29-Mar-12: Thursday evening rocket fire on southern Israel

There are reports in the past hour of a renewal of indiscriminate terrorist fire on southern Israel. The IDF Spokesperson said it this way: "Breaking: Rocket fired from #Gaza hits southern #Israel, home to 1,000,000 civilians" Ynet's correspondents, Ilana Curiel and Neri Brenner, are reporting that three mortar shells, fired from the Gaza Strip, exploded in the Negev's Eshkol region - at this point no reports of injuries or damage.

25-Mar-12: Why are Jewish children killed? What does it tell us about Europe?

Toulouse, France: March 2012

On Friday, CNN ran an op ed under the title "Europe's blind spot on anti-Semitism". It is authored by Frida Ghitis, a Colombia-born journalist who has been published widely in the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune and dozens of publications in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Some extracts:

What would prompt a 23-year-old man, born and raised in France, to chase a small, terrified Jewish girl into a school courtyard, look her in the eye and shoot her in the head? ...I believe an honest examination will reveal a blind spot among those fighting prejudice that has allowed the ancient Jew hatred that infected Europe for centuries to survive. The blind spot is this: When the prejudice - and even the call for murder - is made in connection with the Palestinian cause, people look the other way and give it a pass... Often, when the Palestinian link is made, the prejudice comes from the left, couched as passion for human rights. At times, human rights activists seem to have no problem with anti-Semitism - even of the genocidal variety - condemning it forcefully only if it is accompanied by anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim sentiment. Just days before the Toulouse murders, on March 19, the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva hosted an event featuring a high official from Hamas. That is a group whose easily obtainable charter calls not just for the creation of a Palestinian state, which is something I, like many other people, wholeheartedly support. But Hamas' charter also declares: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it... The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews)..." If a white supremacist organization advocated genocide as this one does, polite society would keep its distance, at the very least. Instead, polite society contributes to a campaign to demonize Israel, fueling the hatred that is then unleashed against Jews in France and elsewhere. Last week, a U.N. official posted to Twitter a picture of a heartbreakingly injured Palestinian girl, tweeting "Another child killed by #Israel ..." Turns out it was a 2006 picture of a girl who died falling from a swing... Why would a man kill small Jewish children? The answer has intrigued historians and psychologists for many centuries. But the more urgent question is what we can do to stop it from happening again. And the answer is that the first requirement is telling the truth about anti-Jewish ideologies.

She mentions a UN official who posted a picture of a heartbreakingly-injured child last week. That woman is Khulood Badawi [2006 photo here]. No mere amateur in the battle for public opinion, Badawi is a seasoned political activist who serves today as the paid Information and Media Coordinator for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs here in Jerusalem. In tweeting the painfully-difficult-to-view photo [it's here], she added this malicious and factually upside-down caption:

“Palestine is bleeding. Another child killed by #Israel. Another father carrying his child to a grave in #Gaza.”

Her dishonest message has been retweeted hundreds of times in the last few days. The reality, as opposed to Badawi's bogus narrative, is this. The picture was taken in 2006, nearly six years ago. Reuters published it then, and like now its value was appreciated by those who want to paint Israel in demonic shades. The actual cause of the child's death (a tragic playground accident) was described this way in the Reuters caption:

“A Palestinian man carries the body of three year-old Raja Abu Shaban, in Gaza August 9, 2006. The three-year-old girl who had been reported killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday actually died of an accident, Palestinian medical workers said on Thursday. Workers at Gaza’s Shifa hospital said on August 10, 2006 that the initial mistake over the cause of death appeared to have arisen because the girl’s corpse was brought in at the same time as the bodies of the gunmen. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES)”

The real reality is that the imagery of hatred, depicting an imagined Israel that seeks the deliberate deaths of the other side's children, will prevail because it's a narrative and a framework that plays to widely held prejudices.

Frida Ghitis expresses it well: the first requirement is telling the truth about anti-Jewish ideologies.

22-Mar-12: Other than about cynical hypocrisy, do the reactions to the deliberate murders of French children teach us something?

Four of the murderer's innocent victims: From left: Rabbi
Jonathan Sandler, 30, a teacher; his two sons, Arye, 6, and Gabriel, 3;
and Miriam Monsonego, 8, the daughter of the school’s principal

No sane or rational human can be unmoved by the events of the past few days ["Gunman dead as French siege ends"] in Toulouse, France. It's disturbing to see how the media coverage of the siege and the endless re-showing of the murderer's face and antics have overshadowed the narrative of unfathomable loss on the part of the shattered Jewish families. But we understand that; it's the way of the world. 

What we completely reject, however, is the bald-faced, cynical hypocrisy of the official Palestinian Arab "moderate" "leadership". There are many instances but let's focus on the most "moderate" of the "moderates" and a comment he made yesterday:

The Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad has condemned the attack on the Jewish school: "It is time for these criminals to stop marketing their terrorist acts in the name of Palestine and to stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life" [Source: BBC]

And today they have the same Fayyad on the Bethlehem-based Maan News expressing similar warm and humane sentiments:

"This terrorist crime is condemned in the strongest terms by the Palestinian people and our children" [Source: Maan]

The reality is different. When the BBC and the others are looking the other way, Fayyad and his more foaming-at-the-mouth colleagues sing a very different song, and yes, it is a song - a song of triumph and of racist hatred. They don't condemn. They honour the murderers and terrorists who kill Jewish children. They make them heroes. They place them on pedestals paid for, created and exploited by the very government which pays them their salaries and which they front. A deeper form of dishonesty is hard to imagine.

You doubt this? Let's take a look. 

Some years ago, a Palestinian Arab woman, a terrorist, called Dalal Mughrabi killed 12 Israeli children and 25 Israeli adults. While her name is not so familiar to people in the circles in which we move, she's a certified giant, a figure to be emulated, in the hate-based culture manufactured and marketed by the Palestinian Arab government in Ramallah, the one headed by the other "moderate", Mahmoud Abbas. 

