Shabbat Shalom From Eilat

The mountains of Eilat (Landscape photos: Pria Bender)

Kassams & Kids: Closer Than You Really Want To Know

Imagine this was a sign on your street:


"Slow - Children Crossing." Rocket-shrapnel riddled street sign in Israel.

Gaza rocket ranges into Israel (so far...):

Click on the image, or here for this, and similar full-sized interactive maps.

(H-T: DoubleTapper)

Noted US Christian Broadcaster Hurt In Kassam Strike (VIDEO ADDED)

Kassam Blast Knocks American Broadcaster to Ground from Israel Always on Vimeo.

Earl Cox is a highly-regarded broadcaster, who has worked tirelessly for Israel's sake for decades. He has worked for two decades in four U.S. Administrations. He is also a friend and colleague, and I have assisted his efforts in Israel in the past, as a recording technician.

This afternoon in Sderot, he was blown off his feet into a concrete bus stop when a Kassam rocket fired from Gaza slammed down close to where he was standing. He and an assistant were "sore and shaken up," in the wake of the attack, according to a colleague, who communicated the details to me.

Earl Cox (on the bench inside bus stop) and aide at the moment of the Kassam impact near them.

This is the release his organization sent out a short time ago:

"SDEROT, ISRAEL --- International Christian broadcaster and columnist, Earl Cox, today lived through what Jews in southern Israel live through each day. Cox, who is known as "the voice of Israel to America," was in Sderot, an Israeli city on the Gaza border, identifying some of the many humanitarian needs of the people living in this area where warning sirens and rocket blasts are a part of everyday life. Cox and his crew experienced a first hand taste of this terror today; not once but twice. As he and his crew were preparing to film a video report when the siren sounded alerting everyone of incoming Kassam rockets. All scrambled for cover. The rocket landed so close to Cox and his crew that the shock waves from the blast threw him and one of his aids against the wall inside one of the 50 portable bomb shelters placed in and around Sderot by Israel Always and Operation LifeShield. Thanks to this shelter, Cox and his crew escaped serious injury.

"Shortly after this first blast, Cox and others on his Israel Always team experienced a second rocket attack and had to scurry for shelter this time finding only an unprotected building. Fortunately they again escaped injury.

"The Israel Always team will remain in southern Israel until the end of Israel's war with radical Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Since beginning his campaign in support of Israel more than ten years ago, Cox and his organization have raised huge sums of money to help meet humanitarian needs in Israel."

Earl and Kathleen are directly responsible for raising money for such reinforced bus stops that saved Earl's and the others in the film's lives. I am certain that this event will only spur them on to greater goals for Israel's sake. Find out more about LifeShield here: http://www.israelalways.com/lifeshield.html

My thoughts and prayers are with Earl, Kathleen and all in Israel for their steadfastness and valor in the face of personal danger.

Click here for more reports about Sderot and Gaza.

What it's Like Prepping for a Gaza Op (exclusive story & audio)

For all the new readers (especially Doubletapper) who are visiting my blog: This is a personal - maybe even too personal - journal of what it's like "getting the call" after 01:00 to prepare for an incursion into the Gaza Strip.

I wrote it over the course of several weeks after a terror bombing at a gambling parlor/bar in the town of Rishon Letzion, near Tel Aviv in 2002.

I recorded the introduction to the linked audio soon after an IDF foray to try to rescue IDF Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

I hope you'll agree that I did my best to be fair and objective interviewing one of the soldiers, a Canadian immigrant, despite the circumstances. My deepest thanks to him for his honest, personal responses. Comments and questions are welcome.

(The audio and written accounts reveal no sensitive IDF material, and were cleared at the time by senior officers)

Audio: Preparing for the Gaza War

The call came...

...My concern rises to the surface like a half-forgotten bad dream tailing me out of my slumber.

"This is a 'tzav-8' call-up. You need to arrive at the base by 9:00 am," she says, asking if I understand the instructions and other pertinent details. I mumble my assent, hanging up the phone as I fall back into a chair.

Stunned, I told my now-awake wife that no, this wasn't a drill and that no, they weren't kidding. Suddenly taken aback in a rush of confusion and inchoate fear, I drag down the dusty, readied backpack from the crawlspace over the bathroom, mentally going over the list of needed last minute supplies.

Later, deep in the heart of the night, we finish packing the bag, both finally comprehending that I was Gaza bound, and though uncertain, likely en route to harms way.

I arrived at the sprawling Negev-area base later that morning. Hundreds of friends and acquaintances - all brothers in arms - were already there, milling in and out of ragged lines, signing in and signing out on rifles, gear and webbing. Guys in the unit I hadn't seen appear for duty in years, aged and way past enlistment age were there, trying on wrinkled fatigues and lacing up stiff boots. Reports said we were at well over a 100 percent show rate. Fairly amazed, proud, and somewhat abashed at the plain show of patriotism, I went from group to group, catching up on news since our last term of service together.

