31-Jul-12: Intense mortar fire on southern Israel in past hour

Immediately after the Hamas attack on
the Hebrew University: Eliad Moreh recovered
from her injuries and speaks eloquently (we know
from personal experience) of the dangers of
underestimating what terrorism does to civilized
society [Image Source]

It's now just before 7:00 pm Tuesday here in Jerusalem. About an hour and a half ago, three mortars were fired by people in the Gaza Strip into a location that we don't intend to name, located very close to the Gaza/Israel border. And twenty minutes ago, in a separate round of firing, the Gazan terrorists shot five additional mortar rounds into southern Israel's Eshkol region. This firing is not strategic - at least not in the conventional sense - and it's not directed at any military target. It's deliberately indiscriminate; the shooters rarely care who or what gets hit. It's almost always like that with the Palestinian Arab terrorists.

Carefully and covertly placing bombs in public places before running away - now that's a different, far more deadly strategy. But it's no less characteristic of the tactics of the Palestinian Arab terrorists in this ongoing war. When the jihadists who place bombs under chairs or inside closets do their work, they know more or less whom they want to hurt. And the way they decide on targets and weapons tells us something about the passions that motivate them and the values that guide them.

Bear that in mind as we recall that today is the tenth anniversary of the Hamas bombing of the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria on the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The killers, sent there by Hamas which now controls the Gaza Strip, had no intention to take control of the space, to attack soldiers or anything military, or to frustrate some military or strategic or even economic plan of the Israeli side. They simply set out to kill, hurt and maim innocent people, and the more the better.

They killed nine that day, and maimed and injured a hundred more [source]; unbelievably, public celebrations followed in the streets of Gaza [source]. As with the attack on the Sbarro restaurant a year earlier which took the life of our daughter Malki, the Hebrew University atrocity was carried out by means of a nail-studded bomb. Nails are devastatingly effective if you want to puncture the greatest possible number of human bodies inside a confined space. It's a satanic choice. It was the Hamas choice.

It's worth noting that a terrorist called Anajas, one of the Satanic participants in the Hebrew University bombing team on behalf of Hamas was sentenced to multiple life terms, and was among the 1,027 killers and assorted Palestinian Arab thugs released in last October's Gilad Shalit transaction.

Consider also that the Hamas people who planned the massacre chose a university whose student body is 30% Arab - well beyond their proportion in Israeli society. The statistic is naturally of zero significance to Hamas and the many Europeans, Americans and others who travel with it.