Palestinians fire at least 80 rockets at southern Israel

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

It's the way Israel rolls

Instigate hostilities with a far weaker neighbor for calculated political gain, then proclaim itself the victim. Yep, pretty much.

[Harpa Timsah 13,258]

It's the Israeli government that agreed to the prisoner swap. Since releasing the Palestinian prisoners, it has proceeded to re-arrest many, and now begin the assassinations. This only encourages the other side to up its ante as well.

The terms of the prisoner swap stipulated specifically that Israel retained the right to rearrest or assassinate the prisoners that were released.

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

The terms of the prisoner swap stipulated specifically that Israel retained the right to rearrest or assassinate the prisoners that were released.

Not to mention "collateral damage" of dozens of people

[Leatherneck 693]

Given the difficulty of those posting here to reach a consensus as to who slapped whom first, a couple of days ago -- easy to see why the Israeli/Palestinian situation is a tangled mess based on events that happened long ago.

Edited March 11, 2012 by Leatherneck

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://news.yahoo.com/israel-kills-more-gaza-gunmen-rockets-fired-israel-103107234.html

Israel kills five more Gaza militants; rockets hit Israel

By Nidal al-Mughrabi | Reuters – 11 hrs ago

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli warplanes killed five militants in Gaza on Saturday, the second day of cross-border violence in which Palestinian fighters have fired dozens of rockets into Israel, both sides said. Fifteen militants in the Gaza Strip have been killed since Friday, Hamas medics said. On Saturday, a gunman was killed in a vehicle near Gaza's border with Egypt. Earlier in the day Israeli jets killed two gunmen on a motorcycle and two others in a pre-dawn attack, officials in Gaza said. The sounds of explosions and rocket fire reverberated across coastal Gaza and southern Israel early on Saturday and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said its air strikes would continue.

"This round in the Strip is still far from over," he told reporters on a visit to the south of Israel, where around half a million people have been told to stay indoors and keep bomb shelters open.

Six people in southern Israel have been injured by rockets fired from Gaza. One man, a Thai worker, was reported to be in a serious condition.

MISSILES INTERCEPTED

Militant groups in Hamas-ruled Gaza vowed to exact revenge for Friday's killings and the Israeli military said more than 90 rockets had been fired at its territory since Friday, including 25 longer-range Grad rockets which Israel's "Iron Dome" missile interceptor system shot down.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told local officials in towns under fire the Jewish state would "continue to strike at all those who plan to attack Israeli citizens". He promised to supply additional missile defense batteries. Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), an armed faction largely independent of Gaza's Islamist Hamas rulers, said it had fired most of the rockets and mortars. The escalating violence drew appeals for a ceasefire from the United Nations, European Union, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority and neighboring Egypt, whose peace treaty with Israel has been tested by last year's toppling of Hosni Mubarak. EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, expressed concern. "I urge all sides to re-establish calm," she said in a statement.

Richard Miron, a spokesman for U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry, called for "both sides to exercise maximum restraint" and condemned rocket firings at Israel.

MILITANT LEADERS KILLED IN CAR

The latest violence began on Friday when Israeli missiles destroyed a car in Gaza City, killing two militant leaders. One of them, Zuheir el-Qessi, head of the PRC, had been involved in plotting a cross-border attack from Egypt, Israel said.

Israeli media reported that Qessi had also been involved in the 2006 capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, was freed as part of a prisoner swap in October.

After darkness fell on Friday, further air strikes killed eight more militants in Gaza, Hamas Islamist officials there said. At least 12 civilians were among 26 wounded in the Israeli attacks, medics reported.

Israel said its attacks were on weapons manufacturing sites and militants preparing to fire rockets.

Egypt's Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamal Amr told state news agency MENA that his government was "making crucial calls for an immediate end to this Israeli escalation to end bloodshed of our brothers". Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri called for Egyptian aid, saying Gaza was "sinking in darkness and in blood".

In Gaza, thousands attended funerals for dead militants on Saturday, listening to speeches calling for revenge.

Gaza officials said Israeli troops opened fire on mourners at a burial for an Islamic Jihad militant attended by hundreds at a cemetery near the Israeli frontier fence, wounding four. Israel's military had no immediate comment on the incident.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged restraint on both sides. He charged Israel was responsible for the "serious deterioration" but urged militants to avoid an escalation that could hurt efforts to renew talks for Palestinian statehood. Hamas, an Iranian-backed group that refuses to recognize Israel, did not claim responsibility for any missile attack on Israel, and there were no reported civilian deaths in Gaza, factors which may prevent the violence escalating. However, Israel says it holds Hamas responsible for any attacks launched from its territory. Hamas seized control of Gaza from Abbas's Fatah movement in a bloody 2007 coup, two years after Israel pulled its forces out of the territory it had captured in a 1967 war.

