31-Oct-12: A Scottish corner in the Holy Land: The BBC explains what it means

Some interesting themes in today's BBC look (online here and the text is at the foot of this post) at the Scots Hotel: a romantic Scots interpretation of the white man's burden in today's Middle East. 

If you have read it, we have some observations:

In 1999, the General Assembly voted to invest around £10 million ($16 m) to upgrade the property. There was an uproar. Critics said it was scandalous to do this at a time when the Church at home was having to sell off properties and merge congregations, not to mention struggling to finance HIV/AIDS projects in Africa. But supporters of the development won the day, insisting that the hotel could become a place of reconciliation in the Middle East. The General Assembly was particularly won over by Palestinian Christian delegates, who pleaded with the Kirk not to abandon its position in Israel.

The outcome is not so well understood by the writer, and maybe not by the Church leadership either. The existence of a Church-owned hotel does precious little to advance the cause of reconciliation between Israeli Jews and the mostly-hostile Arab sea in which our country lives. 

But in terms of the standing and security of Christian Arabs, who face insurmountable, frequently existential, challenges from their Islamic cousins, a case can be made that it has had some positive impact as an expression of concern for their welfare by their fellow Christians in the UK and Europe - a scarce commodity. 

In the village of Reineh, near Nazareth, Father Samuel Barhoum tells me how proud he is of the links with the Kirk. "We are a forsaken minority here," he says, alluding to the fact that outside the Middle East many people are unaware that there are Palestinian Christians as well as Muslims. For him, the Scots Hotel in Tiberias is "an oasis".

This is a significant key line. Who is doing the forsaking? Who is being forsaken? Suggested answers: Christians in the west, to part one. Christian Palestinian Arabs in part two. A scandalous and somewhat baffling ongoing reality, made the more so by the endless denial in which the first of those groups engages.

The Church of Scotland is fiercely supportive of the Palestinian cause. But ironically the existence of the Scots Hotel - which relies to some extent on Israeli goodwill and receives hefty Israeli tourism grants - is said by some to tie the Church's hands.

Does the Church's leadership or membership understand how support for what is called here the Palestinian cause translates into exacerbation of the problems facing Christian groups throughout the Arab world?

Rooms here cost as much as £200 ($320) a night, which puts it out of reach of most local people. Certainly few Palestinians, who it was originally hoped might come here to rub shoulders with Jewish people, could stay here. 

An odd and indefensible position: that Palestinian Arabs need a hotel in order to rub up against Israeli Jews and vice versa. Try selling this idea to the people who daily patronize supermarkets, hospitals, buses, Kupot Holim health fund clinics, universities (and trams in Jerusalem) the length and breadth of Israel.

Churchmen were acutely aware that if they sold the property it would be bought by Israelis, which would be a blow not just to Christianity in the region but also to the Palestinians, whose cause the Church of Scotland strongly supports.

There's a whiff of something unstated and unsavoury here. Understanding how the sale of a hotel to "Jews" could have been a blow to "Christianity" is the key to understanding what's troubling with this superficial and somewhat misleading article and the underlying ideas that animate it.

Here's the first part of the BBC text:

Scots Hotel: Why the Church of Scotland has a Galilee getaway

By Angus Roxburgh | Tiberias, Israel [BBC World Service website]
31 October 2012 Last updated at 00:44 

Spot the odd one out: Hilton, Marriott, Radisson, Church of Scotland, Holiday Inn. Yes, you're right, they are all names of hotels apart from… but wait a minute, the Church of Scotland also owns a hotel, and a very splendid one at that. Very splendid, and very controversial too, since an organisation as thrifty and modest as the Scottish Kirk would not normally be expected to spend £13 million ($20m) building a luxury hotel. It also happens to be situated in one of the world's hotspots - northern Israel, not far from Syria and Lebanon, in the town of Tiberias, which only a few years ago came under rocket attack. So who is the Scots Hotel for, and why does the Church own it? It all started back in the 1880s, when a group of Scottish missionaries led by a surgeon, Dr David Watt Torrance, came to the Holy Land to preach, convert, and heal. Torrance built a hospital in Tiberias which served patients from as far away as Damascus. After the new Israeli state built its own hospital in the region in 1959, the three buildings housing the Scottish one were converted into a hospice for pilgrims, and then a modest guesthouse, owned by the Church of Scotland. By the 1990s, the guesthouse was crumbling due to lack of investment, and the Church faced a dilemma. Sell it - and its beautiful grounds by the Sea of Galilee, including a little cemetery where Dr Torrance and his family are buried - or invest in it...

The rest is on the BBC's website.

31-Oct-12: Pre-dawn rocket attack on nowhere; zero media reporting

Ho hum. A rocket fusillade (two rockets) fired from Gaza by one of the Hamas-controlled enclave's numerous hyper-armed terror groups crashed and exploded in southern Israel around 3 this morning, Wednesday.

This has happened in one or another of the Israeli regions north, east and south of the Gaza Strip almost two hundred times in the month drawing to an end today. With rare exceptions, these attacks go unreported, other than in parts of the Israeli media. This is not because of their lack of terrifying impact on hundreds of thousands of Israeli - men, women, children - especially children - living, working and going to kindergarten and school in the areas under attack. There is plenty of that. We think it's because so few people are interested in knowing the ongoing nature of the terrorists' daily assaults on our society and our country.

None of the homes, schools, roads, buses, farms and chicken coops which have been struck and destroyed or damaged this month or in the years since Gaza became so astonishingly equipped with explosives is located on occupied territory (to use an expression which is laden with inaccuracy and malice). Not a single one.

Unless you mean (like the terrorists of Hamas do) that any presence by Jews in their historical homeland amounts to occupation.

31-Oct-12: US confirms convictions of white-collar terrorists

Lingering doubts that remained about the criminality of the organization frequently called the United States' "largest Islamic charity" [NY Times] ended on Monday. That's when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that it would not overturn an earlier appeal that went against five officials from Holy Land Foundation convicted of illegally funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. That appears to be the final legal avenue open to the convicted men and concludes the case.

For years, in a pattern which to some of us is already familiar, the supporters of the convicts and their lawyers cast the Holy Land Foundation as being, at minimum, the victim of the extreme angst that afflicted the US after the events of September 11, 2001, as well as "an important case for religious freedom, and for civil rights" [The American Muslim]. The group "merely raised money for needy Palestinians", it has been argued, and was never connected to any violence.

America's tribunals of law and fact, one after another, came to a different conclusion. As a result, Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh were convicted on 108 counts in 2008 and will remain in prison serving sentences ranging from 15 to 65 years. Just in passing, a reminder that Mufid Abdulqader is the brother of arch-terrorist Khaled Mashal, "the main leader" [Wikipedia] of Hamas' terrorist operations since 2004.

The fragrantly-named Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development started life as the Occupied Land Fund [US Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, "Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List", updated to October 18, 2012], from offices in Richardson, Texas. In 2007, US federal prosecutors charged the organization and its key leaders with funding Hamas and what it termed other "Islamic terrorist organizations". Soon afterwards, the assets of the "charity" were frozen by the EU and the US, and it was forced to shut down. AFP's November 2008 report of the criminal trial [AFP] said the group and its leaders were found to be "acting as a front for Palestinian militants" and called the trial "largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history".

Far from being an innocent conduit for relieving the poverty of starving children in Gaza, U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis who presided over the criminal trial said it plainly: "The purpose of creating the Holy Land Foundation was as a fundraising arm for Hamas". The men charged and convicted were no mere givers of charity but knowing organizers of a conduit whose end-point was deliberate and well-chosen. The indictment said HLF and its promotors took steps to hide its terrorist-financing purpose from law-enforcement agencies by making a few token donations to harmless, non-Palestinian Arab entities. The bulk of it went to terror. A quote from one of the convicted men, Shukri Abu Baker: “We can give $100,000 to the Islamists and $5,000 to the others.”

Parts of the media in the US and outside it continue to frame this shabby tale in ways that seem calculated to sow doubt about the motivations of the convicted men and to hint at hidden agendas. In a Salon article this past Thursday, the popular website's "assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing" writes ["SCOTUS to consider fate of jailed Muslim charity leaders"] what was done to the group formerly known as Occupied Land Fund:

"The Bush administration shut it down following reports that the group had donated a portion of their foundation funds to schools and hospitals in Gaza through a “Zakat” (charity-giving) Committee that allegedly had connections to Hamas."

Their case has made it all the way up the almost endless legal chain for which the US is rightly famous. Yet she and her editors see no problem in insinuating that this was about "alleged" connections to Hamas; that "portion" of the money was channeled to Hamas; that the US government acted on "reports". This is shamefully inadequate reporting from a source that describes itself as a "pioneering, award-winning news site... with an audience of 10 million monthly unique visitors".

We're less offended by the coverage given to the decision by one of the Iranian government's most prominent mouthpieces, PressTV. Its report ["US Supreme Court spurns justice"] describes the convicted men as 

"Five extraordinary human beings... wrongfully convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. They’re doing hard time in America’s gulag. They learned the hard way about being Muslims in America at the wrong time."

As Wikipedia describes, a large number of other parties - are they also "extraordinary"? - are caught up in the Hamas financing net, including prominent American Islamist groups: 

In May 2007, the U.S. filed an action against the Holy Land Foundation (the largest Muslim charity in the United States at the time for providing funds to Hamas, and federal prosecutors filed pleadings. Along with 300 other organizations, they listed CAIR (and its chairman emeritus, Omar Ahmad), Islamic Society of North America (largest Muslim umbrella organization in the United States), Muslim American Society and North American Islamic Trust as unindicted co-conspirators, a legal designation that can be employed for a variety of reasons including grants of immunity, pragmatic considerations, and evidentiary concerns. While being listed as co-conspirator does not mean that CAIR has been charged with anything...

From here, the evidence appears to show the existence of an active and thriving Moslem Brotherhood hinterland in the United States delivering political and financial support to the terrorists.

30-Oct-12: Egypt's Sinai problem and ours

From the EgyptSource photo essay: Security in the Sinai
The original caption reads "The flow of weapons into Sinai increased
significantly following the security vacuum in Egypt during
and after the revolution. Most weapons came from Libya
or were smuggled in from Israel and Gaza"

A striking photo essay [here] from EgyptSource focuses on the stark realities of Sinai and the multiple challenges it poses to the Egyptians. EgyptSource, a project of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, 

follows Egypt’s transition and provides a platform for Egyptian perspectives on the major issues – economic, political, legal, religious and human rights – that are at stake in the post-Mubarak era...

Needless to say, given its physical proximity to Israel, Sinai is not only an Egyptian challenge. That it gets such a small degree of media attention is a puzzle.

The essay that accompanies the images, by Mosaab Elshamy and published yesterday, starts this way:

Army checkpoints on the road to Sinai are almost an indication of a region at war. The vast peninsula bordering Egypt with Gaza and Israel rose to the forefront of the new Egyptian government's troubles after an army checkpoint was attacked by unknown militants last Ramadan, killing 16 soldiers. This was not the first attack of its kind in Sinai - the region has been a hotbed of militants long before the revolution, but even more so after the fall of Mubarak. This was, however, the deadliest attack seen in Sinai, and the first under President Morsi's rule. Backed by public anger, the military launched Operation Eagle to hunt down those behind the attack. Different claims have been made regarding the outcome, but what is evident from my visit to the region is that little has changed.
All that Sinai has become notorious for - smuggling of weapons, torturing Africans and rise of militancy - remains unchanged. The army had also declared its intention to close down the tunnels connecting Sinai to the besieged Gaza strip, but in Rafah economic activity is booming with trucks full of goods coming in and out of the town almost every hour of the day.
The same lack of security along with rise of Islamist extremists led to yet another sectarian attack on the Coptic minority in Rafah, causing many to flee for their lives, almost 2 years after their church was burnt by armed militants. [More]

Sunday produced two disturbing illustrations of today's Sinai realities - again, almost no media coverage.

