Hamas Uses Children, UN, Press As Human Shields In Gaza

UN "peacekeeping" troops salute Islamic terrorists.

By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency

Jerusalem --- January 15, 2009...... Hamas has again used children, the UN and the press as human shields in Gaza.

Hamas fired several rounds of mortar rockets at Israel Defense Forces from within and around the United Nations headquarters building in Gaza. The IDF responded with artillery fire killing several Hamas terrorists and wounding several civilians who they were hiding behind.

The UN compound and a nearby warehouse were set on fire.

Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the IDF had fired in self defense at the U.N. compound after Hamas terrorists opened fire from the location.

"It is absolutely true that the IDF was attacked from that place, but the consequences are very sad and we apologize for it," he said. "I don't think it should have happened and I'm very sorry."

A senior Israel IDF officer had also said that Israel hit the compound after coming under fire from Palestinian terrorists.

In fierce fighting taking place today, Hamas officials confirmed that an Israel airstrike killed the Hamas interior minister, who oversaw thousands of security agents in the Gaza Strip.

The IDF confirmed the airstrike. Hamas television said that Hamas Interior Minister Said Siam was killed in a strike that flattened a home in Gaza City. A top aide, Siam's brother and his brother's family were also killed.

Siam is considered to be among Hamas' top five leaders in Gaza.

One IDF officer told Sky News: "Hamas will most likely claim victory after this operation is over, but they know that we know that they have a problem."

Iran has threatened to stop all aid and weapons to Hamas if they stop fighting. Hamas has responded by speaking with Egypt hoping that they could arrange a cease-fire before more Hamas leadership dies in fighting.

"If Hamas terrorists in Mexico and Canada started to fire rockets and missiles at US cities, how would the US respond, how would any nation respond in defending their citizens?"

In Israel's fight to defend itself against Hamas terror attacks against civilian populations, Israel is faced with moral challenges unprecedented in their complexity. Hamas, as a basic element of its strategy, exploits the Palestinian populations, the UN and the press as shields for its terrorist operations and infrastructure. This cynical strategy include the following tactics: the deliberate launching of rocket from populated areas, the deliberate use of civilian homes and UN bases to shield Hamas arms and explosives manufacturing facilities and the deliberate use of civilians as human shields against anticipated airstrikes.

 

In order to avoid civilian casualties, Israel sends warning messages before attacking terrorist targets advising civilians to leave. Israel prefers to attack empty buildings used to manufacture rockets, even taking into consideration that the terrorists too will be warned and their lives spared.

Hamas, on the other hand, calls on civilians to come and to protect with their bodies the precise locations they expect Israel to attack. Since they know that Israel will usually strike from the air, they send the children to the roofs to prevent the air force from targeting that building.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is in Israel seeking a cease fire, asked for a "full explanation" and said the Israel defense minister told him there had been a "grave mistake."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the military fired artillery shells at the U.N. compound after Hamas terrorists opened fire from the location. Three people were wounded.

The IDF also fired into a building housing The Associated Press offices, entering a room where two staffers were working but wounding no one.

Though the IDF had obtained the locations of media organizations in Gaza at the beginning of fighting to avoid such attacks, in the heat of a war, mistakes are made. And it is the strategy of Hamas to invite these mistakes.

To enlighten those who may have harbored any doubts, Fathi Ahmad Hammad, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said it with pride: Palestinians deliberately use women and children as human shields.

"The enemies of Allah do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its methods of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: "We desire death like you desire life."

Hammad is a leader of the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, and in 2006 was elected to the Palestinian Parliament as a Hamas representative. He is also director of Al-Aqsa TV, which aired his comments on February 29.

Hammad disclosed Hamas strategy, which some have suspected but few have actually believed: use people, especially women and children, UN facilities and the press as human shields.

This strategy has been immensely successful. Fire at Israel cities from school yards, and make Israel choose between allowing its own children to be targets or risking harm to others. Now we know beyond a doubt that Hamas knows what it is doing, and is doing it intentionally.

But people still will not believe. The prevailing attitude is typified in the words of Javier Solana, head of foreign policy for the European Union:

"I cannot imagine that the religious imperative, the real religious imperative, can make anybody destroy another country. Therefore that is an abuse of religion. I don't think the essence of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. The essence of Hamas is the liberation of the Palestinians, the liberation of their people, not the destruction of Israel."