[mawilson 2,133]

Act 1. Israel assassinates al Qaisi (PRC leader in Gaza) by hitting his car with missiles

The Chinese have a leader in Gaza?

[Karee 4,190]

The Chinese have a leader in Gaza?

[Pooky 3,781]

The Chinese have a leader in Gaza?

Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Once again, the IDF is entangled in its own lies:

In the last two days, Israeli forces have killed at least 15 residents of the Gaza Strip and wounded over 30. Among the dead are two young boys (see here and here), while the wounded included a reporter from the Ma’an News Agency and his pregnant wife. Militant factions in Gaza have responded to the Israeli assault by launching several homemade rockets at Southern Israel, leaving two injured and no one dead.

The Israeli army claimed that it initiated the assault on Gaza in order to kill two alleged militants who supposedly “masterminded” a brazen and deadly terror attack near the Israeli city of Eilat in August of last year. The army also claimed the two were planning a new operation. According to Al Jazeera English’s Jerusalem correspondent Paul Brennan:

The Israeli army is saying these two people it targeted with its clinical airstrike on Friday night were senior militants who were plotting an attack.

The Israeli army says that last year’s attack on the road that runs alongside the Egyptian border, where eight people were killed and 25 Israeli soldiers were wounded, was masterminded by the two men they targeted.

“Zuhair Al-Qaissi and Mahmoud Al-Hannani were said to have been behind these attacks, and the Israeli army said that these two men were planning a similar attack and that is why they launched their aerial clinical attack.

The Jerusalem Post, which functions as a virtual bulletin board for the Israeli army, told a similar story: “The IDF said it decided to bomb Qaisi’s car due to intelligence that he was plotting a large terrorist attack along the border with Egypt,” the paper reported, “similar to the one the [Popular Resistance Committee] carried out last August that killed eight Israelis.”

However:

According to the army’s own investigation of the Eliat attack last year, the attackers were not from Gaza as Israeli government spokespeople initially claimed — they were Egyptian. The army’s investigative findings were first reported by Alex Fishman, the military correspondent for the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharanoth, who had treated the earlier attempts to blame Gaza’s Popular Resistance Committees for Eilat with extreme skepticism. Bloggers Idan Landau [Hebrew only], Richard Silverstein and Yossi Gurvitz also marshaled evidence shredding the army’s case against Gaza.

Finally, in November, Egyptian security forces arrested the suspected mastermind of the Eilat plot, shattering the Israeli army’s initial claims about Gazan culpability. By then, however, Israeli forces had already killed 30 Gazans in retaliation for an attack they had absolutely nothing to do with.

But now, the IDF apparently thinks no one will remember that it was already caught lying about this very same case before, and tries to float the same bogus explanation a second time:

This weekend, the Israeli army reverted to falsely blaming Gazans for last August’s Eilat attacks, contradicting its own investigation and heaps of evidence proving the attacks were planned in Egypt and carried out by Egyptians. The army has no proof that the men it assassinated on Friday — Al-Qaissi and Al-Hannani — were involved in the Eilat attacks, or that they were planning any military operations. So in to manufacture a violent confrontation, the Israeli military simply concocted a lie that conceals what appears to be political considerations.

Why all this now ?

The renewed assault on Gaza coincided with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to Israel after days of discussions in Washington with President Barack Obama about Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu had hoped to secure a solid commitment from Obama to authorize an attack on Iran, or to at least support an Israeli strike in the near future. Instead, he was rebuked, with Obama condemning Netanyahu’s “loose talk of war” and warning him not to strike Iran. During his speech at AIPAC, Netanyahu was forced to mute his demand for Obama to agree to “red lines” on Iran’s nuclear program that would trigger a US attack, descending instead into an incoherent, demagogic rant about a “nuclear duck” and the Holocaust. If Bibi accomplished anything during his visit to Washington, it was keeping the Palestinians off the discussion table, guaranteeing his government a free hand to build expand settlements in the West Bank and attack Gaza with impunity.

Almost as soon as he limped back to Jerusalem in frustration, Netanyahu gathered with his generals to gin up a case for pounding Gaza. The Gaza Strip, with its warehoused population of stateless refugees, would serve as their punching bag and pressure release valve. They could not have their war on Iran — not yet, at least — but they could assault Palestinians in Gaza without fear of repercussions from Washington.

