Posted on 05/14/2004 6:40:18 PM PDT by Libloather
Israel Tries to Kill Islamic Jihad Chief in Gaza
39 minutes ago
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israel tried to assassinate the top leader of the militant Palestinian group Islamic Jihad in a missile strike in Gaza City on Saturday in apparent retaliation for the killing of 13 soldiers this week.
Islamic Jihad officials said four missiles hit a building housing Mohammed al-Hindi's office but that he safely fled the area. The attempt on his life drew a vow from his followers of an "earthquake-like" revenge attacks against the Jewish state.
The air raid followed Israel's assassinations of the two senior Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip in recent weeks and threats to keep striking at the militants' upper echelons based in the coastal territory.
The missile barrage came hours after two Israeli soldiers were killed by Hamas militants in a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip in the latest in a series of ambushes that has dealt the Middle East's mightiest army its worst blow in two years.
Polls showed deepening support in Israel for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout plan, now stalled by hard-liners in his own rightist party, as this week's losses reminded Israelis of the high cost of the hard-to-defend Gaza settlements.
The Gaza violence has also raised concern among Israeli military planners that Palestinians have adopted the tactics of Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas that eventually ended Israel's occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Islamic groups sworn to Israel's destruction, are the driving force behind a campaign of suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis during three and a half years of conflict.
Hamas claimed responsibility for killing six soldiers in a troop carrier on Tuesday during a raid in Gaza City, and Islamic Jihad said it was behind a similar bombing that killed five servicemen on Wednesday.
Israel killed 28 Palestinians, including civilians, during four days of fierce fighting in Gaza.
VOW OF REVENGE
"We will respond to the cowardly attempt on the life of our leader by punishing the Zionist enemies," Islamic Jihad official Khader Habib told Reuters. "There will be an earthquake-like response that will shatter the Zionist entity."
Helicopters first struck an Islamic studies center where al-Hindi worked and then hit the building of a Jihad-linked group that supports families of Palestinians who have killed or been killed in the conflict with Israel, witnesses said.
Islamic Jihad officials had originally said al-Hindi's home had been targeted, but later said they had been mistaken.
Medics said at least 13 people were wounded in the air strikes. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.
On Friday, militants shot dead two soldiers in Rafah while troops were destroying buildings along a nearby Gaza-Egypt border corridor that Israel controls and plans to widen by demolishing homes.
An army statement said a soldier had helped a Palestinian woman carry bags into her apartment and was shot dead by snipers outside the building. When a rescue team arrived, militants shot at them as well, killing another soldier.
Israeli political sources had said dozens or even hundreds of Palestinian homes on the edge of the "Philadelphi" buffer zone would be razed in coming days in a bid to deny cover to militants who attack troops daily.
The new plan seemed aimed at countering critics who have accused the army of leaving its forces vulnerable in the border buffer zone, which runs six miles and is now 250 yards wide in some places.
Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat condemned the corridor's expansion as being in "total contradiction" to what Sharon had presented as "disengagement" from points of conflict.
They've got officials? Can't you just see these jokers running the Human Rights Department at the UN...
Drew an "eathquake-like" dump in his underwear too.
What did you think their last job was???
Running the Human Rights Department at the UN...
then they got PROMOTED.
I think that until the rest of the world lets Isreal deal with there own problems in a way that they see fit without interference from the rest of the world and just the support of the rest of the cristian world the Islamic/muslim problem will continue to exist. FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE. enuf said they are terrorists that care not who they kill.
Go get them their snakes and cut off their head, Israel.
LOL
Dang it. They need to use more missiles from now on. A couple on the neighbors would be good too. :-)
Tough luck, IDF. Get back on the horse, chaverim.
Drat -- now I wish I had used "Zionist Entity" as my screen name. It's got such panache.
Darn those "hard-liners" in Israel who want to prevent a nuclear attack from iran and cold-blooded executions of pregnant women and their children. Darn them!
(and then arm them heavily)
There is another thread on this site about a poll that shows Bush is losing ground as support for the war is dropping. No kidding! The reason is that people are fed up with this half-assed Korea/Vietnam style of war fighting that will lead to certain defeat. Why on earth do our leaders insist on learning nothing from the past but bad habits, failed strategies, and losing tactics?
I can't believe that we're over three years into the "Intifada" and the Israelis haven't yet swept through the Gaza and West Bank cesspools from door to door to clean out the mad Moslem murderers that are the Palestinians. How is it possible that Arafat is still alive? And the US is no better! Its a year down the road from the Iraqi invasion and we still haven't lowered the boom on the killers of our soldiers and civilians. Why haven't we leveled Fallujah? Who the hell cares whether we whack a bunch of killers in some Mosques when the lives of our own people are at stake?
This kind of confused crap is why Bush can't get his poll numbers up past 45%. The guy has a knack for pissing off his natural allies by failing to do what is necessary to successfully prosecute this war in ill-conceived attempts to appease and mollify groups and peoples who wouldn't support him on a bet! He better tell his advisors to drop dead and do what is right, because at this rate it won't matter anyway. He'll lose the election!
"Can't you just see these jokers running the Human Rights Department at the UN..."
Yes.
My suggestion is line up a bunch of 105's and 155 guns and do a "recon by fire" before entering the area.
If at first you don't succeed, try and try again.
I'm assuming those are guns on a plane? I'm totally clueless; however, it sounds perfectly wicked and wonderful. :-) So, I'll defer to your knowledge. All I want is body count. LOL
The Israelis need to hit the Islamofascist parades with cluster-munitions. The next time Israel succeeds in killing a leader of one of those Palestinian terrorist groups(Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.) there will inevitably be a retaliation call and a parading of the late leader's corpse by hooded members of the terrorist groups. At that parade the Israelis should drop every damn kind of bomb they have.
Vietnamization of the war, of course. And that's what the media's been playing since 9/11, which now they don't mention. In the days of Rome and Carthage, they didn't have mass media biased coverage to screw up the works. They just sent the army over to defeat Carthage and sow the ground with salt. I fear, however, that such tactics won't even be on the table today, not when we've already cringed with horror about imprisoned terrorists subjected to humiliation and denied sleep. So, what would it take for us to take the gloves off and smash the enemy once and for all? A nuclear attack on American soil? I'll bet even if they employed poison gas, ebola, any of a half dozen toxins that slaughtered say, a hundred thousand Americans, we'd still worry about finding the 'killers' and 'bringing them to justice'. (If anyone in the administration ever comes out with that idiotic statement again, they should be fired. This is war, not an episode of Law and Order.) At some point, while we still have the capability, we'll have to break heads big time. It is, unfortunately, the only way to get their attention.
I hate to say this, but so many people in this country are such absolute assholes (read Democrats) that I don't believe we would know how to act even if a nuclear bomb was detonated in some American city. We'd continue to run around in circles with our fingers up our asses.
I have decided that the future of this country is not positive. Here we are in the middle of a shooting war for very survival and STILL we have an irredeemably lost half of our own people who are guilty of nothing less than outright treason. How can this go on?
I am planning to extricate myself and all of my relatives from living in high-density urban population centers and moving to isolated rural areas, much like the monks created self-sustaining communities in the monasteries of old. From now on, you do no want to be in any area that mad Moslem murderers consider high value targets. The killing has just started, and the people of this country are so f**king stupid that its evident to me that we have lost the ability to defend ourselves against an implacable enemy. It's already over.
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