Hamas takes aim and targets Israel’s lifeline

...Hamas believes that its human shield strategy will continue to constrain Israel and protect its headquarters and rocket launchers. But there is a limit to how much pressure the international community can apply, and if Israel’s leaders feel that the threat from Hamas is approaching an unacceptable level, they might loosen rules of engagement and stop answering the phone. I think a rocket barrage aimed at the airport falls into this category. This is even more evidence, if any more is needed, that there must be no ceasefire until Hamas’ offensive capabilities are fully neutralized — whatever that takes.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
22 July '14..




News item:

In a sign of increased caution about flying near combat zones, US and European airlines halted flights to Israel Tuesday after a rocket landed near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.

Delta Air Lines and United Airlines suspended service between the US and Israel indefinitely. US Airways scrapped its one flight to Tel Aviv Tuesday. Germany’s Lufthansa and Air France also suspended flights. The actions come days after a Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine with 298 people on board.

Following the action by the US airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited US airlines from flying to the Tel Aviv airport for 24 hours.

This is a very grave development. Ben-Gurion airport is Israel’s main connection to the rest of the world. The economic and psychological disruption that could occur if it were to be closed for a long period would be very severe.

The immediate cause was a Hamas rocket which landed in Yahud, about 1 mile away, and it appears that Hamas is now trying to fire rockets in this direction, as they have threatened to do. Although the airport itself is protected by an Iron Dome system, it’s easy to see why airlines might be nervous. It’s hard enough flying into busy airspace without having to worry about rockets falling from the sky and Tamir missiles coming up to meet them from below.

In fact, one of the most powerful arguments against withdrawing from Judea and Samaria is that it would enable terrorists to subject the airport to the kind of bombardment that has so far been reserved for Sderot and the kibbutzim next door to Gaza.

Anti-Israel Agitprop

Patrick Ross
The Propagandist
01 March '11

It’s that time of year again. The anti-Israeli movement is once again firing the best agitprop they have to offer for Israeli Apartheid Week, those delightful five days of every year where anti-Israeli movement comes together to pretend that Israel is an apartheid state, despite the fact that their political system in no way resembles apartheid.

So in anticipation of this week, it seems worthwhile to remind readers precisely what kind of rhetoric the anti-Israel movement will be passing off on audiences of like-minded demagogues and unsuspecting dupes.

For this we step into the way back machine and travel back to 2009, after Israel attacked Hamas militants in Gaza. In the early days of January, CNN’s Rick Sanchez produced a segment in which it was suggested that Israel may have broken the ceasefire, leading to the conflict itself. This was precisely the claim made by Mustafa Barghouti, and Indepdendent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Barghouti himself often indulges himself in apartheid rhetoric.

(Read full "Anti-Israel Agitprop")

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Rockets are a terror weapon

What used to be a basic tenet of Israel's defense doctrine - that in war, the safety of the civilian population must be assured - has gradually been abandoned. Now, military spokesmen announce that in case of war, Israel's entire civilian population can expect to be hit by terrorist rockets.

Moshe Arens
Haaretz
28 December '10

Terrorists have used pistols and automatic rifles to kill individuals. They have used suicide bombers with pinpoint accuracy to kill groups assembled in places of entertainment. They have used aircraft to kill hundreds and thousands. But the most effective terror weapon has become the ballistic rocket. It is cheap and launched from a distance against civilian targets, allowing the terrorists to escape before the rocket lands.

For some years now, Israel's civilian population has been targeted by terrorist rockets: first Katyusha rockets in the north launched by Hezbollah terrorists, and then Qassam rockets in the south launched by Hamas terrorists. Initially there were tens of rockets, then there were hundreds. But now, the threat comes from tens of thousands of rockets directed at Israel's civilian population.

Moreover, at first only certain border areas were threatened. But now, the entire country is under the threat of terrorist rocket attacks.