Palestinian Media Watch, which survey their public pronouncements and their TV, radio and web presence leaves no doubt about the real, non-BBC-targeted views of Abbas, Fayyad and their amoral colleagues. A handful of examples from among many:

• "Dalal is my mysterious young woman, my revolutionary Jihadi inspiration.... my eternal love. I loved her but knew only her name, Dalal Mughrabi."[Statement of a Fatah official via Facebook - accessed March 22, 2012]
• "The bride of the coast, Dalal Mughrabi, and other female fighters have roles of honor in the national struggle." [The Palestinian Authority's officially appointed governor of Ramallah and of El-Bireh, Laila Ghannam, March 17, 2012]
• "Dalal was a model of a fighting Palestinian woman... who fulfilled her obligation towards her land and homeland." [PA Civil Defense Commissioner Abu Al-Sheikh, March 7, 2012]
• "We have days of heroism that were recorded by women... martyrs like Dalal Mughrabi and others." [Women's rights activist, Zaynab Al-Ghanimi, March 7, 2012]

So is the murderer of Jewish children a figure to be condemned, as Fayyad, Abbas and others say today while this week's gunman's still-warm dead body is still sprawled on the ground in Toulouse? Or is the murderer a hero, a model for Palestinian Arab children to dream of becoming, a noble fighter? The answer is: both. But we need to know that one is a deliberate, outright lie and the other is a central plank in the educational platform of yet another generation of Palestinian children.

Or as we heard someone say in Jerusalem today: Understand Fayyad this way: Let's stick to attacking Israeli Jews because we don't get the same bad press that an attack overseas produces.

22-Mar-12: Overnight rockets fired into Israel

Excuse the thin reporting and analysis; we're traveling. Three rockets, according to Ynet, were fired at southern Israel from the Gaza Strip Wednesday night. A mortar shell was fired at an IDF force patrolling near the Kisufim checkpoint, not far from the Gaza border fence. No injuries or damage reported. A little earlier, a mortar shell exploded in an open area in Sha'ar Hanegev region. And before that, a Qassam rocket was fired at the western Negev, exploding within the battered Eshkol region. No injuries or damage so far reported after the explosions. These attacks, like so many before them, are almost entirely unreported in the conventional news channels.

19-Mar-12: Monday morning rocket attack

The same part of southern Israel - the Eshkol region [report here] - that was struck Friday by a terrorist rocket was hit again this morning (Monday). Ynet says today's rocket was a Qassam and that it exploded in an open area after the Color Red alert was sounded in several towns across the region around 9:50 am. No injuries or damage are so far reported.

16-Mar-12: The surreality of terrorist warfare

The million-plus Israelis living in the southern part of the country had another unquiet night. Around 1:30 morning (Friday), another Gazan rocket crashed to earth and exploded, delivering its message of hatred and racist intolerance, this time to the Eshkol region, amid the terrifying shriek of Color Red sirens. No reports of injuries or damage at this point. And no reports that it even happened other than in a handful of Israeli media channels (no one was killed, right?)

Meanwhile the talented team at Latma capture well the sense of glad-it's-not-happening-to-us that is part of this surrealist terrorist war experience. Below is the Hebrew version - we will replace it with the English subtitled edition when that is released.

15-Mar-12: The terrorists are firing their rockets into southern Israel again tonight

Iron Dome battery, Ashdod 

It's a very unpleasant Thursday night for the citizens of southern Israel. So far, in the hours since sunset, there have been three rocket attacks that we know about. Around 8:40 pm, a long-range and highly lethal GRAD rocket on its way to certain impact in the streets of the battered city of Ashdod was intercepted and destroyed in mid-air by the Israeli Iron Dome counter-missile system.

The people of Ashdod, including members of our family, are exhausted and angry and wondering why an army that has the capacity to inflict devastating damage to the territory from which rockets continue, despite a ceasefire, continues to restrain its responses and to absorb rocket after rocket.

Around 9:20 pm, another rocket struck the Hof Ashkelon region and exploded. And about ten minutes ago, another rocket crashed into an unidentified place in Israel's western Negev region. Too early to know if we escaped harm and damage again - we expect to know more in the coming hour.

Worth noting that earlier in the day, a Qassam rocket exploded near Ofakim, several hundred meters from a school where classes were taking place Thursday morning. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.

15-Mar-12: Aftermath of today's Jerusalem stabbing attack [UPDATED]

A few hours ago, we wrote about a stabbing on the Jerusalem tram. Ynet now reports that the victim, a 19 year-old Israeli girl doing her National Service, is in Shaare Zedek Medical Center where she has been put on a respirator machine and undergoing tests to see whether surgery will be necessary. Her mother is at her bedside.

The Times of Israel says eyewitnesses described the stabber as an Arab man in his 20s wearing a kaffiyeh, jeans and t-shirt. A suspect was arrested at the Qalandiya checkpoint by a police officer and security guard who recognized him. Ynet says he is being questioned and his personal details are under a gag order.

Ynet quotes several witnesses:

"I was sitting on the train, there were no screams or anything to indicate something had happened. When I looked back I suddenly saw people crowding around and as I approached I saw the young woman bleeding. She mumbled, 'why did this happen to me' and 'why do I deserve this'." [According to a medic]: "As I arrived I saw a young woman with stab wounds to her chest. She had a low pulse, as she lost a lot of blood... Dr. Ofer Marin, director of Shaare Zedek's trauma center said that the knife had been lodged inches away from the soldier's heart. "There was definitely an element of luck here. Right now her life is not under any danger."

Thank heavens this did not end up worse than it did. Buses in this country have long been the target for murderous terrorists. Trams are new.

UPDATE Thursday 6:00 pm: The alleged perpetrator has confessed.

Today's terror attack scene

15-Mar-12: Stabbed in Jerusalem this morning

A man on board a Jerusalem tram stabbed a nineteen year old girl this morning. Ynet reports that he stabbed her in the chest and hand. She was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in moderate condition. The stabber escaped and fled in the direction of Shuafat, an Arab neighbourhood of Jerusalem just a few minutes drive from where we live. The police say the hero waited for the tram to stop, then stabbed her and ran. The Jerusalem Post has a slightly different account: he is an Arab youth who rode on the tram until it reached the Pisgat Ze'ev station, where he stabbed the girl and ran. The Post says he has been caught. More details when we have them.

14-Mar-12: Another Grad rocket attack from Gaza - this time, it's Beer Sheva that gets hit [UPDATED]

In the past half hour, the ceasefire-with-terrorists arrangement produced another rocket attack on southern Israel. This time, Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted a rocket launched by the terrorists of the Gaza Strip in the direction of Beer Sheva. The mid-air intercept is reported to have succeeded and as a result there are no injuries or damage. But several residents of the southern city are being treated for shock.

