DTN News: Israeli Tank Fire Kills Two Palestinians

DTN News: Israeli Tank Fire Kills Two Palestinians *Source: DTN News / Int'l Media

(NSI News Source Info) BEIRUT, Lebanon - September 21, 2009: Israeli tank fire has killed two Palestinian men in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources say, with one of them identified as an Islamist militant. Sunday's shelling in eastern Gaza came hours after the army said several rockets were fired at the Jewish state from the Islamist Hamas-ruled coastal enclave, without causing casualties or damage. (Image: Israeli tanks patrolling near Gaza's border) Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing, identified one of the dead men as one of its members. Medical sources said the other was a 25-year-old but could not specify if he was a militant. Two other Palestinians were wounded in the shelling, they said. Soldiers spotted Palestinian militants transporting booby-trapped bombs near the security fence with Israel and opened up with tank fire, hitting the suspects, Israeli military sources said. According to Israeli state radio, two rockets exploded in Israel on Sunday morning without causing injuries or damage, although the army could not confirm the number of devices. In late December, Israel launched a deadly offensive against Hamas to stop rocket fire from Gaza. Since then, more than 200 rockets and mortar rounds have slammed into Israel from the Palestinian territory, the army says.

The army claimed that Hamas had, hours before, launched an unspecified number of rockets into Israel causing no casualties. The developments came as the coastal sliver suffers under a wholesale blockade which Israel has imposed since 2007 when Hamas took over as the area's democratically-elected ruler.

Italian soldiers serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) secure an area near the site from which rockets were fired into Israel, in the southern Lebanese village of Qlaileh. Several rockets fired from southern Lebanon slammed into Israel triggering retaliatory artillery fire across the border, the Israeli military said. UNIFIL said it had no report of casualties on either side.

The blockade continued through the three-week-long Israeli attacks on Gaza in late December and early January, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians

Terrorist Arsenal Of 50,000 Rockets Aimed At Israel

Terrorist Arsenal Of 50,000 Rockets Aimed At Israel

by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu ARUTZ SHEVA Israel National News

(NSI News Source Info) March 16, 2009: Hamas and Hizbullah terrorists have amassed an arsenal of 50,000 rockets aimed at Israel, United Press International (UPI) has reported. Israel still has no defense against the threat, and the government’s highly touted Iron Dome short-range missile defense system is far from being in operation and may not even be practical. “Even if Iron Dome works perfectly, it is never going to have the firepower in interceptors to credibly intercept most, let alone all,” of the rockets, according to the UPI report. Hizbullah has amassed far more rockets than it possessed before the Second Lebanon War in 2006, despite Israel’s agreeing to a ceasefire on the condition that United Nations Interim Forces (UNIFIL) would prevent arms smuggling into Lebanon. In the south, Hamas continues to smuggle weapons into Gaza despite a similar ceasefire ageement, supposedly conditioned on a cessation of arms smuggling, that the Olmert administration announced when concluding Operation Cast Lead in mid-January. Defense Minister Ehud Barak promised two years ago that the Iron Dome short-range missile defense system, along with other systems, would protect Israel from 90 percent of missile attacks, although mortar shells would continue to explode in Israel without interception. Barak announced in October 2007 that the Iron Dome was near completion and would be in place by 2010. He also has stated that its deployment is a precondition for handing over part of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. Last year, officials admitted that the Iron Dome system would not be effective against Kassam rockets fired from less than two miles, meaning that it had no solution for tens of thousands of residents in the Gaza Belt communities, including Sderot. State Comptroller and Ombudsman Micha Lindenstrauss’s recent report of his investigation of the timetable of the Iron Dome system “documented endless delays, indecision, go-it-alone chaotic planning and sheer bureaucratic incompetence,” in the words of UPI reporter Martin Sieff.