28-Sep-09: Freeing hostages - what will it take?

We were dismayed to read that Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said a few days ago "There is no way to bring Gilad Shalit back without freeing terrorists".

No way? We presume Ashkenazi's position is neither political nor diplomatic. Consequently, any negotiations or agreements involving the release of Palestinian Arab terrorists, felons and convicted murderers in exchange for the young hostage being held by the Hamas regime for more than three years are entirely outside the perimeter of his portfolio.

As such, his comment was superfluous and inappropriate. There are other means of rescuing Gilad Shalit, well within Ashkenazi's domain. Evidently these are not being pursued. Perhaps it was this failure and an urge to divert attention from it that prompted Ashekenazi's declaration. Whatever the reason, it's a sad note in a distressing public debate.

Reminder: one of the prisoners slated for release, a convicted multi-murderer, is the woman who engineered the massacre that took our fifteen year-old daughter's life. She can barely wait to do the same again: "I'm not sorry for what I did. We'll become free from the occupation and then I will be free from prison."

28-Sep-09: Another intercept

Today was Israel's one and only really holy day: Yom Kippur. It's the day that the entire country, religious and secular alike - put their usual lives on hold and stay home or, for the more religious-minded, spend the day in the synagogue. Streets and roads are empty, the skies are uncommonly clear, and there's a spirituality in the air that is striking.

A perfect day, in other words, for the many armed-to-the-teeth terrorists on our borders to express the depths of their intolerance and hatred.

Last night (Sunday evening) at about the time many Israelis were saying the solemn Kol Nidre prayer, three Qassam rockets were fired into Israel from the Hamas-regime-controlled Gaza Strip. The Qassams crashed somewhere in the Negev. Fortunately no injuries or damage are reported - which was not the intention of the terrorists and their political masters who aspire to Israeli civilian injuries and damage.

Tonight, Monday evening, a mortar shell was fired in the general direction of Israel from Gaza. This one evidently exploded within Gazan territory - meaning the casualties, if any, will probably not be disclosed by Hamas. Shortly afterwards, also this evening, the Israel Air Force spotted more of the same: a rocket launching device somewhere (not yet disclosed) in the Gaza Strip, primed and aimed at Israel and set to fire. IAF planes locked onto the target and the launcher was hit and destroyed.

Just another day in this ongoing war.

Updated stats: Some 55 Gazan rockets and mortar shells have been fired into Israel in the last three months, making for more than 250 since the end of Operation Cast Lead and more than 750 in 2009, according to an IDF statement.

26-Sep-09: Intercept

Last night (Friday), IDF aircraft intercepted a vehicle transporting rockets to be fired from Gaza into Israel.

The terrorists had just exited the vehicle and were in the process of unloading their weapons when the IAF fired missiles at them. Reuters quotes Islamic Jihad saying that 6 terrorists were in the vehicle: three were killed, 3 seriously wounded. Al Jazeera names the dead as Kamel al-Banna, Mohammed Marshoud and Kamal al-Dahtur, the son of an Islamic Jihad commander killed by the IDF two years ago.

Friday's intercept (captured on video) took place near the Jabalya refugee camp. An IDF report says these specific terrorists had been involved in launching rockets into Israel in recent weeks. Since Israel's Operation Cast Lead campaign against the terrorists of Gaza, the IDF has responded to sporadic Palestinian rocket fire by destroying smuggling tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor, on the Gaza-Egypt border, while some 300 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza into Israel in the same period, 50 in the last ninety days. This was the first Israeli air-strike since the end of Cast Lead in January 2009.

The terrorists are not so easily stopped, as we have learned over the years. This morning, several more Qassam rockets were fired into southern Israel, striking open areas in the Eshkol region, thankfully causing no casualties. Islamic Jihad has vowed revenge for Friday's air strike and this morning's firings are evidently part of that process.

Meanwhile (and of course barely reported) five Gazans were injured today by wild gunshots at the funeral (see picture above) of two of the three Islamic Jihad terrorists.

