Once again, a Muslim targets Jews, killing one and wounding five—all women.

Once again, the police refuse to call it terrorism.

David Gomez, an FBI assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism, said investigators believe the gunman targeted the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.

“We believe at this point it’s a lone individual acting out antagonism toward this particular organization,” Gomez said.

Right. Because the Jewish Federation is a really high-profile Jewish group.

Not.

It’s a fundraising, charitable organization.

Funny how every time world events cause the murder and attack of Jews, the authorities say that world events had nothing to do with it—even as the perpetrators say that is the exact reason they have attacked Jews.

Women. All women. The man shot all women, one pregnant.

Wow, that’s some brave mujaheed.

Not.

The IDF is working on Shabbat.

Israel Defense Forces troops killed 26 Hezbollah gunmen in clashes in the southern Lebanon town of Bint Jbail. No IDF troops were hurt in the opreation, an army spokesperson said.

During the day’s fighting, a joint force of Paratroopers and soldiers from the Golani Brigade seized Hezbollah equipment including five anti-tank missiles, 30 hand grenades, 41 clips and 10 bullet proof vests.

[...] Meanwhile, Israel Air Force warplanes took out the launchers used by Hezbollah to fire a new kind of missile at the Afula area, the furthest south that the guerilla group has reached since it began battering the north of Israel more than two weeks ago.

The initial investigation revealed that the missile has a range of 90 kilometers. The northern district police said that this kind of missile had not landed in the area before. The level of damage caused by the missile impact and the size of the warhead is also unprecedented, suggesting that it could have weighed up to 100 kilograms.

Security officials are looking into the possibility that the missile could have originated in Iran, and may even be a Zelzal missile, which has a range of up to 200 kilometers. Hezbollah has moved some of its rocket and missile launchers further north inside Lebanon following IAF attacks to destroy them.

The good news is that 26 terrorists are dead, and not a single IDF soldier lost his life doing it. Which lends credence to my thinking that Hezbullah is not a cakewalk, but neither is it the threat to the IDF that many analysts would have you believe.

Haaretz offers up the following:

Israel Air Force planes dropped pamphlets on the Gaza Strip offering Palestinians Israel’s terms for a cease-fire, the Itim news agency reported on Friday.

The pamphlets said the Israeli government was willing to cease the Israel Defense Forces attacks on Gaza if abducted soldier Gilad Shalit is returned unharmed and militants stop firing Qassam rockets at Israeli settlements.

Sderot and Askhelon are Israeli cities, not settlements.

Translation error, lazy rewire from wire copy, or Avi Issacharoff’s personal biases?

Update: They changed the word to “communities.”

More evidence that the media are biased against Israel:

Being interviewed on a European radio station, the interviewer snarls at me when I mention that Haifa has a mixed Jewish/Arab population and that as we speak, many of them were sitting in bomb shelters together, hiding from Nasrallah’s rockets.

I was surprised this information could be so irritating. I didn’t dare tell him about the guy who came up to me in downtown Haifa, showed my his bombed shop front and told me he was an Arab who wants the IDF to destroy the Hizbullah.

No wonder the polls always come up against Israel. Seems that only Americans are smart enough to disbelieve the media.

Dusk and there’s another rocket attack on Haifa, a dozen meters from a major hospital. As a frail old woman is stretchered out of the bombed apartment in the run- down neighborhood, a British reporter asks me if it isn’t just a gas explosion, and seems disappointed when I identify a piece of Katyusha rocket.

Disgusting.

Via LGF, this news:

Intelligence reports indicate the leader of Hezbollah is hiding in a foreign mission in Beirut, possibly the Iranian Embassy, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

Israeli military and intelligence forces are continuing to hunt for Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, who fled his headquarters in Beirut shortly before Israeli jets bombed the building last week.

“We think he is in an embassy,” said one U.S. official with access to the intelligence reports, while Israeli intelligence speculates Sheik Nasrallah is hiding in the Iranian Embassy.

If confirmed, the reports could lead to an Israeli air strike on the embassy, possibly leading to a widening of the conflict, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Foreign embassies are sovereign territory and an attack on an embassy could be considered an act of war.

