This might very well be the opening shots of the civil war between Hamas and Fatah.
Carl in Jerusalem at Israel Matzav gets a Joshua's Army commendation for being the first in with this truly sad story.
Palestinian `gunmen' murdered three sons and a bodyguard of Palestinian General Intelligence officer Baha Baalusha, a Fatah loyalist in Gaza City’s Rimal district. The boys, aged 6 to 9 were shot dead outside their school.
While Hamas has officially denounced the shooting and disclaimed any responsibility, The Palestinian Intelligence services have pretty much fingered Hamas or maybe its affiliate, the PRC as the culprits.
Nothing much goes on in Gaza without Hamas having a say in it. And this sounds pretty much like an attempted hit on Baalusha that went wrong. Baalusha was injured a while back in a previous assasination attempt.
The killers opened fire on a street crowded with hundreds of school children, most of whom ran away screaming to try and find a hiding place. Aside from the four fatalities, 4 other people were wounded and taken to a local hospital with gunshot wounds. 30 shots were pumped into the children's car alone.
"I was walking with my young brother, Wael, who is 9, and we just crossed the street in order to take him to the school when shooting took place," said 12-year-old Fadwa Nabulsi, still shaken by the bloody scene.
"We saw fire coming from one car. We started screaming and children started running. I was crying, and I lost Wael for about half an hour. Then I found him hiding in a falafel shop. I'm trying to find my father to take us back home," she said.
I feel deeply for these children...but considering the absolute glee with which the Palestinians target Jewish children, and considering what the Palestinians have taught their children since Oslo and continue to teach them, it's hardly surprising that they would treat their own children this way:
In a further escalation, Fatah `gunmen' fired on the convoy of Hamas Interior Minister Said Siyam today in Gaza. No injuries in what Interior Ministry spokesman Khaled Abu Hilal dismissed as a 'random attack'.
Could be that the attack on Baalusha was a retaliation.
The background of all of the hits and murder attempts is the ongoing power struggle between Hamas and Fatah...and as I've written previously, in some aspects it's a proxy war between the US and Iran.
5 comments:
Better to have the Palestinians fight each other than have them fight Israel.
Let em at it.
Freedom Fighter,
Can I first concur with Nazar?
Secondly, and at the risk of sounding cynical, isn't it possible that the childrens' murder was entirely intentional in that they were either a target of opportunity or, given that the killing took place on the way to school, that they were the target all along.
In a sense, the reasons don't matter: it's wicked either way, but somehow I feel it's all of a piece with the general attitude to children demonstrated by Palestinian terrorists.
Agreed, canker. I also had the feeling that this attack on children was premeditated and absolutely intentional. The Palestinian terrorists - be it Hamas or Fatah - have shown that any collateral damage is acceptable in their struggle for power and domination within the territories.
ff, I've been one of the advocates that it's a proxy war: that the US should view Fatah as "moderate" as opposed to Hamas is flawed. Both groups have constitutions that pledge to destroy Israel, and both advocate brute force and violent means to achieve that nihilistic objective.
If Hamas and Fatah continue to quarrel and kill each other - if that results in less attacks on Israel - then let them be. Olmert could seize this opportunity to chance upon internal rivalry and cause the Hamas leadership to collapse, but given his nauseating predilection towards "ceasefires" and compromise, I'm sure he'll buy the whole "peace" thing hook, line and sinker.
It's hard for me to believe that even terrorists would intentionally target children...I'm going to naively believe that it was a botched attempt at killing the general...
I hate to say this Rosey, but yes, terrorists deliberately target children..especially Jewish children:
J O S H U A P U N D I T: Palestinians give honorary citizenship to child murderers
Israel Matzav: Rebuilding is remembrance
These people are evil..and what is even more evil is that they are heroes in the Arab world.
One thinks of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now `The horror, the horror..destroy them all.'
And no, I'm not kidding.
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