14-Jun-18: In Jerusalem's Shuafat, an explosion reveals a secret bomb workshop

The source caption reads: "The Shuafat Refugee Camp from the
Jewish neighborhood of Pisgat Ze’ev, in northeast Jerusalem.
(Miriam Alster/Flash90 )" [Image Source]

As we write this, there has been very little media attention - and practically none outside Israel - but to us it seems a serious development. 

As reported this morning (Thursday) by the Jerusalem Post ["Police: Explosion in East Jerusalem Caused by Bomb-Making Attempt", June 14, 2018], an explosion last night in the Shuafat neighbourhood of north Jerusalem (it's not really east) was the result of a failed attempt to build an explosive device.

Israel Police investigators, arriving on the scene around 11:00 pm, found additional explosive material in the fourth-floor apartment where the explosion happened. Eight suspects are now under arrest and being interrogated. No names have been released so far, and none of their affiliations (affiliations are a big deal in reporting on terrorism). One individual suffered critical injuries in the explosion and was hospitalized. Another man is much less injured.

That part of Shuafat is usually termed "refugee camp" in media reports. In reality, it's a suburban neighborhood of Jerusalem which is served by the indispensable Jerusalem Light Rail's one and only line (in fact, the light rail system's eastern terminus is at Shuafat).

And while it's certainly not the most gorgeous part of town, it's not exactly a concentration camp as we showed in a post some years ago ["07-Nov-14: Hovels? Shanties? A Palestinian Arab refugee camp"]. It's separated from the rest of the city by the meandering West Bank security barrier and that has a negative impact on easy of access - not to their own communities but to ours - and on law and order. You can get a sense of the questions that arise, and the absence of answers, here: "Stuck between Israel and the PA, Shuafat refugee camp seethes"[ Avi Issacharoff in Times of Israel, June 7, 2015]. Can UNRWA help them? Can the PA? Hamas? It hardly matters because the mess that is Shuafat today seems to serve the needs of all of them.

In that 2014 post of ours, we wrote:

Paradise? No, not at all. But hardly a shanty town either, and very little like what people imagine when the term 'refugee camp' is deployed to describe the place.

As today's Jerusalem Post article points out, a substantial spike in terrorist activity was reported in Shuafat after the separation barrier was established, and that became even more pronounced once the “knife intifada” got going in 2015. Click here to see what we have reported about troubles emanating from Shuafat.

The Jerusalem Light Rail has come under frequent attack inside and
from Shuafat. This scene is from riots right on the tracks in Shuafat in
July 2014 [Getty Images]

The tensions in that part of Jerusalem are no secret. The police leaving the scene last night got involved in what are being called clashes with local residents - who were rioting - but a Jerusalem Police spokesman said no injuries were reported.

We're not aware of any Palestinian Arab sources who seem to see the connection among (a) the riots that meet Israeli service providers; (b) the steady stream of Arab-on-Israeli terrorist activities carried out by Shuafat residents; (c) the passion of those residents to be entirely disconnected from Israeli control; and (d) the low level of Israeli services being provided to the neighborhood.

01-Feb-18: UPDATED: From Gaza: infiltrators, rockets and reports of a lethal feud

You can know a lot about people from the things they
bring with them when they visit: The infiltrators had these
in their possession, plus grenades, says IDF

For the third time this week (see here and here), an Arab-on-Israeli infiltration attack was thwarted before the terrorists were able to do harm to others.

Israel National News says -

Four armed Arab terrorists were captured Thursday evening after they crossed the frontier into Israel from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip [and] were spotted when they approached the security fence and were apprehended shortly after they managed to cross the frontier... Israeli security personnel nabbed the four terrorists after the managed to penetrate the security fence along the Israel-Gaza border. After the four terrorists were captured, Israeli forces found the four were carrying two knives and a grenade. The suspects have been transferred for interrogation. ["Armed terrorists infiltrate from Gaza", Israel National News, February 1, 2018]

A comment in Times of Israel reminds us of often-overlooked aspects of infiltrations:

There have been cases of Gazans entering Israel with weapons not to carry out attacks, but in order to be arrested and sent to prison, rather than remain in the beleaguered coastal enclave, which is run by the Hamas terrorist group.

