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| Israeli Fire Kills 31 in Gaza as Hamas Warns Foreign Airlines, Declares Truce Talks Over | ||
| 2014-08-21 | ||
| [AnNahar] Thirty-one Paleostinians have been killed and at least 120 maimed by Israeli strikes across Gazoo since the collapse of a temporary truce, the emergency services said Wednesday. And the armed wing of Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, warned foreign airlines against flying into Tel Aviv, threatening to step up its six-week conflict with Israel and declaring truce talks in Cairo over. "We are warning international airlines and press them to stop flying into Ben Gurion airport from 6 am (0300 GMT) Thursday," said Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades front man Abu Obeida in a televised speech. Dressed in military fatigues with his face wrapped in a red and white chequered headscarf, he said Hamas was abandoning efforts to negotiate a durable ceasefire with Israel at Egyptian-brokered talks. "We are calling on the Paleostinian delegation to withdraw immediately from Cairo and not to return," said Abu Obeida in a speech broadcast on Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV channel. "There will be no return to talks after today and any move in this direction will never achieve any result," he added. "The enemy lost a golden chance to reach a ceasefire with limited demands, for which it will pay after today." And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the leaders of "terrorist organizations" are legitimate targets and warned that "no one is immune from our fire". "Our policy is the following: if Hamas fires, we will hit back with more force and if they don't understand today, they will understand tomorrow and if not tomorrow then after tomorrow," Netanyahu said. The wife and seven-month-old son of the Qassam Brigades' commander Mohammed Deif were killed in an Israeli air strike on a building in Gazoo City late Tuesday, but Hamas said Deif was still alive. "The Zionist enemy failed to assassinate general commander Abu Khaled," said the front man, using Deif's nom de guerre. Also among those killed on Wednesday were three women, one of them heavily pregnant, and nine children. That number includes the woman's unborn baby, whom medics tried but ultimately failed to save, he said. Two cousins, Mohammed al-Abeet, 16, and Saher al-Abeet, 11, were killed in an air strike on a house in Deir al-Balah in central Gazoo, Qudra said. The violence resumed at around 1300 GMT on Tuesday when three rockets struck southern Israel with the air force hitting back with strikes which continued through the night and into Wednesday. The first deadly strike killed Deif's second wife, Widad, 27, and his seven-month-old son Ali. Rescue workers on Wednesday also pulled the bodies of a 48-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy from the rubble, Qudra said. Shortly before dawn, an air strike hit a home in Deir al-Balah in central Gazoo, killing eight, among them the pregnant woman, her unborn baby, three children and three men. Later in the morning, another child, aged four, was killed along with a man in his 20s in a strike on Zeitun in southern Gazoo City, Qudra said. Four other men were killed in three separate strikes, two of whom died when a missile hit their cycle of violence in the northern town of Beit Lahiya. At their funeral, both were wrapped in green Hamas flags, indicating they were holy warriors. Separately a man also died of injuries sustained earlier in the conflict, which erupted on July 8. At least 2,049 Paleostinians and 67 people on the Israeli side have now been killed since the conflict began on July 8,
Army figures show that since the truce collapsed, Gazoo Death Eaters have fired 137 rockets over the border, of which 94 hit southern and central Israel while another 24 were shot down. In the same period, the army hit 92 targets across Gazoo, a spokeswoman said. On the Israeli side, 67 people have died, including 64 soldiers killed in combat and three civilians killed by rocket fire - one of them a Thai national. The army says five of the soldiers were killed by "friendly fire". The U.N. says around three-quarters of the victims in Gazoo are civilians.
Egyptian mediators scrambled for weeks to push the warring sides to agree a decisive end to the bloodshed, but their latest attempts collapsed on Tuesday when the fighting resumed. Several thousand angry mourners joined the funeral procession for Deif's 27-year-old wife and seven-month-old son in the Jabaliya refugee camp, shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) and demanding Dire Revenge™. Deif heads Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, which vowed to open the "gates of hell" on Israel in retaliation for the killings. Shortly after the funeral, Hamas said Deif was alive and directing operations against Israel. "Those living around the Gazoo border will not return home until Mohammed Deif decides," Hamas front man Sami Abu Zuhri ...a senior spokesman 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 Gaza. The news brought competing Hamas and Fatah forces to the crossing checkpoint for an epic face-making and hollering contest... said. "Abu Khaled is still alive and leading the military operation," a source close to the Islamist movement told AFP, using Deif's nom-de-guerre. Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman agreed that Hamas was dictating the pace of the conflict, calling for military action to overpower the movement. "This policy of 'quiet for quiet' effectively means that Hamas is the initiator and the one deciding when, where and how to shoot at Israeli citizens," he wrote on his Facebook page. "Hamas is controlling the height of the flames and chooses when to disturb life for people in Israel," he said. "There is no other option other than decisive action with one meaning - toppling Hamas." The mourners, firing Kalashnikovs, buried Widad and her son Ali, who died alongside another woman and a teenager when a missile slammed into a six-storey building in Gazoo City late on Tuesday. It was the first deadly air strike August 10. Their bodies were wrapped in green Hamas flags and they were carried to the cemetery with the bodies of two men killed in a strike on a cycle of violence, both presumed Hamas holy warriors. Grief-stricken, Widad's father Mustafa Harb Asfura carried his tiny grandson into the mosque then to the cemetery, his body wrapped in a white sheet exposing his white face with an injury to the eye. "My daughter knew she would die a martyr when she decided to marry Mohammed Deif," he told AFP. In Israel, Interior Minister Gideon Saar justified the attack, calling Deif -- who has escaped five previous liquidation attempts -- a legitimate target. "Mohammed Deif deserves to die just like (the late al-Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden. He is an arch murderer and as long as we have an opportunity we will try to kill him," Saar told army radio. | ||
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 The UN may have the ability to invent lies but generally outsources the work to lower paid foreign workers. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2014-08-21 08:18 |
| #1 the UN is getting its information from Hamas, and Hamas has been shown to lie about it. IMO, the UN is perfectly able to invent lies on their own. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2014-08-21 02:24 |