UPDATE Wednesday 9:00 pm Israel time - There were two Iron Dome intercepts in the skies over Beer Sheva, not one, reports Ynet in an update filed about half an hour ago. These incoming missiles were both powerful, long-range GRAD rockets. A third GRAD rocket, not intercepted presumably because Iron Dome correctly predicted its trajectory, crashed into open spaces somewhere on the periphery of the city. In the past 3 minutes, the mayor of Ashkelon, a city on Israel's southern coast and perilously close to the thuggish hordes of Gaza, has decided there will be no school for the city's children tomorrow. Simply too dangerous.

And now we hear that the children of Beer Sheva and Ashdod will also be staying home on Thursday.

This is another aspect of how a war conducted by terrorists differs from conventional war. Weapons are not only more powerful than in the past; they are also more technology-rich. One person, literally, or perhaps two, can make the decision to fire a volley that threatens an entire city, and can go ahead and do it. No army needed. No chain of command. Just some terrorist thug with other people's deaths on his mind. And millions of civilians on the other side of the fence are then his hostage. We're not saying that's happened here, but it's fairly clear that it is not so far from the reality we face in Islamist Gaza.

14-Mar-12: They're still firing today from Gaza

In Netivot last night [Image Source]

The relative quiet since last night's rocket explosion in a Netivot public car park was breached this afternoon by an incoming mortar round, fired by the Gazan terrorists at anything Israeli.

This one, according to Ynet's report, failed on all counts. Though the shrill Color Red missile warning sirens were screaming throughout southern's Israel's Sha'ar Hanegev region, today's attack fell short, literally. The mortar crashed on the Palestinian Arab side of the fence between Gaza and Israel, and exploded there. For all we know, a Gazan family may have been killed. But we actually don't know because self-inflicted casualties on their side - a routine occurrence - are never reported. No one, in the news sense at least, cares for Arab-on-Arab injuries.

Meanwhile on the Israeli side, students in the south returned to school today - but cautiously, after three days of suspended classes. The Education Ministry says there was an 80% overall attendance but in freshly scarred Netivot, half the students stayed home or were kept there by worried parents.

14-Mar-12: Quote of the day: "Mr Secretary General, something is wrong with this equation"

The Security Council

"Israeli civilians have less than 15 seconds to find shelter from these attacks. The lives of 1,000,000 Israeli civilians are paralyzed. 200,000 Israeli children are out of school. During your trip to Israel last month, you met these children and saw these areas with your own eyes. Yesterday, you told the Security Council, "Rocket attacks out of Gaza against Israeli civilian areas are unacceptable and must stop immediately." Yet, the Security Council has uttered zero words of condemnation of these attacks. There is something wrong with this equation... The situation is grave. If one rocket lands in the wrong place at the wrong time, Israel will be forced to respond in a completely different manner."

Extract from a letter sent earlier this week to Mr Ban Ki-Moon, 

UN secretary-general, by Israel's UN ambassador, Ron Prossor. 

14-Mar-12: This is how it sounds and kind of how it feels to be where the rockets are coming at you

This video was shot in Ashdod, a pleasant coastal city with the misfortune of being within shooting range of the tens of thousands of terrorist rockets stored in houses, mosques and hospitals throughout Gaza.

You hear six explosions and an air-raid siren in this short video clip. We heard those sirens here in Jerusalem when Saddam Hussein's forces fired on us in January and February 1991, and it's something you not only don't forget; it actually makes us shiver to hear it now.

You can see that Ashdod, like Ashkelon and Gan Yavneh and Gadera and Beer Sheva and Netivot and Sderot and other communities with names that are unfamiliar to non-Israelis, looks not so different from cities in countries that are perhaps more familiar to you.

Now, glance over to the right of this page and the widget called Challah Hu Akbar's Counter. It counts rocket attacks on Israelis. Try to imagine how different life is in the places we just listed, and in fact throughout Israel, compared with where you live. What would you be asking your government to do if those rockets, mortars and missiles were being fired at your children and you?

13-Mar-12: Ceasefire? Perhaps but that's a rocket that just exploded in the center of Netivot

The Palestinian Arab terrorists of the Gaza Strip fired a long-range Grad rocket into southern Israel on Tuesday night, says INN. It crashed into the heart of the southern town of Netivot (population 27,000), landing in a parking lot, terrifying residents and reminding Israelis throughout the country that a ceasefire with terrorists is not something on which to build your plans.

Fortunately there are no immediate reports of injuries in the attack. The police bomb squad and emergency services are on site to assist residents.

Some 200 rockets have been fired at Israeli civilians and communities since Friday by the missile-rich, terror-addicted "militants" of Gaza. Reuters says "an Egyptian-brokered truce between Israel and militant groups in the Gaza Strip began to take hold" this morning. The million or so sleep-deprived civilian residents of Israel's south are withholding judgement for now.

13-Mar-12: Just one of the ways in which a terror war is different from conventional war

Ashdod yesterday:  An Israeli woman surveys the damage to her store
following a rocket attack from the nearby Gaza Strip. Image source: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

We'll start with what might seem an irrelevant news report from less than an hour ago:

A 15 year old Palestinian teenager from Gaza has been transported to Israel for emergency medical treatment in an Israeli hospital. He was seriously injured while preparing to launch a Palestinian Qassam rocket at Israeli civilians in southern Israel, when the rocket suddenly malfunctioned and exploded. The explosion took place in the Shuja'iyya district of Gaza city. 

[Source and hit tip: Jameel @ The Muqata]

Next we'll get on to the don'ts. We don't mean to lecture here on how terrorists  don't wear uniforms, or that they deliberately, consistently and almost exclusively target civilians and don't seek strategic or military goals, or that they don't answer to governments who then have to answer for their actions (though in the case of the Palestinian Arab terror groups, they not only don't lack a government but they actually have two, one in Ramallah and the other in Gaza City).

No, what we mean is that in terror warfare, there's no universally agreed definition of what makes it terror in the first place. And as a consequence, it's not universally agreed when the terror has passed or what it produced.

Tonight, for example, there are reports that "both sides honored a cease-fire brokered by neighboring Egypt" [TIME Magazine: "Egypt Brokers a Gaza Ceasefire"]. There is celebrating in Gaza - literally: a victory rally as we type these words.

