16-Mar-20: Israeli Arab mother is arrested; allegedly posed as welfare worker while serving Hamas

Protestors demanding the suspect's release [Image Source]

A news report published yesterday ["Shin Bet says it nabbed Arab Israeli Hamas agent who posed as aid worker", Jacob Magid in Times of Israel, March 15, 2020] raises the case of an Israeli Arab woman in her early thirties now facing serious criminal and terrorism charges.

A resident of the Israeli town of Ar’ara and a mother of two young children, the woman was arrested last month. Ar'ara is a town in the Wadi Ara region of northern Israel, south of Umm al-Fahm and just north-west of the Green Line. Israelis know the area, inhabited mainly by Arabs, as "the Triangle". In 2018, Ar'ara's population was about 25,000.

The suspect's name and other details had remained confidential until yesterday (Sunday) and are now public. Described in parts of the Arab media (here for instance) as a "Palestinian holding Israeli citizenship", she is charged with offences connected with "scamming aid organizations she worked for as well as civilians who donated money to the needy population in Gaza" [Ynet].

Reports name the woman as Aya Khatib, 31. Ynet says she was arrested two months ago in "a special operation" and that she admitted under interogation to taking part in "terrorist activity against Israeli targets".

As reported by Times of Israel, the charges against her are based on the allegation that she was recruited by a pair of Hamas terrorists active in Hamas’ so-called “military” wing, the Izzadin al-Qassam Brigade and that she used her position as a humanitarian worker to divert money and supplies intended for the needy in Gaza. Donors were  evidently told the funds were going to patients claimed to be suffering from cancer.

She is charged as well with providing field intelligence to the terrorists of Hamas including details about the movements of IDF forces during what the Shin Bet, which carried out the investigation leading to her apprehension, called "one of the fighting rounds with the Gaza Strip”.

This is said to be Aya Khatib

The Jerusalem Post names them as Muhammed Pilpel, 29 from Beit Lahiya, and Mahmoud Halua, 32, from Jabaliya. Other news reports give their names as Mohammed Filfel and Mahmoud Halawa.

Through the two Hamas men, according to Israel's Shin Bet, she is said to have transferred hundreds of thousands of shekels to the Hamas terrorists

“while scamming aid organizations and innocent civilians who donated funds with the aim of reaching patients and the needy”

in the Gaza Strip.

The Jerusalem Post report says an indictment is expected to be filed against Khatib in the Acre Magistrate’s Court in the next few days.

Acccording to the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat news site ("the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities"):

On Sunday, the Haifa District Court extended Khatib’s detention period until next Wednesday, on charges of cooperation and intelligence with al-Qassam brigades. The Israeli Public Prosecution submitted Monday the prosecutor's statement to the court. Khatib's lawyer said she denies the charges attributed to her.
Khatib has complained about the conditions of her arrest before the court, which ordered that this matter be examined, her lawyer noted. The court also allowed her two children to meet her.
Khatib has been active on her Facebook page to collect donations for patients, particularly children from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are receiving treatments in Israeli hospitals. She also collected donations for male and female university students whose economic conditions prevented them from paying their university fees.

It's a news item worth keeping in mind the next time demands are made - as they are regularly and often - for Israel to free Palestinian Arab female prisoners.

01-Sep-15: Inbound rocket from Gaza announces new school year

Israeli schools go back this morning, which may be part of the reason for an inbound rocket alarm that sounded around 5:15 this morning (Tuesday) across southern Israel. For now, the thinking is that this one, like so many before it, was a Fell Short, doing damage to people or property on the Hamas side of the Gaza/Israel fence, but it's still early to know for sure. And if it does turn out to have crashed onto Gazan heads or farms or homes, it's highly unlikely we will be hearing details via anyone, least of all the terrorist regime that rules the area, of damage or pain.

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that the launch was done from Gaza's Beit Lahiya and the rocket was pointed in the general direction of the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, but did not get there. Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, said to be connected to ISIS, claimed "credit".

27-Dec-08: Quiet and not-so-quiet deaths

As Israeli forces take decisive action today against the terrorist regime of Hamas-ruled Gaza, it's worth pausing for a moment to notice a pair of deaths that will go mostly unmarked. This is one small example of what it means to live in a terrorist-controlled area.

"A projectile fired by Palestinians fell short of its target in Israel on Friday, striking a house in northern Gaza and killing two schoolgirls... A rocket apparently fired by Palestinians on Friday killed the two Palestinians aged five and 13, Palestinian medics said. None of Gaza's militant factions claimed responsibility for the deadly attack on the house in Beit Lahiya. Gaza Health Ministry official Dr. Moiaya Hassanain identified the two victims as 5-year-old Hanin Abu Khoussa and her 12-year-old cousin, Sabah Abu Khoussa. Three other young people were wounded, Hassanain said. Hamas police said they were investigating the cause of the blast in Beit Lahiya village in northern Gaza, which medics said seemed to be due to a rocket aimed at Israel that had misfired. Gaza militants frequently fire rockets at Israel from the same area."

A longer report is here.

The deaths-by-Qassam losses are not limited to innocent Gazan Palestinian Arab children. An Israeli home in the town of Netivot, southern Israel, was struck earlier today by a "grad" missile fired by the Gaza-based terrorists. An Israeli civilian, 58-year-old Beber Vaknin, was killed inside the home, and four other innocents suffered moderate to serious injuries. JPost reports that "over 80 rockets and mortar shells struck areas throughout the western Negev... a rocket hit a house in the community of Mivtahim, seriously wounding one person and lightly wounding another. A Magen David Adom team treated the wounded at the scene."

