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Today's Top News
Sustained Attacks on Gaza: 15 Dead in Two Days
Second Day of Increased Violence Sees More Israeli Airstrikes
Up to 15 are now dead in what is said to be the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian flare-up in more than three years. Israeli strikes began on Friday when an air raid killed Zohair al-Qaisi, the secretary general of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in Gaza.
Palestinian mourn over the body of Hazem Kerekeaa in the al-Shifa hospital morgue on March 9, 2012. (AFP/Getty)
Al-Jazeera reports:
At least 14 Palestinians have been killed and a dozen others wounded, including children, in a series of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip, medical sources have said.
On Saturday an Israeli drone targetted a motorbike in Khan Younis, south of Gaza city, killing one person.
The airstrike late on Friday struck down three Palestinians after an apache fired rockets that hit a house and a car, medics told Al Jazeera.
An earlier strike targeted the leader of Popular Resistance Committees, Zuhair Al-Qaissi, and his military escort Mahmoud Al-Hannani, a Palestinian prisoner released from Israeli jails five years ago.
Witnesses said Israeli drones were seen hovering above just moments before al-Qaissi's vehicle burst into flames. The intensity of the blast was so fierce that al-Qaissi's head detached as a result, they said.
Islamic Jihad said that the three of those killed belonged to its military wing, the Al-Quds Brigades, looking to end Israel’s occupation of annexed Palestinian lands.
The Al Quds Brigades, part of Islamic Jihad group, said that strikes on the east side of the city had killed its members Obeid al-Gharabli, Mohammed Harara, Hazem Qoureqa and Shadi Seqali. It said that another two of its members, Fayeq Saad and Moatasem Hajaj, were also killed in other strikes.
In addition to the high profile strike, Israeli war jets carried out series of attacks at empty military training camps all over Gaza Strip.
The Israeli attacks came after Palestinians fired dozens of rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel, wounding four people, one seriously, Israeli military sources claimed.
***
Agence France-Presse reports:
A new Israeli air strike killed a man in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday and left a second man clinically dead, Palestinian medical officials said.
They said that the two were hit while riding a motorcycle in the town of Khan Yunis.
Medics said the attack brought to 14 the number of Palestinians killed in 24 hours of cross-border violence in which Israeli aircraft pounded Gaza and Palestinian militants fired at least 70 rockets and mortar rounds into the Jewish state.
It was the deadliest flare-up in more than three years.
The Israeli military said earlier the air force carried out attacks on a range of targets, including a militant leader.
At least 20 Palestinians were wounded in the string of Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Friday and Saturday, Palestinian medics said.
The Palestinian barrage on Israel, which started on Friday morning, injured four people, one of them seriously, Israeli military sources said.
***
Reuters reports:
Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, blamed Israel for the violence and called for Western intervention to try and halt any further escalation which threatened to complicate rife tensions along the restive Israeli-Gaza frontier and their common border with Egypt.
"This Israeli escalation in Gaza is completely condemned and we urge the world community, and the Quartet (of Middle East power brokers), especially the United States, to put enough pressure on Israeli government to stop this escalation," Rdainah told Reuters television.
After weeks of relative calm, violence along the Israeli-Gaza frontier escalated on Friday when Israel blew up a car in Gaza City, killing two militant leaders. [...]
The sounds of explosions and rocket fire reverberated across coastal Gaza and parts of southern Israel early on Saturday. Some half a million people were urged to remain indoors and keep bomb shelters open, and public events were cancelled.
# # #
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80 Comments so far
Show AllThe Empire of the 1% sends the Israeli branch of the MIC against the 99% on motorbikes (using a drone to kill someone on a motorbike; coming to a city near you soon). Complete lunacy.
How many kids did they murder this time? When the US kills kids at least the generals come out with crocodile tears, "We regret the loss of innocent lives" or something like that. The Israelis take delight in killing and terrorizing Palestinian children. Terrorists with modern machines of terror, brought to you by the 1%.
Everybody knows that both sides have been killing each other for thousands of years.
Israel refuses to talk borders and expansion is the zionist plan in case you haven’t learned.
