Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Terrorists brag about causing Gaza civilians to die

The video I posted earlier on Wednesday, showing some Gazans shooting a 120mm mortar towards Israel from the middle of a tree-lined street in Jabalya, was notable for something else (noticed by a commenter): the shooters were dressed like civilians.

No masks (although the Arab TV station that recorded it helpfully obscured their faces,) no guns, no uniforms - just a couple of regular looking guys.

This is a deliberate strategy by the terrorists. Not only are they hiding behind civilians, they are hiding as civilians.

The PCHR for Tuesday counted deaths as it does every day (the English version is not yet available.) It claimed that out of 83 deaths on Tuesday (of which they counted 27 in the UNRWA school), 80 of them were "unarmed civilians."

This makes it sound like the IDF has astoundingly bad aim.

But to understand it, one can read between the lines of this gloating article from the Islamic Jihad mouthpiece Palestine Today:

There is no visibility of the men of the resistance in the streets of the [Gaza] strip. No one sees their means of transportation, and even light weapons can no longer be seen with people publicly in the Gaza Strip. The resistance completely disappeared. Anti-aircraft artillery fires on the aircraft without them knowing the location. The whereabouts of rockets launched from the heart of the strip cannot be seen or known.

According to medical sources, the number of martyrs and wounded of the elements of the Palestinian resistance are few in comparison to the number of civilian martyrs who were killed since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, except for the large number of Palestinian policemen who were martyred on the first day of the war in Gaza.

Abu Mohammed - one of the field commanders in the Jerusalem Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine - said: "The goal is to take the "energy of concealment," to mislead the occupation aircraft and its agents [collaborators.]

In other words, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have made an official tactic out of using civilians as human shields and out of shooting at Israel as civilians. They are proud that the number of apparent (and real) civilian casualties has increased in recent days.

Their war policy is to violate the Geneva Conventions brazenly and officially. Their aim is to maximize the number of civilians killed in Gaza.

The video shows this policy in action. If Israel manages to hit the rocket shooters, they get counted as "civilians," and any bystanders on that street who get killed are icing on the cake for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Since the dead are "martyrs" anyway, they can justify this sick and cynical use of their own people as just another shortcut to Paradise, and each dead civilian is a victory for them, each dead body a literal prize to be photographed and shown off ad infinitum on Arab websites and TV networks.

We've always known this, but they have not usually been as forthcoming about it as this article indicates.

Do explosions look like this?

One can browse wire-service photos of explosions during the first week of Cast Lead, but none of them looks like this one from AP:

(click to enlarge)

Mere Rhetoric and Snapped Shot (and others) have been looking at it, wondering if it is Photoshopped.

I don't see too much motivation for a photographer (Adel Hana, whose pictures have been reproduced on this blog a few times, including for staging photos and for selling pictures to Islamic Jihad) to enhance an explosion, which is impressive enough already.

But the flying debris makes no sense to me.

It is too high, it is too large, and appears to be way too close to the camera. It also all seems to be on the same plane relative to the camera - not in the sphere that debris should be if it was equally blown in all directions.

Snapped Shot is trying to get hold of Hana to get a larger original.

Arab world fears return of Gaza settlements

AFP wrote an interesting story about the reaction of former Gaza residents to Operation Cast Lead:

NITZAN, Israel - Like most of her neighbours, Galit Kakoun dreams of returning to the Gaza Strip which until three years ago was home to 8,000 Jewish settlers like her.

Her reminiscences of the good old days were interrupted by a siren warning of incoming rocket fire from Gaza, 15 kilometers (10 miles) away from her bew home in the small community of Nitzan.

Residents rushed to a shelter and barely made it to safety before a dull thud was heard outside.

For the former Gaza settlers, the rocket underlined what they believe was the error of Israel forcing them to leave Gaza in the summer of 2005. Israel withdrew all of its ground forces from the densely populated territory and handed it over to the Palestinians.

"The current situation never would have existed if we had stayed at home," said Orit Berger, 34, who had lived in Gaza's Gush Katif settlement bloc since the age of three.

"Now Hamas is stronger than it was then," she said.

Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007 and Israel says the offensive it launched on December 27 is aimed at wiping out the Hamas movement's ability to fire rockets on southern Israel.

Israeli authorities insist hostilities will end only when they have achieved their goals.

That, said Berger, would be repeating the mistake of 2005.

In this community of 3,000 where wooden signs bear the names of former Gaza settlements, many neighbours share her views.