By mid afternoon today, the IDF Spokesperson was reporting that, ceasefire or not, so far six rockets launched from the Gaza Strip had hit southern Israel. Shortly after dark, a Gazan Palestinian Arab rocket fired from the terrorist ranks crashed into the Ashkelon Beach (Hof Ashkelon) region; fortunately, no injuries or damage were reported.  To be clear about this, that rocket attack on Ashkelon Beach was in no sense an attack on a military target. The terrorists didn't care, didn't try and very likely could not deliberately strike a military target or any other target, but it hardly matters. Their aim is terror and in this they succeeded. Likewise the mortar attack that happened half an hour ago (around 9:00pm) in the Eshkol region; again, fortunately, no reports of injury or damage. But for the residents of the Eshkol region, suffering one more time through Color Red sirens screaming a warning to take cover, ceasefire or no ceasefire, it hardly matters.

Nor does it matter for the terrorists whose aim is not to conquer or occupy or neutralize their enemy. They have a goal of sowing terror. Tonight's victory rally in Gaza is accompanied with new threats by their leadership to do it all again, only worse [Ynet].

And why should they say or do anything else, when supposedly civilized states, like for instance the Turks, are egging them on, celebrating the great achievement of the past four days and, for good measure, accusing Israel of carrying out no less than a massacre in Gaza. The Turkish prime minister Erdogan is quoted tonight explaining the nightmare of the past few days in ways that make sense to him and his fellow Turks. Israel, he asserts "failed to annihilate the Gaza Strip by withholding food, medications and is therefore now trying to subdue it with airstrikes." Israel, says Erdogan,

"is committing a massacre in Palestine in the backdrop of the recent flare-up on the Gaza border area. Speaking at the Turkish parliament, Erdogan described Gaza as the world's largest open air prison.... [Erdogan said] "23 Gazans lost their lives in the past five days, including children on their way to school". He added, "A genocide has been committed slowly but systematically in Palestine since the beginning of the 20th century." Erdogan said that "the resistance fighters" were not militants or terrorists, but dissidents who are protecting their rights and their lands. Erdogan linked violence in the south to anti-Muslim events around the world and addressed the murder of 16 Afghans by a US soldier earlier this week. He said he wished the Afghan and Palestinian fatalities "revenge from Allah."

We will subdue our sense of the absurdity (better: chutzpah) at hearing the head of the government that committed one of the twentieth century's literal acts of genocide, the one intended to remove every last Turkish Armenian from the face of the earth, accusing Israel (again) of that unspeakable crime. We will also save ourselves the effort of reminding his know-nothing supporters of how food and material aid continued to flow from Israel into Gaza in the past four days, even when Gazan gunmen opened mortar fire on the Kerem Shalom crossing itself this week and struck several aid vehicles. Some genocide. 


But we will address the issue of who was killed on the Gazan side this week. This is important because of the deliberate attempts of the terrorists of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and of Turkey's Erdogan and of the shameless suited diplomats of the Arab League to claim there has been a massacre of innocent Gazans. It is justified because of the calls by the religious fanatics of the new Egyptian parliament's lower house, the People's Assembly, deciding unanimously (unanimously!) that Israel's ambassador to Cairo must be deported and Egyptian gas sales to Israel must be halted and the Camp David peace accords with Israel must be 're-examined".

All these actions are calculated at hiding the truth and maintaining the crazy situation that leads to open and deliberate acts of terrorism (against us) being justified and perpetuated, as they have for so many years in this ongoing war.

So who was killed on the Gazan side? And did a massacre happen there this week as the serious people we listed above all say?

Here is who was killed. According to the IDF: "Twenty-six Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes: 22 terrorists and four civilians." Challah Hu Akbar, who does outstanding research from open source materials (the kind you can find if you spend the time and effort and have the skills) has pieced together a visual table of the dead of the past few days. He writes that 14 of the terrorists killed by Israel since Friday were members of Islamic Jihad. Here are their faces:

Challah Hu Akbar's site 

The images go on down the page. Please visit the website of Challah Hu Akbar, and point your acquaintances to it. Because if we go on from here with intelligent people dishonestly (and malevolently) claiming the Israelis conducted a massacre in Gaza this week, then sooner or later, as a million or more Israelis are held hostage to the vast arsenal of rockets held by the enemies on our northern and southern borders, there will be no option but to respond with devastating force. If that's what it takes, and nothing else persuades them to stop, then tragically that may be what is needed because no state voluntarily leaves its people exposed to an armed-to-the-teeth terrorist enemy.

In Syria today, by the way, "government forces killed dozens of people in the northern city of Idlib, dumping their bodies in a mosque" [Source]. That's just today's toll. The bloodletting orchestrated by Al-Assad, the Butcher of Damascus, has gotten to truly monstrous proportions: "More than 8,000 people have died since anti-government protests erupted in Syria a year ago, a UN official says. UN General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz al-Nasser said many women and children were among the victims." [Source]

13-Mar-12: A hard day's toll

It's been an exhausting, nerve-wracking day for Israelis, especially the million or so living south of Tel Aviv. 

According to Israel's Southern District police, 42 rockets were fired by the terrorists of the Gaza Strip into Israel on Monday. Haaretz says Monday's toll was actually 47 rockets exploding in Israeli territory and 13 more that were intercepted in mid-flight by the Iron Dome system. The Jerusalem Post says the IDF Home Front Command and the heads of local authorities in the South decided tonight (Monday) to keep schools closed in all communities located between 7 and 40 km. from the Gaza Strip. This applies to Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, Netivot, Sderot, Kiryat Malachi, Gedera, Rahat, Yavne, Lakiya and the Gan Yavne Regional Council. Among the Gazan rockets that struck Israeli soil today, several exploded about 40 km south of the center of Tel Aviv. An un-named military official is quoted by Ynet saying there is a possibility that the rockets will reach the Tel Aviv-area since the terror groups “are always contemplating whether to fire their (long-range) Fajr rockets, but they realize the consequences and make the cost-benefit calculation.” Still, this may change if, as seems likely, the Palestinian rocket fire continues. And true to form, the BBC World Service's only mention of any of this, to judge from the Middle East section of its much-visited and highly influential website, is a story headlined "Gaza: New Israeli air strikes leave several dead". 

