Terrorists are now bold enough to publicly warn Israelis to leave southern Israel. Why is that? Because Olmert has not done anything to stop the rockets from flying.

The Popular Resistance Committees called on the residents of Israel’s south to evacuate their families from the line of fire on Friday afternoon. In all more than 20 Qassam rockets have been launched towards Israel from northern Gaza on Friday. Abu Mujihad, a spokesman for the Salah al-Din Brigades (the military wing of the PRC) claimed responsibility for the barrages and told Ynet the attacks were in retaliation for the killing of one of the organization’s senior commanders, Abu al-Sa’ad.

A senior PRC official, Abu Abir, warned the attacks would only increase and urged the evacuation of Sderot and its neighboring communities. “What was up until now is nothing compared to what will be. We call on them (the Israelis) to evacuate for their safety and the safety of their children,” he said.

Yeah, the safety of the children. That’s why the terrorists launch their rockets specifically during the times when Israeli children are walking to and from school. If you were truly interested in the safety of the children, Abu shithead, you wouldn’t be launching rockets filled with ball bearings at them.

Two of the rockets launched on Friday landed in Netiv Haasara and damaged several greenhouses. Another rocket landed in Ashkelon’s industrial zone. The rest landed in open areas in the western Negev and north of Sderot. No injuries were reported in any of the attacks.

Meantime, Hamas is digging in for some major attacks.

The defense establishment is dealing with an increasing number of warnings regarding Hamas plans to carry out a major attack in the Gaza Strip area, security sources say. In meetings held this week the emerging picture was that in light of ongoing IDF military operations in the region against Hamas targets, the organization seeks to boast an achievement via terrorism.

[...] Dozens of Hamas members have been killed in recent weeks in clashes with IDF troops in the Gaza Strip. In addition, the Air force attacked several Hamas targets in response to ongoing Qassam fire. Officials in Israel who have been analyzing the situation believe that the Islamic group is not at its peak at this time.

At the same time, security officials say that Hamas continues to boost its military strength and group members are constantly working to prepare themselves for a possible large-scale IDF ground operation.

“We can see Hamas’ progress every time they come into contact with IDF soldiers in the Strip,” the defense official said. “We can see that they are more highly skilled people who are better equipped than before and they operate like an army.”

That would be because they are an army. They are Iran’s proxies against Israel, and have trained in Iran with the Revolutionary Guards. The next battle will not be easy. It will be a full-on battle with rockets landing in Israeli towns and cities, as well as terrorists trying to launch suicide attacks throughout Israel. It will be a battle joined by Hezbullah and Syria, with Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, aided by the other terrorist organizations and by Fatah as well. Palestinian “police,” who are being trained by the CIA, will turn their weapons on Israeli soldiers. Oh, and the world media will be screaming about Israeli “war crimes” while ignoring Hamas war crimes, just as they did during the Second Lebanon War.

This summer may be the hottest summer in Israel since 1967.

An Israeli professor solved a problem that has been bothering mathematicians for nearly 40 years.
Trakhtman solved the “Road Coloring Problem,” which was raised by Israeli mathematics Prof. Binyamin Weiss and others in 1970. There are many forms but the most popular one among experts goes like this:

A man reaches a town he has never visited before and drives around trying to find the home of his friend even though there are no street names. The friend says not to worry and that he will provide instructions (left, right, left…) on how to get there.This is called synchronizing instruction. The problem is whether by using such instructions, the driver could reach his destination no matter where he was lost, said Prof. Stuart Margolis, a colleague and mentor of Trakhtman who made aliya from the US and joined Bar-Ilan the same year as the Russian mathematician.

“He is brilliant with a high IQ,” Margolis told The Jerusalem Post. “It’s God-given gray matter in his brain. He is shy, reserved and very modest. He intentionally offered his paper to an Israeli journal even though any mathematics journal in the world would be overjoyed to get it. Now he’s working on a real algorithm to implement his solution.”

What’s the most remarkable part of the story?