If this should happen, would there be a more ironic moment in history? Twenty-eight years after the Iranian “students” took over the United States embassy in Tehran, if the Israelis were to bomb the Iranian embassy to kill Nasrallah, I recommend they use the following excuse:

“Whoops! Some of our more revolutionary students took a few IAF jets and bombed the embassy. Sorry, we had no control over their actions—they were upset over Iranian support of Hezbullah.”

A related thought: Is it a war crime to give shelter to the leader of a terrorist army who is currently at war with a UN member state?

How cheap can the Arabs be to their brothers in trouble?

This cheap:

VIENNA, Austria - OPEC’s humanitarian arm said Friday it has approved $1.2 million in aid to Lebanon.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ Fund for International Development said the grant was intended to provide essential relief supplies and support emergency operations.

The money will be channeled through the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, it said.

Wow. That’s four cents for every barrel of oil in a single day of the OPEC daily quota.

The mind reels at the overwhelming generosity of the oil-producing Arab world (and the American-hating producing Venezuela) to the suffering in Lebanon.

By contrast, the Jewish Federation is trying to raise $18 million for the month of July to move all Israelis—Jew, Muslim, and Druze—south out of reach of Hezbullah’s rockets (which were paid for by Iranian oil profits). And gee, they’re getting the money from ordinary people, not OPEC billionaires.

File this one under: Better than you.

A kassam rocket launched by palestinian terrorists landed near a kindergarten. Two children were hurt by the shrapnel. You will not read about Israeli children being hurt by rockets aimed deliberately at the civilian population. If you do, it will be followed immediately by a tale of palestinian children who were hurt by rockets intended for terrorists or arms factories.

Operations aren’t finished in Bint Jbeil.

IDF forces are continuing to operate Friday in the village of Bint Jbeil. According to reports soldiers shot and hit a number of terrorists, killing at least three. There are no injuries among soldiers.

The forces are continuing to search for weapons infrastructures and activity in the area.

The IAF has been busy overnight.

The Air Force has meanwhile struck over 130 targets on Thursday night and in the early hours of Friday morning across Lebanon. The targets hit included a Hizbullah base and rocket launchers.

And the IDF is giving the terrorists a head-start again. Not that this will stop the cries of “War crime!” from the idiots on the left, and the Israel-haters.

A message was sent to a number of residents of villages in southern Lebanon requesting them to leave their villages and head north by ten in the morning on Friday.

The IDF said that “every vehicle traveling in the area after this hour and everyone who doesn’t evacuate their home is endangering their life.”

Hezbullah has upped the ante and is firing longer-range, more devastating rockets. Lucky for Israel, they didn’t hit anyone. Yet.

Hizbullah steps up attacks: Police officials said that on Friday noon Hizbullah fired at Israel, for the first time since the fighting in the north began, five long-range missiles carrying a greater amount of explosives than the Pajar rockets of the type that has been fired so far. The missiles landed in open areas near Afula and in the area between Afula and Beit Shean. No injuries were reported in the attack.

A short while later sirens were heard in the Haifa and Krayot area and residents were ordered into shelters and protected areas. Some rockets landed in open areas near Haifa. In a separate barrage a rocket landed in Nahariya, hitting a vehicle that immediately caught fire. Another rocket struck a public building in town and damaged it. No injuries were reported in the attacks.

Say, Ehud, is it time to send in the large ground force yet? Seventy-one percent of Israelis want to see that happen.

According to a survey of the Israeli public, 82 percent believe the army’s offensive in Lebanon is justified, and 71 percent think Israel should use even greater force.

By the way, here’s why the IAF didn’t bomb the crap out of Bint Jbeil:

An IDF source explained that, considering that there are still a few hundred Lebanese citizens in Bint Jbeil, forces cannot attack the town aerially, and, thus, it is necessary to bring in ground troops. He emphasized that fighting in the area will continue.

So, in effect, when Israeli commanders say they are not sacrificing Israel troops to save enemy civilians, they are lying. As is the world, when it says that Israel deliberately targets civilians.

Time for a STFU moment for someone. Pick one.

Look, Hezbullah—fresh meat!

