Hamas continues its war of attrition against southern Israel. Here’s the tally for the last few days:
Several mortar shells landed Tuesday noon near the Kerem Shalom border crossing in southern Gaza. No injuries or damage were reported in the attack.
A Qassam rocket was fired at Israel on Monday, and landed in an open field near a kibbutz south of Ashkelon. No one was injured in this attack as well.
Regional Council Head Yair Farjun said that the rocket exploded some 200 meters from residents’ houses.
On Sunday, two Qassam rockets were fired at the Western Negev area. One rocket landed in a square in central Sderot, causing a local woman to suffer shock.
The other rocket landed in an open field within the Shaar Hanegev Regional Council area.
Eight IDF soldiers were wounded on Friday, one of them seriously, after several mortar shells hit an IDF base in Nahal Oz.
This is what AP calls a truce. It is only threatened when Israel goes into Gaza to stop the rockets, but it is never threatened when Hamas launches mortars and rockets at Israel. And now that Israel is trying to stop the rocket fire, what do the news services say?
Reuters has the cause—Israeli raids that killed terrorists—backwards. The cause is the terrorists’ firing rockets into Israel. The effect is Israel sending in the IDF to kill the terrorists. But as long as the news media refuse to admit that the true cause of the strife is Hamas’ rocketing of Israel’s civilian population, we’ll continue to see garbage like this:
Militants have fired dozens of rockets and mortar bombs at Israel in the past three weeks after Israeli raids that killed about a dozen gunmen.
The violence has strained a ceasefire in place since June. Saying it was responding to rocket attacks, Israel has tightened its closure of Gaza borders, choking off some food supplies to the territory and raising international concern.
And the AP does pretty much the same, refusing to call the mortar and rockets a violation of the truce:
An Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip killed two Palestinians Tuesday, dealing a new blow to efforts to restore a fraying cease-fire.
[…] Israel and Hamas have been observing a truce since June. But the cease-fire has begun to unravel over the past month, with Palestinian militants firing rockets and mortar shells at Israel and the Israeli army responding with attacks on militant targets.
The cause of the cease-fire violations? Not the rockets. Not the mortars. BOTH sides are at fault. And the AP hasn’t noticed that the rocket fire has been pretty constant since the so-called truce was begun. The fact that fewer rockets are being sent into southern Israel doesn’t mean there is a truce—only a lessening of the acts of war from Hamas.
Wait for the world condemnation now that Palestinians have been killed, and Hamas is trying to play the civilian card.