The rockets continue to fall on Israel, one landing in a (thankfully) empty gymnasium in an Israeli school. Hamas is reportedly trying to get the UN to make Israel stop firing on Gaza, but there is no word of Hamas actually intending to stop its war on Israel. And the world doesn’t seem to give a damn that Israel actually waited 24 hours for the situation to calm before striking Gaza once more. No, all the world media does is concentrate on how many Palestinian civilians Hamas put in the crossfire were injured as a result of that.
The AP whitewash-cum-spin continues, of course. Note the wording: It makes it look like the terrorists deliberately fired at an empty gym, instead of the gym being empty by chance. due to summer break.
Militants in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip bombarded southern Israel with rockets and mortars Sunday, striking an empty school and a score of other targets, as diplomats scrambled to keep a new convulsion of Israeli-Palestinian violence from escalating.
And note also the deliberate minimizing of Israeli casualties.
Since Thursday’s ambush, militants have fired some 100 rockets and mortars on southern Israel, killing an Israeli man and seriously wounding two other people on Saturday. No serious injuries were reported Sunday.
The AP never names or ages Israeli victims. And they always add just a little doubt to Israel’s side of the issue. Look at the insertion of the weasel words.
Senior Israeli officials met late into the night to discuss how to proceed with retaliatory operations against Gaza militants, who they say triggered the latest round of hostilities Thursday with a roadside ambush along the Israeli-Egypt border that killed eight Israelis.
The clear inference is that the hostilities weren’t triggered by the fact that four teams of terrorists attacked Israel with guns, mortars, bombs, and anti-tank missiles. Israel just says that the terrorists started the hostilities. The fact that they did? Well, we have to present the Hamas side of the issue, don’t we?
Mahmoud Abbas has still not come out and condemned the terrorism and rocket attacks. He does, however, intend to use it as a premise for the creation of the fictional statelet of East Palestine.
A spokesman said Abbas’ Palestinian Authority planned to use the renewed violence to bolster its case for statehood at the United Nations next month.
“An independent Palestinian state is the remedy for violence,” Husam Zomlot said. “It would control its borders and prevent such deterioration from happening.”
Even the AP is calling bullshit on that.
Abbas, who only rules the West Bank, asserts no such prospective control at this time. Hamas routed his loyalists from Gaza in a violent 2007 takeover, and a reconciliation pact the two sides signed in May has stalled.
The Reuters take:
Palestinian militants fired at least 12 rockets into southern Israel on Sunday, drawing an Israeli threat to step up attacks in the Gaza Strip in a three-day-old surge of cross-border violence.
Oh, is that what we’re calling rocket attacks these days? “Cross-border violence”?
The bloodshed began on Thursday, when gunmen whom Israel said came from the Gaza Strip and crossed into its territory near the Red Sea resort of Eilat via Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, killed eight people in attacks on a desert road.
Five Egyptian security personnel and seven gunmen were also killed in that day’s violence.
Oh, I see. It’s violence, not terror. Or rocket attacks. Or murder. And of course, Reuters emphasizes Israeli damage to Palestinians, and minimizes any Israeli casualties.
Israel has carried out air strikes in the Gaza Strip since Thursday that medical officials said have killed least 15 people, among them gunmen and five civilians. Israel said more than 100 rockets have been fired from the Hamas Islamist-controlled enclave at its southern towns and villages.
Reuters does not mention that an Israeli man was killed in a rocket attack yesterday, and that many Israelis have been wounded. Anti-Israel bias? Yeah, we got that. Always.
Our kids moved to Ofakim. The siren went off on Shabbos as they were eating shalosh seudos. That gave them 45 seconds to get to their shelter — including the time it took our son-in-law to run into the next room and grab our sleeping 3 year old grandson. The missile injured an infant, a nine year old and a 20 year old. 38 people were treated for anxiety.
45 seconds is not much time, even when your miklat (shelter) is not 4 flights down from your apartment.
A friend of their contractor lived in Beer Sheva and spent that Shabbos in Ofakim. He drove home because he was worried about his pregnant wife and their two small daughters. He made it to Beer Sheva but never made it home. She is now a widow.
Meanwhile, the AP spends most of its article talking about how angry Egypt is, the threat to the 1979 treaty, and the number of people killed by Israel’s response to the attacks. The Israeli casualities from the numerous missile attacks over Shabbos are mentioned as a an afterthought, squeezed into the two final lines of the article.
Remind me why it was a good idea for the US to give nearly a billion dollars in aid to help buy the raw materials for these missiles under the guise of rebuilding Gaza after Cast Lead. Remind me also why it was a good idea for the US to help destabilize the Mubarak regime.