The terms of the truce are clear. Hamas is to stop all attacks from Gaza. No more mortars, no more kassams, no more attempts to kill Israelis. In return, Israel opens the crossings and sends in more goods.
Hamas keeps allowing mortars and kassams to be fired, or fires the rockets themselves. Israel closes the crossings. So what happens? Egypt begs Israel to ignore the fact that deadly missiles are raining down on its territory, and open the crossings anyway. And Israel caves.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday instructed the defense establishment to reopen the goods crossings into the Gaza Strip following a personal request made by Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman. The crossings will reopen partially on Tuesday afternoon.
According to the new decision, the crossings will operate several hours, rather than the entire day. The elements involved in the issue will form a proper plan, setting the list of priorities for the entry of goods into Gaza.
Oh, there’s tough talk.
“At the moment, our response is closing the truce. If needed, we will take other measures. It must be clear that any rocket, of any kind, is a clear violation of the agreement and we shall not ignore it,” a defense source said.
But there is only talk. Meantime, Hamas is training its terrorists on better ways to murder Israelis.
At least two Palestinians were killed on Tuesday morning in an explosion in a training camp for Hamas armed wing in southern Gaza Strip, security and medical sources said.
“The paramedics evacuated two dead bodies and two wounded persons and we expect more casualties because the blast destroyed the whole facility,” said Muawia Hassanien of the Health Ministry ambulance department.
The training center is located in a former Israeli settlement in Khan Younis city in southern Gaza Strip. Security sources confirmed there was training when the explosion occurred.
And here’s the kicker of the Xinhua piece:
Since Israel refused to deal with Hamas government, most of the projects to rebuild the empty former settlement was halted and the large spaces turned into training camps for the different Palestinian militant groups.
Meantime, the world has flooded yet more money into the Palestinian coffers, and the leaders of the PA are begging for more all the time. Funny how none of that money seems to be reaching the Palestinian poor.
The international community has paid out nearly a billion dollars in direct aid to the Palestinians in six months, officials of the International Donors’ Conference for the Palestinian State said here late Monday, while hitting out at Israeli restrictions on movement by Palestinians.
The chair and the co-chairs of the Paris conference, which last December came up with pledges of donations totalling 7.7 billion dollars over three years, ‘strongly welcomed’ the process of disbursing the funds.
Money is raining in, and the economy of the Palestinians is not improving. Who is at fault? Why, Israel, of course.
But ‘restrictions by the Government of Israel on Palestinian movement and access continue to weigh heavily on the economic outlook.
‘Without a significant lifting of such barriers in the West Bank, and a relaxation of the restrictions on humanitarian and commercial flows to the Gaza Strip, there is a much-reduced prospect for private sector recovery, public and private investment programmes will continue to be delayed, and consequently any economic recovery will continue to be inhibited.’
Thank you, Tony Blair. It’s obvious you haven’t learned a thing since you left office. Because your Palestinian partners aren’t showing one whit of evidence that they are changing. Not at all.
In a series of reports published in the ‘al-Hayat al-Jadida’ newspaper Israel is accused of poisoning Palestinian prisoners in its custody and conducting “medical experiments’ on them.
[…] “Many of the male and female prisoners were given injections from needles they had never seen before, that led to permanent hair loss and facial hair loss. There are prisoners who have lost their sight and their sense, those who have lost their sanity and those whose mental condition is increasingly deteriorating, there are prisoners who have become barren and cannot reproduce,” the article said.
This is the official Palestinian media. In other words, international donors are paying for incitement against Israel, something that the world has never truly had a problem with. Europe is once again subsidizing the murder of Jews. Only this time, they get to pretend that they have nothing to do with it.
Thus ends your depressing post of the day. Geez. No wonder I want to discuss ice cream vendors instead of this.
An apt conclusion about Europe. My many years there entailed an endless whining about how they weren’t the Nazis, it was their grandparents, or someone else’s grandparents, while they proved daily that psychologically they are still the hate-filled prejudice-bound self-centered control freak stock that Hitler molded so ably into his murder machine.
Funny how things work out. Israel pulled back from the Gaza Strip, on promises that attacks by the Palestinians would stop. The next day, shells fell on Israel.
The population of Palestine is not easy to find, but one site I found has it at about 3.5 million. One billion dollars among 3.5 million people works out to about $286/person. That’s not a lot by our standards, but is probably quite a bit by theirs.
I also note that that billion or so is in pledges – which may or may not be realized.
Still, it’s probably true that if they spent a little less time on rocket science, and a little more on agriculture &c, they’d be a lot better off.