BY JOSEPH KLEIN, NEWSREALBLOG—
Hamas is now deliberately targeting Israeli school children with rocket attacks against clearly marked school buses. They know no shame, yet they continue to play the victim, pleading with the international community for protection from Israel’s reprisals.
Terrorists in Gaza fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli school bus on Thursday, injuring two people, one of them very seriously. As many as 50 children had been on the bus as it made its way from a regional middle school to drop the kids at their homes. The missile ripped through the entire bus, destroying the interior. Fortunately, most students had disembarked minutes before the attack or there would have been a much more devastating tragedy.
President Shimon Peres, who was visiting the United Nations headquarters in New York, said to UN Security Council ambassadors after being informed of Hamas’ despicable attack on children:
Can the United Nations guarantee that terrorist acts will not happen? None of you would give up on the security of your country, and Israel will also defend itself.
Back on March 24th, I wrote a piece predicting that the increasing level of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel were designed to prod Israel into another operation in Gaza and exploit it in a propaganda effort to garner world support for an international response akin to the no-fly zone established over Libya.
Sadly, my prediction has come to pass. Yesterday it was reported that Arab League Chief Amr Mussa said the organisation will ask the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza, where hostilities have significantly escalated in the wake of hundreds of rocket attacks launched by Hamas and its terrorist allies into Israel.
Mussa told an emergency meeting of Arab League ambassadors that: “The Arab bloc in the United Nations has been directed to ask for the convention of the Security Council to stop the Israeli aggression on Gaza and impose a no-fly zone.”
Dozens of rockets and mortars were fired at Israel’s southern communities by Hamas in Gaza on Saturday alone. The number of rockets and mortars fired by terrorists in Gaza this year now totals 300 – more than in 2010.
Palestinian terrorists are committing crimes against humanity by deliberately trying to slaughter Israeli children in a clearly marked school bus. This follows the bombing in Jerusalem, which killed a British tourist, and the massacre of an Israeli family in the West Bank, including an infant.
But the world says nothing.
Israel has shown incredible restraint in the face of these attacks. It is trying to use a defensive shield to destroy incoming rockets from Gaza. Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system intercepted at least one Grad missile aimed at the city of Ashkelon north of Gaza, the first time the system had worked in combat. It has also responded with some limited air strikes against militant targets in Gaza, which Hamas is already whining about, while it launches even more rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.
If the attacks continue at the current pace and endanger larger and larger numbers of its civilians, including more deliberate attacks on children, Israel will have to respond far more forcefully. That is precisely what the Palestinians are counting on in order to leverage the Libyan no-fly zone precedent at the United Nations against Israel.
Hopefully, the United States will veto any attempt at a Security Council resolution to protect the terrorist aggressors from the consequences of their own evil deeds. Sadly, with this administration, one cannot be sure.
Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.