The Warped Mirror
[1] Monday Nov 19, 2012
The Hamas bombardment of Gaza
You won’t see much in the news about this, but according to the IDF – which of course monitors all rocket launches from Gaza – about 10 percent of the rockets that Hamas shoots in the hope that they will kill and maim Israeli civilians crash back into Gaza [2]. Inevitably, some of these rockets will kill and maim Gazans – after all, as we hear so often, Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
Another well-known, though not widely reported fact is that Hamas likes to fire its rockets from residential areas. Some journalists stationed in Gaza have posted tweets when they observed rockets being launched from populated areas [3] or even from the vicinity of their offices [4] or their hotels [5], and sometimes, it was also noted that Gazans were cheering these launches [6].
But by now, almost 100 Hamas rockets have crashed in Gaza. Needless to say, the damage and casualties these rockets are causing are usually blamed on Israel. That was also the case when the body of a young boy was brought to a Gaza hospital just when Egypt’s Prime Minister was visiting there last week. The dramatic images were widely distributed by the media – but ultimately, it turned out that the dead boy whom CNN presented as “a symbol of civilian casualties [7]” was the victim of a crashed Hamas rocket.
The blogger Elder of Ziyon was the first to point out [8] that the available evidence in this case didn’t justify the claim that the boy had been killed by an Israeli airstrike. In the meantime, a few media sites have corrected their related stories. However, this will probably remain an exceptional case, and most of the damage and casualties caused by crashed Hamas rockets in Gaza will likely be blamed on Israel.
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