What used to be a basic tenet of Israel's defense doctrine - that in war, the safety of the civilian population must be assured - has gradually been abandoned. Now, military spokesmen announce that in case of war, Israel's entire civilian population can expect to be hit by terrorist rockets. This is a fundamental change for the worse in Israel's strategic posture.

How have we allowed this intolerable situation to creep up on us? Were our leaders asleep, not aware of what was happening around us?

Remembering The War Hamas Declared On Israel--3 Days Before Operation Cast Lead

Daled Amos
27 December '10

Three days before Israel's Operation Cast Lead on December 27, 2008--Hamas declared war on Israel:
From Ma'an:

Hamas: 87 shells fired at Israeli targets in 24 hours


Published Thursday 25/12/2008 10:19

Gaza - Ma'an - The military wing affiliated to Hamas, Al-Qassam Brigades released a statement on Thursday morning briefing the group's military activities over the first twenty four hours of an operation they called "Oil Stain" which started Wednesday morning.

According to the statement, a total of 87 shells have been fired at Israeli targets bordering the Gaza Strip including 54 mortar shells, 31 homemade projectiles which Hamas calls "Qassam", and two Soviet-made Grad missiles.

Al-Qassa Brigades threatened to enlarge the "Oil Stain" to get more thousands of Israelis "under fire". The group asserted that its fighters are "far greater than surrendering to Israeli threats and that they became much more prepared to counter Israeli aggression and to defend themselves than in the past."

(Read full "Remembering The War Hamas Declared On Israel")

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The false framework of the Gaza war

Elder of Ziyon
27 December '10

Today is the second anniversary of the beginning of Operation Cast Lead - but it is not the anniversary of the beginning of the Gaza War.

On the very first day of OCL, I pointed out something that has been all but ignored by the media (but that I had mentioned earlier): Hamas declared war on Israel on December 24th, a full three days before Cast Lead.


From Ma'an, December 25th, 2008:

The military wing affiliated to Hamas, Al-Qassam Brigades released a statement on Thursday morning briefing the group's military activities over the first twenty four hours of an operation they called "Oil Stain" which started Wednesday morning.

According to the statement, a total of 87 shells have been fired at Israeli targets bordering the Gaza Strip including 54 mortar shells, 31 homemade projectiles which Hamas calls "Qassam", and two Soviet-made Grad missiles.

Al-Qassam Brigades threatened to enlarge the "Oil Stain" to get more thousands of Israelis "under fire". The group asserted that its fighters are "far greater than surrendering to Israeli threats and that they became much more prepared to counter Israeli aggression and to defend themselves than in the past."

Even after Cast Lead started, Hamas - in Arabic - continued to call the war "Oil Stain." For example, on December 30th, an article in the Palestine Today website brags that "Operation Oil Stain" had been expanded and a Grad rocket had reached Beersheva for the first time.

(Read full "The false framework of the Gaza war")

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How Does A Hamas 'Work Accident' End Up Injuring 5 Children?

Daled Amos
20 October '10


Are you surprised that a Hamas training site is located that close to civilians?

Twelve Palestinians, including five children and three women, were injured in an explosion at a training site of Hamas' military wing the Al-Qassam Brigades on Wednesday in Rafah, southern Gaza.

Locals said a "huge explosion" occurred in the Tel As-Sultan neighborhood, causing damage to residents' windows.

(Read full post)

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Sderot

Stephen Hoffman
Sderot Media Center
12 September '10

Two video clips caught my attention last week which reminded me of the constant suffering of the people of Sderot. Whilst Gaza is always in the news, the hardship of those who have lived in Sderot - right next to the Gaza Strip - for the past five years is wantonly ignored. I am ashamed to say that before watching these clips, I had put the suffering of the people of Sderot to the back of my mind.

The similarities between them and the people of Gaza also came back to me - while the people in Gaza are enslaved by their own leaders; the people of Sderot are enslaved by those same leaders.



