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Gaza Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 18, 2016 3 Comments
It's beginning to look like it will be another hot summer in Israel. There was a bus explosion near Jerusalem earlier today. At first there was confusion as to whether it was a bomb or some technical failure. Police have just confirmed that it was a small bomb, though it remains unclear as of this writing if it was planted or a suicide bombing. https://twitter.com/MickyRosenfeld/status/722106508297781248 https://twitter.com/MickyRosenfeld/status/722097364958388224

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 06, 2016 6 Comments
In a post last December we highlighted the history of Israel’s prisoner exchanges with various Palestinian armed factions. As we noted:
For the past three decades, Israel has been forced to exchange scores of incarcerated terrorists for a mere handful of its POWs. In the majority of these lopsided prisoner swaps the Israeli soldiers had already been killed and came home in body bags. And in many cases the freed terrorists have gone on to perpetrate further terror attacks”.
Israeli soldiers, either dead or alive, have proven to be valuable bargaining chips. So basically, as we discussed, Palestinian terror organizations have been running a prisoner-exchange extortion racket. Now it looks like Israel may again be forced to pay a steep price for several of its civilians too. On Friday, Hamas publicly claimed for the first time that it was holding two Israeli men in captivity.

Posted by Mirabelle Ward on October 06, 2015 23 Comments
The hypocrisy of this administration with respect to Israel can, at times, be stunning. One of those times was in August of 2014, in the middle of the Israeli military operation known as Operation Protective Edge, which was designed to stop rocket-fire emanating from Gaza. A school run by UNRWA, the UN agency that is supposed to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinian Arab refugees and their second, third, and fourth generation descendants, was hit by shelling. It was well-known at that time that Gaza's Hamas rulers were firing on Israel from positions within civilian areas, and that the UNRWA schools were basically doubling as rocket warehouses. Despite this knowledge, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said at the time that the US was "appalled" by the "disgraceful shelling," that Israel "must do more to meet its own standards," and that "the suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 18, 2015 6 Comments
Last spring I visited Sderot, the Israeli town on the Gaza border. Sderot is best known internationally as the town most frequently under rocket attack with almost no warning because of the short distance. Sderot has developed extensive shelter systems, as I discussed in Israelis shelter in place near Gaza. The system includes playground shelters like this one: Sderot Israel Children's Playground Bomb Shelter and an underground municipal bunker for city officials to use when under attack:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 26, 2015 3 Comments
This is the 6th in our look back at the summer 2014 Gaza conflict. On August 26, 2014, the active Gaza fighting stopped with agreement on a ceasefire. How long that lasts is anyone's guess. Hamas is bragging that it has rebuilt tunnels leading into Israel and its rocket stockpiles and production. Hamas had a deliberate strategy of firing from crowded civilian areas both to use civilians as shields and also to run up civilian casualties as part of a media campaign. The international media was bullied on the ground by Hamas operatives, a fact that slowly has leaked out. The latest report from Polish reporter Wojciech Cegielski, I Saw Hamas' Cruel and Selfish Game in Gaza, who describes two specific incidents he witnesses while in Gaza during the fighting:
The first incident happened late in the evening. I was in the bathroom when I’ve heard a loud rocket noise and my Spanish colleague, a journalist who was renting a flat with me near the Gaza beach, started to scream. He wanted to light a cigarette and came to one of the open windows. The moment he was using his lighter, he saw a fireball in front of his eyes and lost his hearing. From what our neighbors told us later, a man drove up in a pickup to our tiny street. He placed a rocket launcher outside and fired. But the rocket failed to go upwards and flew along the street at ground level for a long time before destroying a building. It was a miracle that nobody was hurt or killed.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 23, 2015 6 Comments
Periodically throughout this summer, we are taking a look back at our coverage of the 2014 Gaza conflict. It’s important to do this because a relentless propaganda campaign which falsely portrays the conflict as initiated and continued by Israel, when in fact it was initiated by Hamas rocket fire and continued by Hamas through a series of ceasefire rejections and violations. So far we have covered:
  1. Gaza July 8, 2014 – Hamas Rockets Ignite War
  2. Gaza July 18, 2014 – Ground War After Hamas Rejects Ceasefire
  3. Summer 2014 – “Pro-Palestinian” rallies morph into anti-Semitic hatefests
  4. Gaza 2014: International media in the service of Hamas
