Israel has widened its offensive into Gaza after Palestinian militants refused to return Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped several days ago.
Palestinian terrorist thugs also executed the 18 year old Israeli settler who was kidnapped on Sunday in response to Israel’s offensive in Gaza. His body was recovered by Israeli troops.
Now, Palestinian terrorists are saying that they fired a chemical-tipped warhead into Israel, yet Israel isn’t confirming:
A spokesman for gunmen in the Gaza Strip said they had fired a rocket tipped with a chemical warhead at Israel early on Thursday
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the claim by the spokesman from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.
The group had recently claimed to possess about 20 biological warheads for the makeshift rockets commonly fired from Gaza at Israeli towns. This was the first time the group had claimed firing such a rocket.
“The al-Aqsa Brigades have fired one rocket with a chemical warhead” at southern Israel, Abu Qusai, a spokesman for the group, said in Gaza.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the army had not detected that any such rocket was fired, nor was there any report of such a weapon hitting Israel.
There are also reports that Israel has arrested over thirty Hamas cabinet members as well:
Israeli forces rounded up dozens of Palestinian Cabinet ministers and lawmakers from Hamas, increasing pressure on the Islamic militants to release a captured Israeli soldier, and witnesses said tanks moved into northern Gaza, widening Israel’s largest military operation in the year since Israel pulled out of the seaside territory.
Update: The Jerusalem Post reported three days ago that al Aksa Martyr’s Brigade claimed it had chemical/biological weapons:
The Aksa Martyrs Brigades announced on Sunday that its members have succeeded in manufacturing chemical and biological weapons.
In a leaflet distributed in the Gaza Strip, the group, which belongs to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party, said the weapons were the result of a three-year effort.
According to the statement, the first of its kind, the group has managed to manufacture and develop at least 20 different types of biological and chemical weapons.
The group said its members would not hesitate to add the new weapons to Kassam rockets that are being fired at Israeli communities almost every day. It also threatened to use the weapons against IDF soldiers if Israel carried out its threats to invade the Gaza Strip.
Update II: Hot Air points to a Haaretz report, which has more on the execution of Eliyahu Asheri:
Eighteen-year-old Eliyahu Asheri, from the settlement of Itamar, was found dead by Israel Defense Forces late Wednesday night in the A-Tira neighborhood of Ramallah.
The location of Asheri’s body was tipped off to the IDF by a Palestinian militant arrested on Tuesday. Security forces found the body buried in a field, and determined that he was shot in the head soon after he was kidnapped on Sunday.
Update III: The IDF confirms Asheri’s murder; however, there was some confusion in the original report about where his body was found. He wasn’t found in buried in a field but in a car in a field:
IDF combat engineers and Shin Bet agents, acting on intelligence, found Asheri’s body Wednesday night in an abandoned car in an open field outside of Ramallah. The youth appeared to have been shot to death, and initial findings indicated that he may have been killed as early as Sunday.
Update IV: Sky News has video of the Israel offensive (hat tip Dan Riehl).
They claimed they fired a rocket with a chemical warhead attached? Is there any other reason for Israel to just annex Palestine and destroy the current Palestinean governments, and then impose strict measures to crackdown on the militants?
This is an act of war by a group that wants nothing less than genocide..the complete obliteration of the Israel Nation (as well as all things Jewish).
If the Palestinians want a war, then they’ll get it. And much more.
I don’t see Egypt and Syria getting involved. Unless they want some, too.
They need to sweep this failed “state” into the same bin with all the other failed states, i.e. Soviet Union, East Germany, etc.
The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade: The weapons are the result of 3 years of digging in the Syrian desert.. Thank you Saddam. timelines about perfect..
A spokesman for gunmen in the Gaza Strip said they had fired a rocket tipped with a chemical warhead at Israel early on Thursday
The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the claim by the spokesman from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement.
The group had recently claimed to possess about 20 biological warheads for the makeshift rockets commonly fired from Gaza at Israeli towns. This was the first time the group had claimed firing such a rocket.
Biological or chemical? The article is a bit ambiguous. Would make sense that no evidence of a biological weapon was fired. Chemical would be notable upon impact. Just a thought….
Why did Isreali jets “buzz the tower” over Assads place? to send a message that we know where the new weapons are coming from?
Just a thought…
914
Wizbang’s Sybil
You must have done too much electric Kool Aid in your youth. Hallucinations are a severe psychological disorder.
Holding Hamas cabinet members does not ratchet up pressure on the kidnappers in the slightest, especially if the captive is already dead. However, executing cabinet members might relieve future terror pressure on Israel.
chsw
“Hallucinations are a severe pyschological disorder”
Your exhibit number 1..
chsw
You are such the civilized 21st Century combo of Bismarck & Metternich. Why doesn’t everyone in the World just defer to your expertise in Foreign Affairs?
If the terrotists are stupid enough to fire a Bio/Chem weapon into israel i would suggest they be sitting on a supercharged camel. Gonna be some race for them to get to Iran ahead of the F-16’s and missiles.