Scene of this afternoon's Gaza explosion [Image Source]

Gaza is in the news for additional reasons tonight. Reports around 6 this evening (Thursday) say an explosion in a residential building in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City has taken multiple lives, including children. The WAFA news agency says

Seven people were killed and at least 20 others injured in an explosion in a house in the densely populated Sabra neighborhood in Gaza city on Thursday evening, according to the Ministry of Health. WAFA correspondent said an explosion occurred in a house belonging to Abu Assi family in Sabra neighborhood, leaving seven people dead and 20 others injured some of them seriously. The house collapsed as a result of the explosion. The injured were moved to nearby al-Shifaa Medical Complex for treatment. Initial reports said the explosion resulted from the detonation of a gas cylinder at the house.

An AFP newsagency report quoted by Times of Israel has a very different take on what happened:

At least seven Palestinians died in an explosion in Gaza City Thursday, in what officials say was an intentional act after a family quarrel. “Seven people including children died, and around 30 others were injured in an explosion at a home” in Gaza City, a spokesman for the health ministry says. A police statement says a member of the Abu Assi family deliberately set a gas canister on fire during a family quarrel, leading to the explosion. It says police were investigating the circumstances of the incident. Eyewitnesses say the explosion caused serious damage to the two-story building. [AFP]

Given the opacity of most news emanating from inside the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, we might not ever know.

It's also a great pity that the news industry, whose principle role always, everywhere, is to explain news events to people who don't know about them and don't have the context and background to understand their implications, doesn't shine a little light on what happened in Gaza City. A "family quarrel" with many dead, some unknown number of them children? Go try to find that in your local news stream - TV, radio, Facebook, newspaper. The reality is that feuds among clans play a significant and expensive (in terms of lives ruined and lost) role in Palestinian Arab society:

Clans, which share many attributes with tribal structures but have developed along a different path, are a major factor in local politics and in many ways define the boundaries of what is politically possible... [This] quasi-tribal structure is detrimental to the emergence of a viable democratic culture, harnessing the power of the clans may prove critical at this stage for establishing authority in a fledgling Palestinian state—and understanding clans is thus a crucial part of the study of local Palestinian politics. A Palestinian state’s capacity to actually govern and execute its commitments in the Israeli-Palestinian political process; its monopoly over the means of violence; the possibility of democratization; and the effects of outside intervention on Palestinian political culture—all are to some extent dependent on this all-too-often ignored phenomenon. ["Clans and Militias in Palestinian Politics", Brandeis University, 2006]

The destructive reality of clans in Palestinian Arab life isn't the only thing worth knowing about how the conflict works or the most important. But many things don't make sense without understanding the clan phenomenon. And why the tragic, useless ad completely avoidable deaths of Gazan Arab children are going to have the smallest of impacts on the news cycle today.

UPDATE Friday February 2, 2018 at 8:00 am: The drama in and around Gaza continued late into the night. At least one terrorist rocket was fired from somewhere in Gaza (we don't know the details yet) in the general direction of Israel (the terrorists are indifferent as long as they hurt or damage something, anything, Israeli - that's why they're terrorists). According to Israel National News, this exploded near the border fence. (There are reports on social media saying two rockets.) There are no reports of injuries or damage. No incoming-rocket siren was sounded in the Gaza Belt communities. The Jerusalem Post quotes the IDF saying its forces struck a Hamas observation post in the northern Gaza Strip shortly afterwards in response.

25-Jul-16: German tentacles: An explosion in a wine bar and deepening concern about 'asylum seekers'

A bag outside the wine bar in Ansbach gets inspected  by
security - long after the explosion [Image Source]

Germans, no matter where on the political spectrum their views fit, must be wondering where the next violent headlines in their country are going to come from.

This morning (Monday), the country is waking up to what seems to be a terror attack on a drinking spot in the town of Ansbach, the capital of the administrative region of Middle Franconia in the German state of Bavaria and home to about 40,000. It happens also to be where the United States 12th Combat Aviation Brigade ("Wings of Victory”) has its base.

An open-air music festival was being held in the town, but was immediately canceled by local authorities. Thousands of patrons were evacuated by police in the wake of the assault. German radio speaks this morning of 12 people injured, three of them seriously. The human bomb is dead.

The Interior Minister of Bavaria, Joachim Herrmann, is willing to go on the record with his private speculation about the character of this explosion:

"My personal opinion is that, unfortunately I think, it is very obvious that there has been a real Islamist suicide attack here," Herrmann said early Monday. ["Bavaria bomb blast", RT, July 25, 2016]

The perpetrator is described as a "failed asylum seeker from Syria" [BBC, which in accordance with its guidelines calls this "an attack" but not "terror"] whose "asylum application was rejected last year for reasons that we don't know right at this minute" [Al Jazeera]. He is said by Reuters to have been "carrying a backpack filled with explosives and metal parts that would have been sufficient to kill more people", If they're right, we think the metal parts part of the account might be something of a give-away.

