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On Sept. 29th Members of the militant wing of Hamas fired a Qassam rocket across the Gaza border into the Israeli town of Sederot killing two small children. This is not the first time Hamas members have fired rockets into Israel, though it is one of the only times such an act has killed civilians. The Qassam strikes are largely symbolic attempts to send Israel the message that Palestinians will not acquiesce in the decades' old occupation of their land and Israel's long-term designs.
Besides being illegal and immoral since they target innocent civilians- these strikes are strategically stupid: They present Israel with the perfect pretext for carrying out its goals of grabbing more land, appropriating for itself all of the natural resources, and evicting and re-concentrating the indigenous population into isolated, overcrowded and militarily enclosed landed prisons. Sure enough, Israel has once again made cynical use of the terrible deaths of innocents by using them as an excuse to launch "Operation Days of Penitence," an open-ended massive military incursion into the northern Gaza Strip one that has likely been planned for months if not years.
Already, in just over a week, Israeli soldiers have killed nearly 100 people, many of them civilians and more than a quarter of them children. They have demolished the homes of dozens of families, torn up whole streets, wrecked businesses, uprooted trees, forced schools to close, cut off the water and electricity supplies to thousands of people, carried out air raids, extra-judicial killings and shut down the heavily fortified checkpoints within Gaza and along its borders preventing the flow of human and vehicular traffic. They have besieged the desperately overcrowded Jabalia refugee camp, a half square mile of land home to 106,000 people, taken control over the towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia in north Gaza, and are preventing international emergency aid organizations from distributing food, water and medical supplies. They intend to create a five mile "buffer zone" ostensibly to make the successful launching of Qassam rockets impossible but in effect annexing the northern Gaza Strip (including its illegal Jewish settlements) to Israel before "disengaging" itself from the Gaza Strip the latest euphemism for redeploying the Israeli Occupation Forces in and around Gaza "in exchange" for the annexation of yet more West Bank land to Israel.
In sum, Israel has created this latest humanitarian crisis in order to let an occupied, disinherited, and suffering people know who's boss and it is succeeding handily thanks to the help of its foremost champion. On Tuesday, 5 October 2005 the United States vetoed a United Nations' Security Council Resolution criticizing Israel's latest invasion of Palestinian land. Combined with the greater than usual absence of media coverage of this event, the US veto stops any further knowledge or discussion of the latest Israeli crime against Palestine.
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