For five years the people of Sderot have faced a daily barrage of rockets and mortars. Schools have closed down, psychological as well as physical damage has been done and worst of all I am reminded of what the Mayor of Sderot once said at a JNF event that I attended earlier in the year: 'children have had their childhood taken away'. Whilst we in the west can take our children outside to the playgrounds, take them to school and let them play football the children of Sderot can only dream of this.

(Read full story)

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Hamas Figures Out In One Week What It Took Hezbollah 5 Years

Daled Amos
08 August '10

Rafik Hariri was assassinated in February 2005, but it wasn't till members of the terrorist group Hezbollah were accused of his murder that Hezbollah figured out that Israel was responsible all along.

It didn't take Hamas that long to blame their problems on Israel.

No sooner does Egypt admit that the rockets that hit Israel and Jordan came from Egypt and were fired by Hamas, that Hamas figures out that Israel must have fired the rockets at itself:

Hamas accused Israel Saturday of launching the rockets that struck near Eilat and Jordan last week, as a pretext for further attacks against the Palestinians. The six rockets killed one and wounded three more at the Intercontinental Hotel in Aqaba.

The terrorist group denied being behind the attacks, saying it had "no interest" in launching the rockets, also denying they were fired from the Sinai in Egypt.

(Read full post)

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Gazan rocket lands on Gazans (again)

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War: A Blog
16 July '10

Unreported, other than in the margins of Israeli (only) news channels, yet another Gazan jihadist rocket intended to destroy something, anything, Jewish, fell short last night, Thursday, and crashed into an anonymous part of the Gaza Strip, according to Ynet. This Israeli source says it landed in the vicinity of the El Bureij refugee camp, located in central Gaza.

The litany of self-inflicted misery of the Gazans, exemplified by Tuesday's New York Times "Trapped by Gaza Blockade, Locked in Despair", somehow never extends to referring to the Hamas rockets that land on Gazan homes. It's a routine aspect of life in the jihadosphere, another unreported dimension of this ongoing war, and further evidence - if we needed it - that the very last thing occupying the minds of the terrorists is the well-being of their own people.

More from This Ongoing War: Ambivalence, befuddlement and confusion; how they empower the terrorists and their allies

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The Western media eats up Khaled Meshal's lies to them

Elder of Ziyon
30 May '10

Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' "political" leader in Damascus, was on the Charlie Rose show where he put on a moderate face for his credulous inteviewer:

"We don't have a problem whatsoever with the United States or with American interests," Khaled Meshaal told PBS television in an interview.
"America is a great state, a superpower," he continued.

"But its interest should not be at the expense of the interests of others and the peoples of in the region."

Rose, apparently, did not challenge Meshal on his newfound love of America. If he would have, he could have asked Meshal about something else he said a few years ago, in Arabic, that slightly contradicts his smiling statements to Americans:

(Read full post)

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30-May-10: Non-violent Qassams... again

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War:A Blog
30 May '10

A polite reminder to those head-in-clouds pollyannas who preach to us Israelis from a safe distance away about the right ways to think about terrorists and their actions. Case in point: an article posted in the past hour on a popular current affairs blogsite: Gaza Freedom Flotilla Shows Awesome Power of Nonviolent Resistance

Last night (Saturday), another two Qassam rockets were fired into Israel by jihadists in the northern Gaza Strip, adding to a talley that exceeds 60 for 2010 alone.

One exploded within the jurisdiction of the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council (Israeli reports generally avoid mentioning specific loations to minimize the intelligence value to the terrorists). The other landed short, crashing into an unknown location within the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

(Read full post)

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Moral Collapse: Amnesty International in 2009

NGO Monitor
26 May '10
Posted before Shabbat

Amnesty International’s ideological bias and double standards were exposed by the suspension of senior staff member Gita Saghal, after she condemned Amnesty’s alliance with an alleged Taliban supporter. “Like all tyrants - whether of the right and left, Amnesty International raised the spectre of an assault on human rights to avoid answering questions and to imply that Amnesty International was under attack.”

