians is making him look tough? Bombing Gaza, for lack of a better analogy, is like shooting fish in a barrel.
‘‘The prime minister is now putting his political campaign in the hands of every pilot in the air. The pilots are extremely well-trained, and they’re elite. It isn’t the same with ground troops,’’ he said, adding: ‘‘Unless we’re willing to go into Gaza and just level the place, we’re not going to win.’’
Okay, they were saying that two years ago!
Btw, this myth the Israeli government and its worldwide ma$$ media operation have promoted that Israel is somehow as unstoppable as the Nazi war machine is dangerous. Feels like it is full of hubris given Israel hasn't won a war in decades. They got the crap kicked out of them the last time when they went into Lebanon in 2006.
It's easy to pick on Palestinians. They are LITERALLY a CAPTIVE PEOPLE!
--more--"
"Israeli assault hits Hamas government buildings; Violent conflict in Gaza rages on through 4th day" by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 18, 2012
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israel broadened its assault on the Gaza Strip on Saturday from mostly military targets to centers of government infrastructure, obliterating the four-story headquarters of the Hamas prime minister with a barrage of five bombs.
The attack came a day after the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, hosted his Egyptian counterpart in that very building, a sign of Hamas’ new legitimacy in a radically redrawn Arab world.
That stature was underscored Saturday by a visit to Gaza from the Tunisian foreign minister and the rapid convergence in Cairo of two Hamas allies, the prime minister of Turkey and the crown prince of Qatar, for talks with the Egyptian president and the chairman of Hamas on a possible cease-fire.
But the violent conflict showed no sign of abating as it finished its fourth day. Gaza militants again fired long-range missiles at the population center of Tel Aviv, among nearly 60 that soared into Israel on Saturday, injuring five civilians in an apartment building in Ashdod, in southern Israel, and four soldiers in an unidentified location.
Israel said it hit more than 200 targets overnight and continued with afternoon strikes on a Hamas commander’s home in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun and on a motorcycle-riding militant in the southern border town of Rafah. Israel has also made preparations for a possible ground invasion.
Afternoon delight!
Hamas health officials said 45 Palestinians had been killed and 385 wounded since Wednesday’s escalation in the cross-border battle; three Israelis have died and 63 civilians have been injured.
Even the wounded is disproportionate.
“Everybody is afraid of what’s next,’’ said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, predicting that the rockets fired at Tel Aviv and, on Friday, at Jerusalem, would provoke a rerun of Israel’s ground invasion four years ago.
That is what we are getting now.
Abusada and Efraim Halevy, a former head of Israel’s intelligence service, both said there is no clear endgame to the conflict, since Israel wants to neither reengage in Gaza nor to eliminate Hamas and leave the territory to the chaos of more militant factions.
Yes there is; Israel takes back Gaza and the West Bank, problem solved.
‘‘Ultimately,’’ Halevy said, ‘‘both sides want Hamas to remain in control, strange as it sounds.’’
Bull.
**************************************
Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Asia that the president had spoken daily with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel since the crisis began, as well as to Erdogan and Morsi.
‘‘They have the ability to play a constructive role in engaging Hamas and encouraging a process of de-escalation,’’ Rhodes said of the Turkish and Egyptian leaders. Describing rocket fire coming from Gaza as ‘‘the precipitating factor for the conflict,’’ he added, ‘‘We believe Israel has a right to defend itself and they’ll make their own decisions about the tactics that they use in that regard.’’
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the Tunisian foreign minister, standing outside Al-Shifa Hospital here, told reporters that Israel ‘‘has to respect the international law to stop the aggression against the Palestinian people.’’
The Tunisian government was soon overthrown!
Netanyahu, for his part, spoke Saturday with the leaders of Germany, Italy, Greece, and the Czech Republic, according to a statement from his office.
Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli military, met with his top commanders and instructed his troops ‘‘to continue attacking with full force in the Gaza Strip and to increase the rate of attacks on terrorist targets,’’ according to a military statement. A senior military official who briefed reporters said Israel had hit nearly 1,000 sites since Wednesday in what he called ‘‘intelligence-driven precision strikes,’’ and described civilian casualties as ‘‘regrettable’’ but unavoidable because the ‘‘terrorist infrastructure is embedded inside the population.’’
Israel’s stated goals for the operation are reclaiming calm for its residents, deterring further rocket attacks, and crippling Hamas’ military capabilities. The expansion of the assault to government buildings suggested Israel may be running out of targets relating to the long-range rockets that present the greatest threat, but Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s spokesman, played down the idea that new attacks represented a shift.
Hamas ‘‘makes no distinction between its terrorist military machine and the government structure,’’ he said. ‘‘We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons.’’
The 4 a.m. strike on Haniyeh’s office was as much a psychological blow as a tactical one.
I'm sick of not only the agenda-pushing, war-promoting, mind-manipulating media psyops propaganda, but the endless and whining drone of a certain tribe.
A singed copy of the official Palestinian book of laws lay amid the huge pile of rubble the building was reduced to, along with datebooks and personnel records listing the bank accounts for depositing police officers’ paychecks...
Did it go down as fast as a WTC tower on 9/11?
The point of that strike was to destroy commerce and put pressure on police.
--more--"
"Israel delivers deadly airstrike, warning to Hamas; Attack kills 11 in Gaza; threat of expansion issued" by Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 19, 2012
You will soon see why I don't trust a word from them.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces killed at least 11 people, including several children, in a single airstrike that destroyed a home here on Sunday, as Israel pressed its bombardment of the Gaza Strip for a fifth day, deploying warplanes and naval vessels to pummel the coastal enclave.
That is precision?
The airstrike, which the Israeli military said was meant to kill a Palestinian militant involved in the recent rocket attacks, was the deadliest operation in the recent clashes and was expected to weigh on negotiations for a possible cease-fire.
Among the dead were five women and four small children, the Associated Press reported, citing a Palestinian health official. In all, 73 Palestinians, including 37 civilians, had been killed in the five-day onslaught. Three Israeli civilians had also died and more than 60 have been injured from Palestinian rocket fire.
Two Gaza media offices were also hit on Sunday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned of a ‘‘significant’’ expansion in the offensive unless Hamas halted the rocket barrage.
On Monday, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted as Israeli aircraft struck densely populated areas in the Gaza Strip in its campaign to quell militant rocket fire, the Associated Press reported.
Overnight, an airstrike leveled two houses, killing two children and two adults and injuring 42 people, said Gaza heath official Ashraf al-Kidra. A missile strike on a pickup truck killed three members of the radical Islamic Jihad group, said Hamas security officials.
Cease-fire talks began in Cairo on Sunday, but both sides were digging in, officials close to negotiations said.
An emboldened Hamas made sweeping demands, including the permanent opening of the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt and the end of the Israeli blockade.
This does read like today's articles!
Hamas, badly outgunned on the battlefield, appeared to be trying to exploit its increased political clout with its ideological allies in Egypt’s new Islamist-led government.
Even as the diplomacy intensified, the attacks continued in Gaza and Israel. Palestinian militants fired more than 100 rockets into Israel on Sunday.
Do Palestinians have a right to defend themselves?
Speaking on Sunday from Bangkok, President Obama condemned missile attacks by Palestinian fighters in Gaza and said that Israel had a right to protect itself.
‘‘There’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,’’ Obama said in his first public comments since the violence broke out. ‘‘We are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.’’
What else is new?
The president also said that efforts were underway to address Israel’s security concerns and end the violence. ‘‘We’re going to have to see what kind of progress we can make in the next 24, 36, 48 hours,’’ he said.
He then dropped to his knees, unzipped fly, lowered trousers.... I'll let you fill in the rest.
Militants in Gaza aimed at least one rocket at Tel Aviv on Sunday, a day after Israeli forces broadened the attack beyond military targets, bombing centers of government infrastructure in Gaza, including the four-story headquarters of the Hamas prime minister.
“We are exacting a heavy price from Hamas and the terrorist organizations,’’ Netanyahu told his cabinet at its Sunday meeting.
His remarks were reported shortly after a battery of Israel’s Iron Dome defense shield, hastily deployed near Tel Aviv on Saturday in response to the threat of longer-range rockets, intercepted at least one aimed at the city on Sunday, Israeli officials said. It was the latest of several salvos that have illustrated Hamas’s ability to extend the reach of its rocket attacks.
Since Wednesday, when the escalation of the conflict began, Iron Dome has knocked 245 rockets out of the sky, the military said Saturday, while 500 have struck Israel.
The US-financed system is designed to intercept only rockets streaking toward towns and cities and to ignore those expected to strike open ground.
This at a time of imposed hardship here at home!
But on Sunday a rocket fired from Gaza plowed through the roof of an apartment building in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. There were no immediate reports of casualties there.
So the system doesn't work, either?
I wonder who holds the war-profiteering contract.
In Gaza City, the crash of explosions pierced the quiet several times throughout the early morning. A Hamas militant was killed and seven people were wounded in an attack on the Beach Refugee Camp, where Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, has a home. Those killed included three children ages 1 through 5, the health officials said.
Related: Israeli strike kills four Palestinian children playing soccer on Gaza beach
Seems to be a repeating pattern; ball must have been a bomb.
Talks continued in Cairo that President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt said Saturday night could soon result in a cease-fire. Netanyahu said he would consider a comprehensive cease-fire if the launchings from Gaza stopped.
The attack on Haniyeh’s office, one of several on government installations, came a day after he hosted his Egyptian counterpart in the same building, a sign of Hamas’s new legitimacy in a radically redrawn Arab world.