"We were told: "You have to give up your home, your life in Gush Katif to give peace a chance," said Deborah Neor, her voice dripping with irony.

"Now we have left. And the Palestinians, what are they doing with this chance?" the 52-year-old geography teacher asked.

The I-told-you-so argument is also popular in Nitzan, close to the port city of Ashkelon.

"We knew it, we said at the time that if we leave, rockets would soon fall on Ashkelon and Ashdod," said Gush Katzion veteran Mauria Bentolila, 57. "We gave it all up for nothing."

Even as the toll from the Israeli offensive spirals with Palestinian medics reporting at least 660 dead, many in Nitzan dream of returning to Gaza, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war.

"I am sure we will return," said Kakoun, a 39-year-old mother of four. But she keeps her optimism in check. "If not me, at least my children."

Anat Yaakov, 49, has more ambitious hopes for the impoverished Palestinian territory of 1.5 million that is one of the most crowded places on Earth.

"I believe we will return, but only if the Gaza Strip becomes a fully fledged Israeli territory and not a series of settlements."

Not a bad article, but what I find interesting is where it can be found.

I could only find this story published in two places: The Khaleej (UAE) Times and the Arabic al-Arabiya (without attribution to AFP.) A third wildly inaccurate story, written by an Arab for Alternet, takes for granted that Israel plans to re-occupy Gaza.

This indicates that the Arab public is not nearly as afraid about nor as upset over Gazans being killed as it is about the hated Jews controlling any additional territory. Even the slightest whiff of an idea that Gush Katif would be rebuilt is enough for the collective antennae of the Arab world to twitch. There is also a little irony involved in that this story is sympathetic to Jews who were expelled from their homes, a narrative that the Palestinian Arabs feel that they should own completely.

As I've mentioned before, this fear should be exploited by Israel. When Israel's leaders say that they have no intention of re-occupying Gaza, they are taking their best bargaining chip off the table. Even if it is a bluff, or even if all they end up doing is a symbolic capture of a few square meters, the Arab world would be far more afraid of an "expansionist" Israel taking their land than by a measly few hundred killed, something Arabs do to each other much more effectively and brutally than those genocidal Zionists.

Rocket fire would stop, and many lives would be saved, if the immediate consequence of rocket fire would be a border adjustment, no matter how small.

Comments on comments

I have been extraordinarily lucky that the number of rabidly anti-semitic and anti-Zionist comments have been a minimum at this blog. I see that other pro-Israel bloggers aren't as lucky.

But I do get to see quite a few ridiculous comments on my YouTube videos. Here are a few:

yahoodiekillers has made a comment on Hamas teaching children to kill Jews:
i love hitler for what he did for science, jews treatment of palestinians for the last 50 years makes me understand and love the guy even more.

ozpkiller:
Fuck israel anf fuck these people 2. I hope they destroy israel and then americans realize what the jew fucks been doing to are country and runs them out. Jews are destroying america but the media will not let you find that out cause there run by jews. Your taxes are going where??? israel. these people must be destroyed like hitler was trying to do.

goodhew6155:
Cool, kill all kikes, until the kikes leave Palestine,

arabs4lyfe:
this kid is a hero. kill all tthe jews

To be fair, there is no shortage of "kill all the Muslims" comments as well. Either way, I can appreciate that my readership is generally a bit higher class than YouTube's!

Open thread

While I try to get some real work done, and as I despair that my vote count in the Weblog Awards have gone from from 12% down to below 4%, here's a place for people to talk, and perhaps include links to things you guys have found interesting.

Another six Gazans killed - by Hamas

From YNet:

Six Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel have been executed in the past two days by Hamas security officers in the fighting zone in Jabalya, Ynet has learned.

Among the alleged collaborators were three brothers, one of whom attempted before his arrest to swallow a cell phone's SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card, which is believed to have documented his conversations with Israeli security officials.

In addition to the siblings, three other Palestinians were executed shortly after being seized on suspicion of collaborating with Israel and guiding the IDF forces, particularly Air Force warplanes, before the strikes.

Which means that the number of Arabs killed by Hamas since the war started is at least 50 (8 from 2008).

This is not counting the likely deaths from Hamas firing at IDF soldiers. (I recall a story a few days ago about 10 students killed in crossfire, sorry I did not bookmark it. If someone has that story please ping me.) It also doesn't count the two young sisters killed by an errant Qassam the day before Operation Cast Lead started.

