12-Mar-11: Babies stabbed to death in their beds

Sabbath has just ended here. Now we know that in the quiet of Friday night, five members of a Jewish family were stabbed to death in their beds in yet another in a seemingly endless toll of terrorist murders directed at unarmed Israelis.

First responders said they encountered pools of blood on the floor next to children’s toys. Four family members, not yet named, were already dead: the two parents, one child of eleven and another of three months (three months!) A three year old child still had a pulse and ambulance volunteers undertook lengthy resuscitation efforts. But the baby was beyond help and died. The family's twelve year old daughter got home at midnight after spending some hours with friends in the local Bnei Akiva youth movement. Witnessing the carnage, she raised the alarm and will now have to face life in the wake of a tragedy that defies comprehension.

As has happened so often in the past, credit for the massacre in the community of Itamar was immediately claimed by Palestinian Arab jihadists. This time it was the turn of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and an operating unit of the Fatah organization headed by Palestinian Authority "prime minister" Mahmoud Abbas.  His "foreign minister" Riyad al-Maliki questions whether the murderers were Palestinian via this creative formulation:

"No Palestinian in the past killed an infant and butchered people in such way based on a nationalistic or vengeful motive [which of course] raises doubt as to Israel's rush to accuse the Palestinians of committing this act." 

Abbas and al-Maliki have both spent much their careers in public life encouraging and supporting precisely such acts of murder, rendering it a waste of time to point them to the hundreds of such acts of murder involving dead Jewish infants and children (see the faces of 123 Israeli Children Killed by Palestinian Terrorists, assembled by the Daled Amos blog) the and the butchering of innocent Jews. And certainly including the massacre that took the life of our fifteen year-old daughter.

Note that there is no suggestion here of innocent victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or caught in the crossfire. The killings were by knife, inside a home, by a killer energized by murder-lust and years of incitement by his political and religious leaders. These were not accidental victims of the terrorists. They were its very deliberate target.

The jihadists of the Hamas regime in Gaza have not been slow to express their delight at the scenes of gore, blood and dead Jews. Spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said: "We in the Hamas completely support the resistance against settlers who murder and use crime and terror against the Palestinian people under the auspices of the Israeli occupation soldiers."

More eloquently than the self-promoting words of the terrorists and their ideologues, the news photographs from Gaza (one above, more below) show the reactions in the Palestinian Arab street, literally. The caption, as it appears on the News.com website, reads "Terrorist act: A Palestinian man offers sweets to Hamas policemen in the streets of the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah to celebrate an attack which killed five Israeli settlers at the Itamar settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus."

This captures an essential truth at the heart of this ongoing war. The murder in their beds of little children, of a three month old infant, is a candy-sucking occasion for the people on the other side.