Israel Update for September 2010

At least ten Israelis, five of them policemen, were wounded during the prolonged clashes, which quickly spread to other Arab neighborhoods. Around fifteen Palestinians were also injured, most of them active rioters. One Israeli man was stabbed in the back during the unrest. Several police and private cars were torched or smashed, along with a number of city buses. Thick smoke covered the Temple Mount complex and the nearby Mount of Olives for much of the day. Dozens of Palestinians hurled stones and metal objects upon thousands of Jewish worshipers gathered for pre-Feast of Tabernacles prayers at the Western Wall. Israeli riot police then rushed to the contested holy site, clashing with Palestinian stone throwers while pushing them back from above the hallowed Western Wall.

The intense violence began when an armed Israeli security guard, who works at the City of David Jewish enclave, stopped at an intersection in Silwan as he was driving to a private Jewish home before dawn. He was quickly surrounded by a group of local Palestinians men wielding rocks, including 32 year old Sami Sirhan, a known activist who has been involved in a series of clashes with Jews in the area. Police reports said the incident appeared to be a deliberately staged ambush. The guard told police investigators he pulled out his gun and attempted to escape the area, shooting first in the air and then at Sirhan after the men surrounding his car refused to move back. Sirhan was instantly killed. His subsequent funeral later in the day sparked off the worst rioting in the city since the Al Aksa uprising ended in 2004. Some media reports said he was a member of the large Sirhan family clan which spawned Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who assassinated US presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968.

Israeli police and paramilitary forces were quickly reinforced in the city. Officials pledged to do everything possible to keep the incident localized, and to prevent another full blown Palestinian attrition war from breaking out. However sporadic clashes have been continuing in the city every day since, with occasional gunfire cutting through the air. A Jewish apartment was firebombed in the mixed Abu Tor neighborhood on September 26. While PA leaders publicly urged calm, some Israeli critics charged their purported attempts to maintain the peace were thin at best. Hamas and its allies continued to urge Palestinians to use "all means possible to resist Zionist occupation of Palestinian land."

Flood Of Fire

Weeks before the Jerusalem riots, the Hamas terrorist group had already launched its programme, dubbed Flood of Fire, to oppose renewed Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations by means of violent unprovoked attacks upon Israeli civilians. Two days before the elaborate early August White House ceremony took place that formally inaugurated the US-mediated talks, four Israeli civilians were brutally slaughtered in a Hamas ambush near Judaism's second holiest city on earth, Hebron. The following evening, Hamas terrorists attempted to kill two more Israeli male civilians who were driving northeast of Ramallah. Although the men survived the attack, one was seriously wounded. On September 26, a young Jewish couple was shot and seriously wounded in the same area as the first attack near Hebron, but this time both victims survived. As before, the wife was nine months pregnant, but thankfully this time the baby was born alive, delivered by caesarian section

Many Israeli news reports pointed out that the number of Jewish victims in the initial assault should have read five, since a 40 year old mother of six who was due to deliver her seventh child this month was among the dead. Her husband, driving their family car, was also slain, leaving their six other children instantly orphaned. Two younger passengers in the back seat, a man and a woman, were also killed. They were acquaintances of the car owner who was simply giving them rides to their homes in the Jewish community of Beit Haggai after picking them up at a hitchhiking outpost.

The sheer brutality of the armed assault was demonstrated by the fact that after shooting their victims from a passing car, the Muslim terrorists jumped out and pummeled their bodies with bullets at point blank range to make sure they were all dead, at which time they would have realized that one of the women was clearly pregnant with child. This did not stop them from riddling her swollen belly with bullets.

Kill All The Jews

The Hamas group took full responsibility for the atrocious attack, the worst terrorist incident in several years. A Hamas statement hailed the murderous assault as a "heroic operation" that would be repeated many times in the future. The statement claimed it was not just timed to coincide with the Washington 'peace summit,' but was "a continuation of the jihad and resistance project against the Zionist enemy until the liberation of the land."

Although PA leader Abbas echoed President Barrack Obama in denouncing both attacks during his Washington summit comments, he used the very same language as the Hamas statement, calling them "operations." And Abbas mainly decried the violent assaults because they might affect the renewed peace process, not because they had taken innocent Jewish lives, including an unborn baby. PA security forces did at least arrest some leading Hamas activists in the Hebron area, a move denounced by the radical Islamic group which put out a threatening statement saying, "The hands that have reached the heart of the occupier can reach you too."

Israeli army officials indicated that the three terror attacks may have been ordered by Iran and/or Syria, who actively support the radical Muslim group with money and arms. They said army intelligence had detected increased text communications prior to the attacks, without specifying what that entailed.

Palestinian rockets and mortar shells were fired on many days during September at various Israeli targets around the Gaza Strip, mostly civilian centres. Grad missiles landed on several occasions either inside or on the outskirts of the large city of Ashkelon, just a few miles north of the Hamas-ruled coastal zone. Others struck near the port of Ashdod, which is halfway between Gaza and metropolitan Tel Aviv. One shell exploded between two kindergartens in an Israeli kibbutz community thirty minutes prior to the scheduled arrival of youngsters for their daily activities.

The discovery of phosphorous inside some of the mortar shells was particularly worrisome since it can badly burn skin and lead to permanent nerve damage. Hamas accused Israel of dropping phosphorous bombs on Palestinian civilian zones during the Cast Iron war nearly two years ago. The IDF countered that traces of the element found on the ground came from flares exploded high above in the air, designed to light up the night sky during ground combat engagements.

A popular new film produced in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip vividly illustrates the Hamas vow to wage jihad until Israel is totally destroyed. Titled, The Great Liberation, it shows Palestinians blowing up central Israeli government and economic institutions, including the Bank of Israel in Jerusalem and the nearby Supreme Court building. The movie later pictures jubuliant Palestinian forces 'liberating' Tel Aviv from Israeli Zionist rule. Palestinian national flags are shown flying over the city's buildings as Arabs drive through the streets celebrating their 'triumph.'