In a brazen midday attack yesterday (02 July), a Palestinian terrorist drove a large construction vehicle through a crowded section of Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road killing three Jerusalem residents and leaving crushed and overturned cars and buses in his wake. Once again, terrorists demonstrated their willingness and desire to harm innocent civilians–including the infants injured in yesterday’s incident.
This attack was particularly disturbing occurring as Israel has made strides in peace negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. Though Hamas has agreed to abide by the Egyptian-brokered “state of calm” in Gaza, the organization’s approval for these actions is a noticeable reminder of the challenges Israel still faces from terrorists.
The State of Israel will continue to ensure its citizens’ right to security while maintaining its commitment to achieving peace with the appropriate bodies. She also calls upon the international community to condemn this attack and others like it in the strongest possible terms and to recognize the continued danger posed by extremist bodies and the necessity of advancing the cause of peace.
See the New York Times for continuing developments. Further analysis can be found through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

1. Our responsibility to our servicemen is a supreme value in Israel. It stems from the moral foundations of the State of Israel and the Jewish faith. This is Israel’s true strength.

2. The Cabinet endorsed the prisoner exchange to send a message to IDF soldiers and their families – that Israel will always do everything in its power to bring its sons and daughters home. This, despite misgivings over the need to release a cold-blooded murderer, Samir Kuntar, whose brutality is celebrated by Arab extremists.

3. Israel aspired to reach a deal quickly and on the most favorable terms possible. Rejecting the current deal could have meant a lengthy delay and a more painful price tag.

4. The agreement will return Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to Israel, together with the additional remains of soldiers who fell during the Second Lebanon War and a report on the fate of Ron Arad. Israel will return Kuntar, four other Lebanese terrorists and the bodies of dozens of infiltrators and terrorists (including eight Hizbullah members) to Lebanon. Israel will also give the UN Secretary-General information on four missing Iranian diplomats and, after the exchange, release Palestinian prisoners – whose identity and number will be at Israel’s exclusive discretion.

5. The Government of Israel remains steadfast in its commitment to obtain reliable information on the fate of Ron Arad and to continue working for the release of Gilad Shalit. No effort will be spared to find them and the other MIAs and to bring them home.

6. Israel’s response to the abduction of Goldwasser and Regev was unprecedented – Hizbullah suffered a severe blow to its infrastructure, arsenals and operatives. Its leaders are still in hiding. Israel will respond with full force to any future attempts to abduct its soldiers and citizens.

7. Hizbullah, Hamas, and their fellow Iran-backed terrorists are responsible for the suffering of Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese. They are the obstacle to peace between Israel and its neighbors.

8. Israel expects the international community to take decisive action against extremists and to support Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens while it negotiates peace with pragmatic counterparts.

The World Should Know What He Did to My Family
By Smadar Haran Kaiser

Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page B02

NAHARIYA, Israel–Abu Abbas, the former head of a Palestinian terrorist group who was captured in Iraq on April 15, is infamous for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. But there are probably few who remember why Abbas’s terrorists held the ship and its 400-plus passengers hostage for two days. It was to gain the release of a Lebanese terrorist named Samir Kuntar, who is locked up in an Israeli prison for life. Kuntar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kuntar’s mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas. And my wish now is that this terrorist leader should be prosecuted in the United States, so that the world may know of all his terrorist acts, not the least of which is what he did to my family on April 22, 1979.

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The next day, Abu Abbas announced from Beirut that the terrorist attack in Nahariya had been carried out “to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty” at Camp David the previous year. Abbas seems to have a gift for charming journalists, but imagine the character of a man who protests an act of peace by committing an act of slaughter.

Two of Abbas’s terrorists had been killed by police on the beach. The other two were captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Despite my protests, one was released in a prisoner exchange for Israeli POWs several months before the Achille Lauro hijacking. Abu Abbas was determined to find a way to free Kuntar as well. So he engineered the hijacking of the Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt and demanded the release of 50 Arab terrorists from Israeli jails. The only one of those prisoners actually named was Samir Kuntar. The plight of hundreds held hostage on a cruise ship for two days at sea lent itself to massive international media coverage. The attack on Nahariya, by contrast, had taken less than an hour in the middle of the night. So what happened then was hardly noticed outside of Israel.

One hears the terrorists and their excusers say that they are driven to kill out of desperation. But there is always a choice. Even when you have suffered, you can choose whether to kill and ruin another’s life, or whether to go on and rebuild. Even after my family was murdered, I never dreamed of taking revenge on any Arab. But I am determined that Samir Kuntar should never be released from prison. In 1984, I had to fight my own government not to release him as part of an exchange for several Israeli soldiers who were POWs in Lebanon. I understood, of course, that the families of those POWs would gladly have agreed to the release of an Arab terrorist to get their sons back. But I told Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, that the blood of my family was as red as that of the POWs. Israel had always taken a position of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. If they were going to make an exception, let it be for a terrorist who was not as cruel as Kuntar. “Your job is not to be emotional,” I told Rabin, “but to act rationally.” And he did.

So Kuntar remains in prison. I have been shocked to learn that he has married an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of terrorist prisoners. As the wife of a prisoner, she gets a monthly stipend from the government. I’m not too happy about that.

In recent years, Abu Abbas started telling journalists that he had renounced terrorism and that killing Leon Klinghoffer had been a mistake. But he has never said that killing my family was a mistake. He was a terrorist once, and a terrorist, I believe, he remains. Why else did he spend these last years, as the Israeli press has reported, free as a bird in Baghdad, passing rewards of $25,000 from Saddam Hussein to families of Palestinian suicide bombers? More than words, that kind of cash prize, which is a fortune to poor families, was a way of urging more suicide bombers. The fortunate thing about Abbas’s attaching himself to Hussein is that it set him up for capture.

