Sunday, November 19, 2006
Sounds like someone knows damn well that Israelis are not indiscriminate blood-thirsty bombers. Looks like the Palestinians have a new tactic -- or at least an old one they're willing to use frequently: IDF calls off strike after hundreds shield Gaza militant's house
Palestinian sources called the protest the first of its kind to have in effect prevented an air strike by the IAF. An IDF spokesman said the strike had been called off so to avoid inflicting civilian casualties.
Hundreds of Palestinians formed a human shield around the home of the militant in Beit Lahia late Saturday to prevent an Israel Air Force air strike on the building, residents said.
An IDF spokesman confirmed the raid had been called off because of the protest.
"The attack plan was canceled because of the people there," the spokesman said. "We differentiate between innocent people and terrorists."...
...People flocked to the home of Mohammed al-Baroud after he received a warning from the army late Saturday giving him 30 minutes to leave the house. Barhoud is a commander in the Popular Resistance Committees in the town who is in charge of firing homemade rockets at Israel. Crowds of people stood on the rooftop and in the yard of the home.
Israel routinely orders occupants out of homes ahead of air strikes on suspected weapons-storage facilities, saying it wants to avoid casualties. The incident in Beit Lahia was the first time Palestinians have tried to prevent such an airstrike.
The crowd chanted anti-Israel and anti-American slogans, and people said they were prepared to give their lives to protect the home. "Yes to martyrdom. No to surrender," the crowd chanted...
One may wonder if the Arab population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza might represent the same deterrent to an Iranian nuclear strike. Don' count on it: Palestinians: Our human shield against Iran nukes?
...But Tehran cannot consider a nuclear holocaust against Israel without taking into account those whom Iran holds to be rightful Muslim heirs to Muslim land. The Islamic republic cannot erase the State of Israel without killing large numbers of the very people whose lives it has sworn to protect: the Palestinians.
There was a time, not so long ago, when many Israelis believed that no Arab power would attack Jerusalem, for fear of damaging the holy sites sacred to Islam. Moreover, there was a feeling that Arab powers would refrain from attacking both the holy city and the territories, in order to avoid Palestinian casualties.
But long-held taboos governing the actions of Muslim fighters have been bent, broken and discarded with impunity in recent years. In Iraq, the February bombing of the Al-Askari mosque, one of the holiest of all shrines to Shi'ites ? apparently at the hands of an Al-Qaida cell - was followed within a day by reprisal attacks on no fewer than 161 Sunni mosques.
Where Islamists once refrained from killing non-combatants, especially Muslims, the number of Muslim non-combatants killed in Iraq has grown so astronomically as to resist accurate count.
During the recent war in the north, nearly half of the Israeli civilians killed by Katyusha rockets fired by Iran's client militia Hezbollah, were Arabs.
Under certain circumstances, might Iran sacrifice the Arabs of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, to say nothing of a million Muslim Israeli citizens, in a cataclysmic assault on the Zionist entity?
More directly, would Iran be willing to kill off millions of Arabs if that were the price of exterminating the state of Israel?
The truth, one wishes, were "No." But the real truth, one suspects, is "Not yet."...
But you know that the Isrealis are barbaric monsters for creating their little bionic hornet, a neat little toy that can chase, photograph, and kill a specific target. As in, one or two bad guys, not dozens or hundreds of possible innocents.
I guess nobody pointed out to the Hamasnicks that necessity is the mother of invention, and Israeli is on the cutting edge of technology, whereas they...
Too bad, eh?