Longtime Secretary General Irene Khan left Amnesty in December 2009. Her interim replacement, Claudio Cordone, was centrally involved in the Gita Saghal controversy including the response that “jihad in self-defence” is not “antithetical to human rights.”

In the Middle East, while Amnesty’s main focus in 2009 was Iran’s post-election crisis, arrests, and executions, Israel and the January 2009 Gaza war were given disproportionate and distorted attention.

During the war, AI led NGO campaigns accusing Israel of “unlawful,” “disproportionate,” and “indiscriminate” attacks against Palestinian civilians, releasing more than 20 statements criticizing Israel.

After the war, AI called for an arms embargo against Israel, continued to promote “lawfare” against Israeli officials, and labeled Israel’s treatment of Gaza as “collective punishment under international law.”

Analysis of AI’s 2009 Middle East activities reflects a disproportionate and unjustified focus on Israel. AI issued more in-depth reports (seven) on Israel than on any other country in the region.

The data indicate that ideology, rather than universal human rights, continues to propel AI’s resource allocation. With the exception of Iran, AI devotes little coverage to other chronic Mideast human rights abusers.

AI’s October 2009 report “Troubled Waters – Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water,” coincided with a campaign alleging that “Israel’s Control of Water [is] a Tool of Apartheid and a Means of Ethnic Cleansing.”

The sections in AI’s Annual Report for 2009 on the Palestinians include token mentions of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and condemnation of indiscriminate missile attacks from Gaza, without significant “action items,” in contrast to the targeting of Israel.

This analysis of Amnesty’s 2009 activities demonstrates the continued exploitation of human rights principles, and the degradation of these moral values.

While Amnesty International’s (AI) main Middle East focus in 2009 was Iran’s post-election crisis, arrests, and executions, it also allotted a disproportionate amount of attention and resources to the January 2009 Gaza war.

Israel’s military operation in Gaza was a major and disproportionate focal point for Amnesty International (AI) in 2009. AI virtually erased the context of terrorism in the Gaza war, the continuing violation of Gilad Shalit’s rights, and minimized Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. Its reports consistently accused Israel of “collective punishment” and promoted international isolation of Israel, including a call for an arms embargo.

NGO Monitor’s analysis shows that AI’s reports alleging Israeli violations and “war crimes” lack credible evidence, distort international legal terms, use data selectively, and function as part of a larger demonization campaign.

(Read full report)

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Hamas and the Terrorist Threat from the Gaza Strip

The Main Findings of the Goldstone Report Versus the Factual Findings


The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center
March '10
Posted before Shabbat

(This report is more than 300 pages, authoritative, and a major resource. Y.)

Introduction: main findings

1. This document provides the main findings of a study which examined how the Goldstone Report dealt with the nature and activities of Hamas in the Gaza Strip before and during Operation Cast Lead .

2. The first part of the study examines how the Report relates to the terrorist threat as it developed in the Gaza Strip in the years before Operation Cast Lead . The subsequent parts deal with the various aspects of Hamas’ strategy and combat tactics during the operation , emphasizing the massive use it made of Gazan civilians as human shields. The study does not deal with specific cases of IDF actions, which the IDF has examined separately.

3. The study compares the findings of the Goldstone Report with the actual events on the ground. It is supported by a vast amount of reliable, varied information which originated in the Israeli intelligence community, as well as open-source information, including statements made by Hamas elements .

4. The comparison clearly indicates four basic flaws in the way the Goldstone Report relates to the period before Operation Cast Lead:

The Report does not deal with the nature of Hamas, particularly its terrorist aspects . It focuses on severe criticism of Israel and presents an openly pro-Palestinian version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It does not deal with Hamas’ ideology , its strategy, the military-terrorist infrastructure it constructed, its radical Islamic nature, the way it relates to the West and the pro-Western Arab regimes, the brutality with which it treats its Palestinian opponents, the direction and aid it receives from its headquarters in Damascus, and its record as the terrorist organization which led suicide bombing terrorism against Israel and fired rockets at its civilians over a period of many years . The Report refers to the de facto Hamas administration as a governmental entity (“the Gaza authorities”), and adopts Hamas’ false claim that there is no connection between that entity and the military-terrorist wing . The facts unequivocally prove that Hamas is one integral system, with a hierarchical leadership which maintains close contact between its political, administrative, security and military-terrorist branches.