Gunmen attack buildings in Sinai's Dahab
Maan News | Published yesterday (updated) 29/10/2012 21:34

EL-ARISH, Egypt (Ma'an) -- Gunmen attacked government buildings on Sunday in the Egyptian city of Dahab in the Sinai peninsula, security officials said. Bedouin gunmen attacked a checkpoint at the entrance to the popular Sinai tourist destination and also attacked local government headquarters and a hospital, Egyptian security officials told Ma'an. Disorder has spread in Sinai since former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising last year, with Islamist militants stepping up attacks on security forces and the Israeli border. Egypt's president, Muhammad Mursi, has vowed to restore order.

6 hurt in shooting on children's park in south Sinai
Maan News | Published Sunday 28/10/2012 (updated) 28/10/2012 23:09

SHARM AL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Ma'an) -- Gunmen opened fire in a children's park in south Sinai on Saturday night, wounding six, officials said. The al-Fayrouz park in al-Tur city was packed with families celebrating the Eid al-Adha holiday when a group of Bedouin men opened fire, witnesses said. Four children, a man and woman suffered injuries, some serious, medics said. One child lost the fingers on her left hand, they said.

Then there's this additional aspect of the Sinai challenge; the op ed below from Al Arabiya provides a small window into the conflicted states of mind that characterize the Egyptian - and other Arab sub-groups' - views of the Palestinian Arabs and the multidimensional challenges they have posed for three generations.  

A Palestinian state in Sinai?
By AHMAD NAGUIB ROUSHDY 
Al Arabiya

Rumour has it, and some articles in Egyptian newspapers have stated that the increasing crossings of Palestinians to the Egyptian Sinai through the illegal tunnels between Egypt and Gaza have been taking place in accordance with a plan by the Islamist-led government of Hamas in Gaza, which has ties with the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of President Mohamed Mursiin Egypt. The aim is to settle the Palestinians in Sinai, not as refugees but as a permanent homeland for them and to declare a Palestinian state there, substituting it for the West Bank...
Every Egyptian sympathizes with the Palestinian cause, and much Egyptian blood has been shed in defense of it. But if these rumors are true, the Palestinians have shown themselves to be ungrateful and could be considered to be Egypt's enemies. The Egyptian government should force any Palestinians now in Sinai to return to where they came from, since they cannot be considered refugees. The Mursi government's ties with Hamas should not compromise Egypt's security and sovereignty.
When President Mursi in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September called for the right of the Palestinians to establish an independent state, he meant in Palestine and not in Egypt. Any Egyptian who helps the Palestinians or others to plunder our land must be considered a traitor. [More here] 

Good to keep in mind when simple solutions are next offered up for the complex challenges in this part of the world.

29-Oct-12: Gaza: Not entirely what you might have expected

We spent some hours last month visiting the two (very) active Israel/Gaza crossings to see for ourselves what happens there, and taking pictures. This small forest of fridges awaiting shipment into Gaza from Kerem Shalom . 

Those round-the-clock rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by the armed terrorists hordes of the Hamas-controlled statelet (twenty or more, just today) might be causing some of us to develop a negative view of the Gaza Strip. That would be a great pity.

So here, courtesy of a major article ["Gaza: A Way Out?"] by Nicolas Pelham in the current edition of the NY Review of Books, are some aspects of Gazan life that you might not be expecting.

• Propelling Gaza’s economy, Arab governments across the region, like Qatar’s, have been shifting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money from the PA to Hamas, signaling what may be a historic shift in Palestinian politics.
• Thanks to Gaza’s supply lines to Egypt, its GDP outpaced by a factor of five that of Hamas’s Western-funded rival, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank. 
• While international donors failed to deliver $4.5 billion in promised aid for reconstruction in protest at Hamas’s continued rule, tunnel operators have ferried in 7,500 tons of steel rods, cement, and gravel daily, supplying 90 percent of the enclave’s construction materials. According to World Bank figures, construction starts in the first half of 2011 grew by 220 percent.
• Even when they are open for business, however, the tunnels have their downsides. Some two hundred workers have been killed, many of them children, who are preferred, as in Victorian mines, for their slight frames.
• The economic effects have been remarkable: after notching 6 percent growth in 2008, the Gazan economy grew by 20 percent in 2010 and a whopping 27 percent last year; unemployment in the formal economy fell to 29 percent, its lowest in a decade and an improvement of eight percentage points in a year. 
• A recent International Labor Organization report cited the emergence of 600 “tunnel millionaires”; many of them, seeking somewhere to park their profits, have invested first in land, and then in hundreds of luxury apartment buildings. [We blogged about this phenomenon - see "30-Aug-12: How close to hell is Gaza? Depends whom you want to believe"]
• After three summers of zealous patrols, the [Hamas] morality police withdrew from the beaches and began to let shopkeepers again garb unveiled mannequins in mini-skirts. 
• Hamas licensed and sometimes invested in upscale beach resorts along the coast; last year Palestine’s most luxurious hotel opened, replete with a cocktail bar that is somewhat hopefully awaiting an alcohol license.
• In its rush to join the haves, Hamas began forgetting its former constituency of have-nots. Haniya’s government assigned only $14 million of its $769 million budget in 2012 to welfare. 
• For the first time shantytowns are cropping up on the outskirts of Gaza City. 
• In the shanty next to an abattoir, the only meat homeless Gazans can afford for Islamic festivities is a crippled horse bought from a knacker’s yard, slaughtered in the sand outside their shacks and fried in discarded wheel-hubs.
• Hamas’s dependence on smuggling has underlined its continued illegitimacy in the eyes of much of the world.
• So great is the demand that Gazans complain builders have to be booked months in advance, and decorators are never available. 
• The UN, which previously warned that Gaza faces an imminent humanitarian crisis, has now concluded that it may be years off...
• The tunnels double as portals for smugglers trafficking drugs and weapons, and may, as Cairo alleges, offer Sinai’s militants an escape hatch from Egyptian patrols.
• The geyser of aid money has bought the new donors influence. The new Gaza offices of the IHH—the Islamist charity in Turkey that spearheaded the 2010 aid flotilla to Gaza intercepted by Israel—dominate Gaza City’s Katiba Square, newly grassed with turf hauled through the tunnels. The Islamic University has added Turkish to its curriculum. 
• A new town funded by the United Arab Emirates will provide spacious free housing for 11,000 Gazans rendered homeless by Israeli offensives. The UN calls them “shelters” to avoid the impression that it is resettling refugees in suburban apartments. [Read the whole article here.]

