Whoops, there’s a whole lotta shootin’ goin’ on around thar. (Sorry. Been watching Firefly.)
Wednesday: Infighting in the Palestinian Authority continues as abductions and gun battles run rampant throughout the Gaza Strip.
Five Palestinians were killed in exchanges of fire between Hamas and Fatah this afternoon throughout northern Gaza.
Of those killed four are loyal to Fatah and one is a female bystander who was caught in the crossfire near Jabaliya.
Three of the Fatah members killed were officers in the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PPSS). Close to a dozen additional people were also reported injured in the clashes, though their conditions remain unclear.
Sources say that in all, 10 Palestinians have been kidnapped by both Hamas and Fatah. Earlier in the day gunmen, apparently belonging to Hamas, sought out and killed a Fatah operative in Beit Lahiya.
It caused Ismail Haniyeh, may his hair never grow back, to cut short his latest moneybagging tour of the Arab world.
For the second time, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas plans to cut short a tour of Arab nations, aides said Wednesday.
The aides said Haniyeh would return to Gaza on Thursday to attend to “work” instead of traveling to Jordan, which has offered to host a meeting between Haniyeh and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the Fatah movement in an effort to defuse deadly tensions between their factions.
Both Haniyeh and Abbas have agreed in principle to such a meeting, but no date has been announced.
The aides said Haniyeh decided to break off his trip after making an Islamic pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. They said he would resume the tour, but did not specify when or say what was the nature of the work that led him to come back early.
When you stop laughing at how stupid the AP thinks we are, you can nod your head while I write, “It’s the civil war, stupid.”
And isn’t it amazing how cavalier the news media are when palestinians are not killed by Israel? Check out what the AP has to say about this poor woman, murdered by the warring terrorists:
In the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, one woman was killed after getting caught in the crossfire of a fierce clash between rival forces. Nine others were wounded, mostly combatants, hospital officials said.
Love that little qualifier, too. If the IDF had done the shooting, the word would be all about the civilians, and “Israel said the dead palestinians were militants.”
Yeah, their math always gets fuzzy when it comes to tallying up those killed and wounded by terrorists, but it’s perfect when it comes to IDF casualties. Or inflated, come to think of it. Can you say, “Jenin ‘massacre’?” I knew you could.
Firefly. I picked up the DVD set last month as a Hanukkah present for myself after watching, and enjoying, the DVD of Serenity. Perhaps it would have been better to have seen the Firefly episodes first, but in my case that wouldn’t have been likely.
The silver lining in Firefly’s first season cancellation is that it’s not too expensive to own the entire series. It’s also interesting to see how Serenity develops threads (the Reavers, River’s treatment by and escape from the Alliance, etc.) that Joss Whedon presumably intended to reveal over the course of multiple seasons of Firefly.