BEIRUT, Lebanon Jul 28, 2006 (AP)— The United Nations has decided to remove 50 unarmed observers from posts along the Israeli-Lebanese border and relocate them with lightly armed U.N. peacekeepers, a spokesman said Friday. Also Friday, Hezbollah announced it had fired a new rocket, called the Khaibar-1, and that the rocket had struck near the northern Israeli town of Afoula, south of Haifa.

So does this mean they’re going to actually fire on Hezbullah when the terrorists take up positions by UN outposts?

“These are unarmed people and this is for their protection,” said Milos Struger, a spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers. He said the 2,000 peacekeepers in Lebanon have light weapons for self-defense.

The observer mission, known as UNTSO, had kept about 50 observers in four posts along the border. Two posts have already been abandoned: the one destroyed at Khiam on July 25, and a second near the village of Maroun al-Ras, where Hezbollah guerrilla gunfire wounded an observer on July 23.

Staff from the two remaining posts would be relocated at border posts of the peacekeeping mission, known as UNIFIL, Struger said. He would not say whether the move had been completed.

Guess not.

Is there anyone out there besides me that thinks the UN should simply evacuate their people from Lebanon completely until the war is over? The observers are utterly useless to do anything except provide cover for Hezbullah, and their lives are at risk from both sides as a result.

By the way, check out the AP bias on how the current conflict began:

The recent bloodshed erupted July 12 after Hezbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese border into Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel retaliated with its massive assault on Lebanon, now in its 17th day.

Funny, they seem to have forgotten to point out that Hezbullah murdered three soldiers during the kidnapping attempt, then killed five more when the IDF went to recover their men. Once again, the story is that innocent little Hezbullah simply snuck across the border and “captured” two Israeli soldiers, who doubtless walked right into their great big net across the road.

Buried deep within the article, however, is this explanation:

Israel launched its offensive in Lebanon on July 12, after Hezbollah guerrillas overran the border, killing eight soldiers and capturing two others. Israeli forces opened an earlier offensive in the Gaza Strip on June 28, three days after Hamas militants attacked Israeli army post in southern Israeli, killing two soldiers and capturing another one.

The AP simply can’t bring itself to tell any truth that reflects badly on Israel’s enemies in the parts of the AP stories that actually get published in your local papers.

This is why I read other sources for my news.

All of the analyses I’ve read (by the non-Israeli media) are touting Hezbullah’s ability to lay ambushes. But two Israeli newspapers are reporting that the soldiers killed in Bint Jbeil on Wednesday were not ambushed.

Ha’aretz says it was a chance encounter:

Yadai said that he was convinced, after talking to the troops, that they did not run into a planned Hezbollah ambush, but into a chance confrontation, and that Golani soldiers had opened fire first.

The soldiers said that while they were moving through Bint Jbail, one of them noticed a Hezbollah gunman a few dozen meters away, opened fire and killed him. At that point, dozens of gunmen came out of nearby houses and engaged in close-range battle with the soldiers, causing many fatalities on both sides.

Yadai said he believed the large number of Hezbollah gunmen in the town were there to protect four Katyusha launchers. The launchers were destroyed in the battle.The air force bombed four other Katyusha launchers in Bint Jbail on Thursday.

The Jerusalem Post backs up Ha’aretz’s story:

The firefight began early in the morning when two companies, A and C, began advancing down one of Bint Jbail’s streets on parallel routes. Contrary to previous reports, Friedler said, the Hizbullah fighters were not lying in ambush. “Both sides were unaware of each other and it was actually one of our soldiers who saw them first and opened fire.”

But the Hizbullah men were in upper stories of buildings and had a commanding view of the IDF force. In the initial firing, 30 members of C Company, a third of its total strength, were hit, as was the battalion’s deputy commander, Maj. Roi Klein.

And yet, the IDF captured the area, in spite of being at a disadvantage, and losing eight men almost straight off, including their officers.

The thing that most impressed Capt. Yisrael Friedler, commander of A Company in the Golani Brigade’s Battalion 51, during the bloody battle in Bint Jbail on Wednesday, was the way the junior commanders conducted themselves after their officers had been hit by Hizbullah gunfire.