Imagine that. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are worrying themselves sick about how to keep their families and homes safe from indiscriminate rocket firing. Meanwhile the fat-cat Hamas clique in Gaza City lose sleep over how to conceal the shiny new housing their people have acquired. The really horrible nightmare scenario from their standpoint is that people might start to think the lives of the Gazans have become materially better.

You can easily see how desperate this makes them. And as desperate people famously living in "an immense concentration camp", an "open air prison", what else is there for them to do other than to do terrorism? They can hardly be blamed for that, right? 

29-Oct-12: What the terrorist overlords in Gaza don't want their subjects to see

In a a previous attempt to save Gazan Palestinian Arabs from
paying a price that their Hamas masters were perfectly happy
for them to pay, the IDF distributed leaflets in this form

The ever-informative Elder of Ziyon blog has this report today on measures being taken by the Israel Defense Forces today to protect ordinary non-combatants on the far side of the fence in the wake of the round-the-clock rocket fire into Israel from Gaza.

Arabic media is reporting that the IDF has been dropping leaflets onto southern Gaza Monday morning warning residents to stay safe.

The flyers, spread from Rafah to Deir al Balah, tell Gazans to stay at least 300 meters away from the border with Israel. It also urges them to stay away from rocket launchers and terrorists. The leaflets say that the terror groups pose a threat to people's lives, their families, their children and their property. The papers further said that that terrorists are firing rockets from populated areas into Israel, saying it will pursue the launchers.

Pro-terror media outlets warned other Arab newspapers in the area - and even in Egypt - not to publish the text or images of the flyers, so as not to play into the hands of the IDF and to avoid having Gazans read the "lies" of the enemy.

Similarly, Hamas has been gathering up the warnings and burning them as fast as they can, ostensibly to reduce "confusion."

And, incidentally, the entire concept of human shields doesn't work as well when the shields refuse to play along. 

The IDF has used a variety of additional means in the past [examples here] to go over the heads of the Hamas regime and warn ordinary Palestinian Arab Gazans of the dangers they face as human shields for the jihadists.

29-Oct-12: Drumbeat of terrorist warfare goes on but most don't know it's happening

Not today, but from last week: Israeli home
'visited' by Gaza's terrorist thugs

It's just after ten in the morning here on a bright, warm Autumn morning. A delightful, breezy day. 

Unless you are very determined, and even if you feel very connected to events, it's near impossible to get a meaningful sense of the sheer terror of living within range of the rocket men of Gaza. The thugs of the Hamas-dominated enclave are armed to the teeth with a rocket arsenal that numbers in the tens of thousands... and growing. The sheer volume of the ongoing attacks is mind-numbing, and therefore of so little news value that it's ignored - up until the point when the Gazan Palestinian Arabs get lucky and kill someone. And even then, awareness is minor unless Israel's defensive measures exact innocent lives and the reporters and editors go back into teeth-gnashing mode.

In the past hour, we know of these incoming rockets:

Sha'ar Hanegev at 09:00 am [4 rockets in a single barrage: source]

Sha'ar Hanegev at 09:20 am

Hof Ashkelon at 09:35 am 

Shaar Hanegev/Sderot at 09:50 am 

Sdot Negev at 10:00 am 

These come on top of the terrorist (meaning entirely indiscriminate) rocket attacks from earlier in the morning. We reported on those ["29-Oct-12: Wild, turbulent night and not because of a hurricane"] a couple of hours ago. And they will surely be followed by more.

What's it like to be at ground zero when one of these rockets is fired at you? Click the image below for a taste.

29-Oct-12: File away for use when Haniyeh is next depicted as partner for peace

Man of principle shakes hand of religious ideologue

Ignore the confusing English. The source is a Persian-language news channel translated from the source Arabic and then rendered into English by a team of salaried propagandists.

But there's no mistaking the intent of Ismail Haniyeh, the man who heads the Hamas regime that dominates the Gaza Strip and "one of two disputed Prime Ministers of the Palestinian National Authority". Source: This past Saturday night's edition of the Iranian news channel, FARS [online]

Hamas Leader: Palestinian Stance against Israel Unchangeable   

20:40 | 2012-10-27
TEHRAN (FNA)- Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh underlined his nation's irrevocable stance against Israel, stressing that Palestinians will never ignore even a single span of their land. "We (Palestinians) will never overlook even one span of Palestine's soil because Palestine is an endowed land and no person, leader, organization or group is entitled to the right to ignore this land," Haniyeh said in a meeting on Saturday with the members of 'Miles of Smiles 17' aid convoy and an Indonesian delegation visiting Gaza. "Israel has no future in the Palestinian lands and our motto is that we will never recognize the Zionist regime," he said. 

A man of principle.

In the interests of throwing some modest light on how far the arch-terrorist's principles take him: Many Israelis are aware that earlier this year, the man who instructs the forces under his command to fire off rockets and mortars into anything Israeli and within reach, made arrangements for his brother-in-law to be saved by Zionist doctors at an "Occupation" medical facility in one of the Zionist Entity's major cities.

In early 2012, Haniyeh allowed his sister, Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh, to accompany her critically ill husband to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel, for emergency heart treatment. After successful treatment and care, the couple returned to Gaza without incident. Word of the unusual visit was released only four months later. It remains to be seen how this special treatment for the leader's relatives will be regarded by Gazans. [Wikipedia]

29-Oct-12: Wild, turbulent night and not because of a hurricane

Following yesterday's (Sunday) succession of rocket attacks on communities across a swathe of southern Israel in which (according to Times of Israel) seven Gazan Palestinian Arab terrorist rockets crashed and exploded, Israel responded

"The IAF struck multiple terror targets in Gaza, including two operation centers and a rocket launching site, according to a statement issued by the IDF spokesperson. The strikes were in response to recent rocket attacks..."

Undaunted, the terrorists have kept up their indiscriminate fire. We see reports of multiple Tzeva Adom warnings and rocket explosions, including clusters, throughout the night hours. It's now 6 am and the sun is rising:

02:05 am Eshkol region
02:15 am Eshkol region
02:25 am Eshkol region
02:35 am Eshkol region
02:45 am Eshkol region
03:40 am Ashkelon region
05:40 am Eshkol region

The reports so far say that despite the obvious horror of a night under fire and all that that entails to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis under attack, the Gazan rockets all landed in open areas causing no physical injury to residents of the area and no significant property damage. Overnight rocket tally [source]: 16.

