A balloon landed in Moshav
Bitkha, near Ofakim, on Sunday night. This time, the colorful rubber orb
carried no incendiary device—only a message in Arabic, which read:
"We, the people of Gaza,
need medical treatment. Remove the blockade."
Well, “we, the people of
Israel” would like to suggest that the blockade has nothing to do with your
ability to obtain medical treatment for your people. Take all the European aid
you receive and build hospitals. If you want to be a state, don't depend on
your neighbors to provide you with basic necessities like medical care.
And don’t go crying to us about
your poverty. You’ve launched thousands of rockets, mortars, and missiles into
Israel. That costs money. Lots of money.
Take mortars, for instance. They cost $24,717, each. But when Israel hits back, there goes the mortar (and $24,717).
Mortar rounds can get expensive, too. They cost anywhere from $5.52-$438, depending on type.
Mortar rounds can get expensive, too. They cost anywhere from $5.52-$438, depending on type.
How about a Grad
missile? They cost $1,000 a pop, if you’ll excuse the expression. (As an
aside, the cost to intercept them with Iron Dome, is $100,000.)
And then, of course, there’s
the Qassam
rocket. The raw materials for one of these babies cost $800.
But it’s all actually much more
expensive than it appears to wage a war of terror, according to this 2012 Jerusalem
Post article by Akiva Hamilton:
And the losses continue once the Grad gets to Gaza, with the
IDF regularly destroying rocket caches. Thus, 1,000 Grads, which cost Iran $1
million to purchase, may end up as 300 Grads which cost a further $2 million in
“delivery charges.” This turns a $1,000 Grad rocket in Iran into a $10,000 Grad
rocket in Gaza.
. . . The strategic implications are that the current
rocket-based terror strategy of Hamas and Hezbollah has been rendered both
ineffective and economically unsustainable. I estimate it is currently costing
Hamas (and thus its patron Iran) around $5m. (500 rockets at $10,000 each) to
murder a single Israeli. When Iron Dome reaches 95% interception rate these
figures will double and at 97.5% they will double again.
In 2012, the interception rate
for Iron Dome was over
90%. It may be higher now, but Israel may not be so eager to share the
current interception rate, which may well be regarded as a military secret.
We haven’t even gotten to the
cost of constructing all those
terror tunnels. The IDF estimates that Hamas spent $30 to $90 million, pouring
600,000 tons of concrete, to build three dozen tunnels from Gaza into Israel.
Some of those tunnels cost as much as $3 million to build.
But let’s move away from the
costs of terror to talk about all that beautiful aid money. It’s starting to
shrink, for sure, as the world wakes up to the corruption of UNRWA, and what it
means to fund the Pay for Slay program, but the “West Bank” and Gaza received
over $27b
in international aid between 1993 and 2013. By now, well. Pshaw. We’re way past
that.
And then there’s this UNRWA
funding chart from 2016:
That’s an awful lot of money
going down the toilet. The people are still poor. And they still need Israel’s
hospitals instead of building their own.
By the way, wondering what it
costs to build a really nice hospital? The University of Texas Southwestern Hospital, at over 1.3 million square feet and 532 beds, cost $800 million to
build. Parkland Memorial, Dallas County's public hospital, at around 2 million
square feet with 862 beds, cost $1.3 billion to build. That was in 2017.
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| University of Texas Southwestern Hospital |
Yes. We are all well aware that Hamas keeps this money from the people. We are aware that Hamas offers you incentives to make war on civilian Israel, while starving your families and keeping them in subhuman conditions. But you voted for Hamas in democratic elections. And you are sleeping in the bed you made.
That’s not on us.
We gave you land. We gave you
autonomy. We gave you money. We gave you greenhouses.
But instead of making something of
yourselves: making good, and caring for your own, your hate drives you only toward your own self-destruction.
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| These are the high-tech greenhouses Israeli settlers built in Gaza, that provided employment for thousands of Palestinians and produced an array of fruits and vegetables in the midst of a barren desert. Rich westerners (including Bill Gates) bought and gave them to the Palestinian Authority when Israel withdrew from Gaza. (photo and caption credit: Tom Gross) |
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| These are how the greenhouses looked a few weeks later, after Palestinians looted and burned them. (photo and caption credit: Tom Gross) |
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| In October 2006, Israeli troops temporarily went back into Gaza in an attempt to stop continuing Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli towns and villages. The Israeli army found that the greenhouses were now being used to build arms-smuggling tunnels. (photo and caption credit: Tom Gross) |
The money will continue to dry up, and as it does, you might take a minute to rethink this whole thing. Build a hospital or two, try to
stand on your own two feet.
But we know you won’t. Because you
really don’t care if your people live or die.
As long as you can continue to make war against the Jews.
As long as you can continue to make war against the Jews.
(Thanks
to Dov Epstein for assisting in the research for this piece.)