16-Jan-18: In Gaza, another invisible "Fell Short" wrecks a Palestinian Arab home

From the Deir al-Balah municipal website

This happened on Monday according to a report published late Monday night:

A rocket fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip struck a Palestinian home in Deir al-Balah by mistake, Arab media reported Monday. Located in the central Gaza Strip, two residents of Deir al-Balah were badly wounded and a third lightly wounded. ["Rocket from Gaza Strip accidentally strikes Palestinian home", Jerusalem Post, January 15, 2018]

Another "Fell Short". We only know about them from open sources but have reported on nearly a hundred of them in the past few years. Nearly a hundred rockets fired in the general direction of Israel with the intent of doing any sort of damage to any target that is Israeli - humans, buildings, vehicles, hardly matters what - that failed to cross the Gaza/Israel border. They fell short.

The ghastly aspects of this are not merely in the cold-blooded, blind Palestinian Arab pursuit of damage and injury to anything Israeli, which there certainly is. But where are the media reports about this? And about those that preceded? These rockets might just as well have been invisible for all the attention they get.

The answer seems to be, no one cares very much. Arabs injuring other Arabs (or worse) isn't a theme that gets much media attention except in Israel. And the Hamas regime that keeps the Gaza Strip under its doctrinaire jack-boot has even less interest in publicizing Fell Shorts or the misery they bring into the lives of hapless Palestinian Arabs onto whose heads, roofs and homes they crash.

Deir al-Balah might sound like a nondescript village to people unfamiliar with Gaza. It's not: located right in the middle of the Gaza Strip, it has a population of about 60,000. And lots of homes.

Monday was a busy rocket day for the Gazans though if you rely on the non-Israeli media you would find it hard to know that. Times of Israel reported

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Monday said the Hamas terror group had conducted rocket-launching experiments overnight, with the group preferring continued investment in war than in the well-being of the Gaza Strip’s population. Speaking a day after the IDF announced it had destroyed another border-crossing Hamas attack tunnel, the third in recent months, Liberman said: “I hear a lot about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, about the difficult situation. “The budget for Hamas’s military wing in 2017 was $260 million,” the minister said, noting that about $100 million was supplied by Iran. “All of this $260 million was invested in tunnels and in producing rockets. If they had invested $260 million in their water systems or their health systems they would be in a totally different place.” Liberman said that on Sunday night Hamas “fired three rockets into the sea, and this shows that despite the humanitarian situation and despite shortages in basic supplies they continue” to focus on warfare.

A reasonable person can understand the fury of the Palestinian Arabs. Harder by far is understanding why they don't do the logical thing and act against their inept and utterly corrupt rulers to improve their own lives and futures.

This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("W Gazie kolejna niewidzialna rakieta, która “spadła za blisko” i zniszczyła dom palestyńskich Arabów") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.