914,
The buzzed Assad’s home as a warning. Syria is known to harbor all sorts of terrorists, including Hamas.
914 posted “The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade: The weapons are the result of 3 years of digging in the Syrian desert.. Thank you Saddam. timelines about perfect..”
and chsw posted “However, executing cabinet members might relieve future terror pressure on Israel.”
And the Left is “Unhinged?”
44 not unhinged? maybe convolutedly twisted logically is more descriptive..
Geez, Mak44, what would you recommend the Israel do when those who advocate the total destruction of their state kidnap Israeli soldiers and citizens? Please give us a written demostration of just how far out of touch with reality you realy are. Mak44, you seem to know a lot about electric koolaid. Maybe you should check in to a facility that deals with your problem.
Herr General Zelsdorf
If you are willing to look beyond the Israeli propaganda stranglehold that exists in this country you would learn that the fault lies on both sides.
When as Israel has done & does hold lands captive, contrary to UN resolutions, when you forcibly remove people from their home lands & farms to expropriate their property for illegal settlements, when you take control of the Jordan waters for privileged use on your kibbutzim, when you fracture a homeland with a myriad of settlements & further expropriate land & divide families from their farms to build a wall, you will earn the undying hostility of the people to whom you did this.
This is what has been going on for the past 39 years & you have at least 2 generations of Palestinians who have known nothing other than deprivation at the hands of the Israelis.
Until there is an attempt at an equitable solution, this kind of massive retalliation against a people in one of the densest populated lands in the world will produce only more hatred.
Odd that most of the rest of the World doesn’t quite have our take on the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Of course, it was a Jewish homeland there LONG before it was a Muslim “homeland”.
But, hey, don’t let that fact slow down your anti-Semitism there, makkk.
-=Mike
44
This kind of massive retalliation against a people in one of the most densely populated places on the planet will only bring more hatred?”
More: Quantify that? more then 911? more then the Islamic cartoons i never got to laugh at? please give us something to fear here besides Bush himself..
Old makie 44 would just go over and kiss thier ass like all bootlicking liberals.
Mike “SS”
You Posted: “But, hey, don’t let that fact slow down your anti-Semitism there, makkk.”
You wield a nasty stinger, SS.
How could I be “anti-semitic?” Do you even have the slightest notion of the meaning of “anti-semitic?”
Paraphrasing SNL, “Mike SS, you’re an ignorant slut.”
Mak44 isn’t being anti-Semitic. He’s trying to point out that you can’t look at this whole situation in terms of black and white. I’m sure we can all agree that the Israel is an incredibly screwed up place and it’s been that way for a long time. There’s blood on both sides; both sides have done horrible, horrible things to one another.
Picking one side as right and one as wrong (no matter which side you pick) is an incredibly obtuse and ignorant way to look at the situation.
More importantly, it’s not solution-oriented (unless your idea of a solution is genocide) and merely adds to the cycle of war and hatred that has existed in Israel for so long.
mak44, asking a rhetorical question does not necessarily constitute a revealing statement that anybody else will understand. A fair reading of your comments on Wizbang over the weeks would lead any casual observer to conclude that you are obviously anti-semitic. But so are a lot of people, so what is the actual point you are trying to make?
Geoff, spare us your moral relativism. It does not play well. What you might do is explain WHY exactly you feel the way you do, rather than mindlessly assuming equal culpability in all conflicts just because that feels good to young liberals like yourself.
McCain
You REALLY need to stop embarrassing yourself, not to mention your namesake.
You belched: “A fair reading of your comments on Wizbang over the weeks would lead any casual observer to conclude that you are obviously anti-semitic”
Even if, as you mindlessly accuse, I were anti-semitic, that would be silly were I rabidly pro-Arab.
If you’re going to communicate on an English-speaking blogsite, then either know the meaning of words in that language or prove that you are not some illegal “wetback Irish immigrant.”
You really are just a daft twit and a shameless embarrassment to a US senator.
mak44, so many valuable words to say nothing. Since you want to play semantic games, remind me why again you are not anti-Semitic despite all of your rhetoric to the contrary? Anyone can see that you have a big problem with Jews, right?
McCain
Jews AND ARABS are semites.
Because the state of Israel has engaged in policies and behavior that diminishe that nation’s distinction between itself and the horrors inflicted by a past Nazi state, I find the policies of Israel to be appalling.
The indiscriminate Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli citizens are also equally repugnant.
I weep for the callous destruction of life resulting from belief systems that make one’s side morally right and the other’s morally wrong.
The problem is, little Senator, the world is not so black and white as those who are simplistic would have it.
And that is a BIG problem when one tries to define everything in absolutes. What you see as outrage when a suicide bomber blows up a bus of civilian passengers, some other who has had his family’s homeland expropriated because it was not customary to have officially recorded land titles in his culture and therefore someone just takes his historic family farm to build a kibbutz might just be terribly inflamatory enough to lead him to commit an act of atrocity.
We, in this country, have been thoroughly indoctrinated about the purity of the Israeli state and are absolutely blind to the excesses committed by that state.
