This Ongoing War: A Blog: 5-Feb-08: Living with the Gazans

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

5-Feb-08: Living with the Gazans

Taking a brief time out from their on-again, off-again shooting war with the Egyptians, the Palestinian-Arab terror gangs refocused on Israel this morning.

Two Qassam rockets were fired by Pal-Arab terrorists based in north Gaza in the general direction of southern Israel (the general direction is about the best they're able to do or care to do - any Jewish target is good enough), striking Sderot's industrial zone this morning (Tuesday), according to YNet. They managed to cause damage to two factory buildings and inflicted shock and light injuries to a number of workers as a result of the explosions. One Gazan Pal-Arab Qassam struck the warehouse of a kitchen manufacturing factory in the western Negev town. The other landed in the parking lot of a nearby plant.

The Washington Post says Monday's Egypt-vs-Hamas violence suggested that Hamas has given up hopes of reaching a deal with Egypt under which the border would reopen with Hamas helping to run it. Both the PA's president Mahmoud Abbas and the Egyptian government reject Hamas involvement at the border. It's unlikely Egypt will strike a separate deal with Hamas. Egyptian troops on Sunday sealed the Gaza border with metal spikes and barbed wire ending the 12-day breach during which hundreds of thousands of Gazans flooded the Egyptian border area. The Egyptians halted all border traffic yesterday (Monday).

Another WaPo article yesterday runs somewhat counter to the "humanitarian disaster" headlines of the past weeks. Under the heading "Travel Brings Surprises to Gazans", the paper's correspondent Diaa Hadid writes: "The speed with which Gazans bought up Egyptian goods prompted comments that Gaza is well on its way to colonizing Egypt. Many Gazans who visited Egypt remarked on the discrepancy between their more glamorous image of urban Egypt - derived mostly from movies - and the run-down border region of unpaved streets and small houses they encountered. A trickle of Egyptians also made it into Gaza. Mohammed, an Egyptian truck driver who rented his truck to Palestinians to ferry goods into Gaza, pointed to cars crowding a nearby street and said: "I thought conditions here [meaning Gaza] would be harder than this. I thought people would be starving."

To which we say: Don't believe everything you read in the mainstream news.

UPDATE Tuesday 6:15pm - Ten Qassam rockets have crashed into southern Israel so far today in three separate barrages, and there are injuries to Israeli civilians in Sderot as well as power outages throughout the city.

UPDATE Tuesday 10:00pm - JPost says that earlier today (Tuesday) Pal-Arab terrorist snipers opened fire from the Gaza Strip on agricultural workers in the fields of Kibbutz Nir Oz. They hit a tractor and fortunately nothing else. Recall that Carlos Andres Chavez, a 19 year-old volunteer from Ecuador, was shot in the back and killed by a Hamas terrorist sniper a month ago on another of the kibbutzim in the area.

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