We think it's fair to wonder as well what sort of security was in place at that popular music festival where the man was denied entry for lack of a ticket but where, as it appears, no one checked what must have been a heavy bag on his back to see what use that might be to him. (Israel, this clearly wasn't.)

He won't be answering questions in his current situation. But the trail he left behind during a two year sojourn in Germany (including two attempts to take his own life and getting psychiatric help) en route to his final explosion places him firmly within that million to two million group of recent "asylum"-seeking "refugees" whose presence is reshaping not only Germany but all of Europe. To anyone watching, the influx is much less reported now than a year ago, but continues in full force: about 50,000 undocumented migrants entered Italy from Africa in May 2016 alone [source].

An effort, involving the payment of many millions of Euros to Turkey, was made four months ago but whatever expectations that created have now evaporated:

Under the notorious bargain struck with Ankara on March 18, all those who arrive on the Greek islands were meant to be detained, brought before an asylum tribunal and returned to Turkey in under a week. When the deal was struck, many warned it had pushed international laws governing asylum to their limit. Now, the Greek officials charged with interviewing and approving deportation seem to agree. Aid agencies protested that it violated international law by designating Turkey a “safe third country” for asylum seekers – a controversial premise given Turkey’s record of human rights abuses, reports that it has forcefully deported refugees to the countries they fled, and its only partial ratification of the Geneva Conventions. ["Tension rises among asylum seekers as EU deportation plan falters", Independent UK, March 2016]

Events in Turkey of the past ten days guarantee that efforts to designate it a "safe country" are on ice until further notice.

What we know at this point about the events of last night:

An explosion in the southern German city of Ansbach was a suicide attack, according to the region's interior minister. The bomber died in the blast. A device was exploded by a 27-year-old Syrian national outside a music festival. He had been denied entry into the event due to the lack of a ticket, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said during a news conference early Monday. Twelve people were injured. The man, who has not yet been named, stood around the festival entrance for a short period before he blew himself up. The music festival and surrounding area were evacuated. Authorities said the bomber had previously applied for asylum in Germany but had had his application rejected. He was also known to police in Ansbach for previous offenses. German media outlets reported that he had previously attempted suicide. Herrmann said his backpack contained screws and nails, an apparent attempt to inflict further damage. Officially this attack is not confirmed as terrorism, he said, but there are strong indications it may be. ["Suicide bomb rocks Ansbach, Germany", CNN, July 25, 2016]

A January 2016 Bloomberg report quotes the premier of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, expressing vigorous rejection of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy toward "refugees":

“You have to face the fact that the confusion surrounding the stream of refugees is being exploited to commit crimes,” Seehofer told reporters at Wildbad Kreuth in the Bavarian Alps. “I’m sticking with my demand for a change of refugee policy in all its facets in 2016.” ["Germany Saw 1.1 Million Migrants in 2015 as Debate Intensifies", Bloomberg, January 6, 2016]

It would be surprising to know that the debate he invokes is not growing more intensified this morning. Germans are probably not the only Europeans wondering how many other recently-admitted "asylum seeking" men from places where explosions, stabbings and shootings are rather more common than in Europe are currently getting psychiatric treatment to fight suicidal urges.

Also yesterday, a Syrian "refugee" of 21 - another "asylum-seeker" said to have been "known to the police and... charged in the past with assault" [WSJ] was arrested in the southwestern city of Reutlingen, near Stuttgart after hacking to death a pregnant woman and wounding two people with a machete. He had "arrived in Germany by himself about 18 months ago" [AFP]. The Wall Street Journal notes that "More than 300,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Germany since January 2015". It doesn't say how many of them are known to the police, or what the police know in general. (Or how sure any of the authorities are that this or that arrival is actually a Syrian.)

Add that and the wine bar bombing to these acts of terror on German soil in the past five days:

• 24-Jul-16: In Germany, a gunman with Iranian citizenship kills 9
• 19-Jul-16: Tentacles in Germany: Again, a train, an axe, a religious war-cry, innocent victims and a search for motives

We're with the Europeans. There is much to fear.

16-Apr-14: Someone exploded something in Gaza this morning, killing some people. Mainstream media interest? Not so great

Khan Younis, November 2012 [Image Source]

It's always a tricky thing to base news reports on Palestinian Arab sources, so a grain of salt if not more is needed when processing this report from Maan, the European-funded Palestinian Arab news agency.