(To read full report)
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The Other Side of the “Peace” Process

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
18 March '10

While most of the world rattles on about how Israel’s impudent decision to build apartments for Jews in an existing Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem will harm the peace process, the real obstacles to peace staged yet another demonstration of Middle East realities. In the last two days, Palestinian terrorists fired three rockets into southern Israel. Two landed near the town of Sderot in Southern Israel on Wednesday. One adult and a child suffered from shock from that blast. Then today, a rocket hit nearby Moshav Netiv Ha’asara, killing a worker from Thailand. Thirty such rockets have landed in southern Israel since the beginning of 2010.

Apologists for the Hamas terrorists, who run Gaza as a private fiefdom, were quick to blame the attacks on splinter groups beyond the control of the supposedly responsible thugs of Hamas. Two such groups claimed responsibility. One is an al-Qaeda offshoot, and the other is none other than the al-Asqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist wing of the supposedly moderate and peace-loving Fatah Party that controls the West Bank.

The rockets were an appropriate welcome to the Dame Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s top foreign-policy official, who was in Gaza for a visit. Though Ashton won’t meet with Hamas officials, her trip to Gaza is seen as helping the ongoing campaign to lift the limited blockade of the terrorist-run enclave even though Israel allows food and medical supplies into the Strip, so there is no humanitarian crisis. Those who would like to see this Hamasistan freed from all constraints say that the “humanitarian” issues should take precedence over “politics.” But their humanitarianism takes no notice of Israelis who still live under the constant threat of terrorist missile attacks. Nor do they think Hamas should be forced to free kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for an end to the blockade.

(Read full post)
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Bankrupting Terror

AishVideo
15 March '10

Shurat haDin's Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is the voice of Victims of Terror. By suing Hamas and other terror organizations, she is hitting them in the wallet, trying to put an end to terror.



Our Mission

We tend to think of the fight against terrorism as a burden that falls mainly on the shoulders of government—our military, diplomatic, homeland security, and law-enforcement agencies. Yet there is one area where private citizens can play a leading role: In stopping the flow of funds to terror organizations. Beginning in the 1990s, Western countries, and especially the United States, passed laws making it possible for victims of terror to sue the regimes that sponsor terror, banks that transfer funds to terror groups, front organizations that pretend to serve charitable causes, and even the terrorists themselves. For the first time, terror victims and their families have a chance to fight back through the courts.

Visit Shurat HaDin's website at www.israellawcenter.org

Resistance and Rockets: Hamas Targeting of Israeli Civilians

Jeffrey White
The Washington Institute for
Near East Policy
25 February '10

Recently, Hamas has gone to extraordinary lengths to prove that it did not attack civilian targets in Israel during the December 2008 to January 2009 Gaza conflict. But a review of the organization's own media -- including the website of its military arm, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (www.qassam.ps), and the Hamas-associated monthly journal Filastin al-Muslima (www.fm-m.com) -- shows that Hamas knowingly and repeatedly fired on Israeli population centers in southern Israel. To accept Hamas's latest claim that it did not launch rockets at civilians is to deny its numerous past claims to the contrary.

Claim vs. Conduct

On February 3, 2010, Hamas released a fifty-two-page response to the UN's Goldstone report regarding its conduct during the Gaza war (called the "Battle of al-Furqan" in the organization's commentary). According to this document, the killing and wounding of Israeli civilians was unintentional -- Hamas forces had targeted only military installations during the fighting. This claim was based on a supposed internal investigation conducted by Hamas and led by its justice minister, Faraj al-Ghoul.

(Read full report)
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