As the French know, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Scenes from the southern coastal city of Ashdod. A woman is evacuated following one of several rocket attacks from the nearby Gaza Strip, on March 12, 2012. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

Shaken students from a school for religious girls take urgent cover next to their bus as yet another rocket is fired in their general direction by the terrorists of Gaza,  March 12, 2012 in Ashdod, Israel. (Photos by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images) 

12-Mar-12: Lest the bare facts get lost...

This car took a direct hit on the streets of Ashdod,
Israel's sixth largest city, today. [Image Source: REUTERS/Nir Elias]

About 190 missiles, rockets and mortars have been fired in the usual Palestinian Arab way - indiscriminately in the general direction of where the Jews live accompanied by a prayer to their god that they find some soft human target - since the latest escalation in this ongoing war started on Friday.

Today has been no less dramatic for the million or so Israelis living at Ground Zero, which means all of southern Israel up to and including Tel Aviv's southern suburbs, compared with the previous three days.

The IDF Spokesperson's office has confirmed the attacks below, but from personal knowledge, with family members living in the cities under siege, we believe the list is only partial.

• Overnight: Some 25 Gazan rockets were fired into Israel from midnight until dawn. Every one of them was accompanied by Code Red warnings that curdle your blood even if you are used to their unearthly sound.
• The Iron Dome active defense system intercepted 5 rockets during the hours of darkness. Since Friday, Iron Dome countermeasures have stopped 49 Palestinian Arab rockets in mid-air.
• Around noon today, the Kerem Shalom border crossing - the main entry point for goods coming into the Gaza Strip - came under mortar fire from the Gazan side. Can another artificial "humanitarian crisis" be far behind? 
• At about 2:15 this afternoon, a volley of six more rockets struck southern Israel. Three additional rockets were exploded in mid-air by the Iron Dome system, preventing a much worse outcome. 
• Towards 2:30 pm, Ashdod - a city of more than 200,000 - was hit once again by three incoming Gazan missiles, all of them probably Grads [Ashdod News in Hebrew]. An 80 year-old woman was moderately injured, among other wounded casualties, when one of the rockets made a direct hit on a vehicle [see picture above] in an Ashdod shopping center car park. The residents of Ashdod have been subjected to almost incessant air-raid warnings, exploding rockets and terrifying booms since Friday.

Nitzan, south of Ashdod, yesterday: Running for shelter
as an air-raid siren shrieks [Image Source: AFP / Jack Guez]

South of Ashdod, Israelis take cover in a concrete pipe/shelter as incoming
Palestinian rockets seek their targets. [Image Source:  AFP / Jack Guez]

The Reuters caption reads: "An Israeli girl looks for steel ball bearings on a wall of a school in the southern city of Beersheba, after it was damaged by a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza March 11, 2012. "
[Image Source: REUTERS/Amir Cohen]

Incidentally, did you see this last photograph published anywhere? Click to search on Google now: we think you are going to find it's nowhere. It's our impression that this kind of image - Israeli child under attack, and she's black - is anathema to mainstream picture editors throughout the world. 

12-Mar-12: Manipulating public opinion is as important to the terrorist strategy as firing rockets and here's why and how

Gaza: Terrorist operating his rocket launcher
from behind Palestinian Arab human shield [Image Source].
Why is this constant truth not expressed in the reports that
reach mainstream media news-consumers? Is it irrelevant to
the casualty figures?

More than a million Israelis are now four days into a recurring nightmare: air raid sirens at intervals of some hours, and sometimes of minutes. Indiscriminate, ongoing firing of lethal-payload missiles into their cities, farms, villages, buses, schools and homes round the clock. And it's being done by semi-organized groups of thugs whose sole reason for existing is to do exactly this.

This, as we have written before, is an asymmetric war. Meaning, our side chooses to fight by the rules that govern relations between countries, while theirs conducts war by the rules that you find in effect throughout the Arab world.

Are we being prejudiced in saying something that everyone with eyes can see? The death toll from the Arab version of warfare - the one where you direct anti-missile batteries and tank fire at your own citizens, Syrian-style or as the Yemeni regime does - speaks for itself and is pretty instructive. Yesterday alone, the Syrian government, the one with a seat at the United Nations and at UNESCO, murdered some fifty Syrian women and Syrian children according to the Christian Science Monitor, while CNN says 45 Syrians were killed by Syrian government forces in one city alone, Homs.

"Women and children were stabbed and burned to death late Sunday in the Syrian city of Homs, opposition activists said, after peace talks between a U.N. special envoy and the Syrian regime failed to yield a cease-fire... Children were stabbed to death in front of their mothers, and women and minor girls were sexually assaulted before being shot."

Over here throughout southern Israel, hundreds of communities are in effect under siege. This is not because the Israeli side lacks the firepower to blast the enemy forces who are firing deadly rockets 24/7 with intent to kill. It's because the IDF, on the instructions of the government and people of Israel, operates with the restraint that is a natural part of being a civilized society. The price we pay is terribly high.

Yet, for the most part, reports in the news media today continue to paint matters in the traditional neighbourhood-bully (that's us) versus homeless-wailing-widows-and-barefoot-children (that's the Gazans), conveniently forgetting many things including these two central points:

1. The Gazan forces, no matter what we think of their ethics, are equipped to an almost incomprehensible degree with missiles. These are stored in residential homes, in hospitals, in mosques, in places which - if the IDF chose to attack them directly (and the IDF does not lack the field intelligence to do this - would cause utter devastation to Palestinian Arab society in Gaza.
2. Consistently, over the years, anyone watching the news reporting that emanates from Arab sources in  general and the Palestinian Arabs in  particular, will have noticed how important a role is played by the manipulation of Western public opinion. This especially true of the way pathetic and defenseless victims are trotted out when needed and used to galvanize the natural desire of people in civilized countries to stand up for the weak and victimized. The trouble is, this frequently is done by distorting, exaggerating and inventing facts.

Here's an especially infuriating example brought to light thanks to the alertness of Elder of Ziyon.

Elder points to a report published by the Maan newsagency, a source of a great deal of Palestinian Arab spin since its inception in 2002 in Bethlehem. Maan is purveying the story of Nayif Shaaban Qarmout, a schoolboy of 15 who was killed today in Beit Lahiya, north Gaza by "an Israeli airstrike" according to Ma'an's correspondent. How many readers of the world's mainstream media will think twice about the truthfulness of this report? It plays so well into the fat-and-skinny narrative so beloved of editors and analysts. But it's evidently untrue and meaningfully so.