17-Sep-09: Human rights, judges and moral hypocrisy

"As long as Judge Richard Goldstone doesn't probe the United States, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka or Turkey, just as he probed Israel, he is not a moral figure. A law is a law only when it applies to everyone and does not discriminate, as Goldstone did."

Ari Shavit, "UN must hold Obama to same standard as Israel"
Haaretz 17th September 2009

16-Sep-09: On unity of purpose

We are small geographically and close-knit emotionally. When tragedy strikes, we all grieve as one.

So it has been this week in the wake of Assaf Ramon's death. We had barely recovered from the loss of his heroic, trail-blazing father in the 2002 Columbia space-shuttle disaster. Now in disbelief we are trying to fathom how fate could single out the same family a second time and in so similar a manner.

The same unity of purpose has accompanied the tortuous saga of Gilad Shalit's captivity by Hamas. We have all shared his parents' pain and their urgent desire to bring him home. And we have all been intensely frustrated by our government's egregious failure to rescue him.

How puzzling it is then that Shalit activists have now chosen to shatter that unity. Rather than galvanize more Israelis to demonstrate against our government's inertia, they have chosen to alienate a vast sector of the nation. At their upcoming event they will make bedfellows of the Palestinians whose relatives Hamas seeks to free from Israeli prison in exchange for Shalit's release.

You have to wonder about their sanity. Those with whom the Shalit camp is collaborating are the very Palestinians who raised and educated their terrorist-children. These parents are the ones who infected them with a passion for our own murder.

Moreover, in joining forces with those terror-enablers, Shalit activists are proclaiming that, in their eyes, Israeli victims of terror are inconsequential.

11-Sep-09: It's terrorism day... again

Today being 11th September, there are events of various kinds taking place all over the world to remember the iconic acts of hatred and destruction from eight years ago that forever changed the way Americans think about terrorism.

Here in Israel, we've been given yet another in a long, long series of reminders that this ongoing war of terror is serious, destructive and very dangerous.

Haaretz reports in the past twenty minutes that three Lebanese Katyusha rockets have struck northern Israel. They landed in open fields near Nahariya. Very fortunately, and uncharacteristically, there are no reports of casualties.

Haaretz says: "The rockets were fired from southern Lebanon and Israel Radio has reported that the Israel Defense Forces have launched retaliatory artillery into southern Lebanon. A resident of a northern Kibbutz told Haaretz of the rockets "it was very surprising. We suddenly heard a boom. We are very happy no one was hurt."

Israel's Channel 10 has just reported that an electric tower was struck by one of the rockets.

7-Sep-09: When trading for lives, how much is too much?

Frimet Roth's op-ed article analyzing the price of a rumoured deal for the life of an Israeli hostage held by the terrorists of Hamas appears in today's Jerusalem Post print and online editions.

Netanyahu, it's time for a change of tack
By FRIMET ROTH

Once again, hope for the return of kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit was raised and then dashed within days. The familiar roller coaster invites the question: Why have our leaders failed to free Schalit?

This year several high-profile missions were carried out to rescue Western hostages. Their success could be instructive for Israel. First, Ingrid Betancourt, a Colombian politician, was freed along with 14 other hostages from jungle captivity in July 2008 in a daring, Hollywoodesque infiltration of guerrilla camps.

Then, on August 5, 2009, former US president Bill Clinton's visit to North Korea scored the surprise release of two American journalists who had been sentenced to 12 years' hard labor by a Pyongyang court. The women were whisked to freedom with Clinton only 20 hours after he landed there.

Next, on August 16, 2009, a visit by US Senator Jim Webb of Virginia to Myanmar secured the return of an American imprisoned there.

Elation over these homecomings has been tempered by concern over the ramifications of the deals cut. As an Associated Press report put it: "Such visits, argue experts, can give regime leaders an aura of respect and recognition that may make it harder for the US to press for sanctions or continue isolation policies aimed at forcing change in everything from humans rights to nuclear power."

