Let’s keep an eye on this story. Here’s the first AP story on the kassam that landed in a military base in the Negev:

Rocket Hits Sleeping Israeli Soldiers
By ARON HELLER – 59 minutes ago

JERUSALEM (AP) — A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck a tent filled with sleeping soldiers in a southern Israeli army base, wounding more than 25 of them early Tuesday, Israeli medics and the army said.

The army confirmed said the soldiers in the tent that was hit were all recent recruits in basic training at an army base in southern Israel less than a mile north of the Gaza Strip.

Eli Bin, director of the Magen David Adom rescue service, said one of the wounded soldiers was in critical condition, two were seriously injured, 25 others were lightly to moderately injured. The wounded were being evacuated to hospitals in southern Israel.

Islamic Jihad, a small radical militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Palestinian militants in Gaza fire rockets daily at towns in southern Israel. The crude rockets wreak panic but rarely cause serious casualties. Gaza’s Hamas rulers have not been actively involved, but have done nothing to halt the rocket fire.

Tuesday’s attack was the largest number of injuries sustained in a single such attack against Israel.

Sderot, a working-class town of 22,000, and surrounding towns have been battered by thousands of projectiles launched in recent years from Gaza. The inaccurate rockets have killed 12 people in the past seven years.

Can’t wait to see what the story is like tomorrow when I wake up.

The “crude, homemade rockets” that are launched into Israel on a near-daily basis found a mark: Sleeping soldiers.

More than 25 Israelis soldiers were hospitalized after a Qassam rocket launched from northern Gaza landed on a military base in the western Negev early Tuesday morning. This is the largest number of casualties to date resulting from a single Qassam attack.

Three rockets were launched at around 1:30 am, from the area of the Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun. Two of the rockets landed in open areas, but one landed in the Zikkim base, about 1 kilometer north of the Gaza Strip, next to a tent containing several soldiers from a battalion in basic training.

[...] The tent that sustained the direct hit served as a makeshift meal tent and contained a number of soldiers at the time of impact. Several soldiers in an adjacent sleeping tent were injured from shrapnel and the force of the blast. Despite the rocket threat on the region, it had been decided at the beginning of training that the new recruits would continue sleeping in tents.

Think Olmert will get up off his ass and allow Barak free rein in Gaza now?

I think so.

A Catholic Priest is leading a movement to bring to light the testimony of non-Jewish Ukrainians who witnessed the Holocaust. And he’s finding that it was even worse than reported.

Roman Catholic Rev. Patrick Desbois and his small team of investigators have spent six years canvassing the towns and villages of Ukraine to patiently hear elderly people tell of what they saw during those terrible years when they were young.

He says his team has pinpointed more than 600 mass execution sites, about 70 percent of them previously unknown. It has surveyed about a third of Ukraine, he says, and estimates there are at least 2,500 such sites throughout the Texas-sized country.

The work of Desbois and his Yahad-In Unum group is adding important new information to the history of the Holocaust - a period exhaustively studied in some countries but still veiled in much of the former Soviet Union.

[...] Vital to the effort, says Desbois, is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and its vast Soviet archival material available. That and Desbois’ field work have expanded historians’ knowledge about the public nature of the killings, the large variety of methods of execution, and the Nazis’ forced recruitment of children to assist in their actions.

“You have a marriage of validation with the sources 60 years apart,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “Using the two sources together one can understand what happened on the ground in those towns and villages in Ukraine.”

[...] Desbois registers an event or killing site only after obtaining three independent witness accounts. His team has two translators, a photographer and cameraman, a ballistics specialist and a mapping expert.

Why is a Catholic priest working so hard to document the destruction of Ukraine’s Jews?

The 52-year-old priest was raised on his grandfather’s stories of surviving a Nazi prison camp in Ukraine, and has devoted his career to healing wounds between Catholics and Jews. His group, Yahad-In Unum - which combines the Hebrew and Latin words for “together” - was founded by influential Catholics and Jews.

Good for him. Another righteous Gentile helps to heal the world.

Now that it’s journalists being beaten, the Times (and the Times-own IHT) is noticing that Hamas is beating Palestinians when they don’t like what they do.

During the first Fatah protest rally at Friday prayers here late last month, a number of Palestinian journalists trying to cover the event were beaten by the Hamas police force. Some journalists were arrested and their cameras seized, prompting complaints from the Gaza branch of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

The next night, Aug. 26, at about 10 p.m., Hamas police officers entered Sakher Abu El Oun’s courtyard, preparing to arrest him. Abu El Oun, a reporter for Agence France-Presse and head of the union here, telephoned a colleague.