Israel, as most people know by know, mounted a lightning strike on multiple Hamas installations earlier today, causing colossal damage to property and life, and neutralizing a considerable part of what the terrorist regime is able to do. JTA, quoting Gazan sources, says "most of the dead were affiliated with the security forces, including Gaza City's police chief, although a number of the casualties were civilians. Hamas officials said at least 140 of the dead belonged to the terrorist group's militias."

There is no reason to think the terrorist regime and its powerful and capable backers are surrendering. They know the dark art of terror better than almost anyone anywhere. We can expect turbulent times. The price exacted by terrorism's practitioners is bound to continue to rise, with victims on all sides.

12-Mar-08: Making children, saving children - stories you don't see

The item below appears in this week's edition of Spiegel, the German news magazine. It's translated to English, and shows familiar events in a rarely-seen light. Don't pass this along to those who believe there's a Zionist plot to perform genocide on the Palestinian Arabs. Poor dears, they won't have a clue how to deal with this reality.

BORN IN ISRAEL: Palestinian Twins Under Rocket Fire from Gaza
Christoph Schult in Ashkelon

When a Palestinian woman gave birth to twins in an Israeli hospital she experienced what it is like to be the target of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

The humming noise in the sky over Beit Lahia grows slowly louder. It sounds as if the buzzing of a hornet were being amplified by loud speakers in a football stadium. Residents of the Gaza Strip call them "Sannana," or the humming ones, the small unmanned drones that the Israelis use to scan the border region for rocket commandos -- and then to liquidate them with precisely targeted missiles.

Ashraf Shafii has climbed onto the roof his house and is looking across strawberry fields toward the border wall. The smoke-belching towers of the power plant in the Israeli city of Ashkelon jut into the sky along the horizon. His wife is over there in Ashkelon today.

Shafii, a 34-year-old lab technician at the Islamic University of Gaza, glances at his six-year-old daughter. "We were so desperate to have more children," he says. For years, he waited in vain for his wife to bear a son. When she turned 30, the couple decided to get fertility treatment.
Iman Shafii finally became pregnant. During an ultrasound examination, doctors discovered four small embryos. The first died in the fifth month of pregnancy and the second died a few weeks later. Shafii was admitted to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, but the condition of the two remaining embryos became increasingly fragile. "You have to go to Israel," the doctor told her.

Because Israel refuses to engage in any contact with the authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza, patients turn to private brokers who submit their entry applications to the Palestinian Authority of moderate President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. But it can be a lengthy process.

The Shafiis were lucky. Iman was permitted to enter Israel after only 24 hours. She took a taxi to a spot near the Erez border crossing, and then she was pushed in a wheelchair across the last 500 meters of bumpy ground. She reached the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon just in time. She gave birth on Feb. 25, by Caesarean section, to a girl, Bayan, and to the couple's long-awaited son, Faisal.

Iman Shafii, 32, wearing a headscarf and oval glasses, and speaking in a soft voice, sits on a chair between two incubators. Today is the first day she is permitted to hold her babies in her arms. A nurse brings out the boy first, then the girl. As the tears well up in her eyes, Shafii kisses her children on their foreheads. "If the children had stayed in Gaza, they would not have survived," she says.

Her only impression of Israel has been the one she gets on Palestinian television, which usually shows tanks and soldiers, and celebrates attacks, like the recent shooting inside a Talmud school in Jerusalem, as acts of heroism. But now a doctor wearing a yarmulke walks into the room, says "Shalom" and asks her in English how she is feeling.

Dr. Shmuel Zangen, the director of the hospital's neo-natal unit, doesn't care who he treats. "As a doctor, I enjoy the privilege of not having to think about it," he says. "It certainly is odd that we take care of Palestinian children while they shoot at us. It's the sort of thing that only happens in the Middle East."

'Not a Just War'
In the past, Shafii saw the Israelis exclusively as perpetrators, but in Ashkelon she is encountering, for the first time, victims of the acts of terror committed by her own people. One of them is nine-year-old Yossi, who is sitting in a wheelchair. A steel frame holds his left shoulder together. It was fractured by shrapnel from a rocket that landed in the city of Sderot. "The people in Sderot are suffering just as we are in Gaza," she says.

There was a sharp increase in the Palestinian rocket attacks after Israel cleared the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip in September 2005. The Israeli military counted 2,305 hits last year, and there have already been 1,146 in the first two months of this year. Until now, almost all of the missiles have been Qassam rockets, which are made in the Gaza Strip and have a range of about 12 kilometers (seven miles).

But the breaching of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Egypt by Hamas in January made it possible to bring in Russian and Iranian rockets with longer ranges. This means that cities considered safe in the past are now threatened. One of them is Ashkelon. On the second day after the birth of Bayan and Faisal, a Soviet-made "Grad" rocket landed on the hospital grounds. "I heard it hit, 200 meters away from me," says Shafii. The neonatal unit was moved to a bunker the next day. "The groups that are firing the rockets are not fighting a just war," says the Palestinian mother, adding that they are not abiding by what the Prophet Muhammad said: that wars may only be waged between soldiers, but not against civilians.

The buzzing drone in the sky over Beit Lahia has flown away to the south. The sound of an Israeli missile striking its target can be heard a short time later. Within a few minutes, there are reports that a member of the group Islamic Jihad was killed.

Ashraf Shafii describes how young, masked men repeatedly set up their rocket launchers under the cover of houses in Beit Lahia. "They shoot at Israeli civilians, which is completely unacceptable," says Shafii. "And they put us Palestinian civilians in grave danger, because the Israelis shoot back."

Why doesn't he object? "They are armed," says Shafii, "and they shoot at anyone who gets in their way."

The father is holding the first photos of his newborn twins in his hands. He is worried about the rockets being fired at Ashkelon. He says that he would never have believed it possible that he could be indebted to the Israelis for anything. "What a confusing situation," he says.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan