11-Jan-14: Saturday night rocket fire on southern Israel

Providing some appropriate context, a report from Times of Israel tonight says a Qassam rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel this evening (Saturday), shortly after the announcement of the death of Ariel Sharon.

While there is some doubt at this hour as to whether and where this crashed to earth, the report suggests the trajectory pointed to a spot

"not far from where relatives of late ex-prime minister Ariel Sharon gathered at the family home at Shikmim Farm. Red alert sirens sounded in the area near the coastal city of Ashkelon, but no impact was reported, an IDF spokesperson said. Palestinian sources reported Israeli retaliatory airstrikes into the Gaza Strip shortly thereafter. There was no confirmation of the reports."

The Dubai-based pan-Arab news website Al Arabiya doesn't seem to know anything about tonight's incoming Gazan rocket. (This is fairly standard practice in the Arab world.) But it does provide considerable coverage to Sharon's passing. He had been comatose since suffering a devastating stroke on January 4, 2006, eight years and one week ago.

The photo above, showing candies being handed out in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, is from Al Arabiya tonight.

The terrorists of Gaza, in their endless pursuit of Israeli civilian victims, don't actually need the passing of a prominent Israeli figure to provide them with incentives. The GANSO website, published from the Gaza Strip with "the assistance of the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid department", often discloses rocket attacks that don't make the general media or even the Israeli.

In many cases, this is because those rockets are in the "fell short" category, not managing to get as far as the Israeli side of the fence that separates our country from the toxic Hamas-controlled failed mini-state. Fell-shorts regularly injure and kill Gazans. This is rarely reported.

Today, GANSO's bulletin shows this:

http://www.gaza-nso.org/?p=incident-alerts

Here's an enlarged view of the text:

In the GANSO lexicon, "Pal. ops." is how they refer to terrorists in the service of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or other members of the Islamist groups operating from Gaza under Hamas auspirces; "MA" is one of Gaza's five zones (Rafah, Khan Yunis, Middle Area, Gaza City, North Gaza), and "HMR" absurdly means Home-made Rocket. Military intelligence estimates there are tens of thousands of rockets in the control of the Gazan terror forces. GANSO and its European Union backers carefully avoid dealing with revelations as narrative-busting as that.

As for a terrorists rocket exploding prematurely in the packed Gaza Strip, did you read about that? We follow these things pretty closely and saw no mention. Were people hurt? Killed? Anyone's guess.