A 63-year-old mathematics professor at Bar-Ilan University, who worked as a guard for about five years after his aliya from the former Soviet Union in 1990, has solved an abstract math problem that has befuddled experts for the last 38 years.

He started over again in the middle of his life and now has achieved fame in his field.

I’m guessing that something like this would apply to Rubik’s cube.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I wondered about this report when I first read it.

An Israeli missile hit a school in Beit Hanoun, killing a teacher and wounding three pupils, hospital officials said.Two of the wounded were initially identified as fellow staff members but the Education Ministry later said all three were pupils aged 16.

“What was the fault of a teacher, an emissary on a sacred mission?” the ministry said in a statement deploring the attack.

Keep in mind the claim of the Education Minstry later. The next two paragraphs provided a likely explanation for what happened. (And keep in mind that Hamas specifically fires its qassams at the very times that Israeli children are going to or returning from school.)

An Israeli military spokeswoman said troops had fired on a Palestinian rocket crew spotted inside Beit Hanoun.”We certainly did not target a school,” she said. An investigation is under way to determine whether the building might have been hit by a stray missile.

But as is Israel’s nature, it was checking to make sure that it didn’t make a mistake.

Elder of Ziyon saw a later report that confirmed Israel’s first response.

Associated Press Television News footage showed the school to be a series of huts in a rural area. A rocket-launching device was spotted between some olive trees, indicating militants had used the school for cover to launch attacks.

Elder of Ziyon observes:

Placing a rocket launcher on the grounds of a school is, of course, a war crime. But Hamas, as well as the “moderate” PA, will cynically use use the death of a teacher as proof of supposed Israeli attacks on civilians.

Do you think that the spokesman from Hamas’s Education Ministry didn’t know that rockets were being launched within proximity to the school?

Meryl notes another example of how Hamas looks out for the welfare of its constituents.

Hamas policemen seized a convoy of humanitarian aid bound for the Palestinian Red Crescent on Thursday evening, the second convoy it has taken from the aid agency, aid employees said.Policemen from Hamas halted 14 trucks filled with food and medicine at a checkpoint after it crossed an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza on Thursday, said employees of the Palestinian Red Crescent, who declined to be named, fearing reprisals from Hamas. A Hamas official said the aid was seized because the organization was distributing aid to former Fatah fighters and not to impoverished Palestinians.

And she lists other Hamas assaults on the freedoms of the residents of Gaza.

When Hamas was building support for its “political” program it could count on the support of credulous reporters who would portray them as cuddly policy wonks. Now they’re showing they’re true colors (not just towards Israel) and the media tries to find the one thing that possibly casts the organization in a positive light: that it hadn’t claimed any suicide attacks in four years until this week’s in Dimona. I don’t think that it was for lack of effort. And given its record, especially recently, it’s hard to comprehend why reporters are still trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. (It might be that Hamas was accurate in claiming “credit” for the attack in Dimona.)

At some point we ought to start seeing reports on how Hamas is starting to create a backlash in Gaza by its shows of reckless disregard for its constituents. Somehow, I don’t think that we’ll ever read a significant number of such reports.

UPDATE: Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post covers some of this. In a related slideshow (using an AP report) the strike on the school is desribed as part of the “escalating violence.” No word on the AP report on the presence of the rocket launchers near the school. Given the reliability of Hamas on similar matters in the past, it’s remarkable that Knickmeyer didn’t at least include a line to the effect of: “Often when Israel strikes at civilians it’s in response to weaponry or fighters located among non-combatants.” We’ll see if she corrects the story in subsequent reports.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

A blogger The Sudanese Thinker calls Israel a WMD.

Let’s shelter our oppressed Palestinian brothers. Let’s put them first before any of those living a few feet away from us. They deserve more help. The problems in our own backyards don’t matter, and for many they don’t even exist, but those that are miles and miles away from us do — through our television screens, the radios’ shouts and screams, opinions of the Arab streets, and our schools’ books and distorted dreams.Oh Lord, destroy the sons of pigs and apes. They are our wonderful leaders’ deadly Weapons of Mass Distraction.

(emphasis mine.)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.