“I called one journalist” who sent out the information “and within minutes, about 70 journalists and some human rights activists came to my house and prevented them from taking me away,” he said. “My kids were crying, it was a very ugly picture.”

The police told him, he said, “that they had instructions to arrest me, I had refused, and I would be responsible” for any consequences.

That’s a pretty scary story. So what does Steve Erlanger, whitewasher extraordinaire, say about it?

Hamas seems confused about how to quash Fatah protests and simultaneously deal with the media. Trying to nurture a reputation for honesty and legal behavior since it conquered Gaza in bloody fighting in June, Hamas leaders promise journalists freedom of action, but the police intimidate the journalists.

“Confused.” As if choosing to violently suppress press freedoms is only one of many options on the “how to deal with the media” menu.

The result is a kind of self-censorship, local journalists say, that goes beyond what they traditionally practiced under Fatah, which also tried to manipulate or own the Palestinian press.

Gee. “Self-censorship.” Think the British journalists’ union that voted to boycott Israel might want to add Gaza to their boycott? But I digress.

Here’s the laff-riot line of the story:

Zahar said, “There have been mistakes, but they are decreasing.” Nounou has been an important mediator between police and journalists and has usually secured their release. “We follow every complaint,” he said. “We respect freedom of expression and even allow Fatah here to hold press conferences and demonstrations, which Hamas cannot in the West Bank.”

Really? That’s why you’re beating journalists, out of respect? But wait, there’s one more laugh to come.

Under Fatah, “the rules were essentially clear,” said another local journalist working for a different news agency. “Don’t attack Yasir Arafat or Muhammad Dahlan or Rashid Abu Shbak,” all prominent Fatah figures.

Gee, for the good old days when you couldn’t report on the corruption and brutality of the Palestinian leadership, but you could report everything else. Amazing. They don’t even see the irony.

Sometimes, the spammers come up with some real winners for names. I like these three:

Comprehended O. Hague
Reheat O. Kidd
Martini Q. Curlicued

They were all from somebody who thought that “The Pharmacy America Trusts” would interest me. Nope. But the names amuse.

The AFP is so pissed off that Israeli officials won’t leak secret information, it practically leaps off the monitor.

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli officials Sunday maintained an uncharacteristic veil of silence over Syrian reports that Israeli warplanes violated its airspace.

For the third day in a row, Israel made no official comments about statements by Damascus that Syria’s air defences opened fire on Israeli warplanes for violating Syrian airspace at dawn on Thursday, ratcheting up the tension between the neighbouring foes still officially at war.

In a country notorious for leaks, the Israeli media was left grasping at straws as not one senior official broke with reported instructions not to make any comments on the incident.

For the first time in many reporters’ memories, journalists covering the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday were led directly into the meeting room, instead of being allowed to loiter in the hallway and talk to individual ministers.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “specifically instructed ministers not to alk about the incident related to Syria at all,” was all that one senior government official would say on the matter.

For the journalists eager for any hint of an official comment, Olmert offered only one cryptic phrase at the beginning of the cabinet meeting.

Now the Ynet version:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert praised the IDF for its “courageous” and “unusual” operations at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but did not directly refer to the reported overflights in Syrian airspace or to the capture, according to Palestinian sources, of a top Hamas official in the Gaza Strip.

“I want to express my appreciation of the security forces’s courageous and unusual operations that are aimed at impeding the activities of terror groups,” he said.
“These are operations whose nature we cannot always reveal to the public, naturally. There were numerous operations that Israel carried out against leaders of terror groups, and these operations will continue without hesitation. Anyone who sends terrorists will be targeted wherever he is,” Olmert said.

Gee. I can’t understand why Israeli officials would try to stop the leaking of extremely top-secret and sensitive information. Why, you’d think they had the right to secrecy or something.

And you gotta love this paragraph:

Peace talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 2000 over disagreements about the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau the Jewish state seized from Damascus during the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed in 1981.

How can annexation be anything but unilateral? Since when do nations ask for permission to annex territory? That’s yet another example of the anti-Israel media bias. Must pound Israel at every opportunity, even if it means pretending that other states always ask permission before annexing territory taken in a war—even territory that was used to regularly bomb civilians.

Reading crap like that is what gives me a happy feeling all over thinking about how pissed off the AFP is that they can’t find an anonymous source to leak government secrets.

Sucks to be them.