Then it was redrawn again!
That stature was underscored Saturday by a visit to Gaza from the Tunisian foreign minister and trips to Cairo by two Hamas allies, the prime minister of Turkey and the crown prince of Qatar, for talks with the Egyptian president and the chairman of Hamas on a possible cease-fire.
--more--"
"Hamas chief scoffs at Israel’s ground invasion threat; Gaza death toll at 107; strike kills militant leader" by Alan Cowell and Fares Akram | New York Times, November 20, 2012
No scoffing this time.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — The top leader of Hamas dared Israel on Monday to launch a ground invasion of Gaza and dismissed diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire in the six-day-old conflict, as the Israeli military countered Gazan rockets with a new wave of deadly airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave.
They took the dare in 2014!
The airstrikes have killed more than 100 Palestinians since they began Wednesday. Monday’s strikes included a second hit on a 15-story Gaza City building that houses media outlets, in which a top militant leader was killed. Among the volley of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel on Monday was one that hit a vacant school.
The Palestinians have volleys; Israel a single strike or wave here and there, then it's over. They don't call it the Jew York Times for nothing!
Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, where the diplomatic efforts were underway, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, suggested that the Israeli infantry mobilization on the border with Gaza was a bluff on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
‘‘If you wanted to launch it, you would have done it,’’ Meshal told reporters. He accused Israel of using the invasion threat as an attempt to ‘‘dictate its own terms and force us into silence.’’
Rejecting Israel’s contention that Hamas had precipitated the conflict, Meshal said the burden was on the Israelis. ‘‘The demand of the people of Gaza is meeting their legitimate demands — for Israel to be restrained from its aggression, assassinations, and invasions, and for the siege over Gaza to be ended,’’ he said.
You called his bluff.
International leaders stepped up efforts to broker a cease-fire. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon traveled to Cairo to make a personal appeal for an end to the violence....
President Obama’s administration worked behind the scenes to end the fighting....
PFFFT!
The latest Gaza casualties — 22 people reported killed since midnight local time — included Palestinians killed in strikes by warplanes, a drone attack on two men on a motorcycle, and a father and two toddler sons in their bombed northern Gaza home, witnesses and medical sources said.
On Tuesday, Israeli aircraft battered the headquarters of the Gaza Strip bank the territory’s Hamas rulers set up to sidestep international sanctions.
The inside of the bank was destroyed, and a building supply business in the basement was damaged.
On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets.
And they GET AWAY WITH IT ALL THE TIME! Shows you the FECKLESSNESS of the Jewish-owned media!
Israeli officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multiuse building where many local broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al Arabiya, had offices.
But?
Israel says its onslaught is designed to stop Hamas from launching the rockets, but, after an apparent lull overnight, more missiles hurtled toward targets in Israel, some of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.
Of five rockets fired on Monday at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, four were intercepted but one smashed through the roof at the entrance to an empty school, causing damage but no casualties....
--more--"
"At funeral for Gaza victims, calls for resistance and revenge" by Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 20, 2012
They occasionally bent to kiss the boy’s bare and bloodied head or shrouded feet. But they had to jog to stay ahead of the body of his father on a grand wooden pallet, and thousands who thronged on all sides.
There were few if any visible tears at the intense, chaotic, lengthy funeral Monday of Jamal and seven relatives, among 12 people killed the day before in the single deadliest attack since the latest hostilities between Israel and the Gaza Strip began Wednesday.
Instead, there were fingers jabbing the air to signal ‘‘Allah is the only one,’’ defiant chants about resistance and calls for revenge, flags in the signature green of Hamas and the white of its Al Qassam Brigades.
Don't behave like Israelis.
At the destroyed Dalu family home, a man climbed atop the pile of rubble where a dozen photographers had positioned themselves and hoisted the body of one of the four slain children into the air several times, as though a totem.
At the mosque, the eulogy was disrupted by the launching of a missile bound for Israel. And at the cemetery, a Qassam commander addressed not the mourners but to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, warning, ‘‘We still have so much in our pockets, and we will show you if we have to.’’
Isn't Qassam a Fatah outfit?
Much of the militant pageantry was probably meant as a message for the news media, and thus the world, given how the Dalus had instantly become the face of the Palestinian casualty count.
But the tone, far more fundamentalist than funereal, was also a potent sign of the culture of martyrdom that pervades this place, and the numbness many here have developed to death and destruction after years of cross-border conflict.
JWho wrote this again?
“This blood which was provided by your family will not go in vain,’’ a Hamas minister told the mourners at the mosque. ‘‘The rights of these children, the rights of these little flowers, is on our neck.’’
Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibovich, an Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman, said it was still looking into the Sunday strike on the Dalu home, which she called an accident.
PFFFFT!
--more--"
"US joins mounting effort for Israel-Hamas truce" by David D. Kirkpatrick and Ethan Bronner | New York Times, November 21, 2012
JERUSALEM — The total fatalities in Gaza.... more than 130....
Really all I'm looking for now.
The Israeli assaults carried into early Wednesday, with multiple blasts punctuating the otherwise darkened Gaza skies....
While President Obama publicly stressed Israel’s right to self-defense because of domestic political concerns, officials said the administration also had decided to take an understanding approach to Morsi’s need to denounce Israel in order to appeal to his domestic audience.
‘‘We know that the Egyptians have their domestic politics as well,’’ one US official said, and each president understood the other’s political context. ‘‘But they both agree that this nonsense can’t go on.’’
I agree.
Officials of Morsi’s government acknowledged that the Gaza battle had put them in a bind. As Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Morsi must respond to a public deeply angry at Israel and eager to rally behind the Palestinians. ‘‘But if he responds fully to public opinion, he risks what we have been trying to do for peace and stability in the region,’’ a senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
We all know what happened to him.
Indeed, despite the Egyptian government’s caustic statements about Israel and noisy solidarity with Hamas, several US officials said Morsi and the new Islamist government needed no encouragement in its efforts to push for an end to not only the Israeli bombing but also Hamas’s missile fire.
But Israel wants guarantees that Egypt will stop the flow of arms into Gaza from Sinai, and that seems a tall order. Egypt has been unable to control Sinai and would not want to be seen in the role of Israeli enforcer. Egypt is hoping Hamas will restrain itself on missile imports, but it is far from clear that Hamas wants to or can, given the range of forces in Gaza vying for power, including the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad.
Within Hamas itself, there are divisions and fractured views on the truce negotiations. In Gaza on Tuesday, Fawzi Barhoum, the Hamas spokesman, said that ‘‘we hold absolutely no hope of Hillary Clinton’’ helping to resolve the conflict.
She would undoubtedly make things worse.
Obama, who was in Asia, had found himself repeatedly on the phone with Middle Eastern leaders in recent days and decided that Clinton, who also spoke to a dozen of her counterparts here, could make the difference in setting a cease-fire.
Nope, nor can John Kerry.
Netanyahu’s calculations are numerous. He has an election looming in January, and agreeing to stop his operation in Gaza could be risky if rocket fire resumed. But sending troops into Gaza poses perhaps even more risks.
‘‘The Israeli government will face its voters without any tangible achievement in hand to show,’’ Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, wrote Tuesday. He said that he did not believe Netanyahu had begun this operation with electoral considerations in mind, but that ‘‘the deliberations about ending it are deeply affected by political calculations.’’
Netanyahu is also contending with a radically altered Middle East, and while he says that protecting his people is not dependent on who is in power in Egypt or Turkey, a reduced military operation and fewer civilian casualties in Gaza would make relations with both countries less difficult.
--more--"
"Israel, Hamas accept cease-fire; US, Egypt broker deal; talks will focus on grievances" by David D. Kirkpatrick and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 22, 2012
A big day, but for different reasons.
CAIRO — Violence killed more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis over the last week....
A 30-to-1 ratio.
Gazans poured into the streets declaring victory against the far more powerful Israeli military.
Giving them all they can handle now, too!
In Israel, the public reaction was far more subdued. Many residents in the south expressed doubt that the agreement would hold, partly because at least five Palestinian rockets thudded into southern Israel after the cease-fire began....
Which zettlers set those off?
The deal demonstrated the pragmatism of Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, who balanced public support for Hamas with a determination to preserve the peace with Israel. But it was unclear whether the agreement would be a turning point or merely a lull in the conflict.
Too bad he is long gone, and it was only a lull.
The cease-fire deal was reached only through a final US diplomatic push: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred for hours with Morsi and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at the presidential palace in Egypt.
What are they waiting for now?
Hanging over the talks was the Israeli shock at a Tel Aviv bus bombing — praised by Hamas — that recalled past Palestinian uprisings and raised fears of heavy Israeli retaliation. After false hopes the day before, Western and Egyptian diplomats said they had all but given up hope for a quick end to the violence....
Oh, ANOTHER ISRAELI FALSE FLAG at a very inopportune time? C'mon!!!!
There were immediate questions about the durability of the deal....
Khaled Meshal, the top leader of Hamas, thanked Iran for its military support at a triumphal news conference in Cairo. ‘‘This is a point on the way to a great defeat for Israel,’’ he said.
That was only Round II.
He suggested that the West had come to Hamas and its Islamist allies in Egypt pleading for peace. ‘‘The Americans and the Europeans asked the Egyptians, ‘You have the ear of the resistance,’ ’’ he said, using the term Hamas prefers to describe itself and other Palestinian militants fighting the Israeli occupation. ‘‘Egypt did not sell out the resistance as some people have claimed. Egypt understood the demands of the resistance and the Palestinian people.’’
