30-Aug-06: Crossings

The headlines accompanying UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's visit to Israel yesterday and today are focused on two main themes. First, he's calling for the removal of the Israeli blockade of Lebanon. And he says the breaches of the ceasefire between Hizbollah and Israel are mainly by Israel, and Israel should stop the breaching, pronto. As for the Israeli soldiers kidnapped from Israeli territory by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, these, he says, are an 'irritant'.

We can't speak for all Israelis, but the majority of us think Hizbollah are not about to lay down their weapons, dismantle their missile launchers or empty out their deep and fortified bunkers. In fact there's a fairly widely-held view here that Hizbollah got as far as they thought they could get in the July round and are now quietly getting on with preparations for the next round. But what would we know? It's not clear how much he shares our viewpoint, but there's not much doubt about Mr Annan's contribution to the solution. He says: "Let's not kid ourselves and pretend that the only way to disarm is through force." Echoing his sentiment, the Lebanese government, a tad optimistically perhaps, says: "The army will confiscate every piece of weapon that it finds, and that is what is happening now, in a firm but friendly manner". Yep, firm but friendly - that ought to do it.

But the part that really steams us is where he demands the blockade be lifted.

Israel has imposed restrictions on all air and sea routes to Lebanon. Currently road access is available to and from Syria, and commercial flights to Beirut airport have been allowed only to and from Amman, Jordan, an Arab state with a peace treaty with Israel. Various Lebanese political figures have adopted the usual hysterical exaggerations. "We cannot submit to siege and blackmail and abandon our sovereignty" says Tarrad Hamadeh, Lebanese minister of Labor speaking on Hezbollah television. The Lebanese cabinet on Monday called the siege one of Israel's "terrorist practices."

Away from the hyperbole, Israelis are familiar with the cleft stick of defending against a war waged by real terrorists on one hand, and refraining from creating misery for civilians on the hostile side of the fence, on the other. It's not easy and the terrorists - Hamas in the south and center, Hizbollah in the north - understand this well. Which is why they keep recreating the conditions intended to threaten Israeli lives while maximizing unpleasantness and inconvenience and worse for their own brothers and sisters at every opportunity.

Here's an example. A tunnel was discovered earlier this week near the Karni Crossing. [Have a look at the pictures we have reproduced on the right of this column - and click on the image to see a larger version.] Israeli forces, acting on intelligence tips, found a shaft reaching 13 meters underground, and a 150 meter-long tunnel whose entrance was inside a private residence in Sajjaiyeh, in the suburbs of Gaza City. The tunnel was blown up yesterday. It's not the first such tunnel, and it won't be the last. It was created in order to enable a terror attack on Karni itself - again, not for the first time. Previous attempts are summarized here, here and here and many other places. There have been dozens.

Few of us have been to Karni, and very few people understand why it's so important - or why we're mentioning it in connection with the blockade on Lebanon. Karni Crossing is a cargo terminal on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. The crossing was constructed in 1993 to allow Palestinian merchants to export and import goods. It's where 'back-to-back' transfers are arranged, in which merchandise and produce for the Israeli market or for export overseas is removed from a Palestinian truck and placed in an Israeli truck, and vice versa for Gaza-bound goods. There are about 800 such truck transfers every day at Karni.

In the past six years, it's been attacked by Palestinian terror groups a number of times, usually by mortar attacks or infantry assaults. The dead have included victims from both sides of the border. The terrorists have also used Karni to smuggle bombers and explosive belts into Israel. Karni has been frequently shut down for repairs after such attacks, or because of an intelligence tip-off of an upcoming attack.

Karni, along with Erez and Kerem Shalom, two other major Gaza crossings constructed by Israel, is a lifeline for the Gazan population. Merchandise and medical supplies flow in and out of the Gaza Strip through these facilities, which is precisely why they are targeted by the terrorists. The terrorists deliberately aim to weaken the Palestinian economy. Still, they're reopened again and again after each attack because of an Israeli desire to ease the daily lives of those Palestinian civilians not involved in terror.

This all probably sounds straightforward enough to whoever reads this blog. But do a search of "Karni" in today's news sources, and you'll get stories that focus - like Annan has done this week - exclusively on the economic and humanitarian harm suffered by the Arab cvilian population.

They entirely ignore the actions of the terrorists, the counter-terror work of the Israelis and the woeful context in which Palestinian Arab terror groups do anything and everything to kill and destroy, including shooting themselves and their communities in the foot. This makes these media stories partial, inaccurate, misleading and eventually life-threatening to us.

To illustrate, here are the first 3 results of a Google News search on the word "Karni" this morning:

NDTV (India): The US has proposed deploying international observers at the Karni cargo crossing between Israel and Gaza to prevent repeated security closures of Gaza's economic lifeline.

ZeeNews (India): Relief operations in Gaza Strip come to a standstill: New York, Aug 28: With UN agencies facing severe shortage of food, fuel and construction supplies due to the continuing Israeli blockade, relief operations in the Gaza strip have come to a standstill.

WAFA (Palestinian News Agency): HR Organisations Appeal to Israeli Court to Order Opening of Crossings: TEL AVIV, August 29, 2006, (WAFA) - Six human rights organisations submitted an urgent request to the Israeli Supreme Court to order the Minister of Defense to open the crossings into the Gaza Strip for the regular human supplies.

Another example - this headline from a recent United Nations report: "Only a fully functioning Karni Crossing can avert looming humanitarian crisis" Report, UNRWA, 22 March 2006

Really? That's the only thing. How simple life must be when you focus all your attention on what's being done to you, and not on what you are doing or failing to do.

So... in the interest of creating a tiny bit of balance, here's more of what virtually the entire world of news media failed to tell you about this week's festivities.

The Shin Bet supplied the IDF with pinpoint intelligence that led troops to the building in which the tunnel was concealed. IDF soldiers then located and destroyed the tunnel which was found in a building about 1.3 kilometers from the border with Israel. The width and depth of the tunnel, estimated to have been dug weeks ago, were impressive. It was dug in the direction of Karni Crossing where terrorists had planned to attack Israeli soldiers and civilians operating the crossing. The Shin Bet thinks the tunnel may have been intended to enable the terrorists to kidnap soldiers or civilians in the Karni area. Soldiers of Brigade 71 of the Armored Corps, in which Corporal Gilad Shalit served before he was kidnapped two months ago, took part in the operation to locate and destroy the tunnel. 13 armed Palestinian Arab gunmen have been killed in the past two days in the Sajjaiyeh area in clashes with the IDF.

If a humanitarian catastrophe is averted in Gaza, or in Lebanon for that matter, this will have far more to do with successful anti-terrorist measures than with Annan's speeches or with the bogus 'heroism' of the Lebanese, Hamas or Hizbollah 'resistance'.