It is not likely that you will find any newspapers keeping a count of the number of Arabs killed by Hamas, however. It is extremely likely that they are all included in the incessant counts of people supposedly killed by Israel.

My 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 43 (one of whom was in the West Bank.) These numbers are necessarily mostly from Israeli sources, as the Palestinian Arab media is very reluctant to speak about these except in very general terms, so I have had to loosen up my rules a little in deciding who is included. (This YNet article included their own verification, the earlier JPost article on 35 "collaborator" deaths didn't, which bothers me.) In reality, the numbers are probably higher.

UPDATE: I may have double-counted some; I'm adjusting accordingly.

Video: 120mm mortar shot from Jebalya

From Arab TV, terrorists shooting mortars from a city street. Notice that the shooters use the trees lining the wide street for cover.

Is Israel allowed to shoot back under the bizarre restrictions that the world community seems to require?

from the Israel Foreign Ministry website.

UPDATE: Naftali in the comments points out that the terrorists are not wearing fatigues, so if Israel kills them they would be considered "civilians."

Israel is following the "Powell Doctrine"

In 2001, an interesting event occurred in Gaza:

On April 17 (2001), Israeli military forces, after what was described in the press as fierce bombardment of Palestinian security positions in Gaza, took control of a square mile of territory in the Gaza Strip (territory that had been transferred to Palestinian control pursuant to the 1993 Oslo accords) and announced plans to hold it indefinitely as a buffer zone. The Israeli action was in response to a Palestinian mortar attack on Sederot, a town in Israel about four miles from the border with Gaza. The Israeli government explained its action as part of its ongoing effort to defend Israel from Palestinian violence.

United States Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a statement that said in part, "The hostilities last night in Gaza were precipitated by the provocative Palestinian mortar attacks on Israel. The Israeli response was excessive and disproportionate. We call upon both sides to respect the agreements they've signed." Shortly after Secretary Powell's statement was issued, the Israeli army announced that it was withdrawing from its positions in Gaza. The army withdrew, though it returned for 45 minutes the next day and destroyed a police station. The Israeli government denied that it had yielded to U.S. pressure to withdraw, but Israeli state radio and some others said the withdrawal was a response to U.S. pressure.

Powell's response at the time was a bit ironic.

Ten years earlier, in 1991, Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, articulated the US policy for getting involved in conflicts. Powell used this initially to justify the first Iraq war. This became known as the Powell Doctrine, and it is most interesting to revisit during Operation Cast Lead.

The doctrine is summarized as follows:

1) Military action should be used only as a last resort and only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target;
2) The force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy;
3) There must be strong support for the campaign by the general public; and
4) There must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict in which the military is engaged.

Perhaps the Powell Doctrine didn't apply to Israel in 2001, as that was the very start of the mortar and rocket attacks towards Israeli towns in the Negev and massive force may not have yet been considered a "last resort."

But while we do not yet know Israel's exit strategy, the first three points are exactly in line with what Israel is doing today. Israel already tried truces, diplomacy, "soft" persuasion, and very limited military action to no avail, and in fact over time the rocket attacks only got more serious - and everyone in Israel realizes that the status quo was wholly unacceptable.

Most notable is the second point, where the Powell doctrine states that disproportionate force is not only not discouraged, it is required!

I have not yet seen anyone try to argue that the Powell doctrine is illegal under international law even though it explicitly states that the force used must be disproportionate. It must be one of those international laws that are only selectively invoked, for a single nation.

What really happened at the UNRWA school?

Chris Gunness, UNRWA spokesman, said that the agency was "99.9% certain" that no terrorists were on the grounds of the UNRWA school that saw some 30 people die yesterday.

John Ging, director of the UNRWA in Gaza, says that there is no way that terrorists could have been there. How does he know? Because "U.N. staff members and Palestinian families in the school compound in the Jabaliya refugee camp had been screened for weapons."

The AP reported immediately after the explosions:

Two residents of the area who spoke by telephone said they saw a small group of militants firing mortar rounds from a street near the school, the Associated Press reported. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, the AP said. The residents said the two brothers were known to be low-level Hamas militants. They said a group of militants - one of them said four - were firing mortar shells from near the school.

The IDF says that "The information that we have is that there was the launching of a mortar from the school's yard towards one of our forces. Our forces retaliated but it turned out that the school was booby trapped and as a result of our retaliation, everything flared up. There were a lot of secondary explosions from which probably those people were wounded."

From the pictures of the school that have been published, and from statements, it does not appear that anyone is claiming that mortars were being shot from within the school nor that Israel shot back into the school building. And Ging is clearly lying when he says that no weapons are allowed into UNRWA schools, as the IDF showed video of mortars being shot from that same school in 2007. In addition, in at least one case a UNRWA teacher was also an Islamic Jihad terrorist. And it is hard to take seriously that idea that the UNRWA can stop heavily armed terrorists from doing whatever they want at their schools anyway, especially when the agency will never criticize Hamas; and most of its employees are Palestinian Arabs who know that they would be killed if they do anything against the wishes of Hamas. Beyond that, Hamas has shown that it uses schools to store weapons, as the IDF showed yet again yesterday.

At this time my guess is that the mortars were shot from either very close to the school or within the school compound, Israel automatically returned fire to that same spot, and some of that shrapnel caused secondary explosions from bombs or weapons that were inside the school compound, although I am not sure about the booby traps. The death total seems way too high for tank shells alone. Obviously the residents of Gaza are too afraid to give evidence that would implicate Hamas and similarly photographers are afraid to take pictures that would show any clear terrorist activity in the school or outside it. (Hamas has already shown no compunction about brutally murdering "collaborators" in the fog of war, that are in all likelihood being counted as deaths from the IDF.)

(It is also interesting that while the initial reports said 42-45 dead, the UN later said that it was 30 dead, but today's newspapers report the higher figure as fact. The casualty count from the war is certainly higher than the reality.)

Jeffrey Goldberg on Hamas kiddie death pr0n

From Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic:

...Wwe've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

This is the sort of thing that you can be sure that many reporters have seen in Gaza over the years...and don't bother to report.

Because getting a great picture of a dead kid is much more important than writing about Hamas' sick use of dead bodies as props.

Suburban Gaza

Here, from Google Maps, is Jabalya, the town in Gaza where Hamas just detonated booby traps at a UNRWA school, killing dozens and blaming Israel:

Here is a bit more detail of the section in the center (click to enlarge):

While parts of the town are certainly crowded, it looks like plenty of people are living in houses where there are lots of trees. This looks just like any suburban US community. (This is not the "refugee camp" next door, which certainly is more crowded than this. But the school was apparently in Jabalya, not the camp.)

"One of the most densely populated places on Earth."

See also my recent video on the same theme.

Al-Arabiya Arabic news roundup

Al-Arabiya in Arabic covers completely different stories than its English counterpart.

Some publicity-seeker named Jacob Bender led a "Jewish prayer service" at Al Azhar University for Palestinian Arab victims of the war, calling israeli actions a "crime against humanity." Somehow, I don't think he had a minyan.

Analysts are theorizing that Iran may be behind Hamas' decision to escalate, as a way of showing relevance as a regional superpower or of diverting attention from its nuclear program.

Gazans are supposedly getting constant automated phone calls from Israel saying that Hamas has been defeated, as part of psychological warfare. The article mentions that they are fearful when they get these calls.

Jordanian officials are getting more fearful that one result of this war would be that Jordan will be forced to take responsibility for the West Bank rather than there ever being a two-state solution. They do not want to rule another 3 million Palestinian Arabs.

An Egyptian court refused to grant a divorce to a Christian woman whose husband converted to Islam. Her argument was that since her marriage was done in a church and was predicated on Christian principles, her husband had effectively annuled the marriage by changing his religion. The Egyptian courts said that since, under sharia, a Muslim man can marry a Christian woman and since she was not being mistreated, they cannot force him to divorce her.

The link list again

The coverage in the blogosphere of Operation Cast Lead is excellent, and I want to urge all of you again to read those for the basic news and links to other good analysis:

Israellycool and The Muqata liveblogging the war itself, and Backspin liveblogging the media about the war.
Mere Rhetoric doing his snarky best at putting things in context.
Israel Matzav doing a comprehensive and amazing job.
Jack's Shack has been putting up fantastic, twice a day roundups of articles in the old media as well as new.
The Augean Stables skewers the mainstream media coverage and digs up amazing facts.
Yaacov Lozowick has great, instant, in-depth observations and analysis.
The IDF Spokesperson Blog has some good info as well.
Snapped Shot adds his own expertise in finding media bias, especially in photographs.
Plus the usual JBlogosphere suspects: Daled Amos, Meryl Yourish, Soccer Dad, Yid with Lid, Boker Tov Boulder, Oleh Girl....

It gets hard to find original things to post when everyone else is doing such a great job!