The agreement postponed the resolution of the most contentious issue: Israel’s tight restrictions on the border crossings into Gaza under a seven-year-old embargo imposed to thwart Hamas from arming itself. The one-page ‘‘understanding’’ regarding the cease-fire called for ‘‘opening the crossing and facilitating the movement of people and transfer of goods,’’ but it also said that ‘‘procedures of implementation will be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the cease-fire.’’
But however fragile the cease-fire may be, the deal itself may be a turning point for Egypt’s Islamist leaders, in both their relations with the West and their role in the region. Since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak — a reliable ally of Washington and Israel — many in the West have been worried about how Egypt’s leaders might respond to the next confrontation that pits their allies in Hamas against Israel.
Now the new regime is even worse, and what a coincidence Morsi is gone!
As a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc, Morsi often railed against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and praised Hamas for rejecting the Western-backed peace process in favor of armed resistance.
That kind of stuff gets you in trouble.
US officials and Morsi’s advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said both the Egyptian president and Obama had given the other room to manage the demands of their domestic constituencies. They spoke by phone at least six times during the fighting, officials said.
But behind the scenes, the Americans pushed the Israelis toward a truce and Morsi pressured Hamas, as the parties all acknowledged Wednesday. Essam el-Haddad, Morsi’s top foreign policy adviser, said, ‘‘I think that the United States from the first moments was trying to find an end to the bloodshed.’’
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
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"Cease-fire between Israel and Hamas seems to be holding" by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 23, 2012
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinians erupted in triumphant celebrations Thursday, vowing new unity among rival factions and a renewed commitment to the tactic of resistance, while Israel’s leaders sought to soberly sell the achievements of their latest military operation to a domestic audience long skeptical of cease-fire agreements like the one announced the night before.
After eight days of intense Israeli shelling from air and sea that killed 162 Gazans, including at least 30 militant commanders, and flattened many government buildings and private homes, people poured onto the streets, beaming as they shopped and strolled under the shield of the cease-fire agreement reached Wednesday in Cairo. The place was awash in flags, not only the signature green of the ruling Hamas party but also the yellow, black and red of rivals Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a rainbow not visible here in years.
Meaning Israel's attack backfired!
Despite the death and destruction, Hamas emerged emboldened, analysts said, not only because it had landed rockets near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but also from the unprecedented visits and support by Arab and Muslim leaders, potentially resetting the balance of power and tone in Palestinian politics, as leaders from various factions declared the peace process dead.
“The blood of Jabari united the people of the nation on the choice of jihad and resistance,’’ Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister, declared in a televised speech, referring to the commander Ahmed al-Jabari, killed in an Israeli airstrike at the beginning of the operation last week. ‘‘Resistance is the shortest way to liberate Palestine.’’
There were neither celebrations nor significant protests across the border in Israel, where people in southern cities passed the first day in more than a week without constant sirens signaling incoming rockets sending them to safe rooms. Instead, an uneasy, even grim calm set in. The military announced that an officer, Lieutenant Boris Yarmulnik, 28, died from wounds from a rocket attack the day before, bringing the death toll on the Israeli side to six, four of them civilians. Israeli authorities announced several arrests, including an Arab Israeli citizen, for a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that revived memories of violence from the last Palestinian uprising.
But there was collective relief in Israel as thousands of army reservists, sent to the Gaza border ahead of a possible ground invasion, gradually began returning home. With national elections eight weeks away, Israeli politicians tried to showcase accomplishments without raising expectations....
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said ‘‘We will have to do this again.’’
What was widely heralded as a game changer by Palestinian politicians and independent analysts alike was viewed by Israeli officials and commentators as a maintenance mission that had succeeded in its stated goals: restoring quiet after months of intensifying rocket fire, and culling the weapons cache of Gaza’s armed groups....
Hamas took control of Gaza after winning elections....
In Jerusalem, Dan Meridor, a senior minister of intelligence and atomic energy, told reporters that Israel had ‘‘used force in a very moderate and measured way.’’ He said the military had struck ten times the number of targets compared with the previous government’s invasion of Gaza four years ago but killed far fewer people than during that invasion: slightly more than 10 percent. One of the main military achievements, he said, was the destruction of most of the long-range Iranian Fajr-5 missiles in Gaza.
Still doesn't look like "success" to me.
Responding to criticism from the far right and many residents of the south that Israel did not go far enough by failing to cripple Hamas, Meridor said: ‘‘Could we win Gaza from Hamas? Obviously, if we decide to do it. Then we have to ask ourselves what we will do once we are there.’’
We will be finding out soon.
Analysts said that by stopping short of a ground invasion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged from the crisis looking like a moderate, responsible leader.
PFFFFT!
Stop printing the Israeli public relations handouts as news, please.
Currently facing no credible rival for his post, he also can campaign on an improved relationship with President Obama, who, according to Israeli officials, displayed no vindictiveness as he helped mediate the dispute, despite the widely held perception that Netanyahu had supported Mitt Romney. He also can claim credit for the start of a mechanism for better communication with Egypt’s new leadership.
“Everybody wanted a situation where they could not have a ground operation and they could have Hamas sing ‘Hatikva,’ ’’ said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communications at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, referring to the Israeli national anthem. ‘‘Frankly, I have to say kudos to Netanyahu, and I don’t usually pay him compliments. I think he got the best out of a bad situation.’’
Of course there were mixed feelings. On Netanyahu’s Facebook page, Gila Glickerman, the mother of a combat soldier, thanked the prime minister for bringing her son home, while another person wrote, ‘‘You’ve just lost a vote at the ballot box.’’
--more--"
"Where’s our humanity for Gaza?" by Sara Roy | Globe Correspondent, November 23, 2012
Between February 2009 — just after the Operation Cast Lead onslaught — and August 2012, Israeli attacks in Gaza, averaging six per week. They came by aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones, and tanks throughout Gaza; the confiscation of, or damage to, fishing boats and the detention and arrest of fishermen; attacks on industrial, farm, and food production facilities; and military ground incursions.
The current crisis is framed in terms devoid of any real context. The issue goes far beyond which side precipitated the terrible violence that has killed innocents on both sides. The issue — largely forgotten — is one of continued occupation and blockade, a grossly asymmetrical conflict that has deliberately and systematically disabled Gaza’s economy and people.
The Gaza Strip is now in its 46th year of occupation, 22nd year of closure, and sixth year of intensified closure. The resulting normalization of the occupation assumes a dangerous form in the Gaza Strip, whose status as an occupied territory has ceased to matter in the West; the attention has shifted — after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory and 2007 takeover of the territory — to Gaza’s containment and punishment, rendering illegitimate any notion of human rights or freedom for Palestinians.
The Israeli government has referred to its siege policy as a form of “economic warfare.” In a Nov. 2008 cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv released by WikiLeaks, US officials wrote, “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed . . . on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge” with the aim of having Gaza’s economy “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” This was achieved through an Israeli-imposed blockade that ended all normal trade.
That is an abominable policy by an abysmal regime.
The result has been high and persistent unemployment, which stood near 30 percent by June 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Approximately 39 percent of Gaza’s people lived below the poverty line in 2011. The figure would be far greater without donor aid.
Gaza’s economic decline is seen in the near collapse of its agricultural sector. One factor is the destruction of around 7,800 acres of agricultural land during Cast Lead. Consequently, approximately one-third of Gaza’s total arable land is out of production. Furthermore, Israeli-imposed buffer zones — areas of restricted access — now absorb nearly 14 percent of Gaza’s total land and at least 48 percent of total arable land.
Similarly, the sea buffer zone covers 85 percent of the maritime area promised to Palestinians in the Oslo Accords, reducing 20 nautical miles to three, where waters are fouled by sewage flows in excess of 23 million gallons daily.
Oh, Israel violated agreements, did they?
Another critical constraint is water. Gaza’s aquifer has been ruined by prolonged over-pumping and sewage and contaminant infiltration.
Related: Israel's Waterworld
See where the sewage is coming from?
Almost all of Gaza’s municipal wells used for drinking water are seriously polluted. Due to the breakdown of Gaza’s sanitation infrastructure, particularly after 2008, this infiltration has led to elevated levels of nitrates and chlorides in the groundwater and soil — far above World Health Organization safety levels — posing a dangerous health risk to humans and livestock.
Where is the world uproar, 'eh?
Israel’s blockade policy restricts the entry of materials needed to repair, maintain, and upgrade Gaza’s sewage and wastewater treatment infrastructure. Save the Children reported in 2011 that Israeli airstrikes destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure valued at $1.3 million.
Then it is a DELIBERATE POLICY and a CRIME!
The impact on health is clear: Just under 10 percent of Gazan children under five suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2010. According to Save the Children, “Diseases of poverty and conflict combined with a degenerating health care system are claiming growing numbers of Gaza’s children.”
Something like 14 Gazans a day die from neglect every day.
Birth defects, congenital anomalies, and cancer cases are reportedly rising. This is likely due to environmental contamination, including the possible use of toxic weaponry during Cast Lead. The current military assault will undoubtedly worsen environmental conditions.
They mean U.S.-supplied depleted uranium munitions and the like.
Yet the US government will probably cut funding to the Palestinians if they pursue United Nations observer membership.
Political differences aside, where is our humanity?
Well, "our" government's is in the back pocket of Israel.