Yesterday, as the Gazan death toll climbed into the teens, US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice took to Twitter to declare: “We thoroughly condemn terrorist rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israeli towns & cities and call on both sides to restore calm.”

http://maxblumenthal.com/2012/03/israels-bogus-case-for-bombing-gaza-obscures-political-motives/#more-2258

[웃 910]

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

The Chinese have a leader in Gaza?

No, only take out.

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

Militants = Palestinian Women and Children

Innocents = Israeli Soldiers an Civilians

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Israel wanted an escalation, so it instigated one.

Escalation is good for Israel

Hamas' continued preference for diplomatic action in the face of Israel's attacks on Gaza is less than convenient for those who desire an Israeli strike on Iran.

Advocates of a strike on Iran couldn't have hoped for a more convincing performance than the current exchange of fire between Israel and Gaza. "A million Israelis under fire" is only a taste of what is expected when Iran's nuclear project is completed. When that happens, seven million Israelis will be under the threat of fire and nuclear fallout.

This is what happens when "only" the Islamic Jihad fires Grad rockets, when Hamas stays out of the fight, and when the "miraculous system" that prevents missiles from falling on kindergartens still works. Under the threat of a nuclear Iran, miracles won't help, and people in Tel Aviv will also be forced to hide in bomb shelters or escape to Eilat.

Here’s the proof: There is no alternative to striking Iran and there is no better time than the present, when the weather permits and world diplomacy is preoccupied with Syria. For Israelis, there is no better proof that no harm will come to them as a result of an attack on Iran than the performance of the Iron Dome anti-rocket system, which has demonstrated a 95% rate of effectiveness. The escalation in Gaza is good for Israel – that is, for that part of Israel that wants to strike Iran.

It is hard to understand what basis there is for the assertion that Israel is not striving to escalate the situation. One could assume that an armed response by the Popular Resistance Committees or Islamic Jihad to Israel's targeted assassination was taken into account. But did anyone weigh the possibility that the violent reaction could lead to a greater number of Israeli casualties than any terrorist attack that Zuhair al-Qaisi, the secretary-general of the Popular Resistance Committees, could have carried out?

In the absence of a clear answer to that question, one may assume that those who decided to assassinate al-Qaisi once again relied on the "measured response" strategy, in which an Israeli strike draws a reaction, which draws an Israeli counter-reaction. Everything is proportionate, and Israel controls the height of the flames, while proclaiming that "Israel does not seek to escalate the situation."

...

Unlike Israel, Hamas has an understandable interest in putting an end to the escalation, which caught it off guard. The organization is mired in an internal political struggle. After fleeing Syria, its leadership is looking for a new home. The dialogue with Fatah has yet to produce an agreement on a unity government, and its ideological side must deal with the willingness of the Muslim Brotherhood, its ideological umbrella organization, to carry on a dialogue with the U.S. and respect the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.

...

This dependence on Egypt has managed in the past to produce extended ceasefires which have proven themselves in recent months, especially after the signing of the reconciliation agreement with Fatah, which produced Khaled Meshal's declarations that Hamas would restrict itself to nonviolent forms of struggle against Israel.

However, it seems that the change in Hamas not only hasn't convinced Israel, but even stands in the way of its "no partner" policy and could sabotage its efforts to head off the creation of a Palestinian unity government, which would lead to renewed efforts at the UN to secure an independent Palestinian state.

Thus, Hamas must be dragged toward military activity against Israel, and nothing is easier, at least in Israel's estimation, than to launch a "unilateral" attack against a wanted non-Hamas man, to wait for the response to come, and hope that Hamas joins in.

The plan didn't work, yet.

So far, it hasn't happened. Hamas still prefers the diplomatic channel and has carried on intensive diplomatic contacts over the past two days with Egypt's Supreme Military Council. Israel apparently needs to wait for another opportunity. Meanwhile, however, it has already managed to turn the attention of Arab diplomacy away from Syria and toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/escalation-is-good-for-israel-1.417848

[Pooky 3,781]

Israel wanted an escalation, so it instigated one.

The plan didn't work, yet.

I bet the 7,500 dead Syrians don't really care what the Arab nations' priorities are any more

[Sofiyya 1,687]

I bet the 7,500 dead Syrians don't really care what the Arab nations' priorities are any more

The same could be said for dead Afghanis and dead Iraqis about the priorities of the West.