Palestinian firefighters inspect the rubble of a metal workshop after it was hit by Israeli helicopters in Gaza city, early Tuesday, June 20, 2006. Israeli helicopters fired a missile into a metal workshop in downtown Gaza City, but no wounded were reported, Palestinian official said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
From Petra (Jordan):
Gaza, June 20 (Petra)--Israeli aircrafts fired missiles on a metal workshop in Al Daraj neighborhood in Gaza, a Palestinian source said.
The source said that the missiles fired by Apache Helicopters destroyed the workshop and caused damage to a number of buildings.
No injuries were reported during the operation.
From the Bahrain News Agency:
Gaza, June. 20, (BNA) Israeli fighter planes conducted today an attack on a metal workshop located at Al Deraj, in Gaza's centre causing injuries to people.
Palestinian sources stated that the Israeli planes targeted the workshop using one missile which caused its destruction and which caught fire due to the attack. Material damages were also caused to neighbouring buildings by shrapnel's.
Just an innocent metal workshop, where presumably Palestinian Arabs are making souvenirs for tourists, or perhaps spare parts for their cars, right? The AP photo caption is the same as the Arab report on the missile strike - no context, just a random act of Israeli violence against some poor Palestinian Arab's livelihood.
At the end of a different AP report, there is a hint as to what could possibly been built at this workshop, but it is only a hint:
It is unclear whether AP means to have any repationship between the two paragraphs.
In cross-border strife, Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a metal workshop in Gaza City early Tuesday. Residents said nobody was hurt. The military said the workshop was run by Hamas.
Palestinian militants have been pelting Israel with rockets fired from Gaza, and Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, met with angry residents of a town near Gaza that has been a frequent target, and pledged military action to put an end to the barrages.
Xinhua, in China, gives a tiny bit more context:
The Palestinian shelling coincided with an Israeli air raid at a metal workshop in Gaza that Israel said it was used to produce crude rockets. No injuries reported in the after midnight shelling.
Earlier, al-Nasser Saladin Brigades of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), said it had launched a holy rocket that landed near the car of Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
The only other news source I saw that actually mention context is, interestingly, credited to AP as well - but I saw it mentioned in no other story:
Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a metal workshop in Gaza City early Tuesday, residents and the Israeli military said.
The military said the workshop was run by Hamas and used to make rockets and other weapons. Residents said no one was hurt.
Maybe the reason that the wire services are so reluctant to mention that these "workshops" are meant to create terror weapons is because they could no longer refer to rockets as being "home-made." (At the moment of this writing, there are over 1300 mentions in Google News of "homemade rockets," and exactly the two mentions above saying the possibility that rockets are made in "metal workshops.")