--more--"
"Hamas No. 2 rejects Gaza arms halt" by Mohammed Daraghmeh and Sara El Deeb | Associated Press, November 25, 2012
CAIRO — Gaza’s ruling Hamas will not stop arming itself because only a strong arsenal, not negotiations, can extract concessions from Israel, the number two leader of the Islamic militant group said in an interview Saturday.
The comments by Moussa Abu Marzouk, just three days after the worst bout of Israel-Hamas fighting in four years, signaled trouble ahead for Egyptian-brokered talks between the hostile neighbors on a new border deal.
Hamas demands that Israel and Egypt lift all restrictions on the movement of goods and people in and out of the Palestinian territory, which has been buckling under a border blockade since the Islamists seized the territory in 2007.
How many times you going to repeat the same lie?
The restrictions have been eased somewhat in recent years, but not enough to allow Gaza’s battered economy to develop.
To keep it at a low level.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
However, an Israeli security official said last week that Israel would probably link a significant easing of the blockade to Hamas’s willingness to stop smuggling weapons into Gaza and producing them there.
Abu Marzouk said Saturday that the group would not disarm, arguing that recent Palestinian history has shown that negotiations with Israel lead nowhere unless backed by force.
Why not? It's the EUSraeli way.
‘‘There is no way to relinquish weapons,’’ Abu Marzouk said in his office on the outskirts of Cairo. ‘‘These weapons protected us.’’
Hamas’s founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction, but leaders of the group have also said they are ready for a long-term cease-fire with the Jewish state.
They have called for a 100-year truce and will accept a vote, so WTF?
The group is believed to have amassed a large arsenal of thousands of rockets since Israel’s last military offensive in Gaza four years ago. Hamas has been smuggling weapons through tunnels under the border with Egypt, but also claims to have begun making longer-range rockets in Gaza.
What is in Israel's arsenal?
During the latest round of fighting, Hamas fired Iranian-made rockets that came close to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time.
A-ha!
Israeli warplanes pounded the tunnel area during the offensive to disrupt smuggling, and tunnel operators reported serious damage, but in the past were able to rebuild quickly.
Hamas used to be evasive about Iranian support, but in recent days senior officials in the group have openly thanked Tehran. Gaza strongman Mahmoud Zahar told reporters on Saturday that he is confident Iran will increase military and financial support to Hamas and the smaller militant group Islamic Jihad.
Isn't Hamas Sunni and Iran Shi'ite?
Iran and its regional rivals, the Sunni-led states in the Gulf, have been competing to lure Hamas into their respective camps.
Zahar said Saturday that Hamas is not beholden to anyone, but defended the group’s ties with Iran. ‘‘If they don’t like it, let them compete with Iran in giving us weapons and money,’’ he said in an apparent jab at the Gulf states.
Abu Marzouk, meanwhile, said Hamas would not stand in the way of a bid by its main political rival, internationally backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to seek UN recognition for a state of Palestine next week.
Abbas will ask the UN General Assembly to approve ‘‘Palestine’’ — made up of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in 1967 — as a nonmember observer state.
Such a state is far from being established, but Palestinians hope UN recognition would affirm its future borders, to be used as a baseline once negotiations with Israel resume.
Israel, while willing to cede some land, refuses with withdraw to the 1967 lines and opposes Abbas’s UN move as an attempt to bypass negotiations. Israel has moved half a million Israelis into settlements on war-won land.
Abu Marzouk suggested that Abbas is wasting his time at the UN.
Israel and the West have shunned Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis, as a terror organization.
How many Palestinians has Israel killed?
However, Hamas officials believe the boycott is slowly eroding, pointing to U.S. support for the cease-fire deal brokered by Egypt and the ongoing indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas.
Hamas finally accepted as legitimate government and voice of Palestinians.
--more--"
"Confusion over cease-fire imperils some Gazans" by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 24, 2012
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — In the 12 years that he has lived here in the Abassam neighborhood adjacent to Gaza’s eastern border, Eyad Qudaih said, he had never ventured more than 20 yards east of his white stucco home because Israel said the entire area was off-limits.
But Friday morning, emboldened by the fresh cease-fire, he took his four young daughters 300 yards east, to the small plot of land where he dreams of growing wheat and malt like his father once did.
‘‘It was like someone who was hungry and had a big meal,’’ Qudaih said as he touched the fence that has separated him from the border lands. ‘‘Grilled sheep with nuts.’’
But around 11 a.m. the moment was interrupted by the all too common sound of gunfire. A spokesman for the Israeli military said soldiers had fired warning shots and then at the feet of some Palestinians who tried to cross the border fence into Israeli territory. Qudaih’s cousin Anwar Qudaih, 20, was killed, and others were wounded, Health Ministry officials here in Gaza said.
The episode did not fracture the truce that ended eight days of fighting between Hamas and Israel. But it did showcase the confusion that remains over the cease-fire deal announced Wednesday in Cairo. While Hamas officials have been boasting about the concessions they say they have exacted from Israel, Israeli officials have downplayed the deal, saying nothing had yet been agreed beyond the immediate cessation of hostilities.
On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said dismissively that Hamas’s main achievement so far was getting a document that was typed rather than handwritten.
In substance, Israelis said they agreed to discuss the border and other issues, but that those talks had not yet begun — and there did not appear even to be a mechanism in place for starting.
But that was clearly not the understanding of the hundreds of Gazans who thought that they would have access to a strip of fertile land that had for years been so tantalizingly close — and yet beyond their reach. Palestinians flocked to the fence Thursday and Friday because their leaders said the cease-fire eased what they call Israel’s ‘‘siege’’ of Gaza, including restrictions on movement in the so-called buffer zone, a 1,000-foot strip on Gaza’s eastern and northern borders.
Hamas leaders said that was but one of the quality of life improvements that they had won. They also told their people that Israel would ease restrictions on fishing off the coast and the passage of people and goods through border crossings.
They never did.
But an Israeli government official said Friday that while Israel had indeed agreed to discuss the issues with the Egyptian sponsors of the cease-fire, its policy had not yet changed.
Riad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, described Friday’s shooting as a clear violation of the agreement that was signed, telling reporters at an unrelated news conference in Rome, ‘‘I hope it will be the exception rather than the rule.’’
Health Ministry officials in Gaza said Friday that the Palestinian death toll from the fighting had grown to 167, not including Qudaih, as several people died of the wounds they had suffered in Israeli airstrikes. Six Israelis, two of them soldiers, have been killed since the escalation began.
That the killing Friday did not spark other violence suggests that Hamas, the militant Islamic faction that has ruled Gaza since 2007, is not looking for excuses to return to battle. But Ahmed Yousif, a former adviser to the Hamas prime minister, said patience would be limited.
Yeah, right, they are the aggressors.
‘‘Gradual steps should be taken to give the impression to the people we are no longer under siege,’’ said Yousif, who remains close to the Hamas leaders and now runs a research organization, House of Wisdom. ‘‘It might take some time, but this is what we’re going to achieve in the long run. As long as there is progress I think the people will continue the cease-fire. If there is no progress, this will start again.’’
And here we are today.
The buffer zone was established in 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which it had occupied since the 1967 war.
--more--"
"Bitter foes begin talks on details of Gaza truce" by Josef Federman | Associated Press, November 27, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israel launched some 1,500 airstrikes in a move to end rocket attacks out of Gaza, while the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad militant groups fired a similar number of rockets at Israeli cities. More than 160 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, were killed. Palestinian attacks killed six Israelis, including four civilians and two soldiers....
Hamas seized control of the territory....
SIGH!
While Israel has eased the blockade in recent years, key restrictions remain in place on exports out of Gaza and the entry of badly needed building materials into the territory....
If they can't sell their products.... ???
--more--"
"Long-exiled Hamas leader visits Gaza Strip" by Steven Erlanger | New York Times, December 08, 2012
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The long-exiled leader of the militant group Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, entered Gaza for the first time Friday, a symbolically powerful visit that sought to reinforce the contention by Hamas that it was victorious in its eight-day clash with Israel.
For Mashaal, 56, whom the Israelis tried to assassinate in Jordan in 1997, it was a triumphant day, as Hamas fighters, armed with rifles and wearing balaclavas, lined the streets where he was to travel. He entered from Egypt, through the Rafah crossing, an indication of a new alliance with Cairo after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, an avowed adversary of Hamas....
Not for long.
Mashaal, who has spent years in exile and now spends most of his time in Qatar, had never before been to Gaza, was permitted to cross the Egyptian border now that allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, a cousin of Hamas, have come to power in Egypt. At the same time, Hamas tried to use his visit to reinforce the impression that it is ascendant and no longer isolated.
Mashaal arrived in Gaza to celebrate the 25th anniversary Saturday of the founding of Hamas....
Israel helped.
His visit also provided a visible unity in Palestinian territory of Hamas in exile, represented by Mashaal, and Hamas on the ground, in the person of the Gazan prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, who met him at Rafah and traveled with him through a noisy and celebratory day.
If Gazans are happy, I am happy.
Mashaal fled the West Bank with his family at age 11 after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He said Friday that he had returned once to the West Bank in 1975, but had not entered Palestinian territory since.
In 1997, when he was in Amman, Jordan, agents from the Israeli intelligence service, posing as Canadian tourists, tried to kill him by injecting him with poison. The agents were captured by Jordanian authorities, and Mashaal lay in a coma until Benjamin Netanyahu, then and now the Israeli prime minister, was pressured to hand over an antidote....