A syndicated APF news item (Agence France Press - never accused of being partial to the Israel side in such matters) published some hours ago adopts the customary he-said/she-said approach to the claims and counterclaims of the boy's death. But then buried near the end of the report, there's this rather unambiguous observation:

According to an AFP correspondent at the scene, there were no signs of any impact on the ground which could have been caused by a missile, with the most likely cause of his death being some kind of explosive device he was carrying.

So it appears that Israel's war machine not only takes self-limiting, extreme painstaking care to avoid unwanted civilian casualties among the ranks of our enemies; but it turns out that the "Zionist entity" (as anti-semites throughout the Arab and Iranian world prefer to call Israel) happens to be confronted with an enemy that consistently, historically, deliberately exploits its own children in the terrorist war it visits upon its neighbours (us).

This is another in a depressingly long list of reasons why the men with the rocket launchers are rightly called terrorists.

And also why Israel's civil authorities are forced to make decisions like the one, just announced, to move all child and women patients at Ashkelon’s Barzali Hospital into bomb shelters, while sending home as many other patients as possible as the terrorist  bombardment  from Gaza continues and moves northward to where Israel's largest cities are.

11-Mar-12: Day 3 and the incoming Gazan rockets keep attacking Israeli population centers [UPDATED]

The barrage of rocket fire directed - in a general way, minus any worthwhile accuracy - at southern Israel's population centers continues this morning (Sunday).

Around 6 am, yet another rocket from the terrorists of Gaza crashed into an open field in the Eshkol region. So far, there are no reports of injury or damage but as we have remind readers many times in the past, that is never the intention of the terrorists.

Then around 6:30 am, a rocket heading towards Israel's southern coastal city of Ashkelon was intercepted in the sky and destroyed by the Iron Dome anti-missile system. Ynet says two rockets headed for Ashdod were stopped this morning by Iron Dome. The IDF Spokesperson says no fewer than 28 incoming rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome since this latest wave of rocket-borne Gazan terrorism erupted on Friday.

UPDATE Sunday 09:15 am: According to Jerusalem Post, probably in line with what we noted earlier from  Ynet, two Grad-type rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome batteries shortly after 7:00 this morning. Grad rockets have a longer-range rocket than the more common Qassams and if they were intercepted by the very-expensive-to-fire Iron Dome batteries stationed around Israel's southern cities, then the calculation on the part of the IDF must have been that the rockets were headed for a city, probably Ashdod (as Ynet reported) or Ashkelon.

JPost says two other rockets crashed into southern Israel in the past hour: of the rockets exploded south of Ashkelon and the other in the Eshkol Regional Council. Those rockets are reported to have landed in open territories and caused no casualties or damages - which was not the intention of the terrorists.

11-Mar-12: Scenes from an asymmetrical war

The people of Ashdod, a city south of Tel Aviv, have had a maddening
weekend with incoming rocket sirens round the clock
and the kind of tension and fear that people living far
from here cannot imagine. This Reuters photo shows
a launcher, part of the Iron Dome rocket shield system,
freshly deployed in a field on the edge of the city. 

The terrorists of Gaza, as we noted earlier tonight, have so far flung (the best word we can think of for their indiscriminate firing into southern Israel) some 135 rockets into southern Israel in the latest escalation in this ongoing war.

Around 11 o'clock on Saturday night, a barrage of five rockets emanating from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip crashed into the Eshkol region of southern Israel. This time, no injuries and no damage reported but there have been Israeli casualties during this past 30 hours of ceaseless indiscriminate rocket firing into Israel. Most of the rockets have been fired in the general direction of Ashkelon and Ashdod and Gan Yavneh, southern dormitory suburbs of Tel Aviv. One Israeli civilian was severely injured, but very fortunately the injury list at this stage is relatively short. The Iron Dome anti-rocket system developed and urgently pressed into service by the Israeli military last year has done an impressive job of intercepting those missiles and rockets calculated (by the IDF) to be heading towards populated areas and, as Tom Gross writes tonight, disregarding those that are heading towards fields and empty land:

Of the first hundred launched from Gaza in the last 24 hours, 29 of the incoming rockets were heading towards Israeli population centers. 27 of them have been intercepted by the Iron Dome: a success rate of 93%.

Ashdod, on Israel's southern coast: under more
normal circumstances, a relaxed, pleasant and
fast-growing Mediterranean city [Image Source]

A number of Palestinian Arab terrorists have been eliminated by IDF action in the past day, caught as they were in the act of launching rockets at Israeli targets. No doubt there will be changes in the coming hours, but at this point, we believe no Palestinian civilians have been harmed. The precision of the IDF attacks so far has been extraordinary.

The website of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights has been tracking this weekend's dead terrorists (hat tip to Mr Medad) and unwittingly helping the outside world see how much care the Israeli side takes in blunting the terrorists and their rockets while making maximum efforts to avoid injury or worse to bystanders. Here's a summary of their running list so far:

• Friday, March 9, 2012 at 6:15 pm: A vehicle carrying two leaders of the Popular Resistance Committees was  struck from the air. The men inside were killed. They were Zuhair Mousa Ahmed al-Qaissi, 49, from Rafah, the so-called Secretary-General of the Popular Resistance Committees [more about him in a moment]; and Mahmoud Ahmed Hanani, 44, from Nablus, the son-in-law of al-Qaissi. [Note that the report states this son-in-law had been released from an Israeli prison and expelled to Gaza in 2006.]  The Times of Israel says tonight that al-Qaissi had boasted about his involvement in the kidnapping and holding for ransom of Gilad Shalit. He was the head of the Popular Resistance Committees, a somewhat shadowy terrorist group linked to Hamas. The Times quotes him saying shortly after the Shalit kidnapping that he was handed over to Hamas because Hamas “had the capabilities and the locations which allowed them to keep the prisoner in a safe secret place.” 
• Friday, March 9, 2012 at 7:20 pm: Three "activists" [Palestinian Arab code-name for terrorists] of  the al-Quds Brigades division of Palestinian Islamic Jihad were spotted and killed from the air while they were "near al-Mentar Hill in the east of al-Shuja'iya neighborhood in the east of Gaza City" [Israeli reports say they were in the process of firing off rockets into Israel at that exact moment]. The men's names: Mohammed Khaled Harara, 24; Fadel 'Obaid al-Gharabli, 25;  Hazem 'Awadh Quraiqe', 33.
• Friday, March 9, 2012 at 10.30 pm: another pinpoint attack from an IDF jet eliminated Shadi Riad al-Saiqali, 27 another so-called "activist" from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, this time in the al-Tuffah neighborhood in the east of Gaza City. 
• Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 12:45 am: Another air-borne attack on Palestinian Islamic Jihad "activists", meaning terrorists in the process of despatching rockets into Israel from a location "near the headquarters of the Palestinian Legislative Council in the center of Gaza City". Three terrorists were all eliminated. Their names: Fa'eq Sameer Sa'ad, 28; Mo'tassem Diab Hajjaj, 22;  Ahmed 'Abdul Fattah Hajjaj, 24.
• Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 1:45 am:  Another air-borne attack on Palestinian Islamic Jihad "activists", meaning terrorists in the process of despatching rockets into Israel from a location "near Hammouda fuel station in the southeast of Beit Lahia". Killed: Mohammed Yahia Mohammed al-Mughari, 24; and Mahmoud Ismail Nejem, 22.  A third un-named terrorist (PHCR calls him an "activist") was seriously wounded.
• Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 4:10, yet another precise air-borne IDF attack on Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists caught in the act. They were driving on Saladin road near the entrance of the central Gaza Strip town of Deir al-Balah. Their car took a direct hit, killing Mohammed Ibrahim al-Ghamri, 26. Three others terrorists in the car were wounded. 

The late Zuhair Mousa Ahmed al-Qaissi

The rain of rockets has not yet ended, and neither have Israeli pinpoint military attacks on specified targets in the Gaza area. Since there's uncertainty about how much freedom-to-operate the Gazan thugs still have at this point, the authorities in Beersheba, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Netivot, Kiryat Gat, Ofakim, Beer Tuvia, Yavne and Gedera have announced that all schools in their regions will be closed today (Sunday).

To call the news coverage of the ongoing rocket barrage on southern Israel minimal would be an understatement. It's almost entirely unreported, though the reactions to the untimely deaths of 'activists' from the Palestinian Arab side [for instance, "Israel launches deadly air strikes on Gaza" over at the BBC right now] are given wide, headline-level prominence, particularly in third-world countries. Hard not to be extremely cynical about the hypocrisy that produces results like this.

10-Mar-12: The terrorists of Gaza manage to fire more than 100 rockets at southern Israel in a single 24 hour period

The rocket fire from Gaza that we reported (and almost no news channels outside Israel did) on Friday produced a pinpoint Israeli strike on several terrorists, identified by name in the Palestinian Arab media, later on Friday afternoon.

There then followed an onslaught of rockets from the vast arsenal held in Hamas-controlled Gaza that has continued until the last few hours. The details are important (if we want to understand the nature of terrorist-instigated warfare, that is) and since the Sabbath has just ended, we need some time to compile it. So please stay tuned. The IDF's incoming-rocket count up until an hour ago (7:30 pm Israel time) was 135.

While we prepare a report, we want to remind you of one aspect of what we wrote yesterday about the absence of news report attention when it's Israelis being pounded: "On the other hand, if and when Israel's military decides to strike back at the storage facilities that hold the thousands of Gazan Palestinian Arab missiles, watch how the news and photo editors spring to life."

9-Mar-12: Rain, hail, sleet or snow - the thugs are always ready to fire in the general Israeli direction

It's a magnificent, early-spring day here. Reminder: there are only two kinds of weather that the terrorists consider to be ideal: good weather and bad weather.

Two Qassam rockets fired from the Hamas-controlled, terrorism-addicted Gaza Strip crashed into open areas of southern Israel's Eshkol region [Ynet] around 1:00 pm today. At this stage, there are no reports of injury or damage - just terrified civilians, fed up with the constant hail of lethal weapons from the thugs on the other side of the fence.

Consult CHALLAH HU AKBAR'S COUNTER: ROCKET ATTACKS ON ISRAEL, the widget on the right side of this and every other page of the This Ongoing War blog, to get an up-to-date numeric sense of what the appalling Gazan Arab regime wishes for its neighbours. And notice how today's attack and most of those that came before it make no impact whatever on news reports outside our country.

On the other hand, if and when Israel's military decides to strike back at the storage facilities that hold the thousands of Gazan Palestinian Arab missiles, watch how the news and photo editors spring to life.

8-Mar-12: Shalit epilogue continued

The Shalit transaction

Khalid Makhamira, a 39-year-old Palestinian Arab who was recently released as part of the Gilad Schalit prisoner exchange was re-arrested by soldiers from the IDF's Kfir Brigade today in the village of Yata in the southern Hebron Hills.

Reporting in the Jerusalem Post this evening, Yaakov Katz says the arrest did not go smoothly. A Palestinian Arab stabbed one of the Kfir soldiers who opened fire, injuring the attacker and killing another Palestinian Arab who was with him. Both Palestinian Arabs are reported to be teenagers. The soldier has moderate injuries and was evacuated to Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Karem, Jerusalem.

Makhamira was arrested in 2006. According to the Jerusalem Post's article, he was serving a life sentence for his involvement in terrorist shooting attacks on Israelis during the Arafat War (the so-called Second Intifada that Arafat and his Fatah organization launched on Jewish New Year in 2000). From our own investigation, he was in prison after being convicted of deliberate killing, shooting with a lethal weapon and membership of a prohibited organization. He is prisoner number 160 on the October 2011 Shalit list under the name Khalid Musa Id Shahada Makhamira.

Originally a member of Fatah, he graduated to Hamas during his five years in an Israeli prison and was then set prematurely and unjustly free as one of the 1,027 terrorists released as the price for the freedom of the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit.

Makhamira's re-arrest today is said to be for engaging in terrorist activity, specifically the smuggling of cash to fund terrorist activity in the West Bank. Katz writes that Makhamira is the fifth Palestinian Arab from the Shalit deal to be re-arrested in recent weeks. But as the very astute blogger Challah Hu Akbar notes today, Palestinian sources say the talley till now is actually more than five.