This is the mistake Westerners, profoundly ignorant of history, make over and over again: to assume that all cultures everywhere hold the same values they do. This is a dangerous form of ethnocentrism.

Perhaps if Solana had been listening, he would have heard how Hamas repeatedly proclaims its intention to destroy Israel. He might have seen the following on the Hamas web site: "Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it. Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave. The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims."

The UN has not exactly been a neutral force, both in Lebanon and in Gaza.

 

Israel has called for the removal of several United Nations soldiers from Lebanon after photographs surfaced of the soldiers saluting the coffins of Hezbollah terrorists during a prisoner exchange.

The blue-helmet UN troops, who operate under the auspices of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), are meant disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and be an impartial buffer along the country’s border with Israel.

Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, said he was “shocked and horrified” by the photograph and that it was time for the saluting soldiers to go.

“I think they should be recalled and be sent back to whichever country they came from,” said Gillerman. “I think they’ve definitely compromised their impartiality and have in a very big way, in a very serious way, compromised the integrity of the United Nations.”

Four U.N. officials were killed in Lebanon by an apparent Israel airstrike. Within hours of the event, former U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan announced his belief that Israel had deliberately targeted the U.N. personnel. Annan demanded that “any further attack on U.N. positions and personnel must stop.”

Yesterday, strong evidence came to light suggesting that Hizbollah was effectively using the U.N. position as a shield, conducting attacks against Israel, knowing that any Israeli response was likely to hit the U.N. post. The New York Sun reports that one of the U.N. officials killed in the attack had earlier sent e-mails saying that Hizbollah was “all over” his position. The recipient of those e-mails, a former major-general in the Canadian military named Lewis MacKenzie, described their contents:

“What he was telling us was Hezbollah fighters were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them, and that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the U.N. They use the U.N. as shields knowing that they cannot be punished for it.”

To Hizbollah, civilians and U.N. positions are strategic assets. The terrorist group routinely launches attacks from residential areas and near U.N. posts. Hizbollah knows that this puts Israel in a bind: if Israel decides to respond, that response will provide a tear-jerking scene for the evening news where the headline will be “Israeli Bomb Kills Civilians,” or “U.N. Officials Killed in Israeli Airstrike.” But if Israel backs down out of a fear of how the media will report the story, then Hizbollah gets a safe haven where they can launch attacks with impunity. Hizbollah wins either way, with a propaganda victory or a military one.

Palestinian Arab terrorists have used UN ambulances to steal and transport parts of the bodies of IDF soldiers killed in and along the Gaza-Egypt border.

The ambulances belonged to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East – better known as UNWRA.

During a visits to the Gaza Strip, the IDF has called on UN Secretary General to deal with the cynical use of UNWRA by the “Palestinians” in acts of terrorism against Israelis.

It was not the first time UN and other ambulances had been used in such ways.

 

Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Yuval Diskin told the Israel Security Cabinet that although Hamas has been dealt an extremely heavy blow by Israel aerial bombings of terrorist targets, it is exploiting the deterioration in Gaza to attack Israel.

"A number of Hamas operatives hide in hospitals, several of them walking around in doctors' and nurses' uniforms," he revealed.

Hamas also has turned dozens of Muslim mosques into command posts as its terrorists widen their attacks to reach the heavily populations of Be'er Sheva, as well as come closer to Tel Aviv.

Israel Air Force officers reported that flight crews saw terrorist cells launching rockets from within heavily populated cities, including Khan Yunis, Rafiah and Gaza City as well.

Ambassador Gabriela Shalev, Permanent Representative of Israel recently told the UN: "For eight years the citizens of southern Israel have suffered the trauma of almost daily missile attacks from Gaza. For eight years more than 8,000 rockets and mortar shells have targeted Israeli towns and villages. For eight years the residents of these towns have had a bare 15 seconds to hurry, with their children and their elderly, to find cover before rockets and missiles land on their houses and schools.

15 seconds would not give the members of this UN Council time to leave this room. No State would permit such attacks on its citizens. Nor should it."

"Hamas has no interest in making peace with the enemy; for Hamas peace is the enemy. Its only interest is in establishing a regime of tyranny for Gazans and of terror for Israelis.

