27-Aug-12: Yet another rocket attack on Sderot this afternoon

Three rockets yesterday, including two that did damage to industrial plants. A morning attack today to coincide with children returning to school for the new year. And now, at about 2 this afternoon, another attack from the bottomless stockpile of rockets stored in Gaza's homes, schools, mosques and hospitals. 

From the reports we have seen [Hebrew source here, Israel National News English-language report here], neither human injury nor property damage resulted from this afternoon's rockets (there were two of them) which, it is reasonable to assume, were timed to coincide with when most of the Israeli school-children in the vicinity were on the roads heading home from the first school-day of the year. 

But that's not the point. 

Each rocket attack increases the anxiety and diminishes the confidence of innocent children, and of course their families. There is no other strategic dimension to these attacks. The terrorists of Gaza are not about to cross the border and attempt to seize the city of Sderot and its 24,000+ residents. Nor are they aiming at this strategic target or that army camp. They have neither the ability (with the Qassam weapon platform) nor the desire to do anything more than fling something that might possibly kill, in the general direction of the Israelis, any Israelis, within range. 

The people of Sderot have less than 15 seconds from the time a rocket is fired at it to run for shelter. Can you imagine living like that, ever? Sderot has been under almost-constant bombardment from the terrorist forces of Hamas-controlled Gaza since Israel handed to the Palestinian Authority the flourishing communities it had established in the Gaza Strip in 2005. Thousands of rockets have been fired at Sderot since then. The names of the eleven people killed by the terrorists who fired these rockets are here.

It's not well known that the European Union funds a Gaza-based organization called GANSO that 'impartially" reports on rocket firings. Its website consistently refers to the lethal Israel-facing rockets of the Gazan terrorists as HMRs. The acronym stands for home-made rockets. It's clearly meant to convey the message that they are really not that dangerous, and certainly don't even up the asymmetry between the noble Gazan strugglers and the over-equipped Israeli dominators, or something along those lines. Today's GANSO bulletin refers to this morning's attack on Sderot this way:

Pal. ops. fired 1 HMR from Beit Hanoun, NG, toward the Green Line.

That's a literal quote. The "ops" are the terrorists. Beit Hanoun is a residential area in Gaza that is home to more than 33,000 people. "HMR" you already know means something quite different from it really is. And "toward the Green Line" is an outrageous lie for European consumption. The lethal Qassam rockets, which are designed to kill and do in fact kill, are fired at Israeli civilians 100% of the time, even if they don't always succeed. 

There's no one in the European Union who has the wit or the interest to tell the GAMSO people to discontinue their propaganda-laden reporting, so it and the rockets keep coming.