In the local version of 'normal life', residents have been advised by the civil defence authorities to remain within fifteen seconds walk/run of shelter. Schools throughout the area will remain open.

Stay tuned.

28-Oct-12: Two additional rounds of rocket fire directed at Israelis in the past hour

Two more rounds of rockets have been fired into Israel (perhaps "flung" into Israel is more accurate since the thuggish men who set these rockets to fire off have neither the ability nor the slightest interest to direct them at a specific target) in the past hour.

Around 4:05 pm this afternoon (Sunday), several rockets (it appears to have been three, according to Times of Israel) crashed and exploded in the Hof Ashkelon region of southern Israel. These all blew up in open fields and as far as we can tell at this stage, there are neither injuries nor property damage. This was not the outcome the terrorists sought and they will certainly keep trying unless someone from the Israeli side stops them; only the Israeli side has the interest and the potential ability to do that.

Then a few minutes ago, at about 4:35 pm, a further round of rockets was fired off by the Gazan Palestinian Arab terror gangs, and are believed to have crashed and exploded in the Eshkol region. We do not yet have either confirmation or an indication of the result of the later round.

28-Oct-12: First reports of a gunfight between IDF and terrorists at Sufa Crossing

The Sufa Crossing that used to, but no longer does, play a major role in the entry of goods and equipment from Israel to Gaza, came under fire in the past half hour. We received initial, as-yet-unconfirmed, reports of a hail of mortar fire from terrorist forces in Gaza at the IDF personnel stationed in the area at about 2 this afternoon (Sunday). Updates when we have them.

From Wikipedia:

The Sufa border crossing was open in the past to Palestinians working in Israeli farms. During the Second Intifada, the border crossing and the military base next to it were subject to several Palestinian attacks, and the crossing has been intermittently closed. In October 2007, the crossing was closed, leaving the Kerem Shalom crossing the only point of entry. In November, despite IDF objections who said it was harder to guard than Kerem Shalom, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai decided to reopen it. It has since been used to transfer Humanitarian assistance to the Strip. In May 2008 the crossing was once again closed following a mortar attack which wounded an IDF soldier. A few days later, thousands of Palestinians protested the Israeli blockade. Six people were reported wounded by the IDF in that incident. On June 1 [presumably 2008], about forty Israeli farmers protested at the crossing, in a bid to stop the transportation of goods into the Strip despite the ongoing Qassam rocket barrages.

28-Oct-12: The rocket-armed terrorists of Gaza continue taking pot-shots at Be'er Sheva

In the last few minutes, starting around 07:40 this morning (Sunday), several reports of incoming rockets in and close to the city of Be'er Sheva and the Ramat Negev region, some 45 km from the Gaza Strip. Some eye-witnesses are reporting that there was no Tzeva Adom warning ahead of the boom, at least in the urban areas of Be'er Sheva. More details when we have them.

28-Oct-12: Be'er Sheva hit by two GRAD rockets at dawn; school classes canceled

Be'er Sheva

The attack on Israel's largest southern city came around 5:30 this morning (Sunday). From the newsflash of Times of Israel:

Two Grad rockets were fired from Gaza at Beersheba slightly after dawn Sunday morning, hours after Israeli planes killed a Hamas terrorist in Gaza. There were no reports of injuries or damage from the missiles, which landed in open areas near Beersheba, a city of some 250,000. Classes in the city were canceled for Sunday because of the fear of continued rocket fire. Earlier Sunday morning, Israeli planes struck Gaza after two rockets were fired into southern Israel, seemingly ending a fragile ceasefire between the Hamas-held territory and Israel. There were no reports of injuries or damage after the rockets landed in open areas in the Eshkol region at around 2 a.m. Sunday.

On the website of the Popular Resistance Committees, you can see a claim of 'credit', in Arabic. The PRC is described in Wikipedia as

"a coalition of various armed Palestinian factions that oppose the conciliatory approach adopted by the Palestinian Authority and Fatah towards Israel. Active in the Gaza Strip, the military wing of the PRC is the Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades. Set up in late 2000 by former Fatah and Tanzim member Jamal Abu Samhadana, the PRC are composed primarily of ex-Fatah fighters and al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades members and are alleged by Israel to be inspired and financed by Hezbollah. The PRC specializes in planting roadside bombs and vehicle explosive charges - directed against military and civilian convoys. The PRC is described as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States." 

The Wikipedia entry mentions PRC's connection to the Hezbollah of Lebanon:

"According to Israel, the relation between the PRC and Hezbollah is more than coincidental. Israel alleges the organization enjoys financing and technical support from Hezbollah since its founding, and is a sort of proxy of Hezbollah's influence in the Gaza Strip.[25][26] The organization outwardly projects this relation through its mimicry of the Hezbollah flag which also bears a fist clenching a Kalashnikov rifle and stylized writing."

28-Oct-12: What lies behind ongoing efforts to paint Gaza as a region under Israeli siege?

We snapped this during a September 2012 visit to the Kerem Shalom crossing. A truck laden with
steel reinforcing rods for construction purposes leaves Israel and enters the Gaza Strip. Reports that Israel
prevents the entry of construction materials continue, despite the abundant evidence that disproves it.

We have commented here time and again about the persistence of the quiet inaccurate notion that Gaza is a region under siege. Over the past several years, we have seen campaigns that blame Israel for the shortage or absence or unreliability of electricity in the Hamas-controlled mini-state ["21-Jan-08: Electric wars - a sad tale of two realities"]. We have seen Gaza described as a huge open-air concentration camp ["30-Jul-10: Once again, from the world's largest 'prison camp'"]. Gaza's children have been portrayed as starving, uneducated, deprived of medical care and oppressed ["30-Aug-12: How close to hell is Gaza? Depends whom you want to believe"] and the blame for all of it is laid at the feet of Israel.

