28-Dec-07: End-of-year special effort

The lives of two Israeli hikers ended a short time ago in a hail of Palestinian Arab bullets in the Hebron area. YNet, in a story filed an hour ago (2:20pm Friday, Israel time) says this was a terrorist drive-by shooting, the second in the past month, directed against ordinary civilian Israelis.

The victims, part of a group hiking near Telem Creek, were killed right away. There are additional wounded.

The published news report ends with this cryptic observation: "Ynet has further learned that Hamas was likely to claim the shooting."

Hamas is on the losing end of the power struggle among the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, and there's an impression they need to score more Jewish deaths to add to the annual tally before the year ends.

On the other front, Palestinian Arab terrorists from the Gaza Strip fired yet another in the depressingly long stream of Qassam rockets that have been directed at anything Jewish in Israel's western Negev. Fortunately no injuries or damages are reported but - as always - this was not the intention of the terrorists.

UPDATE: Saturday night - The victims of Friday's terrorist murder: Ahikam Amichai (20) and David Rubin (21). They are being buried in Jerusalem as we write this. Hashem yikom damam.

UPDATE: Monday 31-Dec-07 - The minister for "information" of the Palestinian Authority, in an especially brazen demonstration of chutzpah, is said this morning by the Jerusalem Post to have shared with reporters in Ramallah that he "does not rule out" the possibility that the murders resulted from a "dispute" between arms dealers. In plain language, that the Israeli hikers had intended to sell weapons to their Palestinian Arab assailants. His remarks encouraged another clown, the Palestinian Authority police chief of Hebron Samih A-Safi, to make the same sort of offensive statement to the Palestinian news agency Ma'an. This sort of libelous rubbish plays well in the circles they move in (Ramallah, for instance, and Hebron and London). But it sickens informed Israelis who know something about the values of young men like the two Jewish victims (both of them graduates of elite combat units in the IDF) whose passion for the land, every inch of it, was the real motivation for them being killed. Lest there be any real doubt about the matter, it's also reported this morning that no fewer than 3 Pal-Arab terror groups have already claimed "credit" for the killings: Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.