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"Israel eases Gaza materials blockade" by Amy Teibel | Associated Press, January 01, 2013
JERUSALEM — Israel has started allowing long-banned building materials into the Gaza Strip, its first key concession to the Palestinian territory’s ruling Hamas movement under the cease-fire that ended eight days of fighting last month, the military said Monday.
The military says the shipments will continue so long as the border remains quiet. But a Hamas official said the amount sent so far is small, and Gaza economists say it would take years of round-the-clock shipments to make a dent in the gap left by five years of blockade.
Then let's get started.
Israel imposed a wide-ranging embargo on Gaza after Hamas seized it in 2007....
Sigh.
The military says it began allowing shipments of gravel to Gaza’s private sector on Sunday because the Israeli attacks on Hamas’ military operations in November cowed the militant group into quiet....
‘‘Now we’re talking about a permanent easing,’’ said Major Guy Inbar, a military spokesman, adding that 20 truckloads a day could enter Gaza, depending on Palestinian demand. Other concessions could follow, he said. ‘‘The longer the calm persists, the more we’ll weigh additional easings of restrictions,’’ he said.
Israel recently authorized the entry of 60 trucks and buses for the first time since Hamas’ 2007 Gaza takeover, though there are conflicting reports on whether vehicles have actually gone through. Another major concession the Gazans seek would be a lifting of a near-ban on exports from the impoverished territory.
--more--"
Then it was a victory for Hamas.
JERUSALEM — The total fatalities in Gaza.... more than 130....
Really all I'm looking for now.
The Israeli assaults carried into early Wednesday, with multiple blasts punctuating the otherwise darkened Gaza skies....
While President Obama publicly stressed Israel’s right to self-defense because of domestic political concerns, officials said the administration also had decided to take an understanding approach to Morsi’s need to denounce Israel in order to appeal to his domestic audience.
‘‘We know that the Egyptians have their domestic politics as well,’’ one US official said, and each president understood the other’s political context. ‘‘But they both agree that this nonsense can’t go on.’’
I agree.
Officials of Morsi’s government acknowledged that the Gaza battle had put them in a bind. As Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Morsi must respond to a public deeply angry at Israel and eager to rally behind the Palestinians. ‘‘But if he responds fully to public opinion, he risks what we have been trying to do for peace and stability in the region,’’ a senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
We all know what happened to him.
Indeed, despite the Egyptian government’s caustic statements about Israel and noisy solidarity with Hamas, several US officials said Morsi and the new Islamist government needed no encouragement in its efforts to push for an end to not only the Israeli bombing but also Hamas’s missile fire.
But Israel wants guarantees that Egypt will stop the flow of arms into Gaza from Sinai, and that seems a tall order. Egypt has been unable to control Sinai and would not want to be seen in the role of Israeli enforcer. Egypt is hoping Hamas will restrain itself on missile imports, but it is far from clear that Hamas wants to or can, given the range of forces in Gaza vying for power, including the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad.
Within Hamas itself, there are divisions and fractured views on the truce negotiations. In Gaza on Tuesday, Fawzi Barhoum, the Hamas spokesman, said that ‘‘we hold absolutely no hope of Hillary Clinton’’ helping to resolve the conflict.
She would undoubtedly make things worse.
Obama, who was in Asia, had found himself repeatedly on the phone with Middle Eastern leaders in recent days and decided that Clinton, who also spoke to a dozen of her counterparts here, could make the difference in setting a cease-fire.
Nope, nor can John Kerry.
Netanyahu’s calculations are numerous. He has an election looming in January, and agreeing to stop his operation in Gaza could be risky if rocket fire resumed. But sending troops into Gaza poses perhaps even more risks.
‘‘The Israeli government will face its voters without any tangible achievement in hand to show,’’ Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, wrote Tuesday. He said that he did not believe Netanyahu had begun this operation with electoral considerations in mind, but that ‘‘the deliberations about ending it are deeply affected by political calculations.’’
Netanyahu is also contending with a radically altered Middle East, and while he says that protecting his people is not dependent on who is in power in Egypt or Turkey, a reduced military operation and fewer civilian casualties in Gaza would make relations with both countries less difficult.
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"Israel, Hamas accept cease-fire; US, Egypt broker deal; talks will focus on grievances" by David D. Kirkpatrick and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 22, 2012
A big day, but for different reasons.
CAIRO — Violence killed more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis over the last week....
A 30-to-1 ratio.
Gazans poured into the streets declaring victory against the far more powerful Israeli military.
Giving them all they can handle now, too!
In Israel, the public reaction was far more subdued. Many residents in the south expressed doubt that the agreement would hold, partly because at least five Palestinian rockets thudded into southern Israel after the cease-fire began....
Which zettlers set those off?
The deal demonstrated the pragmatism of Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, who balanced public support for Hamas with a determination to preserve the peace with Israel. But it was unclear whether the agreement would be a turning point or merely a lull in the conflict.
Too bad he is long gone, and it was only a lull.
The cease-fire deal was reached only through a final US diplomatic push: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conferred for hours with Morsi and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, at the presidential palace in Egypt.
What are they waiting for now?
Hanging over the talks was the Israeli shock at a Tel Aviv bus bombing — praised by Hamas — that recalled past Palestinian uprisings and raised fears of heavy Israeli retaliation. After false hopes the day before, Western and Egyptian diplomats said they had all but given up hope for a quick end to the violence....
Oh, ANOTHER ISRAELI FALSE FLAG at a very inopportune time? C'mon!!!!
There were immediate questions about the durability of the deal....
Khaled Meshal, the top leader of Hamas, thanked Iran for its military support at a triumphal news conference in Cairo. ‘‘This is a point on the way to a great defeat for Israel,’’ he said.
That was only Round II.
He suggested that the West had come to Hamas and its Islamist allies in Egypt pleading for peace. ‘‘The Americans and the Europeans asked the Egyptians, ‘You have the ear of the resistance,’ ’’ he said, using the term Hamas prefers to describe itself and other Palestinian militants fighting the Israeli occupation. ‘‘Egypt did not sell out the resistance as some people have claimed. Egypt understood the demands of the resistance and the Palestinian people.’’
The agreement postponed the resolution of the most contentious issue: Israel’s tight restrictions on the border crossings into Gaza under a seven-year-old embargo imposed to thwart Hamas from arming itself. The one-page ‘‘understanding’’ regarding the cease-fire called for ‘‘opening the crossing and facilitating the movement of people and transfer of goods,’’ but it also said that ‘‘procedures of implementation will be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the cease-fire.’’
But however fragile the cease-fire may be, the deal itself may be a turning point for Egypt’s Islamist leaders, in both their relations with the West and their role in the region. Since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak — a reliable ally of Washington and Israel — many in the West have been worried about how Egypt’s leaders might respond to the next confrontation that pits their allies in Hamas against Israel.
Now the new regime is even worse, and what a coincidence Morsi is gone!
As a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s parliamentary bloc, Morsi often railed against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and praised Hamas for rejecting the Western-backed peace process in favor of armed resistance.
That kind of stuff gets you in trouble.
US officials and Morsi’s advisers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said both the Egyptian president and Obama had given the other room to manage the demands of their domestic constituencies. They spoke by phone at least six times during the fighting, officials said.
But behind the scenes, the Americans pushed the Israelis toward a truce and Morsi pressured Hamas, as the parties all acknowledged Wednesday. Essam el-Haddad, Morsi’s top foreign policy adviser, said, ‘‘I think that the United States from the first moments was trying to find an end to the bloodshed.’’
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
--more--"
"Cease-fire between Israel and Hamas seems to be holding" by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 23, 2012
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinians erupted in triumphant celebrations Thursday, vowing new unity among rival factions and a renewed commitment to the tactic of resistance, while Israel’s leaders sought to soberly sell the achievements of their latest military operation to a domestic audience long skeptical of cease-fire agreements like the one announced the night before.
After eight days of intense Israeli shelling from air and sea that killed 162 Gazans, including at least 30 militant commanders, and flattened many government buildings and private homes, people poured onto the streets, beaming as they shopped and strolled under the shield of the cease-fire agreement reached Wednesday in Cairo. The place was awash in flags, not only the signature green of the ruling Hamas party but also the yellow, black and red of rivals Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a rainbow not visible here in years.
Meaning Israel's attack backfired!
Despite the death and destruction, Hamas emerged emboldened, analysts said, not only because it had landed rockets near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but also from the unprecedented visits and support by Arab and Muslim leaders, potentially resetting the balance of power and tone in Palestinian politics, as leaders from various factions declared the peace process dead.
“The blood of Jabari united the people of the nation on the choice of jihad and resistance,’’ Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister, declared in a televised speech, referring to the commander Ahmed al-Jabari, killed in an Israeli airstrike at the beginning of the operation last week. ‘‘Resistance is the shortest way to liberate Palestine.’’
There were neither celebrations nor significant protests across the border in Israel, where people in southern cities passed the first day in more than a week without constant sirens signaling incoming rockets sending them to safe rooms. Instead, an uneasy, even grim calm set in. The military announced that an officer, Lieutenant Boris Yarmulnik, 28, died from wounds from a rocket attack the day before, bringing the death toll on the Israeli side to six, four of them civilians. Israeli authorities announced several arrests, including an Arab Israeli citizen, for a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Wednesday that revived memories of violence from the last Palestinian uprising.
But there was collective relief in Israel as thousands of army reservists, sent to the Gaza border ahead of a possible ground invasion, gradually began returning home. With national elections eight weeks away, Israeli politicians tried to showcase accomplishments without raising expectations....