Perhaps things will get a little better now, in the wake of the flying visit to Gaza this past week by one of the world's wealthiest individuals, the Emir of Qatar.

Haniyeh: Qatar visit breaks Gaza siege

Published in Maan News Tuesday 23/10/2012 (updated) 25/10/2012 11:12    GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday said the visit of Qatar's emir to the Gaza Strip had helped lift Israel's blockade of the enclave. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani on Tuesday was the first head of state to enter Gaza since 1999 in a visit that broke the isolation of its rulers Hamas.  "You are today, by this visit, declaring the breaking of the unjust blockade," Haniyeh told the Qatari leader in a speech at the site of a new town to be built with Gulf money. "Today we declare victory against the blockade through this historic visit," he said. "We say thank you, Emir, thank you Qatar for this noble Arab stance ... Hail to the blood of martyrs which brought us to this moment." [More]

That visit, and the huge financial gift that Qatar says it is going to hand over, represents a potentially important turning point in the way Gaza is perceived. Two of the more influential writers at Haaretz, Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, offered an analysis in the newspaper's Friday edition that has not gotten the exposure we think it deserves.

Myth of a siege
Haaretz - Oct.26, 2012 | 2:05 PM
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff

For a moment last weekend, a small ship called Estelle shook up the international media. Once more a handful of peace activists demonstrated the brutality of the Israeli occupation, which is denying food to the starving residents of Gaza. And if that were not enough, after the forcible interception at sea, the hard-hearted Israeli government threw the pursuers of justice, among them a few Israelis, into jail.
The trouble with this story is that the activity to remove the supposed siege is not compatible with the facts on the ground − to put it mildly. The siege of Gaza has long since become a myth, promoted by the Hamas government with the aid of a few left-wing international organizations. In practice, the festive declaration on Tuesday by the Hamas prime minister that the siege has ended − during the visit by the Emir of Qatar − let the cat out of the bag.
Still, the activists’ spin made its way successfully into the international media. After the interception of the Estelle, CNN reported this week that the Israeli siege of Gaza has been going on for the past five years. The simple truth is that there is no longer an Israeli siege of Gaza.
Restrictions remain on exports from Gaza and on the free movement of people from Gaza to the West Bank (20,000 people a year move from the Strip to the West Bank). Gaza does not have an active airport or maritime port, and Israel blocks ships from docking there. Gaza has only a land crossing to Egypt and a limited crossing to Israeli territory. But a siege, in the plain sense of the term, does not exist.
Under pressure of the Mavi Marmara affair in May 2010 (when nine Turkish activists died after the Israeli navy boarded the ship), the Israeli government revised its policy and greatly eased the entry of goods from the West Bank into Gaza. There is currently no shortage in Gaza of food or construction materials. Gazans can enter Egypt through the Rafah crossing, and from there proceed to any destination in the world.
In fact, an average of 1,200 people a day are doing just that, according to statistics released by the Hamas government itself. Those who are prevented from crossing officially by the Egyptians (for security and other reasons) cross through the tunnels. This is no longer a tough trek between Palestinian Rafah and Egyptian Rafah through a dark, narrow tunnel. A taxi service, effectively a form of public transportation, now plies the Gaza-Egypt route via the tunnels.
The markets are overflowing with fruits, vegetables, the latest iPhones and much more. A major real-estate boom is underway in Gaza, and the projected growth rate for 2012 is 9 percent, according to the World Bank. (By comparison, the probable growth rate in the West Bank will be 5 percent.) For the first time in years, West Bank residents who are asked about this in opinion polls claim that they are economically less well-off than the Gazans (though they are wrong).
Israel allows almost free entry of goods through the Kerem Shalom crossing, apart from those which Hamas itself doesn’t want as it hopes to keep the tunnels flourishing and because the price of some goods from Egypt is cheaper.
This week’s visit by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, was a historic occasion. A Hamas honor guard awaited him on the Palestinian side as he arrived via Rafah. He dedicated a huge rehabilitation project worth $400 million − a donation the likes of which the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank can only dream about. If even Haniyeh is talking about the end of the siege, maybe it’s time for left-wing activists from Israel and abroad to stop engaging in cheap PR stunts.

Given its usefulness to those who propagate it, we're not expecting the powerful 'Poor Gaza is a victim of Israeli cruelty' meme to go away anytime soon. But we do expect that more people will become sensitive to the cold-blooded manipulation by ideologically motivated media and political figures that keeps it alive.

28-Oct-12: Eshkol region: Late-night incoming rocket

Following a quiet Saturday there are reports of the Tzeva Adom incoming missile alert being sounded throughout the Eshkol region of southern Israel in the past few minutes, starting around 12:28am. We also have unconfirmed reports of multiple explosions immediately following the warning. More details here when we get them.

26-Oct-12: Ordinary Europeans and their politicians fund Palestinian Arab terror. How do they respond when confronted with the evidence?

This convicted killer is serving 67 life sentences in an Israeli
prison for multiple murders. He built and delivered a bomb hidden
within a guitar case that took 15 innocent lives including our child's.
He is Abdullah Barghouti. A significant part of  his monthly salary
for October 2012 was paid, literally, by this blog's readers.

Douglas Murray has a powerful op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal Europe dealing with something we have puzzled over and written about several times over the past years. How is it that sharp-as-a-pin politicians, serving as ministers in European governments, sign off on documents that transfer many millions of Euros, Pounds and Dollars into the bottomless pit of the Palestinian Arab jihad, and then forget they did it? Or deny they did? Or demonstrate that they never actually fully understood that they did it? 

They personally, with their own pens and their own fingers, fund hatred-driven terrorism that allows evil men and women to kill members of a different religion. And then they pretend that it wasn't them, it wasn't the money they sent, it's a misunderstanding, it's not my fault.

Are we greatly simplifying a complex situation? We're a family whose child was murdered by members of a group that has benefited for years from payments of the kind we're describing. How many people do you know whose child died by murder? It concentrates your mind greatly.

Here's Douglas Murray, associate director at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, a think-tank, writing under the headline "Palestinian Terrorists on the Payroll" [online at the WSJE site]:

...Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family's way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick "suicide bomber" on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East... 