The Guardian publishes Hamas lies

Today, The Guardian published an op-ed by Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. Setting aside the incongruity of a Western newspaper publishing the words of a terrorist who shares the same murderous ideology as Al Qaeda and whose organization's charter is unapologetically anti-semitic, we are also treated to an article that is filled with real lies - not only the half-truths one would expect. For example:

For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start. Israel was required to open crossings to Gaza, and extend the truce to the West Bank.

Hamas violated the cease-fire agreement from the start by smuggling weapons continuously. This was the major reason why Israel never fully opened the crossings, although it eased the restrictions significantly. In addition, the cease-fire was meant for all terror groups, not just Hamas, and Hamas encouraged rocket attacks by Islamic Jihad and other groups since the beginning of November.

The West Bank was never part of the agreement, period.

It proceeded to tighten its deadly siege of Gaza, repeatedly cutting electricity and water supplies.

Israel did not cut electricity nor water during the six months.

The collective punishment did not halt, but accelerated - as did the assassinations and killings. Thirty Gazans were killed by Israeli fire and hundreds of patients died as a direct effect of the siege during the so-called ceasefire.

Both false. From the PCHR I count 22 alleged deaths in Gaza during that time period: 4 during the initial shaky couple of weeks when there were still rocket attacks, 6 during the operation in November to destroy the kidnapping tunnel, and the other 8 during the rocket barrages that followed - and nearly all of the 22 were terrorists. As far as the "hundreds of patients" dying, I followed that from the beginning and it was a complete fiction where doctors from Gaza would regularly announce that certain patients died because of the "siege" when pretty much all of them would have died anyway. Israel never blocked sick patients unless they also posed a security risk, and Israel allowed hundreds of patients from Gaza to be treated in Israel during that time, as well as before and after the "truce."

When this broken truce neared its end, we expressed our readiness for a new comprehensive truce in return for lifting the blockade and opening all Gaza border crossings, including Rafah. Our calls fell on deaf ears.

This one is an egregious lie. Hamas explicitly and repeatedly rejected the truce extension, as The Guardian itself reported.

No rockets have ever been fired from the West Bank.

Another lie. They have rarely been fired, but quite a few have been built there.

What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel's dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.

Another Arab fantasy.

Most of the rest of the article is obvious Hamas spin, but that is acceptable for an op-ed (if still reprehensible for a newspaper to allow a terrorist to write on its pages to begin with.)

What is not acceptable is including these lies. A casual reader would understand that the views are slanted but he would expect a major newspaper to vet out clear fabrications. Meshal just managed to spread unabashed falsehoods, which is far worse than just opinion.

This is simply unethical journalism on the part of the Guardian.

Overnight PalArab news roundup

I finally found confirmation that Hamas has been executing "collaborators" during this operation in the Palestinian Arab press, although they do not give any numbers nor do they say that the victims were exclusively Fatah as the earlier Jerusalem Post story indicated.

There is one specific report of Hamas executing a 76-year old Fatah member and injuring his son, a woman and child because the man didn't adhere to his "house arrest."

For the purposes of my counting of Palestinian Arab on Arab deaths (the "self-death count") there is of course no way to know how many civilians are being killed by Hamas during the urban fighting with Israel. It is fair guess that Hamas is not nearly as concerned about Gaza civilian deaths as Israel is, and more than likely that Hamas craves such deaths so it can blame Israel. For example, yesterday's Guardian said that ten children were killed in Hamas-IDF battles - but who actually killed them? Similarly, there were at least three separate instances of Qasssams falling short in Gaza, killing two children and injuring others, in the thre days before Cast Iron started. How many of the hundreds of missiles since then have also fallen short, killed people and then Israel was blamed? One possible example is this story from Maan about a girl who was injured by a "missile" supposedly from an air strike; but how probable was it to have been an errant Qassam? We'll never know for sure, but it seems to me that the chances for Qassams falling short increase dramatically when the people launching them are in a very big rush to shoot it and disappear as quickly as possible. For now, though, I am only adding one to the 2009 self-death count, raising it to 37.

Another Arab source has an intriguing report, that Israel warned Syria that if Hezbollah tried to open a second front against Israel. Israel will hold Syria responsible - and attack the Syrians. Syria typically uses proxies to do its dirty work, but it is deathly afraid of anything that might destabilize the regime, so this makes a lot of sense.

There are reports that Israel arrested an Iranian reporter in Jerusalem for not adhering to Israeli military censorship.