Tonight we revisit one of the most notorious Hamas actions, the mass public execution of alleged collaborators without trial. The facts of the alleged collaboration were disputed, including by families, and many of those executed were in fact in Hamas prison at the time of the alleged collaboration. Hamas used the conflict as an excuse to carry out a political reign of terror. In late July, Hamas executed 30 alleged collaborators (via i24 News). On August 22, 2014, another 18 were rounded up and publicly shot to death, after several were executed earlier in the week:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 04, 2015 5 Comments
On August 2, 2014, in the middle of the Gaza conflict, we ran the A.F. Branco cartoon that is the featured image to this post. It's a fitting occasion to revisit the media bias that frames the international view of the 2014 Gaza conflict, as the fourth in our series looking back at our coverage. Our first three posts were: As before, we are focusing on revisiting our contemporaneous coverage. The international media is extremely sensitive to discussions of its bias, so much so that when, in June of 2015, the Israeli Foreign Ministry produced a comical short cartoon video poking fun at international media bias, the international media blew a gasket. The Foreign Ministry took down the video, though it was captured by others: Was this unfair to the international media? No, it was very fair, though overly simplified (just like the media's coverage of Gaza). Our posts from the summer of 2014 reflected the media bias. In that conflict, the media played a key role in covering up Hamas use of civilians as shields:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 26, 2015 1 Comment
This is the third in our series revisiting our coverage of the 2014 Gaza conflict. In the first post, we reported how the war did not start the way the anti-Israel propagandists content, with an Israeli attack in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens by a Hamas-affiliated cell in the West Bank. To the contrary, the kidnapping resulted in an Israeli crackdown in the West Bank, but it was relentless Hamas rocket fire from Gaza into Israel that precipitated Israeli air attacks on Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Gaza July 8, 2014 – Hamas Rockets Ignite War. Having debunked (again) the myth that Israel started the Gaza conflict, we debunked another myth, that the thousands of deaths and injuries were the result of Israel's desire to assault Gaza. In fact, after the first week of air attacks and Hamas rocket fire and infiltrations, Egypt proposed a ceasefire. Had both sides accepted that ceasefire, there would have been no Israeli ground invasion, and the deaths and casualties a small fraction of the ultimate total. Israel accepted the ceasefire, Hamas rejected it. The result was more Hamas rocket fire, and an Israeli ground invasion. Gaza July 18, 2014 – Ground War After Hamas Rejects Ceasefire. Now another myth busted -- that protests in Europe and elsewhere were merely anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic, and in any event, isolated. In fact, virtually everywhere there was a major "pro-Palestinian" rally, there was blatant anti-Semitism accompanied by threats and violence. And not just overseas. In Miami, Boston and San Francisco as well. Here are the events we covered. It's not an exhaustive list, by any means.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 18, 2015 8 Comments
Periodically throughout this summer, we are taking a look back at our coverage of the 2014 Gaza conflict. It's important to do this because a relentless propaganda campaign portrays the conflict as initiated and continued by Israel in retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens by a Hamas-affiliated cell in the West Bank. In fact, the conflict started as a result of relentless Hamas rocket fire into Israel, a topic we recently revisited in Gaza July 8, 2014 – Hamas Rockets Ignite War. On July 10, 2014, CNN reported on the Hamas rocket fire: In this post, we revisit how the ground war started only after Hamas rejected an Egyptian ceasefire proposal, which Israel had accepted. Had the conflict stopped at that point, only a small fraction of the deaths and destruction which eventually were visited on Gaza to try to stop the rocket fire would have happened. Hamas, and it supporters in the West including leading pro-BDS websites which justified and encouraged "the resistance," bear responsibility for what befell Gaza. On July 15, 2014, Hamas formally rejected the Egyptian ceasefire proposal and continued rocket fire into Israel.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 08, 2015 2 Comments
On June 12, 2014, three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered in the West Bank by a Hamas-affiliated group. The bodies would be found on June 30. During June, an intensive search was conducted for the teens and the murderers, including the arrest of many Hamas members in the West Bank and a crackdown on its operations. Militants in Gaza fired a total of 62 rockets into Israel during June (even before the kidnapping), and Israel retaliated by targeting rocket crews and militants in Gaza: On June 30, 2014, 16 rockets were fired into Israel by Hamas, leading to more Israeli targeting and a massive Hamas rocket offensive. Hamas or other militants fired over a dozen rockets a day the first few days of July, and then on July 7 as Israel retaliated with airstrikes, the daily count grew to 80 rockets on July 7 and 156 on July 8.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 29, 2015 10 Comments
