When you hear about the suffering of people in Gaza, always remember how Hamas, which controls Gaza, diverts cement, steel and other infrastructure supplies including electricity into building elaborate attack tunnels and developing military rocket capabilities.
Add to Hamas other groups, such as Islamic Jihad, which are devoted to Israel’s destruction and devote resources to that end, and it’s clear that the problem is not Israel or the military blockade, but the decisions made by Palestinians themselves.
We saw it in the last several weeks of the so-called Great March of Return, which has seen waves of attackers trying to break through the border fence. It’s a military operation under cover of civilian protests. When that hasn’t worked, they’ve armed kites with incendiary devices and have succeeded in setting Israel agricultural fields and nature reserves on fire.
The environmental crimes of the “protesters” have been self-destructive. They burned thousands of tires creating a toxic cloud of toxic black smoke which, due to prevailing winds, stayed over Gaza.
But today brought the worst self-inflicted wounds. “Protesters” today set the main gas line supplying fuel to Gaza on fire and also seriously damaged the terminal through which most goods were shipped into Gaza.
The Times of Israel reports:
Dozens of Palestinians broke into the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and the Hamas-run Strip on Friday evening, setting fire to the gas pipeline that supplies fuel to the Strip, the army said.The Gazans, who did not break through to the Israeli side of the border, trashed their own supply infrastructure, Israeli military officials said.The IDF shared video of the Kerem Shalom incident, during which Palestinians broke into the Palestinian side of the crossing and damaged pipelines carrying gas and oil into Gaza, which already suffers from a large energy shortage….Kerem Shalom is the main crossing for goods and humanitarian aid to pass into Strip from Israel.Elsewhere, there were two mass attempts to damage and breach the security fence around the central Gaza Strip during the protests, the army said.Israeli soldiers who were called to the scene of those attempts forced back the demonstrators using less-lethal riot dispersal weapons and live fire.“Two attempts by a group of rioters to damage the fence and cross into Israeli territory from the central [Gaza] Strip were thwarted a short while ago,” the army said on Friday evening.
Here is the Kerem Shalom terminal before the “peaceful Palestinian protesters” got ahold of it today:
Today was not the first time Palestinians have tried to destroy the Kerem Shalom crossing. In January of this year, we reported on Israel’s destruction of a tunnel built by Hamas intended to blow up the crossing.
In 2008 suicide bombers tried to blow up the crossing:
Palestinian suicide bombers from Gaza drove three explosives-laden vehicles into the Kerem Shalom goods crossing on the border with Israel early on Saturday, detonating two of them, the Israeli military said.Three bombers were killed in the blasts and 13 Israeli soldiers were wounded, three moderately and the rest lightly, the military said.Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the Gaza Strip, claimed responsibility for the attack. It came on the eve of the weeklong Passover holiday in Israel and hours before former President Jimmy Carter held a second meeting in Damascus with exiled leaders of Hamas, reportedly to explore the possibility of a cease-fire and a prisoner exchange between the group and Israel.Hamas is holding an Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was captured in a border raid on an army position not far from Kerem Shalom and taken into Gaza in June 2006. The group is demanding the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in return for the Israeli corporal.
So much of Palestinian harm is self-inflicted. But you’ll never hear that from the biased international media, which takes Hamas propaganda at face value and almost never holds Palestinians accountable for their own conduct.
Instead, all we hear about in the media is “peaceful Palestinian protesters.”
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