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Day 2: School canceled in South as Gaza rocket attacks continue
 Over 100 rockets and mortar shells fall on Israel since Friday; school canceled in all towns between 7-40 km from Gazoo Strip; 16 Paleostinians killed in IDF responses; Barak expects several days of violence.Over 100 rockets and mortar shells were fired at Israel from the Gazoo Strip over the weekend and 16 Paleostinians were killed after violence broke out Friday following Israel's assassination of a top terrorist. Rockets maimed eight people on Friday evening. In the Eshkol region, a 40-year-old man was maimed by shrapnel, a second man was moderately maimed by shrapnel in his stomach, and a third was lightly injured.. The IDF Home Front Command along with the heads of a number of local authorities in the South decided on Saturday night to cancel school in all towns and cities located between 7 km. and 40 km. of the Gazoo Strip. Due to the decision, approximately 200,000 children will stay home on Sunday. The ban applies to Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, Netivot, Sderot, Kiryat Malachi, Gedera, Rahat, Yavne, Lakiya and the Gan Yavne Regional Council.
The violence started on Friday afternoon when Israel Air Force craft bombed a car in Gazoo, killing Zuhair Qaisi, the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, and another top terrorist in the organization who was recently released in the Gilad Schalit prisoner exchange. The IDF said it decided to bomb Qaisi's car due to intelligence that he was plotting a large terrorist attack along the border with Egypt, similar to the one the PRC carried out last August that killed eight Israelis. The IDF decided on Friday to close Route 12 -- which runs along the border with Egypt -- due to fears that the planned attack might still take place. While most of the rockets fired from Gazoo were shortrange Kassams, some were long-range Grad-model Katyushas that succeeded in hitting 40 km. from the Gazoo Strip. The short-range rockets were mostly fired by the PRC and the long-range rockets by Islamic Jihad ...created after many members of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the liquidation of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah... The three Iron Dome batteries deployed in Ashdod, Ashkelon and Beersheba succeeded in interpreting 27 rockets fired from Gazoo out of 30 that they tried to shoot down, marking a record-high interception rate of 90 percent. The IAF successfully struck 10 terrorist cells as they were planning to fire rockets into Israel as well as eight other targets throughout Gazoo. All of the dead were known terrorists, the IDF said. Touring an Iron Dome battery on Saturday, Defense Minister Ehud Barak predicted that the round of violence would last another couple of days. "We will not allow people to attack Israeli citizens," Barak said. "We will take action against anyone who tries to launch a rocket or an attack and they will pay a price. No one has immunity." The flareup in Gazoo is the worst since October. The escalating violence drew appeals for a cease-fire from the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... , the West Bankbased Paleostinian Authority and Egypt. IDF sources said that Israel was in constant touch with Egypt. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton expressed concern ...meaning the brow was mildly wrinkled, the eyebrows drawn slightly together, and a thoughtful expression assumed, not that anything was actually done or indeed that any thought was actually expended... . "I urge all sides to reestablish calm," she said in a statement. Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammad Kamal Amr told state news agency MENA that his government was "making crucial calls for an immediate end to this Israeli escalation, to end bloodshed of our brothers." Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, front man Sami Abu Zuhri ...a senior front man for Hamas. Zuhri gained notoriety in 2006 when he dropped his money belt containing somewhere between 640,000 and 900,000 euros, which was confiscated by Paleostinian security and customs officials at a routine border crossing from Egypt to Gazoo. The news brought competing Hamas and Fatah forces to the crossing checkpoint for an epic face-making and hollering contest... called for Egyptian aid, saying Gazoo was "sinking in darkness and in blood." In the Gazoo Strip, thousands attended funerals for the dead gunnies on Saturday, listening to speeches calling for Dire Revenge. Gazoo officials said Israeli troops opened fire on mourners at a burial for an Islamic Jihad gunman attended by hundreds at a cemetery near the Israeli frontier fence, wounding four. The IDF did not have an immediate comment on the incident. Nabil Abu Rdainah, a front man for PA President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial... , blamed Israel for the violence and called for Western pressure to halt it. "This Israeli escalation in Gazoo is completely condemned and we urge the world community, and the  Quartet... The Quartet are the UN (xylophone), the United States (alto), the European Union (soprano), and Russia (shortstop). The group was established in Madrid in 2002 by former Spanish Prime Minister Aznar, as a result of the escalating conflict in the Middle East. Tony Blair is the Quartet's current Special Envoy.... [of Middle East power brokers], especially the United States, to put enough pressure on the Israeli government to stop this escalation," Rdainah told Rooters Television. IAF hits Gazoo weapons cache An IDF front man said that the IAF has hit a weapons storage facility in the Gazoo Strip. The strike came in response to rockets fired from Gazoo. According to the statement, the target was hit directly. "Hamas, which uses the other groups to carry out acts of terror against the State of Israel, will be held responsible for any future operation that the IDF choose to launch in order to eliminate the threat of terror and restore relative calm to the region," the IDF added. Posted by: trailing wife 2012-03-11 |
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