Browsing Posts published on May 21, 2007
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**The video above is of an earlier Qassam missile attack on Israel**
Palestinian terror groups, namely Hamas and Islamic Jihad, continue with their campaign of missile fire on Israeli civilians, and have murdered a 35 year old woman today while she sat in her car. Over 100 missiles have been launched into Israeli cities and towns in the past week alone.
Israel left Gaza two years ago in the hope of creating a space to build peace. Since then Hamas has come to power, and cynically they continue spending their energies and money on weapons to terrorize innocent civilians both in Israel and amongst their Palestinian co-nationals in Gaza. Instead of investing in the institutions of statehood like education, health services, infrastructure, jobs, etc, Hamas chooses to smuggle tons of munitions, guns, missiles and bombs into Gaza.
As Hezbollah proved in Lebanon, and Hamas is proving now in the Palestinian territories, when terror groups bent on the destruction of their neighbors are elected into office, they do not moderate their positions. In fact, their incorporation emboldens their apocalyptic goals and they wind up dragging the region into conflict.
From YNET:
Woman killed in Sderot rocket attack
Qassam hits car near southern town’s commercial center, critically injuring a woman and moderately wounding another man. More than 10 rockets fired from Gaza Strip since Monday morning
Roi Mandel
A woman was killed and another man was moderately injured Monday evening as a Qassam rocket hit a car at a commercial center in the southern town of Sderot, near a bakery.
Five rockets were fired at the southern town at around 8 pm.Two landed south of Ashkelon, one landed in Sderot and two in the western Negev.
Lebanon Conflict
The recent conflicts unfolding in Southern Israel/Gaza and in Northern Lebanon/Nahr el-Bared camp are eerily similar in that in both cases you have terror groups cynically hiding behind civilians while provoking a fight with another power. As long as extremists are allowed to sow their violent ideologies and practices, whether it is launching missiles into Israel or spreading unrest in Lebanon, these conflicts will continue without resolution.
To create the conditions for peace these extremists must be confronted one way or another.
Here is some background on the conflicts raging in Lebanon and Southern Israel/Gaza.
From YNET:
Lebanese troops tighten siege of camp
Soldiers pound Palestinian refugee camp with artillery day after worst eruption of violence since end of1975-90 civil war
Lebanese troops tightened a siege of a Palestinian refugee camp Monday where a shadowy group suspected of ties to al-Qaeda was holed up, pounding it with artillery a day after the worst eruption of violence since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.
The death toll from Sunday’s violence climbed to near 50, but it was not known how many civilians have been killed inside the Nahr el-Bared camp on the outskirts of the northern port city of Tripoli, the scene of the heaviest fighting. No new deaths on Monday have been reported.
Lebanese officials said one of the men killed Sunday was a suspect in a failed German train bombing — another indication the camp had become a refuge for Fatah Islam militants planning attacks outside of Lebanon. In the past, others affiliated with the group in the camp have said they were aiming to send trained fighters into Iraq and the group’s leader has been linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The rest is here.
From HAARETZ:
Hamas, Fatah officials: Internal fighting in Gaza is far from over
By Avi Issacharoff
Members of both Hamas and Fatah said Monday that internal infighting was far from over, just one day after Egyptian mediators announced a new cease-fire aimed at ending nine days of fighting that has left roughly 50 people dead.
The fighting between Fatah and Hamas has abated in recent days, as Israel has responded to a heavy Qassam rocket fire with a bombing campaign against Hamas targets, but tensions remain high.
“The Israeli attacks will only postpone the internal fighting but will not end it,” said senior Fatah official Ziad Abu Ein. “As long as there are many guns out on the streets it is very easy to renew Palestinian-Palestinian fighting.”
The rest is here.
Media Conflict Coverage in the Middle East
This issue has been a topic of constant debate. How do journalists cover the Israeli/Arab conflict, or for that matter any conflict, in a fair and balanced way when journalists are threatened with kidnapping and death? Alan Johnston is still missing, and as the report below highlights, others have been killed and many are now avoiding the Gaza Strip altogether. There are also persistent reports of journalists being threatened by terror groups if their reports reflect those groups’ actions in a negative way.
Ultimately, this raises the point that open societies struggling against terror groups sometimes become media victims of their own openness. When a journalist is free to cover every aspect, political debate and flaw of one society, but is unable to move and report freely about the other society engaged in the conflict the news will surely be skewed.
How can this be addressed?
From Haaretz:
For Gaza journalists, kidnap is no longer the biggest fear
By Avi Issacharoff
What happened last Friday to Abd a-Salem Abu Askar, the head of Abu Dhabi television in the territories, is the nightmare of every journalist in the Gaza Strip.
At about 7:30 P.M. that day, Abu Askar left his house in Gaza City. Some 200 meters away, he ran into a roadblock manned by masked gunmen, who demanded his identification card. Then one radioed: “We’ve detained Abu Askar.” Abu Askar managed to call his office and say that he had been kidnapped; a few minutes later, a van carrying 10 gunmen arrived, removed him from his car, beat him up and took him to an unknown location.