Fortunately such people can be consoled by the limitless complacency of the international development minister. For after the facts about the DfID budget were revealed, Alan Duncan rejected them in the following tones: "If these claims were true, this would be a matter of very serious concern for me and the Department."  

"However," Mr. Duncan said, "I am pleased to reassure you that we have investigated the matter fully and can confirm that the allegations in Palestinian Media Watch's report are both inaccurate and misleading." The payments were not in fact salaries, he claimed, but rather "social assistance programs to provide welfare payments. 

"How nice it must be to be Mr. Duncan. So clever, so satisfied and so wrong. For this week it became clear quite how little Mr. Duncan knows or cares about the uses to which he puts our taxpayers' money.It is possible of course that on this occasion he does not care. 

When it comes to the Middle East, Mr. Duncan's views are well-known. As well as being fond of some of the ropier regimes in the region, he has expressed a long-held disdain for the region's only truly free state.Just a year ago Mr. Duncan dragged his department into a row when its website posted a video of him divesting himself of some of his franker opinions. Standing beside Israel's security fence—built, successfully, to stop a spate of suicide bombing—Mr. Duncan described the fence as a "land grab," claimed that Israelis deliberately stole water from Palestinians, and said that the land in question did not belong to the Jewish state. 

The latter point was spat out by Mr. Duncan with such ferocity—the video has since been removed—as to make it perfectly clear this was something Mr. Duncan felt, as well as thought.But perhaps one should be more generous and assume that Mr. Duncan simply had not known what he was talking about on the subject of taxpayers' money or the security fence. DfID spends around £86 million each year in the Palestinian areas. Around £30 million of this goes to the PA's general budget, from which the terrorists receive their salaries. And PMW's latest report provides exactly the evidence Mr. Duncan said did not exist.  

The PA itself refers to the payments to prisoners not as "welfare payments," as Mr. Duncan would have it, but as a "monthly salary."In addition, there is no possibility that the salary reflects the prisoner's family's welfare needs because the payments bear no relation to either the prisoner's marital status or social welfare situation. What they do relate to is the length of the sentence, with those convicted and sentenced for the worst crimes receiving the highest payments...At the exact same time as Britain is drawing down its defense spending, and as the government is eviscerating the armed forces it still relies on, it is increasing the spending on salaries for terrorists and others who attack our allies. [More]

The issue is not a new one. It's an ongoing scandal, and it means British taxpayers, Belgian taxpayers, French taxpayers, German taxpayers and a host of other ordinary people are providing what the child-killers of Gaza and the PA need in order to keep going. You might be interested to read what we wrote on this theme. A few instances:

• 4-Sep-12: Where's the shame? How much of your tax dollars went to fund the pension of our child's murderer? More than you probably thought
• 28-Jul-11: Taxpayer-funded salaries to convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists. What a good idea.
• 20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?

And to show you how much it's not a new issue, we can point you to an essay we published in the same paper, the Wall Street Journal Europe nine years ago, in its September 26, 2003 edition. Our essay is called Blood, Money and Education [online here] and it has some quite sharp things to say about a certain British politician who was up to his eyebrows in involvement with covering up the EU funding of Palestinian terrorism at the time. Today he is the UK government's man in charge of the BBC.

25-Oct-12: Incoming mortar fire at 09:30 Thursday

The location is unstated for security reasons, but this residence in
southern Israel was one of eight that took a direct rocket hit yesterday.
[Image Source:  AP Photo/ Tsafrir Abayov]

Following yesterday's terrorist violence and drama (more than eighty missiles, five people injured on the Israeli side, eight residences directly hit) there has been either a lull or a ceasefire, depending on how optimistic you are, in the fire-zone of southern Israel. But after lasting ten hours or so, it ended this morning.

At about 09:30 am, a mortar exploded in the Eshkol region. Times of Israel says there were no injuries to add to the ongoing total, and no significant property damage but there was certainly more terror in the lives of the people living in the 14 kibbutzim, 13 moshavim and three villages that make up Eshkol.

24-Oct-12: It's night, and the rockets keep coming in

At 10:10 tonight, Wednesday, a few minutes before we posted these lines, there was another rocket attack from Gaza on communities in southern Israel, this time impacting the hard-hit Hof Ashkelon region. We'll update this post once we know the outcome of the latest rockets. Meanwhile the Times of Israel is currently featuring a lead story headed "Southern Israel residents describe near-death hits, children out of school and non-stop missiles". 

Here's how it starts:

Talking about life under the threat of Gazan mortars and rockets, residents of the South on Wednesday described unfortified homes, a government that isn’t protecting them, and a “tragedy waiting to happen” as children congregate during periods of incoming fire.“Regretfully, we’re not protected. We have houses with asbestos roofs and cardboard ceilings,” Ilan Cohen of the Eshkol Region told Channel 2 TV.“At 7 a.m., we woke up to two red alerts. One of the alerts was actually very real when a missile scored a direct hit on the house,” he added dryly.Cohen wasn’t injured in the attack, but a neighbor barely survived a direct hit on the building, according to his description of events.“The State of Israel needs to wake up and make the right decision and protect us,” he said, and added: “Today was very close.”

These are difficult days and nights for a large part of the Israeli population - especially hard when they know that most Israelis are being spared the torment of living under round-the-clock rocket attack by seriously hateful men with death and destruction on their minds. That the agony is not being doled out evenly is obvious to the Israelis living within rocket distance of Gaza. And that's before they take into account the way some of the world's most influential news channels, the BBC in particular, continue to simply look the other way and ignore the ongoing barrages of Gazan missiles. The BBC's leading Middle East story at this hour, as it has been all day, is "Militants killed in Gaza strikes" where "Militants" means armed terrorists sitting on top of a mountain of locally-produced and fully-imported rockets, and "Gaza strikes" refers to Israel's defence forces surgically picking out the rocket-rich terrorist groups from among the population in which they have purposefully embedded themselves.

Feh.

24-Oct-12: Toll of missiles fired into Israel passed eighty this afternoon; don't wait for the BBC to report it

Everything that the BBC's editors want their audience to know about events
in the area is on this page. The snapshot above was taken at 15:20 GMT on Wednesday October 24, 2012.

We tuned in to the BBC World Service news on the car radio thirty minutes ago and caught the 4:30 pm news bulletin. As expected, the latest developments in and around Gaza were among the chief stories, and rightly so.

And - as we have grown accustomed to hearing over the years - the BBC's emphasis in the reporting of what is happening tells people like us - on the ground in the Middle East, acutely aware of the missile warfare being waged from Gaza - approaches the story in a way that causes us to despair. Basically, it's upside down.

The BBC radio bulletin, more or less accurately reflected in a story that appears at this moment on its website, says:

Gaza militants killed in strikes following rocket fire    The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have carried out air strikes over Gaza City, killing at least four Hamas militants and injuring several other people. It comes after a night of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel which injured at least three people. Two large explosions were also heard in Gaza on Wednesday morning. [More]

Those are the first three lines of the report. You can read further but you will see no mention of the dramatic events of today, Wednesday, a day in which more than eighty missiles, rockets and mortars were fired at civilian Israeli targets by the terror squads of Gaza under Hamas leadership and inspiration. No mention.

For those with an interest in what's being done to Israelis by the terrorist thugs, here are some updates.

After the rocket/mortar barrages of early this morning about which we wrote here earlier, there was a three hour pause in which the incoming firing from Gaza stopped.  By then, an estimated eighty (that's 80) rockets and mortars had crashed into Israeli territory and exploded, causing fear, damage, destruction and injury on a scale ranging from minor to critical. They were made up of a mix of made-in-Gaza Qassam rockets and military-grade Grad rockets, generally imported, that have a substantially greater range and larger warhead.

Times of Israel says the rocket assault continued just after midday when a single barrage of eight rockets was fired into the Hof Ashkelon region, and two more in the Eshkol region. The Iron Dome intercepted and destroyed yet another missile fired at the city of Ashkelon, adding to this morning's tally of seven. In all five people have been injured today to the point of needing hospitalization. The terrorization of the population of southern Israel is happening on a scale that affects a much larger number of civilians. School classes were cancelled across wide swathes of Israel's south today, and in many places residents were instructed by Civil Defence and IDF authorities to remain within 15 seconds of their “secure rooms” in case of further attacks.

If you know people who get their news from the BBC, you might do them a favour and share these reports with them, since it does not look like the editors at BBC World Service plan to give too much attention to the Israeli victims of this ongoing war of terror being waged against a beleagured Israeli civilian population.

24-Oct-12: Mid-morning, the terrorists of Gaza keep firing into Israel

Scene of one of today's direct hits

The rockets of Gaza keep coming. There was another barrage a few minutes ago, at 10:30 Wednesday morning. The explosions that followed were in the Eshkol region.

The picture at right [Image Source] from Ynet is of one of the residences that took a direct hit. There have been several others.

The agricultural contract field-workers who were injured this morning are reported to be from Thailand, and the condition of two of them, now in hospital, is said to be grave.

24-Oct-12: 67 Gazan rockets and mortars fired at anything Israeli since last night... so far

JPost reports that the incoming count of terrorist rockets and mortars so far this morning (as of about 09:00 Wednesday) is 50 [Haaretz counts 52 so far], and 67 since yesterday evening. 22 have crashed into the Eshkol region; 21 have landed in the Lachish region. The Iron Dome anti-missile system has intercepted seven rockets so far, according to an IDF spokesman. Times of Israel says all seven were directed at rockets that appeared to be on a trajectory pointing to the city of Ashkelon - thus averting far larger damage and injury outcomes. Seven Israeli homes have taken hits so far this morning [Times of Israel]

The IDF Home Front command has instructed residents living within 10 km of Gaza to remain indoors this morning and to take shelter. Southern municipalities have canceled schools amid the ongoing escalation, while Israel Police have heightened patrols around Gaza in the south, placing bomb sappers in the area to deal with the heightened threat.

24-Oct-12: 08:30 am update - More rockets, some injuries and damage, and Hamas strives for 'unity'

Indiscriminate daily fire by the thugs of Gaza sometimes produces
the results of which they dream: An Israeli home in Eshkol
region after taking a direct hit this morning [Image Source]  

Ynet reports at 08:30 Wednesday morning

• Hamas' military wing and the Popular Resistance Committee have both claimed responsibility for the ongoing rocket attack on southern Israel. 
• Over 50 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israel on Wednesday. Two foreign workers were seriously injured in the attack.

Three men were hurt in the Eshkol region this morning when a chicken coop in which they were working took a direct hit from a popular resistance, national self-determination, humiliation-offsetting rocket fired by one of the many terrorist gangs operating freely in Gaza, and flinging rockets anywhere in the general Israeli direction. Times of Israel says the three are contract workers from a foreign country; all are hospitalized now, two of them in critical condition.

Ibrahim Barzak of Associated Press writes ("In Gaza visit, Qatari emir forges leading role") about the circumstances behind this morning's rocket barrages:

• The arrival of Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani [on Tuesday] gave Hamas its biggest diplomatic victory yet since violently taking control of Gaza in June 2007 from forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Repeated attempts to reconcile, including a Qatari-brokered deal early this year, have failed...
• The emir received a hero's welcome as he crossed through Gaza's southern border with Egypt... 
• In a speech at Gaza's Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold, the emir called on the Palestinians to heal their bitter rift, saying a unified front is the only way to achieve statehood. "Why are you staying divided? There are no peace negotiations (between Palestinian factions), and there is no clear strategy of resistance and liberation. Why shouldn't brothers sit together and reconcile?"

Evidently, they're listening to him.

Not so surprisingly, the Aljazeera news network which the self-same Emir of Qatar funded and directs (it purports to be independent but in fact is owned today by the Sheik's Qatar Media Corporation) carries not a word of this morning's ongoing rocket attacks on Israel in its news coverage at this hour (09:00, Wednesday morning).

But it does carry some glowing eye-witness reportage this morning from its correspondent, Nicole Johnston, reporting from Gaza:

"I haven't seen Hamas officials looking quite so pleased with themselves since they managed to free more than 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners last year," she said.

Rocket attacks, smiley faces, a feeling of well-being, plus three wives and twenty-four children: so much good that can come from one modest man's efforts - a man whose wealth is estimated at $2,400 million [source]. Truly heart-warming.