After noting that Hamas in a fit of pique, denied residents who had been approved for the Hajj to travel to Saudi Arabia, the NYT reported.
Israel and Hamas are also eyeing each other warily because on Dec. 19 their six-month truce comes to an end, and neither is sure whether to renew it. For the past several weeks, both have violated its terms, with Hamas lobbing rockets into southern Israel, terrorizing and injuring dozens, and Israeli forces carrying out raids into Gaza, killing and wounding militants.
“…both have violated its terms?!?!” Yikes. Israel struck at a tunneling project in northern Gaza. Let me remind you what Gen Doron Almog said last week:
On Wednesday, Almog addressed a conference in Westminster, central London, titled “Ending Impunity or Decreasing Accountability: Averting Abuse of Universal Jurisdiction.”
To show that the IDF deferred to the judicial system, Almog said that while he headed the Southern Command, he requested the demolition of a certain house in Gaza. His request was turned down by the legal echelons of the IDF.
In June 2006, that house served as cover for the tunnel from Gaza into Israel that was used to kidnap Gilad Schalit.
Israel had every reason to believe that the tunnel it destroyed was being built to give Hamas an opportunity to attack outside of Gaza. The tunnel may not, at that point, have been an immediate threat. But it would be. To call the attack on Hamas’s “tunnel offensive” a violation of the ceasefire is absurd.
Teh Times also reported about Hamas’s Hajj prevention techniques
Witnesses said the police used sticks to beat those who did not turn back. Five tourism company owners who dealt with the West Bank officials for the hajj were jailed by Hamas security men, according to Maher Amin, owner of another such company.
The result is that Gazans, isolated by an Israeli, Egyptian and Western closure for the past year and a half, now have another reason to feel besieged — they are being deprived of the chance to perform one of the most basic duties of a Muslim, the Mecca pilgrimage.
“Even the Israelis never dared prevent the pilgrimage this way,” Mr. Amin complained.
“Even Israel!!!!”
And here is what happened to a young man who got on the wrong side of Fatah:
However, interrogations by Israelis, who never charged him with a crime, were polite, he said, compared to three nightmarish days last month, after Palestinian intelligence agents seized the young factory worker from his home in the middle of the night and proceeded to beat him and suspend him for hours from a hook by his wrists while his arms were tied behind his back.
Too afraid to let his name be published — he said his jailers warned him not to talk to the media — L. told Reuters this week that his interrogators repeatedly demanded that he admit to being a Hamas activist. “You’re Hamas! You’re Hamas! Tell us what you’re up to! Who are you working for?” they asked, while kicking and punching the prisoner as he hung or stood in what the torture manuals call “stress positions”.
“I told them that the Israelis had let me go,” L. said, smiling nervously at the irony of citing Israelis as a character reference to protect him from his fellow Palestinians. “If I was what they said, the Israelis wouldn’t have released me.”
You mean that the Israelis allow more freedom and are not as brutal as the leaders of the PA? Are the Palestinians becoming nostalgic for Israel?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.