The knowing looks between us as we backslapped and traded stories of times gone by wordlessly said it all. Our unit, together with many others, was preparing to go into operation against the Palestinian terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip...(more here)

What Part Of 'Exploiting Hospitals For Cover' Isn't Clear?

Two hard news items that may help in clarifying the question, and providing the answer for the moral cretin audience:

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Hamas Officials Hiding in Gaza Hospital Maternity Ward - Avi Issacharoff (Ha'aretz)
Palestinian sources said senior Hamas officials have been spotted more than once wandering around the maternity ward of Gaza City's Shifa Hospital and even using the hospital to hold press conferences, on the theory that it offers a safe haven from Israeli fire.
For the same reason, Hamas forces have taken refuge near buildings that serve as headquarters for various international organizations, such as the Red Cross and the UN.

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Hamas Steals Aid Supplies for Its Own Hospital for Gunmen - Yaakov Katz (Jerusalem Post)
Hamas has set up an independent hospital in Gaza to treat its wounded and is pilfering a significant portion of the medicine allowed into the Strip, senior defense officials said Monday.
Nevertheless, the Defense Ministry said it would continue facilitating the transfer of food and medical supplies into Gaza since the humanitarian convoys play a key role in garnering international legitimacy for the IDF's operations.

More here.

Hamas Body Armor

(Courtesy: Cox & Forkum)

More here.

How To 'Reach Out And Touch Somebody' In Gaza

How the Israeli Army manages how to know who, where and how to warn non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza when to get the hell off the phone and out of the building before the Hellfires drop, is eerily similar to the movie, "Eagle Eye:"

"[Apparently] the Israeli Army has "figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning.

"Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls.

"The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning."

Also as apparently, this blogger is an IT ubergeek - NOT that there's anything wrong with that. Jus' sayin'.

For the rest'a'us, let's take a deeeep breath, and read the next paragraph together aloud:

"Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there's a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

"Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

"Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

Ahh, right, that last sentence.

Turns out there's a pretty cool and constructive use for that paranoid, slacker fever-dream of a plot that that pretty much made up Eagle Eye, after all.

Who knew? Clearly not the PatriotActophobics who made the film.

Read the rest.

Latest Twitters On The Fighting & 'Hamasochism'

Latest Twitters on the Fighting in Gaza & 'Hamasochism'

• http://twitter.com/israelconsulate
• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=israel
• http://twitter.com/qassamcount
• http://twitter.com/Muqata
• http://twitter.com/ASoldiersMother

---
Contrast & Compare:

Exhibit A)
Israeli doctors mobilize to save a Palestinian baby's life: http://tinyurl.com/9ahb2v

More about this here.

Exhibit B)
From Richard Landes:

"Would Hamas secretly blow up its own people in order to blame Israel? Certainly, their ideology would justify such a move. As Hamas representative Fathi Hamad said last February, “Palestinians have created a human shield against the Zionist bombing machine.”

For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life. [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) Feb. 29, 2008]

"As if to illustrate both the international reach of this Islamic ideology of death and martyrdom and it’s repugnant quality (at least to a Western liberal), a Saudi cameraman filmed live the “making of a martyr” when the doctors pulled the plug on a girl in a Gaza hospital. Could she have lived, had Hamas allowed her to go to Egypt in one of the many unused ambulances waiting at their southern border? We will never know."

'We didn't mean to, but we lied to our kids'

From Daniel Gordis:

"Why should children living in uncontested Israeli territory grow up being taught that in the playground, when the siren goes off, you run into the caterpillar, and hope that the rocket doesn't kill any of your friends who don't make it in time?

"These weeks, with the question of whether or not Jewish sovereignty means anything at all, there is really only one question. As Joshua said to the angel (Joshua 5:13), "are you for us, or for our adversaries?" Do you believe that Jews in Sederot have a right to live without bomb-shelter caterpillars in their playgrounds?

"Do you understand that the only point of having a Jewish state is that Jews should no longer live - and die - at the whim of those who hate us just because we exist?"

And this from Victor David Hanson at NRO:

"There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live."

Latest Gaza Map & Updates

White words in upper caption: [IDF] control of Kassam firing areas. Israel has returned to take control of [former Israeli] communities in northern Gaza.

Ynet News map (cleared by IDF censors) of Israeli Army incursion into the northern and southern ends of the Gaza Strip. Latest reports say the IDF has also succeeded in deploying forces across Gaza, effectively cutting the territory in two (blue arrows above the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps). IDF officials say that is in order to thwart movement of armed Palestinian forces from one area of fighting to another.