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said ‘‘We will have to do this again.’’
What was widely heralded as a game changer by Palestinian politicians and independent analysts alike was viewed by Israeli officials and commentators as a maintenance mission that had succeeded in its stated goals: restoring quiet after months of intensifying rocket fire, and culling the weapons cache of Gaza’s armed groups....
Hamas took control of Gaza after winning elections....
In Jerusalem, Dan Meridor, a senior minister of intelligence and atomic energy, told reporters that Israel had ‘‘used force in a very moderate and measured way.’’ He said the military had struck ten times the number of targets compared with the previous government’s invasion of Gaza four years ago but killed far fewer people than during that invasion: slightly more than 10 percent. One of the main military achievements, he said, was the destruction of most of the long-range Iranian Fajr-5 missiles in Gaza.
Still doesn't look like "success" to me.
Responding to criticism from the far right and many residents of the south that Israel did not go far enough by failing to cripple Hamas, Meridor said: ‘‘Could we win Gaza from Hamas? Obviously, if we decide to do it. Then we have to ask ourselves what we will do once we are there.’’
We will be finding out soon.
Analysts said that by stopping short of a ground invasion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged from the crisis looking like a moderate, responsible leader.
PFFFFT!
Stop printing the Israeli public relations handouts as news, please.
Currently facing no credible rival for his post, he also can campaign on an improved relationship with President Obama, who, according to Israeli officials, displayed no vindictiveness as he helped mediate the dispute, despite the widely held perception that Netanyahu had supported Mitt Romney. He also can claim credit for the start of a mechanism for better communication with Egypt’s new leadership.
“Everybody wanted a situation where they could not have a ground operation and they could have Hamas sing ‘Hatikva,’ ’’ said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communications at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, referring to the Israeli national anthem. ‘‘Frankly, I have to say kudos to Netanyahu, and I don’t usually pay him compliments. I think he got the best out of a bad situation.’’
Of course there were mixed feelings. On Netanyahu’s Facebook page, Gila Glickerman, the mother of a combat soldier, thanked the prime minister for bringing her son home, while another person wrote, ‘‘You’ve just lost a vote at the ballot box.’’
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"Where’s our humanity for Gaza?" by Sara Roy | Globe Correspondent, November 23, 2012
Between February 2009 — just after the Operation Cast Lead onslaught — and August 2012, Israeli attacks in Gaza, averaging six per week. They came by aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones, and tanks throughout Gaza; the confiscation of, or damage to, fishing boats and the detention and arrest of fishermen; attacks on industrial, farm, and food production facilities; and military ground incursions.
The current crisis is framed in terms devoid of any real context. The issue goes far beyond which side precipitated the terrible violence that has killed innocents on both sides. The issue — largely forgotten — is one of continued occupation and blockade, a grossly asymmetrical conflict that has deliberately and systematically disabled Gaza’s economy and people.
The Gaza Strip is now in its 46th year of occupation, 22nd year of closure, and sixth year of intensified closure. The resulting normalization of the occupation assumes a dangerous form in the Gaza Strip, whose status as an occupied territory has ceased to matter in the West; the attention has shifted — after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory and 2007 takeover of the territory — to Gaza’s containment and punishment, rendering illegitimate any notion of human rights or freedom for Palestinians.
The Israeli government has referred to its siege policy as a form of “economic warfare.” In a Nov. 2008 cable from the US embassy in Tel Aviv released by WikiLeaks, US officials wrote, “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed . . . on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge” with the aim of having Gaza’s economy “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” This was achieved through an Israeli-imposed blockade that ended all normal trade.
That is an abominable policy by an abysmal regime.
The result has been high and persistent unemployment, which stood near 30 percent by June 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Approximately 39 percent of Gaza’s people lived below the poverty line in 2011. The figure would be far greater without donor aid.
Gaza’s economic decline is seen in the near collapse of its agricultural sector. One factor is the destruction of around 7,800 acres of agricultural land during Cast Lead. Consequently, approximately one-third of Gaza’s total arable land is out of production. Furthermore, Israeli-imposed buffer zones — areas of restricted access — now absorb nearly 14 percent of Gaza’s total land and at least 48 percent of total arable land.
Similarly, the sea buffer zone covers 85 percent of the maritime area promised to Palestinians in the Oslo Accords, reducing 20 nautical miles to three, where waters are fouled by sewage flows in excess of 23 million gallons daily.
Oh, Israel violated agreements, did they?
Another critical constraint is water. Gaza’s aquifer has been ruined by prolonged over-pumping and sewage and contaminant infiltration.
Related: Israel's Waterworld
See where the sewage is coming from?
Almost all of Gaza’s municipal wells used for drinking water are seriously polluted. Due to the breakdown of Gaza’s sanitation infrastructure, particularly after 2008, this infiltration has led to elevated levels of nitrates and chlorides in the groundwater and soil — far above World Health Organization safety levels — posing a dangerous health risk to humans and livestock.
Where is the world uproar, 'eh?
Israel’s blockade policy restricts the entry of materials needed to repair, maintain, and upgrade Gaza’s sewage and wastewater treatment infrastructure. Save the Children reported in 2011 that Israeli airstrikes destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure valued at $1.3 million.
Then it is a DELIBERATE POLICY and a CRIME!
The impact on health is clear: Just under 10 percent of Gazan children under five suffered from chronic malnutrition in 2010. According to Save the Children, “Diseases of poverty and conflict combined with a degenerating health care system are claiming growing numbers of Gaza’s children.”
Something like 14 Gazans a day die from neglect every day.
Birth defects, congenital anomalies, and cancer cases are reportedly rising. This is likely due to environmental contamination, including the possible use of toxic weaponry during Cast Lead. The current military assault will undoubtedly worsen environmental conditions.
They mean U.S.-supplied depleted uranium munitions and the like.
Yet the US government will probably cut funding to the Palestinians if they pursue United Nations observer membership.
Political differences aside, where is our humanity?
Well, "our" government's is in the back pocket of Israel.
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"Hamas No. 2 rejects Gaza arms halt" by Mohammed Daraghmeh and Sara El Deeb | Associated Press, November 25, 2012
CAIRO — Gaza’s ruling Hamas will not stop arming itself because only a strong arsenal, not negotiations, can extract concessions from Israel, the number two leader of the Islamic militant group said in an interview Saturday.
The comments by Moussa Abu Marzouk, just three days after the worst bout of Israel-Hamas fighting in four years, signaled trouble ahead for Egyptian-brokered talks between the hostile neighbors on a new border deal.
Hamas demands that Israel and Egypt lift all restrictions on the movement of goods and people in and out of the Palestinian territory, which has been buckling under a border blockade since the Islamists seized the territory in 2007.
How many times you going to repeat the same lie?
The restrictions have been eased somewhat in recent years, but not enough to allow Gaza’s battered economy to develop.
To keep it at a low level.
Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
However, an Israeli security official said last week that Israel would probably link a significant easing of the blockade to Hamas’s willingness to stop smuggling weapons into Gaza and producing them there.
Abu Marzouk said Saturday that the group would not disarm, arguing that recent Palestinian history has shown that negotiations with Israel lead nowhere unless backed by force.
Why not? It's the EUSraeli way.
‘‘There is no way to relinquish weapons,’’ Abu Marzouk said in his office on the outskirts of Cairo. ‘‘These weapons protected us.’’
Hamas’s founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction, but leaders of the group have also said they are ready for a long-term cease-fire with the Jewish state.
They have called for a 100-year truce and will accept a vote, so WTF?
The group is believed to have amassed a large arsenal of thousands of rockets since Israel’s last military offensive in Gaza four years ago. Hamas has been smuggling weapons through tunnels under the border with Egypt, but also claims to have begun making longer-range rockets in Gaza.
What is in Israel's arsenal?
During the latest round of fighting, Hamas fired Iranian-made rockets that came close to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time.
A-ha!
Israeli warplanes pounded the tunnel area during the offensive to disrupt smuggling, and tunnel operators reported serious damage, but in the past were able to rebuild quickly.
Hamas used to be evasive about Iranian support, but in recent days senior officials in the group have openly thanked Tehran. Gaza strongman Mahmoud Zahar told reporters on Saturday that he is confident Iran will increase military and financial support to Hamas and the smaller militant group Islamic Jihad.
Isn't Hamas Sunni and Iran Shi'ite?
Iran and its regional rivals, the Sunni-led states in the Gulf, have been competing to lure Hamas into their respective camps.
Zahar said Saturday that Hamas is not beholden to anyone, but defended the group’s ties with Iran. ‘‘If they don’t like it, let them compete with Iran in giving us weapons and money,’’ he said in an apparent jab at the Gulf states.
Abu Marzouk, meanwhile, said Hamas would not stand in the way of a bid by its main political rival, internationally backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to seek UN recognition for a state of Palestine next week.
Abbas will ask the UN General Assembly to approve ‘‘Palestine’’ — made up of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, areas Israel captured in 1967 — as a nonmember observer state.
Such a state is far from being established, but Palestinians hope UN recognition would affirm its future borders, to be used as a baseline once negotiations with Israel resume.
Israel, while willing to cede some land, refuses with withdraw to the 1967 lines and opposes Abbas’s UN move as an attempt to bypass negotiations. Israel has moved half a million Israelis into settlements on war-won land.
Abu Marzouk suggested that Abbas is wasting his time at the UN.