Maan reported at 11:15 this morning (Wednesday) that there has been "an explosion" this morning in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, in or near Khan Younis (population: 350,000). It quotes Ashraf al-Qidra whom we have mentioned here in the past, speaking on behalf of the Hamas regime's Ministry of Health, saying "the circumstances behind the explosion were not clear". What is evidently less unclear is that three Palestinian Arab men are dead and four others are injured with shrapnel wounds and in "stable" condition. The Maan report has been picked up by several other news outlets, most of them Israeli, this morning.

For people who follow events in the Hamas-run enclave, it's commonplace for news of failed terror attacks and self-inflicted injuries from mishandled explosives (such as the one that killed three Gazan men a month ago) to be reported via Hamas' Ministry of Health.

Why not the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Jihad, the Police Ministry, the Public Safety Ministry, the Department of Child Welfare, the Ministry of Outbound Explosives? Because they don't have any of those. The ministers who sit in the Hamas government are those who head Justice, Housing/Public Works, Local Government, Agriculture, Finance, Religious Affairs (naturally), Interior, Education and of course Health, as well as "prime minister" Ismail Haniyeh.

The Gazan Palestinian Arabs last had elections more than eight years ago. They have been under iron-booted Hamas rule since June 2007 when its jihadist irregulars carried out a savage massacre of Fatah forces and seized control. The Palestinian Authority's prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who also stands at the head of Fatah and who is currently in the year ten of his four-year term of office, has not set foot in Gaza in the seven years since then, though he has been widely reported to be about to go there (2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010.)

The Mahmoud Abbas villa in Gaza [Image Source]

Though he owns a multi-million dollar villa (see this 2003 report) there, he has not seen it or stepped across its ample threshold in at least seven years, throughout which it has been held and used by Hamas.

But he shows no visible embarrassment in purporting to speak for the Gazans when he sits down at what passes for a peace table with the Israeli and the Americans and says he's there to negotiate.

Our point is there is almost zero criticism in the global news media of the man's hubris in claiming to seek resolutions and understandings in the name of the Palestinian Arabs while in reality he is forcibly excluded from everything Gazan.

The truth is relatively little is known about what actually happens day to day, and especially the very bad things done to Gazans by the dark forces of Hamas, in the Gaza Strip, as today's explosion report highlights. It's hardly a free and open society. Yet we rarely hear the experts of the mainstream news media owning up to this, even while they bemoan a failed peace process. Perhaps it's time to hold them to a higher standard.

18-Oct-12: Cyprus says it stopped a terror attack on Israelis

Limassol by night: Terror target [Image Source: Wikipedia]  

Ynet and Times of Israel are both reporting this evening on revelations made in the Cypriot newspaper Alithia saying that the Cyprus secret service has thwarted a terror attack against Israelis in Limassol. Ynet says this happened at Limassol Airport but from checking the online version of the Alithia story (it's here) we think Ynet's editors seem to have misunderstood. Limassol is a major sea port; it has no airport. 

One hundred grams of explosives were found somewhere in the port, intended, as the report suggests, to target Israeli tourists visiting Cyprus as passengers on cruise ships. The attempted attack has not been reported in any other Cypriot news media outlets, and Kol Yisrael's news (state radio) this evening says Israeli government sources say they are not aware of the plot. No information at this stage about whether any suspects have been arrested.

Ynet reminds us that in September, Israel's Counter Terrorism Bureau asked security and government authorities in Cyprus, Bulgaria and Thailand to step up visible and undercover security around Israeli tourists. 

Also worth noting that a Lebanese, Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, was arrested in Limassol three months ago, and charged with terrorism offences that involved tracking the movements and planned arrival times of Israeli tourists. He was in court just this past Friday (under tight security, it may not surprise you to know) and pleaded not guilty [source]. His trial should have gotten underway in September, but was delayed.

Something's happening there because the original 17 charges have been reduced to eight and it's no longer terrorism but conspiracy to commit a crime and membership of an unnamed criminal organisation. He remains in custody until his next hearing a week from today. AFP says "Cyprus police have refused to comment publicly on the case, describing it as a “sensitive political issue” but did say investigators have found no evidence to suggest he had any accomplices" whatever that means.

Additional background in these earlier blog posts of ours

• 21-Jul-12: How involved in terror against Israelis and Jews are the Iranians?
• 14-Jul-12: Terror attack in Cyprus foiled; the targets seem to have been Israelis