Thursday, December 28, 2006
There's supposed to be some sort of cease-fire going on, but the rockets have never stopped falling on southern Israel. Come to find out that part of the problem is Hizballah paying rewards for the rocketeers: Hizbullah paying for Kassam attacks
According to Israeli intelligence information, Hizbullah is smuggling cash into the Gaza Strip and paying "a number of unknown local splinter groups" for each attack.
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) sources said the Islamist organization paid several thousand dollars for each attack, with the amount dependent on the number of Israelis killed or wounded.
"We know that Hizbullah is involved in funding terrorist activity in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," a security official said.
"Palestinian terrorists get thousands of dollars per attack. Sometimes they are paid before the attack and sometimes they submit a bill to Lebanon afterward and the money gets transferred a short while later."
According to the officials, while Islamic Jihad was behind most recent rocket attacks - including the one on Tuesday night that critically wounded 14-year-old Adir Basad in Sderot - several splinter terrorists groups are also involved and have received direct funding from Hizbullah.
According to security officials, Islamic Jihad gets the money via its headquarters in Damascus while Fatah's Tanzim terror group and the Popular Resistance Committees receive payment from Hizbullah in Lebanon.
All of the money originated in Iran, the officials said.
Government officials said Hamas was not currently involved in firing missiles, but was doing nothing to stop those who were...
Meanwhile, Honest Reporting reports from Sderot, where:
Much more at the link.
Your report regarding the qassam rockets fired into Israel reminded me of a video I recently saw on the MEMRI site. To see the video, go to the page on the MEMRI site indicated just below:
http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S5&P1=12#
The page shows a list of videos from the Arab media regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Scroll down to nearly the bottom of the page, to video #1291 (the numbers are not in order).
Video # 1291 dates from this past June, and it shows an Al Jazeera report of activities and interviews with members of the Al-Quds Brigades, the Armed Wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It's done in an "up here at the front with our boys" kind of way. And it has the through-the-looking-glass quality of a straight news report done from a mindset so different from our own.
Anyway, about a quarter of the way through the video, our intrepid reporter has us witness the launching of two rockets from a grove. We watch brigades members set up the equipment, launch the missiles to shouts of "Allah Akbar," and then we see them decamping, saying "Get out now. Quickly, guys." All the while our reporter speculates that, though one may disagree about the effectiveness of these "simple, locally made missiles" against Israel's arsenal, at least they're complicating Israel's security.
"Complicating Israel's security." That's it. And now, another attack has complicated the health of those two youngsters.
The video is worth watching. It really gives you the mindset of Al Jazeera, and its purported professional objectivity.