Israel and the West have shunned Hamas, which has killed hundreds of Israelis, as a terror organization.
How many Palestinians has Israel killed?
However, Hamas officials believe the boycott is slowly eroding, pointing to U.S. support for the cease-fire deal brokered by Egypt and the ongoing indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas.
Hamas finally accepted as legitimate government and voice of Palestinians.
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"Confusion over cease-fire imperils some Gazans" by Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, November 24, 2012
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — In the 12 years that he has lived here in the Abassam neighborhood adjacent to Gaza’s eastern border, Eyad Qudaih said, he had never ventured more than 20 yards east of his white stucco home because Israel said the entire area was off-limits.
But Friday morning, emboldened by the fresh cease-fire, he took his four young daughters 300 yards east, to the small plot of land where he dreams of growing wheat and malt like his father once did.
‘‘It was like someone who was hungry and had a big meal,’’ Qudaih said as he touched the fence that has separated him from the border lands. ‘‘Grilled sheep with nuts.’’
But around 11 a.m. the moment was interrupted by the all too common sound of gunfire. A spokesman for the Israeli military said soldiers had fired warning shots and then at the feet of some Palestinians who tried to cross the border fence into Israeli territory. Qudaih’s cousin Anwar Qudaih, 20, was killed, and others were wounded, Health Ministry officials here in Gaza said.
The episode did not fracture the truce that ended eight days of fighting between Hamas and Israel. But it did showcase the confusion that remains over the cease-fire deal announced Wednesday in Cairo. While Hamas officials have been boasting about the concessions they say they have exacted from Israel, Israeli officials have downplayed the deal, saying nothing had yet been agreed beyond the immediate cessation of hostilities.
On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said dismissively that Hamas’s main achievement so far was getting a document that was typed rather than handwritten.
In substance, Israelis said they agreed to discuss the border and other issues, but that those talks had not yet begun — and there did not appear even to be a mechanism in place for starting.
But that was clearly not the understanding of the hundreds of Gazans who thought that they would have access to a strip of fertile land that had for years been so tantalizingly close — and yet beyond their reach. Palestinians flocked to the fence Thursday and Friday because their leaders said the cease-fire eased what they call Israel’s ‘‘siege’’ of Gaza, including restrictions on movement in the so-called buffer zone, a 1,000-foot strip on Gaza’s eastern and northern borders.
Hamas leaders said that was but one of the quality of life improvements that they had won. They also told their people that Israel would ease restrictions on fishing off the coast and the passage of people and goods through border crossings.
They never did.
But an Israeli government official said Friday that while Israel had indeed agreed to discuss the issues with the Egyptian sponsors of the cease-fire, its policy had not yet changed.
Riad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, described Friday’s shooting as a clear violation of the agreement that was signed, telling reporters at an unrelated news conference in Rome, ‘‘I hope it will be the exception rather than the rule.’’
Health Ministry officials in Gaza said Friday that the Palestinian death toll from the fighting had grown to 167, not including Qudaih, as several people died of the wounds they had suffered in Israeli airstrikes. Six Israelis, two of them soldiers, have been killed since the escalation began.
That the killing Friday did not spark other violence suggests that Hamas, the militant Islamic faction that has ruled Gaza since 2007, is not looking for excuses to return to battle. But Ahmed Yousif, a former adviser to the Hamas prime minister, said patience would be limited.
Yeah, right, they are the aggressors.
‘‘Gradual steps should be taken to give the impression to the people we are no longer under siege,’’ said Yousif, who remains close to the Hamas leaders and now runs a research organization, House of Wisdom. ‘‘It might take some time, but this is what we’re going to achieve in the long run. As long as there is progress I think the people will continue the cease-fire. If there is no progress, this will start again.’’
And here we are today.
The buffer zone was established in 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which it had occupied since the 1967 war.
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"Bitter foes begin talks on details of Gaza truce" by Josef Federman | Associated Press, November 27, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israel launched some 1,500 airstrikes in a move to end rocket attacks out of Gaza, while the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad militant groups fired a similar number of rockets at Israeli cities. More than 160 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, were killed. Palestinian attacks killed six Israelis, including four civilians and two soldiers....
Hamas seized control of the territory....
SIGH!
While Israel has eased the blockade in recent years, key restrictions remain in place on exports out of Gaza and the entry of badly needed building materials into the territory....
If they can't sell their products.... ???
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"Long-exiled Hamas leader visits Gaza Strip" by Steven Erlanger | New York Times, December 08, 2012
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The long-exiled leader of the militant group Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, entered Gaza for the first time Friday, a symbolically powerful visit that sought to reinforce the contention by Hamas that it was victorious in its eight-day clash with Israel.
For Mashaal, 56, whom the Israelis tried to assassinate in Jordan in 1997, it was a triumphant day, as Hamas fighters, armed with rifles and wearing balaclavas, lined the streets where he was to travel. He entered from Egypt, through the Rafah crossing, an indication of a new alliance with Cairo after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, an avowed adversary of Hamas....
Not for long.
Mashaal, who has spent years in exile and now spends most of his time in Qatar, had never before been to Gaza, was permitted to cross the Egyptian border now that allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, a cousin of Hamas, have come to power in Egypt. At the same time, Hamas tried to use his visit to reinforce the impression that it is ascendant and no longer isolated.
Mashaal arrived in Gaza to celebrate the 25th anniversary Saturday of the founding of Hamas....
Israel helped.
His visit also provided a visible unity in Palestinian territory of Hamas in exile, represented by Mashaal, and Hamas on the ground, in the person of the Gazan prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, who met him at Rafah and traveled with him through a noisy and celebratory day.
If Gazans are happy, I am happy.
Mashaal fled the West Bank with his family at age 11 after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. He said Friday that he had returned once to the West Bank in 1975, but had not entered Palestinian territory since.
In 1997, when he was in Amman, Jordan, agents from the Israeli intelligence service, posing as Canadian tourists, tried to kill him by injecting him with poison. The agents were captured by Jordanian authorities, and Mashaal lay in a coma until Benjamin Netanyahu, then and now the Israeli prime minister, was pressured to hand over an antidote....
--more--"
"Israel eases Gaza materials blockade" by Amy Teibel | Associated Press, January 01, 2013
JERUSALEM — Israel has started allowing long-banned building materials into the Gaza Strip, its first key concession to the Palestinian territory’s ruling Hamas movement under the cease-fire that ended eight days of fighting last month, the military said Monday.
The military says the shipments will continue so long as the border remains quiet. But a Hamas official said the amount sent so far is small, and Gaza economists say it would take years of round-the-clock shipments to make a dent in the gap left by five years of blockade.
Then let's get started.
Israel imposed a wide-ranging embargo on Gaza after Hamas seized it in 2007....
Sigh.
The military says it began allowing shipments of gravel to Gaza’s private sector on Sunday because the Israeli attacks on Hamas’ military operations in November cowed the militant group into quiet....
‘‘Now we’re talking about a permanent easing,’’ said Major Guy Inbar, a military spokesman, adding that 20 truckloads a day could enter Gaza, depending on Palestinian demand. Other concessions could follow, he said. ‘‘The longer the calm persists, the more we’ll weigh additional easings of restrictions,’’ he said.
Israel recently authorized the entry of 60 trucks and buses for the first time since Hamas’ 2007 Gaza takeover, though there are conflicting reports on whether vehicles have actually gone through. Another major concession the Gazans seek would be a lifting of a near-ban on exports from the impoverished territory.
--more--"
Then it was a victory for Hamas.
"Hamas stages first West Bank march since 2007" by Mohammed Daraghmeh | Associated Press, December 14, 2012
NABLUS, West Bank — The Islamic militant group Hamas staged its first public demonstration in the West Bank since 2007 on Thursday, illustrating its improving ties with the rival Fatah movement after a five-year rift.
The show of force by Hamas reflected the group’s popularity in Palestinian society following an eight-day battle against Israel last month and its rising influence as Islamists rise to power across the region.
Peaceful protest is now a show of force, according to my Jewish War Daily.
Hamas said about 5,000 supporters of the Islamic militant group took to the streets in Nablus after prayers Thursday.
Marchers chanted, ‘‘Hamas — you are the guns; we are the bullets,’’ and, ‘‘Hamas, fire more rockets on Tel Aviv.’’ Some women held models of the rockets Gaza militants fired at Israeli cities in last month’s fighting.
Hamas’s influence was also on display in the city of Hebron, where thousands of supporters turned out for the funeral of a teenager killed by Israeli border police officers a day earlier. The police say he brandished a weapon, which later turned out to be fake.
What you begin to realize is everything out the Israeli mouth is a lie.
Hamas members have been subjected to both Israeli and Palestinian crackdowns since the Islamic militant group seized power in the Gaza Strip five years ago, leaving the Palestinians’ Western-backed president, Mahmoud Abbas, in control only of the West Bank.
What did I just say?
But the two rival factions have made gestures toward each other following an eight-day Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip last month and Abbas’s successful bid at the United Nations to win international recognition of a de facto Palestinian state.
And every time they do Israel creates a crisis and thumps them.
‘‘Hamas steadfastness and victory in Gaza was a big victory for all Palestinian people,’’ Amin Makboul, a Fatah leader, said in a speech at Thursday’s rally in Nablus.
Lack of progress in peace talks with Israel and Hamas’s perceived victory in recent fighting has made the Islamic militant group among Palestinians.
Thousands of Palestinians marched through the streets of Hebron on Thursday, chanting anti-Israel slogans and waving green Hamas flags during a funeral procession for a teenager killed a day earlier in this volatile West Bank city.
Dozens of youths clashed with Israeli soldiers throughout the day, throwing stones and bottles. Troops responded with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. No serious injuries were reported.
Wednesday’s shooting of Mohammed Suleima, 17, has raised tensions in Hebron, where several hundred ultranationalist Jewish settlers live in heavily fortified enclaves in the midst of more than 180,000 Palestinians.
They mean militant Zionist terrorists.
The shooting occurred near a holy site known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Tradition holds that it is the place where their shared patriarch, Abraham, or Ibrahim to Muslims, bought a burial plot.
Israel’s paramilitary border police force said officers shot Suleima after he threatened them with a gun that only later turned out to be fake. But relatives of the Palestinian youth said he was unarmed.
The relatives initially said Suleima had been hard of hearing and did not hear soldiers’ orders for him to halt. But family members later said the boy’s hearing was fine.
Yeah, right, it is the Palestinians who are liars.
Some 5,000 people joined Thursday’s funeral procession, praising God and vowing revenge. ‘‘Our blood will redeem the martyr,’’ the crowd chanted.
Suleima’s body was wrapped in a green Hamas shroud as it was carried on a stretcher through the streets. Dozens of people held green Hamas flags aloft during the procession. Suleima’s family is known to support Hamas, and his brother was released last year in a prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel that freed an Israeli soldier held for five years in Gaza.
--more--"
Israel has other ways to wage war:
"Bedouins ousted from West Bank" by MOHAMMED BALLAS | Associated Press, January 03, 2013
KHIRBET AL-MEITEH, West Bank — The Israeli military on Wednesday ordered dozens of Palestinian Bedouins to leave their communities so it could conduct military exercises in a remote area of the West Bank.
The military said that the order was temporary, and that the Palestinians were living illegally in closed military zones. The Bedouins say they have lived in the area for decades. While the army has issued temporary evacuation orders in the past, Bedouins say they have increased in frequency, and they charge the practice is meant to pressure them to leave their homes.
Israel has used largely empty areas of the West Bank for military bases, firing ranges, and maneuvers since shortly after it captured the territory in 1967, marking off large areas and spurring frequent complaints from Palestinians.
The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank as a key part of a future state.
After receiving the latest evacuation order, one family dismantled its tents, loading sheep and small children onto a trailer in the community of Khirbet al-Meiteh.
‘‘We will sleep here tonight, in this trailer,’’ said Walid Zawahiri, 57. ‘‘There’s nowhere else to go.’’
--more--"
No world uproar?
"Palestinian prime minister warns of cash crisis" Associated Press, January 07, 2013
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian self-rule government is in ‘‘extreme jeopardy’’ because of an unprecedented financial crisis, largely because Arab countries have failed to send hundreds of millions of dollars in promised aid, the Palestinian prime minister said Sunday.
The cash crunch has gradually worsened in recent years, and the Palestinian Authority now has reached the point of not being able to pay the salaries of about 150,000 government employees, Salam Fayyad said.
The number of Palestinian poor is bound to quickly double to 50 percent of the population of roughly 4 million if the crisis continues, Fayyad said. ‘‘The status quo is not sustainable,’’ he said in an interview at his West Bank office.
The Palestinian Authority, set up two decades ago as part of interim peace deals with Israel, was meant to be temporary and replaced by a state of Palestine, which was to be established through negotiations with Israel. But for the past four years the two sides have been unable to agree on the terms of resuming negotiations.
In late November, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas won UN recognition of a state of Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, overriding Israeli objections to the largely symbolic step.
On Sunday, Abbas asked his West Bank-based government to prepare for replacing the words ‘‘Palestinian Authority’’ with ‘‘State of Palestine’’ in all public documents, including ID cards, driving licenses and passports.
Israeli officials declined to comment, including on whether Israel would prevent Palestinians with new ID cards and passports from crossing borders and checkpoints.
The UN bid gave the Palestinians new diplomatic leverage by affirming the borders of a future state of Palestine in lands Israel captured in 1967, but changed little in the day-to-day lives of Palestinians.
I guess that is why I'm not interested in putting up the links.
--more--"
The more things change....
"Israelis accused of killing teenager; Was near barrier; army investigates" by Joel Greenberg | Washington Post, January 16, 2013
JERUSALEM — Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian teenager Tuesday near Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank, Palestinians said, in the latest of several fatal shootings in recent days near fences in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Now Israeli snipers picking them off one-by-one near the Apartheid Wall.
The shooting at Budrus, west of Ramallah, occurred when a group of high-school students, out walking after first-semester final exams, approached the fence that runs outside the village, according to reports from the scene.
The barrier, built by Israel to keep out suicide bombers and other attackers, slices into the West Bank in several locations to take in Jewish settlements, cutting off some Palestinian villages from their lands. At Budrus, the fence route was changed several years ago, restoring most of the village’s land, after a campaign of nonviolent protest by residents.
An army spokeswoman said that several Palestinians damaged the barrier Tuesday ‘‘in an attempt to infiltrate into Israel’’ and that soldiers following rules of engagement shot at one youth who tried to cross the fence. She said the army had opened an investigation.
Related: Palestinian Climbs West Bank Wall and Kills Israeli
Villagers reported that Samir Awad, 16, was shot as he fled soldiers who had been hiding in a trench near the fence.
Looks like an AMBUSH or ASSASSINATION!
Ayed Morrar, a prominent activist in Budrus, said by phone that according to accounts by Awad’s friends, they were surprised by the soldiers, who first shot the youth in the leg and tried to arrest him, then fired at him again as he tried to run away. Photos of Awad’s upper body taken by a fieldworker for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem showed wounds in the chest and head.
It was therefore an EXECUTION!
Morrar said that soldiers used rubber-coated bullets and tear gas to disperse villagers who had gathered at the scene. The army spokeswoman did not explain why the nonlethal weapons were not used earlier.
In a similar event Saturday, soldiers killed a 21-year-old Palestinian when he tried to cross the West Bank barrier south of Hebron. His family said he had been trying to sneak into Israel to work. The military said that soldiers followed standard rules of engagement, firing at the legs of the suspect when he refused to stop.
And yet somehow these guys keep ending up dead!
On Friday, a Palestinian was killed in the Gaza Strip when soldiers opened fire at a group that approached the fence on the border with Israel. The army said soldiers followed rules of engagement when Palestinians entered a ‘‘forbidden area’’ and tried to damage the fence.
Yeah, well, if so then F*** ISRAEL!
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"Israel says tunnel from Gaza discovered; Building material supply suspended" by Isabel Kershner | New York Times, October 14, 2013
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military announced Sunday that it had discovered an underground tunnel leading from Gaza into Israel that could have been used for an attack against Israeli soldiers or civilians.
In response to the discovery, the military said it had suspended the flow of building materials to the private sector in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave.
In other words, it was an excuse to keep Gaza operating at a low level.
Major General Sami Turjeman, the Southern Command chief, said the freeze was ordered because Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza, was using construction materials approved by Israel for civilian purposes to build tunnels like the one discovered recently.
Officials said Israel would continue to allow the transfer of construction materials for projects overseen by international organizations.
Military officials said the tunnel was about a mile long and was built at a depth of nearly 60 feet. They added that it had probably been constructed more than a year ago and was discovered last week. It was the third such tunnel discovered this year, they said.
The mouth of the tunnel is near Ein Hashlosha, an Israeli communal farm near the border with Gaza.
In 2006, Hamas and other militant groups used a smuggling tunnel for a cross-border raid in which they killed two Israeli soldiers and seized a third, Gilad Shalit, who was whisked into Gaza and held captive for five years before being released in a prisoner exchange.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the security forces in remarks at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday.
“This is part of our policy — an aggressive policy against terrorism, including preventive action, intelligence, initiated action, responsive action and, of course, Operation Pillar of Defense,” Netanyahu said, referring to a military offensive in Gaza in November 2012 that Israel said was aimed at halting rocket fire from Gaza against southern Israel.
As a result of these measures, he said, Israel had enjoyed its quietest year in more than a decade, although he also pointed to what he said was a rise in terrorist actions in recent weeks.
Hamas has largely observed an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire with Israel that ended the fighting in November.
But the discovery of the tunnel east of Gaza was portrayed locally by Hamas as evidence that it had not dropped armed resistance and that it continued to prepare for the next round of fighting against Israel.
The NYT must be prescient.
A spokesman for Hamas’s military wing who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Obaida said, “The determination that rests in the minds and hearts of the resistance fighters is more important than tunnels dug in the mud; out of the first, you can make thousands of the second.”
Over the past month, two Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinians in the West Bank, and a 9-year-old girl was lightly wounded in a shooting outside her home in a West Bank settlement. On Friday, an Israeli man was bludgeoned to death in an isolated area of the West Bank’s Jordan Valley.
The Shin Bet security agency said Sunday that with the help of the military and the police, it had arrested three Palestinians from the Hebron area on suspicion of involvement in the killing. It said that two of the suspects, one 18 and the other 21, had confessed to carrying out the killing and that it was investigating whether it was an act of terrorism or a criminal attack.
Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, and since it took power in Gaza, thousands of rockets have been fired into Israel. Israel carried out major military operations in 2009 and last year in Gaza in response to rocket fire. While various militant groups operate in Gaza, Israel says it holds Hamas responsible.
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Nine months later, it is Cast Lead III: The First Genocide of the Twenty-First Century.
