27-Oct-13: Another invisible bus, more invisible victims

Rock-hurling Palestinian Arab thug: Odd how mainstream press
photographers can't get enough of them,
while reporters seem entirely unaware of them [Image Source]

There are reports tonight (Saturday night) of an attack on an Israeli passenger bus, in the wake of Friday's bus bombing.

This time, eight travelers on a bus were injured when the vehicle came under attack from a group of Palestinian Arab "youths" hurling the sort of large rocks that can be lethal when their target is moving rapidly. The assailants are said to be "unknown", so we assume their age is too, despite the reporter's confidence about their ages.

Israel National News calls the attack tonight an "ambush", which sounds accurate, and places it near Al Fawar, a Palestinian Arab settlement in the South Har Hevron vicinity.

Ynet says the injured Israelis received emergency first aid at the scene from paramedics and were then taken to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba for further treatment. IDF soldiers are said to be now searching the area for the attackers.

The confluence of large rocks, terror-minded rock-throwers and fast moving buses make for lethal outcomes. An attack on another bus on Friday, by means of an explosive device ["25-Oct-13: Grenade hurled at people in an Israeli school-bus today. How many more terrorists should we free now?"] received almost zero news reporting outside Israel. So is it terror if the mainstream news channels don't report it? Perhaps not, to judge from the extremely subdued discussion that it has generated.

There's a high likelihood that the territories occupied by the two Palestinian Arab statelets are going to be the scene of fresh celebrations in "honour" of the premature freedom to be granted this coming week to another couple of dozen convicted killers of Israelis. The scale and scope of ongoing terror attacks ought to be a major concern, it seems to us, for those reporting the news and for those absorbing the reports and trying to make sense of them. Yet somehow...

To put some numbers around this: INN quotes the latest published report of the Shin Bet that says 133 terror attacks occurred during September, compared with a "mere" 99 in August 2013. Most of these attacks were mounted on people in the Judea and Samaria region: 104 compared with 68 in August 2013.

It's evident to anyone who wants to look that the rate of terror attacks is on the increase, and for reasons that are not hard to fathom.