At least no one got hurt this time. But Gaza Flotilla III was a complete flop. Meant to break Israel's perfectly legal naval blockade of Gaza (more on legality here), designed to stop Iranian shipments of weapons, the flotilla avoided the disaster of Gaza Flotilla I, in which 9 people were killed when they attacked Israeli commandos boarding a ship. This time, when it appeared Israel would prevent the flotilla from getting to Gaza, three of the boats called it off. The main boat, from Sweden but bearing an Israeli Arab lawmaker and the former President of Tunisia, proceeded, and was boarded by Israeli commandos. The IDF posted the following announcement:

Posted by David Gerstman on June 23, 2015 7 Comments
First the good news, the so-called Schabas report, the United Nations Human Rights Council inquiry into last year's war between Hamas and Israel, isn't as bad as its predecessor, the infamous, discredited Goldstone report. But it's still pretty bad. The Schabas report is named for the judge who originally headed it, William Schabas. Schabas stepped down when it was reported that he had done paid work for the Palestinian Authority. Schabas had previously said that he wanted to see Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried for war crimes had to step down when it was clear that he was hopelessly compromised. After he resigned the commission was headed by former New York State justice, Mary McGowan Davis. For the most part media outlets reported that the conclusion of the report is that both sides "may have committed war crimes." There are two problems with this. The first is that it is inconclusive. The second and more serious one is that it put Israel and Hamas, which precipitated the conflict by launching rockets into Israel, on the same level. Rockets fired from Gaza civilian area at Israel

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 21, 2015 18 Comments
Israel has a military blockade on the Gaza strip due to Hamas control which has turned the 40-mile long strip of land into an Iranian rocket base. There are other radical groups there, such as Islamic Jihad and now ISIS-related groups, who also have rockets. Iran could ship vastly larger and more sophisticated quantities of rockets and missiles if it could use ships rather than smuggling tunnels, and it has tried multiple times. This video shows the Karin A vessel seized in 2009, ferrying arms to Gaza through Egypt. Imagine if such ships could dock directly in Gaza, or offload to smaller ships just off the coast. In March 2014, another ship was seized.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 15, 2015 4 Comments
Because I am a glutton for punishment, I read the anti-Zionist Mondoweiss website. I do it, so you don't have to. One of the authors there posted this video put out by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, apparently one in a series, as if it were a bad thing. Seems pretty much on target to me. [NOTE - The video was taken down after furious complaints from the international media, including The NY Times. Here is a version captured by another outfit] This comes, of course, in anticipation of a hit job on Israel by the UN Human Rights Commission in a report to be released this week regarding the 2014 Gaza conflict. In that conflict, the media played a key role in covering up Hamas use of civilians as shields:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 14, 2015 13 Comments
It's too late to undo the massive propaganda campaign surrounding the 2014 Gaza conflict, which Israel called Operation Protective Edge. False statistics about civilian casualties were put out by Hamas ministries and then adopted without question by the UN, "human rights" groups, and the media to create the narrative that "most" or "almost all" or the "vast majority" of deaths were civilian. Critics of Israel have yet to explain how Israel was supposed to stop Hamas from firing rockets, tunneling under the border, or landing commandos by sea without firing into the civilian areas from which Hamas was operating. During the 2014 Gaza conflict, we covered the deliberate Hamas tactic of firing from civilian areas (including those next to hospitals and apartments,) as well as how Hamas used the main Gaza hospital as a military headquarters. Almost all of this was covered up by the media: http://youtu.be/Nu-e5qWXx-k Round two in the propaganda war against Israel will take place this week, when the U.N. Human Rights Council releases its report on alleged Israeli war crimes. The UNHCR is the body completely obsessed with Israel.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 31, 2015 6 Comments
Our journey off the usual tourist trail through Israel continued today with a visit to border areas near Gaza. Sderot is famous for being the closest Israeli town to Gaza, and the first and most frequent target. The Sderot Media Center has a wealth of information. Sderot Satellite Map North Gaza Because Sderot is so close, the town has only 15 seconds warning once a launch is detected. This video is from 2008: There are bomb shelters everywhere, including on the street (see Featured Image - "Shalom" painted on a bomb shelter) and in the playground, where the bomb shelter is in the form of a large caterpillar so as to make it more welcoming to children.
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