It is obvious to me Israel is retaliating because Obama would not obey their demand to start bombing Iran. Iran serves as a distraction of Israeli expansion through ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/03/201239235251961119.html
The death toll is rising and Israel is still bombing Gaza now.
J folk intel
Also since Abraham made his first son Ishmael an outcast because Ishmael's mother was Abraham’s Slave, so the Moslems believe they are also of the original foreign tribe. We can discuss myths of history or which interpretation is the truth but everybody acts on what they believe and Netanyahoo believes in the Biblical tale of Abraham and is puzzled why Moslems think they are being treated like slaves when the Bible tells why and the Jewish law that you are not really a Jew unless your mother is, not your father. And I should know the prejudice of that because of the crap my Jewish Mom went through because she married my Dad, a good man raised Methodist.
Maybe Jesus had it easy compared to the Wars of today.
Whatever you believe I am not being sarcastic about Everybody knows that both sides have been killing each other for thousands of years and I might add sometimes even killing their own side whatever you want to call which side is which.
But lets get back on topic today whatever Schlomo thinks.
No Israel makes these CLAIMS. The Israeli army likes to make a lot of progagandistic claims about it being the "most moral army". Just because it keeps repeating this propaganda many times, does not make it true.
One strongly suspects that the latter will prevail over the former as Obama is certainly offering little hope that the United States will, as TomC. notes above, send in its military to protect the Palestinians. Perhaps Obama feels that such an action would not keep him in the good graces of the Israel lobby.
Really, somebody has somebodies back somewhere and Obama has already promised before the world that it’s not Palestine’s.
Does anyone actually believe ANY claims made by Israeli military sources? "By way of deception thou shall do war." -- official Mossad motto
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, THE TRUTH IS THE GREATEST ENEMY OF THE STATE.”
"Israel has the right to defend itself," is Obama-speak for this.
"The guy wounded me by saying I was mean - of course that gave me the right to wipe out him and his family," as one Israeli said to his USAn friend...
Free Gaza. BDS against Israel.
As far as I know, the Palestinians didn't purposefully creat the nazi state of Israel just to have something to attack!
Blame the victim all you want. But just because the Palestinians had lots of neat stuff, doesn't give Israel the "right" to steal it.
I'll bet you blame women when they get raped too!
You're the kind of person that says, "If you fight back against me for raping you, you'll just make it worse!"
Absolutely pathetic.
The only people who believe anything that the Israeli military says are zionist functionaries..
I would like to thik that these IDF drones would realize that their attempts to sway opinions on this site are a losing proposition and that dealing in the truth is a more sensible - let alone moral - option.
q
I would even guess that many of the Palestinain prisoners released had location chips implanted in them for future hits.
J folk intel
Ah doubt's yer British! If you were, you woudn't be spouting this balderdash!
You're an obvious practitioner of the Israeli propaganda art of Hasbara. You learn it at temple, every Saturday, don't you?
Israelis murder Palestinians by drone, then, when the Palestinians offer a weak response in the form of several innacurate and poorly armed "rockets" (more like bottle-rockets), the Jews come back and bomb the hell out of man, woman and child! Oh, yer a fine lot, you are!
AFP: "and mortar rounds into the Jewish state."
Corporate media's referring to Israel simply as a Jewish state, without regard to the 25% non-Jewish living in Israel of which 20% are Arab, is occurring more frequently. It is a propaganda campaign to ethnically cleanse from discussion the Arabs living in Israel.
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: October 24, 2010 "JERUSALEM — The more stridently Israel insists on Palestinian recognition of it as the nation-state of the Jewish people, the more adamantly the Palestinian leadership seems to refuse." "As a result, some senior Israeli officials are beginning to question the wisdom of the policy of their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made recognition of the legitimacy of the Jewish nation-state a prerequisite for any final agreement with the Palestinians." [...] “Of course we are a Jewish state,” Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, told an audience attending a conference on the Future of the Jewish People last week, organized by the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem." End of Excerpt from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/world/middleeast/25israel.html Now this automatically calls into question the legitamacy of the frequent use of the term, "the only democracy in the middle east" because a state cannot be a true democracy when it values some citizens over others and affords them a differing rights set.