“The moment their officers went down,” he told The Jerusalem Post Thursday, “the sergeants took their radios and began reporting in and managing the battle, while at the same time taking charge of evacuating the wounded. It was the height of professionalism,” he said.

So while it was a tragedy, and a deep loss of life for Israel, the analysts seem to be adding more padding to Hezbullah’s talents than would seem to be the case.

The Israelis have confirmed that Hezbollah is fighting like a professional military. Their units are fighting at the company level at the least (Unit size of approximately 100 men), and perhaps in larger formations. Intelligence also confirms there is specialization within the Hezbollah units, including trained infantry, mortar teams, missile squads, and logistical personal. Iran has trained and organized Hezbollah’s army into something far more deadly than a militia force. Hezbollah’s core ‘active’ army is estimated at 3,000 - 5,000, with as many as 50,000 part time militia and support personnel that can be called upon to fight (20,000 is the average estimate).

Fine, I’m no Bill Roggio. But I can read numbers just as well as he can, and I’m thinking that regardless of whether or not Hezbullah has 5,000 or 50,000, simple mathematics would still put the IDF in the advantage column. When you factor in the fact that they are Israelis, and that they are fighting a war their nation cannot afford to lose—numbers become meaningless. The IDF cannot afford to lose to Hezbullah. And frankly, no matter how much training they’ve gotten, I can’t believe they’re anywhere near the equal of the world’s third-best army.

There is also this: Does anyone think that Israel will not, if pushed to the very edge, stop playing the “Don’t Hurt The Civilians” game and simply level town after town until Hezbullah is finished?

No one has ever pushed Israel to the edge yet. Gd willing, we will never see it. But I don’t doubt an ultimate victory for Israel. The fact that it won’t be easy isn’t something that Israelis were expecting. It is the media—the non-Israeli media—who are making up the lie that the IDF was expecting a cakewalk.

Nearly two weeks into the new war in the Middle East, two rather surprising developments have emerged: The Israeli army, which trades on its almost mythical abilities, has shown some cracks. And the army’s enemy, Hezbollah, appears stronger and more elusive than almost anyone imagined.

None of which was lost on the Israeli security cabinet, which met for six hours today at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, and decided to continue the same limited operations against the Hezbollah militants.

Please note the breathless prose, and the absolute stupidity of the lead. In the first paragraph, Dean Reynolds reports that the IDF is not up to the challenge. In the second, he supports his point by reporting that the Israeli cabinet decided that it was not necessary to ratchet up the forces and move into an all-out ground war.

The problem with this, of course, is that most people will not read the second paragraph critically, but will take it as proof that the IDF is “showing cracks.”

The rest of the story is equally as stupid, riddled with words like “humiliation” and “huddled in bomb shelters.” Funny, but that’s not the Israel I’m reading about on the blogs and in the Israeli media.

Looks like I’m going to have to add Dean Reynolds and ABC News to my STFU chorus. STFU, Dean.

Two new policies have been implemented in Gaza. The first: The IDF will fire on any terrorist approaching Israel. The second? Time to stop the tunnels.

First publication: The Israel Defense Forces is setting up a special security area in the northern Gaza Strip which is aimed at curbing attempts by terror groups to dig tunnels into Israel.

A senior officier told Ynet that the area will stretch a kilometer in Palestinian territory, which will be “clean” of building under which tunnels can be dug.

After the northern command’s decision to keep Hizbullah away from the border and the new policy under which every gunmen situated a kilometer away from the border is shot at, the southern command decided to implement a similar policy.

“Mostly, the excavations are dug in houses, hothouses or any other place where the action can be hidden. Therefore we decided to adopt
a new policy and simply to raze and attack every structure or cover hat can be used to conceal an entrance to a tunnel. As such every Palestinian attempt to dig a tunnel will be foiled,” he said.

Another policy to which I can say: AFT. (About friggin’ time, for those of you who were wondering.)

The only way to deal with terrorists is to cut them off before they can implement the terror. Of course the palestinians are going to scream about violations of this or that or the other thing, but it’s time to turn a deaf ear to that, too.

They had their chance to build Gaza. Israel left it a year ago. The palestinians have chosen terror and war, instead of peace and rebuilding.