31-Aug-06: Far from media attention, rockets keep crashing into Israel

For months, Qassam rockets have been directed into Israeli towns by terrorists in the Gaza Strip. By and large, these attacks have been ignored by the foreign media, but have continued, almost on a daily basis, to terrorise Israelis living in towns and cities within firing range of Gaza. (Until the Hezbollah War in July, we reported most of the Qassam attacks in our daily blogs of the past months.)

They have caused destruction of homes, schools, factories, businesses. Maimings, injuries and deaths - the 2004 Maariv map at right gives an overview of how bad things were two years ago; the faces signify people killed by Qassams. (We'll replace it with a more accurate, up-to-date image when we can locate or make one.)

This morning (Thursday), five Qassam rockets landed in various parts of the Israeli town of Sderot. Because the Palestinian rockets lack any serious directional guidance system, no one - least of all the thugs firing them - knows where they are going to impact, whom they're going to maim or kill, or what the consequences will be. This is part of what makes them terrorists. Today's attacks led to several people requiring hospitalization, mainly for shock. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries.

Demonstrating his utter indifference to the moral and human dimensions of this while summoning the full moral authority of his high office, the head of the Palestinian Authority expressed himself in the media today. Mahmoud Abbas called the rockets being fired into Israel "pipes". The problem with these pipes, he said, is that they provide Israel with an excuse to carry out military operations in the Gaza Strip.

"Our people [the Palestinian Arabs] don't deserve these tragedies," he said, inventing an entirely new and twisted meaning for an otherwise straightforward word. "If these pipes provide an excuse, it's time to stop using them."

In the context of Palestinian Arab politics, shallow pronouncements of this sort are what qualify Abbas as a moderate.

UPDATE: Since several readers asked, the death toll from Qassam rocket pot-shots into the communities abutting the Gaza Strip stands at 13. Hundreds more have been injured and hospitalized. Refer to Wikipedia for some out-of-date but nonetheless useful and accurate details. Or search our blog, using the search term "Qassam". We've been reporting these attacks pretty consistently since the start of now-forgotten Hamas "ceasefire" (that was bogus from its inception) of February 2005.