8-Mar-12: Some images to keep in mind as you hear about more terrorist attacks emanating from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in days to come

Keep in mind, as you view the images below, that the Palestinian Arabs are one of the world's largest beneficiaries of foreign aid, receiving over $3 billion annually. That's before we include the multi-billion dollar annual budget of UNRWA, the UN's unique (designed to benefit Palestinian Arabs only) refugee relief organization that holds the Gaza economy together through the provision of many thousands of bogus jobs and eligibility lists that keep growing and growing faster than the population does. 

In addition, think about these points. In 2009, over 60% of Palestine's gross national income, and almost 100% of government expenditure, came from aid. The PA budgets allocate ten times more money to security than to agriculture.The Palestinian Arab NGO sector has become a byword for corruption, incompetence and meaningless job creation. And the list goes on and on and on, as does the silence of people who normally have plenty to say about events in this neighborhood. 

Something is very wrong with this picture.

Palestinians wait to fill containers with fuel at a petrol station in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 3, 2012. Palestinian Islamist group Hamas faces growing discontent in its Gaza stronghold because of renewed tax hikes and the mismanagement of a power crisis that has led to lengthy blackouts across the coastal enclave. Traders who import goods from Israel and the West Bank say Hamas authorities have introduced additional fees beyond the usual tax they collect, putting their businesses at risk and threatening the livelihoods of thousands of workers. This Reuters picture was taken March 3, 2012. [Image source]

Hamas customs officers in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip stand on sacks of cement smuggled into the Gaza Strip through tunnels dug beneath the frontier with Egypt March 3, 2012. Palestinian Islamist group Hamas faces growing discontent in its Gaza stronghold because of renewed tax hikes and the mismanagement of a power crisis that has led to lengthy blackouts across the coastal enclave. Traders who import goods from Israel and the West Bank say Hamas authorities have introduced additional fees beyond the usual tax they collect, putting their businesses at risk and threatening the livelihoods of thousands of workers. This Reuters picture was taken March 3, 2012 [Image source].

Palestinians wait to fill gas cylinders at a gas filling station in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 8, 2012. [Image source]

A Hamas customs officer in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip walks on steel bars smuggled into the Gaza Strip through tunnels dug beneath the frontier with Egypt March 3, 2012. Palestinian Islamist group Hamas faces growing discontent in its Gaza stronghold because of renewed tax hikes and the mismanagement of a power crisis that has led to lengthy blackouts across the coastal enclave. Traders who import goods from Israel and the West Bank say Hamas authorities have introduced additional fees beyond the usual tax they collect, putting their businesses at risk and threatening the livelihoods of thousands of workers. This Reuters picture taken March 3, 2012 [Image source].

8-Mar-12: Mortar attack marks Purim festival

It's Purim, a Jewish festival day. Israel National News reported earlier today on morning mortar fire in the general direction of one of the kibbutzim in southern Israel from (of course) Gaza. INN correspondent Gavriel Queenann writes that

It exploded in an open field in the Eshkol region that borders Gaza and is frequently targeted in terror attacks. No injuries or property damage are reported. Hamas in Gaza claims to maintain a truce with Israel, but allows its terror confederates in the coastal enclave to routinely launch regular rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli communities. The IDF confirmed the attack and its commitment to the security of Israel's citizens in the south. A military response may be forthcoming. However, Israel's strategic paradigm of airstrikes-for-rockets has faced mounting criticism from military analysts as perpetuating the poor security situation that marks Israel's Gaza-belt region. IDF commanders and senior security officials increasingly say a major ground operation targeting Hamas' terror infrastructure in Gaza will prove "inevitable."

It's a festival here, as we said. But the striking failure of the Gazan Hamas regime to achieve even the minimal levels of community welfare for their people - despite phenomenal levels of aid money that have been pouring into their open maw for years, decades, is part of the reason why there are endless angry recruits ready to keep the terrorist warfare going against Israel. What else can we possibly expect them to do?

Palestinian Bedouins wade through water following rains
which flooded their tent homes and surrounding land
in the central Gaza Strip on March 4, 2012. [Source: Getty Images]

8-Mar-12: Job security and benefits in the terror organizations: not what they used to be

Wafa Al-Biss in 2005

Elder of Ziyon posted yesterday (Wednesday) that Wafa al-Biss feels deeply resentful because of her inability to get funding from the terrorists of Fatah to pay for surgery. 

Wafa's story goes beyond your usual unhappy-taxpayer-outs-unsympathetic-bureaucrats disclosure. You can understand her disappointment. She is a convicted terrorist, a so-called suicide bomber who was intercepted by Israeli security at the Erez Crossing in 2005 while trying to smuggle explosives into an Israeli hospital, Soroka, down south in Beer Sheva. She was 21 back then, and had been given approval to cross over into Israel to get delicate advanced treatment for severe burns suffered at home in a gas explosion. 

The logic is fairly straightforward. Since she was a little girl, her dream had been, and still was, to be a shahid (“martyr”) and die for allah's sake. Getting the opportunity to have her body healed by Israelis was the provocation that led her to plot an explosion that would kill doctors, nurses and patients in the very hospital, Soroka, that was going to save her. You understand the logic, right?

Ms Al-Biss went to prison for twelve years because thankfully the alert security people noticed her odd appearance, and eventually saw that 22 pounds of explosives were stitched into her underwear. She is no longer in prison because, like 476 other convicted murderers including this monster, she was freed in round one of the Gilad Shalit transaction in October 2011. 

Wafa Al-Biss in 2011

You can also see why the Arabic-language media pay her attention. When she got home to the Gaza Strip five months ago following her premature release, she told cheering schoolchildren, according to Al Ahram newspaper, that "she hoped they would follow her example... Biss said she had planned to blow herself up at the checkpoint but her detonator malfunctioned." [There's more background in "I would be a suicide bomber three times over if I could".] She's precisely the kind of role model that is ensuring Palestinian Arab society's children don't make it out of the Dark Ages.

But here, in Elder's words, is the real point. 

"While other terror groups have been giving jobs to former prisoners, Fatah hasn't offered her anything. She says that she is being treated with negligence and neglect as she gave her blood and years of her life to the cause. Maybe Fatah isn't paying because she is such a failure. After all, if she had managed to blow herself up in Erez, they wouldn't owe her a thing." 

Fatah is headed by the "moderate" Palestinian Arab president Mahmoud Abbas.