Some say that Italy should have first crack at Abbas. It had already convicted him of the Achille Lauro hijacking in absentia in 1986. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now wants Abbas handed over so that he can begin serving his life sentence. But it’s also true that in 1985, the Italians had Abbas in their hands after U.S. fighter jets forced his plane to land in Sicily. And yet they let him go. So while I trust Berlusconi, who knows if a future Italian government might not again wash its hands of Abbas?

In 1995, Rabin, then our prime minister, asked me to join him on his trip to the White House, where he was to sign a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat, which I supported. I believe that he wanted me to represent all Israeli victims of terrorism. Rabin dreaded shaking hands with Arafat, knowing that those hands were bloody. At first, I agreed to make the trip, but at the last minute, I declined. As prime minister, Rabin had to shake hands with Arafat for political reasons. As a private person, I did not. So I stayed here.

Now I am ready and willing to come to the United States to testify against Abu Abbas if he is tried for terrorism. The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer have said they are ready to do the same. Unlike Klinghoffer, Danny, Einat and Yael were not American citizens. But Klinghoffer was killed on an Italian ship in Abbas’s attempt to free the killer of my family in Israel. We are all connected by the international web of terrorism woven by Abbas. Let the truth come out in a new and public trial. And let it be in the United States, the leader in the struggle against terrorism.
Smadar Haran Kaiser is a social worker. She is remarried and has two daughters.

Hamas has recently increased its mortar fire from the Gaza Strip as it continued to indescriminately attack Israeli civilians living in the Western Negev.

Once again, Palestinian terrorist organizations have demonstrated their willingness to strike Israeli civilians.

For more pictures, click here.

The Hamas organization is staging a situation of crisis and distress, and harming the civilian population in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to divert pressure onto Israel.
Colonel Nir Press, Head of the Coordination and Liaison Administration: “The State of Israel has permitted the steady and continuous flow of fuel into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks.”

2,200,000 liters of diesel fuel are transferred through the Nahal Oz fuel terminal to the Gaza Strip power plant weekly. This power plant is capable of supplying 30% of the total electricity requirements of the Gaza Strip. The remaining power needs are supplied by Israel and Egypt. In addition, unlimited quantities of cooking gas, 800,000 liters of diesel fuel for transportation and 75,000 liters of gasoline are transferred weekly.

The gasoline and diesel fuel transferred by Israel is designated primarily for use by ambulances, water pumps, the sewage system, for the operation of generators at various institutions such as hospitals, schools and clinics, for agricultural use, transportation, school buses, food trucks, garbage collection, public transportation, shipping boats, food plants, bakeries, and so on.

Col. Press stated that it has become apparent in recent weeks that the Palestinians are staging an energy crisis while instigating a strike and protest rallies. The closed filling stations, the long lines of people and vehicles waiting many hours to fill their tanks, are all part of a planned Hamas media campaign being conducted at the expense of the civilian population – a crisis caused by their failure to draw available fuel supplies from the Nahal Oz Palestinian fuel depot.

Col. Press further stated that “In the last two weeks there were no restrictions on freely drawing fuel from the Palestinian depot at Nahal Oz and distributing it to filling stations, but this did not take place. In contrast, cooking gas and diesel fuel for the power station have been supplied on a regular basis. As of today, the Palestinian stock of fuel amounts to 188,000 liters of gasoline and over 800,000 liters of diesel fuel.”

The Hamas organization is intentionally harming the civilian population in the Gaza Strip by not allowing the supply of fuel for humanitarian purposes, and preventing the distribution of fuel to civilian filling stations. In the weeks preceding this development, a substantial share of the fuel supplies – almost half – was diverted for use by the Hamas terror organization and its operatives.

The murderous attack on 9 April 2008 at the Nahal Oz fuel terminal, in which two civilian workers at the terminal, Oleg Lipson and Lev Cherniak, were killed, constitutes additional testimony to the terror from the Gaza Strip directed at Israel, at the crossings which serve the Palestinians, and at Israeli civilians working for Palestinian welfare, while attempting to create a crisis and to harness Palestinian public opinion against Israel as part of this campaign.

The cynical use of the Palestinian population, as well as the stoppage of the supply of fuel for civilian and humanitarian use, could have been prevented by drawing the available fuel from the depot at the Palestinian terminal and directing it to humanitarian/civilian needs and to local filling stations, for the benefit of the residents of Gaza.

See here for the full study by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

Comment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

Israel views the Hamas, who controls the Gaza Strip, as responsible for today’s (9/4) terror attack on the Nahal Oz fuel crossing terminal. Hamas bears the responsibility for this attack, and will bear the consequences as well.
Today’s attack proves yet again that the terrorists in Gaza not only attack Israelis, but also try to harm the civilian infrastructure that allows a normal way of life in the Gaza Strip. It is plain to see that the terrorists’ goal is to kill as many Israelis as possible while also undermining any example of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, such as occurs at the crossing points between Israel and Gaza.
Israel transfers food, fuel, medicines, equipment and humanitarian supplies on a daily basis to the residents of the Gaza Strip. The terrorists who attacked the fuel terminal today are trying to harm this activity and thereby harm the lives and welfare of the residents of Gaza.
Israel will determine how to defend itself and will act against the terrorist organizations, their commanders and operators. At the same time, Israel will continue with its efforts to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

For further details, see here.