ISRAEL IS primed to pay astronomically more for Gilad Schalit. Yet our leaders are indifferent to the deadly ramifications. The release of mass murderers in return for Schalit's freedom poses an irrefutable risk. Yet for three years it has been touted as the single option available.

The day after Schalit's disappearance, his kidnappers offered information about him if Israel agreed to release all female and under-18-year-old Palestinian prisoners.

Since then, while the list of prisoners has grown, no other avenue of rescue has ever been shown, let alone rumored, to be on the cards. Not even the massive Operation Cast Lead produced evidence of any rescue attempt.

Instead, Hamas has been sitting pretty all these years. The only pressure exerted on it has been to delete several prisoners from its list and to approve the exile of several others after release. Moreover, the sine qua non of any deal, the release of all female prisoners, has never been challenged. It is accepted by all as a compassionate stipulation.

One of those women is Ahlam Tamimi. This journalist-cum-university student was involved in the reconnaissance and planning of the August 9, 2001 terror attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant.

That morning, Tamimi, along with a suicide bomber and 10 kg of explosives, took a taxi from Ramallah. At the checkpoint between east and west Jerusalem, her accomplice, Izzadin al-Masri, got out and walked past the IDF soldiers empty-handed. Tamimi remained in the taxi, passing through unsearched, while the explosives lay beside her.

Once past the checkpoint, Tamimi rejoined Masri on foot. The pair then walked toward the center of Jerusalem. Tamimi carried a camera and the two conversed aloud in English to pass for tourists.

When they reached Sbarro, the target Tamimi had selected, she reminded Masri to wait 15 minutes before detonating the bomb. She didn't want to suffer any scratches herself.

At 1:50 p.m., Masri obeyed Tamimi. The ensuing inferno took the lives of 15 innocent Jewish men, women and children.

There were actually seventeen victims: One of the dead was pregnant. Another woman has been in a coma ever since.

My 15-year-old daughter, Malki, never made it to the hospital. She was among the first to die.

Tamimi was tried and sentenced in 2004 to 16 life terms. In an interview from her cell she said: "I am not sorry for what I did. We'll become free from the occupation and then I will be free." She smiled when an interviewer informed her that she had killed eight children, three more than she had presumed.

Does this sound like a weak, pitiable female prisoner?

LAST WEEK, when Schalit's liberation appeared imminent, we learned that a German mediator was activated at Israel's invitation. He has been commuting to Egypt since mid-July and is pressuring Hamas to clinch this deal.

Pressuring Hamas? Does a terrorist organization need to be cajoled to accept the return of hundreds of its hit men in return for one captive? Israel, on the other hand has been an amenable, or rather eager, party to the negotiations from the outset. Our politicians have been doggedly laying on the hard-sell rhetoric to convince us that the only choice is releasing mass murderers or losing Schalit.

"At this point we should not worry about the released terrorists going back to acts of terror and murder," wrote Eitan Haber on Ynet last week. "Findings from the previous swaps show that only a few go back to terrorism."

Haber is utterly wrong. Thirty of the terrorist attacks perpetrated since 2000 were committed by terrorists freed in deals with terror organizations. Their terrorism killed 177 persons and wounded hundreds of others, permanently disabling some.

Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levi eloquently confirmed those findings. In rejecting a past petition against a prisoner release, he wrote: "This is not the very first time that by virtue of agreements it signed, the State of Israel frees terrorists who sowed death and destruction in our midst. After every such prisoner release, the hope reverberated in many hearts that this time a change would ensue... this hope was in vain, and it might be more fittingly defined as a false illusion. If we needed further proof... one can find it in the bloody events that have accompanied us since October 2000. Many of those whom Israel had in the past set free participated in these horrific events."

It is time Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu abandoned Ehud Olmert's misguided lead. Alternative strategies should at long last be resolutely pursued.

Schalit must be freed now. Cold-blooded mass murderers - never.

The writer and her husband founded the Malki Foundation (www.kerenmalki.org) in their daughter's memory. Malki Roth was murdered in the Sbarro restaurant massacre in 2001. The foundation provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.