Young Israeli Firebombing Victim’s Condition Improving
Doctors treating 11-year-old Ayala Shapira, severely burned in a Palestinian firebombing attack last week, have brought her back to partial consciousness, Israel’s NRG News reported Thursday.Israeli security center publishes names of 50 killed terrorists 'concealed by Hamas'
Ayala and her father, Avner, were driving home from enrichment lessons at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv to their community of El Matan in northern Samaria late Thursday night, when two Palestinians ambushed the vehicle, with one hurling a firebomb through her open window.
Shapira suffered third-degree burns to 30-40 percent of her body, including her face and chest, despite her father managing to get her out of the burning vehicle and carry her into their community, several hundred meters away.
On Thursday, her doctors decided to lower the dosage of anesthetic she was being given intravenously to numb the pain of her burns. As a result, Ayala entered a partially alert state, and can respond to her environment but has yet to speak, and is still on a respirator.
Doctors at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv said she has a “long, complicated,” rehabilitation ahead due to her life-threatening injuries. (h/t Jewess)
An Israeli defense analysis center on Thursday released the names of 50 Gazan terrorists killed in combat with Israel this summer, whose identities were kept by Hamas from Palestinian casualty lists.From a Hamas leader, unusual introspection
The Tel Aviv-based Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center said all of the combatant casualties were members of Hamas’s military wing, the Izzadin Kassam Brigades.
“The names did not show up on other casualty lists publicized by organizations affiliated with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority,” said the center, which is a part of the Israeli Intelligence and Heritage Commemoration Center, founded by leading members of the Israeli intelligence community.
According to the study, 52% of Palestinian casualties from the conflict were terrorists and 48% civilians.
A report released on Thursday said the newly identified combatant casualties belonged one of the following categories: some were terrorists left behind in Israel after being killed in fire fights with IDF units during the summer war; others were terrorists buried in tunnels or the ruins of buildings bombed by the IDF; and others were terrorists who died of their wounds in hospital and were not identified during hostilities.
Breaking ranks with his Islamist political movement, Hamas’s deputy foreign minister Ghazi Hamad has penned a rare op-ed of self-criticism, blaming both Hamas and Fatah’s shortsightedness for “losing Palestine.”
It is not often that a senior Hamas leader, a former chairman of the movement’s border crossings authority, bitterly accuses his group of “clapping with one hand at its festivals, singing of its heroism, listening to itself and describing the other as faltering.” It is even rarer for such a leader to allow his words, published in recent days in Arab media, to be translated for a wider, non-Palestinian audience.
Hamad’s op-ed, “Now I understand how and why the Palestinians lost Palestine,” published here [Times of Israel], is iconoclastic in two meaningful ways. Firstly, it tears the mask off the political deal reached last June between Fatah and Hamas in the form of a unity technocrat government, exposing it as no more than a charade for public consumption.
“Rather than focusing the struggle against the occupation, the struggle has become exclusively intra-Palestinian. It is a struggle in which each of the sides tries to prove that his option is best and the other’s has failed. How long has this battle lasted, undecided? Is it really necessary for us to do this?” he writes.
Secondly, the op-ed points to the shortcomings of Hamas’s policy of “armed resistance and nothing else,” arguing instead that military struggle and smart diplomacy are two essential aspects of a sound Palestinian strategy.
Nonetheless, what he does not do is suggest that “armed resistance” in the Palestinian cause is either morally or practically wrong, and neither does he explicitly suggest any acceptance of Israel.