And our outrage over suicide bombings couples nicely w/ our feelings about the Islamic world after 9/11.
Those of you on the right, cheering on the excesses of Israel, definitively illustrate Ghandi’s statement, “An eye for an eye and the world will soon be blind.”
If no one rises enough above this stupid chain of human righteousness & retribution, the path to the next century will likely be aborted well before its dawn along w/ humanity.
Where is the morality in that?
mak44,
Yeah duh about Semites, but that isn’t what we are talking about. The term anti-Semitic means a hatred of Jews specifically. You are obviously young and ill-versed in the proper, colloquial usage of our language. The rest of your comment gives you away as a typical moral-relativist liberal, who is unable to distinguish between terrorism and governance, between morality and immorality, between questionable tactics and unquestionable evil.
McCain
And your post shows you to be the inhumane self-righteous thug that you are.
mak44, you compare a suicide bomber killing innocent lives to eminant domain takeover? I’m sure that “his family’s homeland expropriated because it was not customary to have officially recorded land titles in his culture and therefore someone just takes his historic family farm to build a kibbutz” is bad, but to compare that to someone KILLING INNOCENT LIVES….where are you coming from?
I’m sure you’re one outraged over the “torture” that is espoused to happen at Abu Graib and Guantanimo Bay…while at the same time equating said “torture” with the kidnapping of civilians and military personnel, then mutilating and torturing those people in such a fashion as to leave them in pieces, often beheading them on camera to show their “warriorhood” to the world.
Mak44, I asked you for an example of your idiocy and you supply it in spades. You must be aware that Israel possesses the most powerful military force in the region. They have suffered terrorist strike after terrorist strike. No nation on earth would have withstood what that have with the patience they have shown. Anything else you have to say is BS and know it. The Palistinians wish to drive the Israelis into the sea. They want war, they get war, one they cannot win. How brilliant is that, you lop.
For what it’s worth, the IDF action around Northern Gaza is as much due to the continued Qassam rocket launches as anything else, perhaps even more.
It should also be noted that, while many, including the EU and US editorial pages, are calling for Israeli restraint, not a single Palestinian has been injured in the Israeli incursion. In fact, with the slayings of two captured Israeli citizens, an 18 year-old and a 62 year-old civilian, more Israeli blood has been spilled. Even al-Jazeera has noted this. Not so that I have seen in the American media, such as NYT, LAT, or WaPo.
This is why it is left to people like us to study, follow and contextualize events.
Thanks for the post, Kim.
MAK has demonstrated himself to be glaringly ignorant of the international law relating to sovereignty issues. He simply cannot accept that once Israel [legally] conquered the territory that waged war on it repeatedly, it became theirs to do with as they pleased — even if it is high-handed and bossy.
For high-handed, he needs to go check out what Mexico did and is doing to its southern separatists, for example. But nobody hears a word about them cuz, unfortunately, there isn’t a huge bigotry against Mexicans that rivals anti-semitism. And that’s the reason there aren’t 148 or 97 or 366 UN resolutions all wetting their panties in Mexico’s direction like there are against Israel doing what they’re entitled to do.
And MAK has yet to answer [at all, let alone adequately] the anti-semitic flavor of his land repatriation scheme. Israel needs to give the conquered territory back to the Arabs? Then Poland needs to give East Prussia back to the Germans. And France needs to give Burgundy back to the Burgundians. And Britanny back to the Britons. Et-freakin-cetera backwards through history.
Reports are indicating that the Israelis have indeed found the chemical warhead in question. Markings on the warhead read “DANGER: DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE”.
AS i mentioned in another post, mak doesn’t seem to be concerned much about the Is women and children blown up by the Palestinian terrorists. He is too busy condemning Is in its effort to protect its citizens. If one Is child is blown up, Is should allow another one to be blown up as well to gain peace. That seems to be Mak ‘s logic.
Hmmmm.
No offense but that joke is extraordinarily lame.
Yes yes yes. Water = H2O = dihydrogen monoxide.
Vastly amusing. Rip roaring laughing milk spewing humor. Please, keep the hits on rolling ’cause nobody has ever heard this before.
Because the state of Israel has engaged in policies and behavior that diminishe that nation’s distinction between itself and the horrors inflicted by a past Nazi state, I find the policies of Israel to be appalling.
Wow, where could ANYBODY get the idea that you don’t like the Jews?
And that is a BIG problem when one tries to define everything in absolutes. What you see as outrage when a suicide bomber blows up a bus of civilian passengers, some other who has had his family’s homeland expropriated because it was not customary to have officially recorded land titles in his culture and therefore someone just takes his historic family farm to build a kibbutz might just be terribly inflamatory enough to lead him to commit an act of atrocity.
…and since the Muslims stole the land from the Jews centuries earlier, the sub-human bomber deserves nothing more than mockery.
Judaism is markedly older than Islam and was founded in the Middle East.
So, in YOUR world, only Muslims are allowed to militarily take land.
But that you will actually DEFEND slaughtering innocents because you’re unhappy with policy, then you have shown a quite unpleasant light upon yourself.
-=Mike