Hamas likes to tell the Palestinians that it was terrorism that brought Israel to withdraw from Gaza in 2005. But the truth is plain to see: It was the hope for peace that led us to withdraw from Gaza and the terrorism of Hamas that compelled us to re-enter.

In our efforts to avoid confrontation, we also agreed six months ago to an Egyptian-brokered tahadia - a situation of calm. Hamas violated this arrangement on a daily basis. Over 365 rockets and mortar shells were fired during this period. And all the while it used the so-called ‘calm’ to build up its supplies of weapons and rockets, smuggled through tunnels into the Gaza Strip. Yet still we restrained ourselves.

But when Hamas unilaterally announced the end of the tahadia and began to wage a new campaign of rocket attacks against Israel's citizens with the weapons it had smuggled in to Gaza during the ‘calm’, we could restrain ourselves no longer.

With its new Iran made missiles, Hamas is now able to reach as far as the cities of Ashdod and Beer Sheva, placing over one million Israelis in the shadow of its terror.

Many in this hall have condemned Hamas' terrorist attacks, and we welcome this statement of basic principle. But the families at home in the city of Sderot, and children at school in Kibbutz Netiv Ha'asara will not be protected by these condemnations. In the face of such terrorism we have no choice. We have to defend ourselves - not from the Palestinian people, but from the terrorists who have taken them hostage. Not to gain territory or power, but to demonstrate that our restraint was not weakness and to give our citizens the basic right of a normal life.

In this campaign Israel has dealt the Hamas infrastructure a major blow. Dozens of its terrorist factories and training bases have been destroyed, its stockpiles of rockets have been significantly depleted, and many of the tunnels used to smuggle weapons have been put out of action.

But we have not only sought to change the reality for our citizens, we have also sought to uphold the values that set us apart from the terrorists.

Hamas rejects every core humanitarian principle. Instead of waging its battle openly between combatants, it directs its attacks against civilians. Some have called these attacks “indiscriminate” but this is not the case; Hamas’ attacks are very discriminate – directed deliberately at innocent men, women and children. In the past week alone, Hamas rockets have landed on a school and on a kindergarten.

Hamas shows a similar disdain for the lives of Palestinians. It has adopted the terrorists' tactic – the coward's tactic – of using civilians as shields while its leaders themselves flee from combat with Israel's soldiers and make pathetic demonstrations of bravado from their bunkers. It hides its missiles and terrorist bases in homes and hospitals and mosques, and, as we saw earlier today, deliberately launches attacks from in and around schools and United Nations’ facilities – with tragic results.

For Israel, every civilian death – Israeli or Palestinian – is a tragedy. In responding to terrorist attacks that show no respect for human life – either Israeli or Palestinian – Israel takes steps to protect both. It takes every possible measure to limit civilian casualties – even where these measures endanger the lives of our soldiers or the effectiveness of their operations.

The IDF has dropped tens of thousands of leaflets and made thousands of phone calls to Palestinian civilians, beseeching them to leave the areas of terrorist operation to avoid harm.

Failing to respond to terrorists simply because they are using civilians as cover is not and cannot be an option. To do so would simply broadcast an invitation to every terrorist group in the world to set up shop inside a hospital or a kindergarten.

There is no equivalence between a State which equips civilian homes with bomb shelters and a terrorist regime that fills them with missiles. There is no equivalence between military commanders who struggle daily to ensure that their operations are conducted in accordance with the requirements of international humanitarian law, and the terrorists who flout this law by keeping Corporal Gilad Shalit captive, without even allowing the International Red Cross access to see him for 930 days. There is no equivalence between a State using force in exercise of its right of self-defense and a terrorist organization for which the very resort to violence is unlawful."

 

Israel Ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev concludes: "We, the people of Israel, listened to the international community when you told us to withdraw from Gaza and promised that this would give us the credibility to respond forcefully should Gaza turn into a launching pad for terrorism. We listened when you promised us that acting with restraint during the period of calm would give us the credibility to fight back should the rocket attacks resume. Now is your time to make good on those promises."

An Israel attack near a UN school in northern Gaza earlier this month killed nearly 40 people. Israel, without delay showed clear video footage of the terrorists firing on IDF positions from the UN building.

Israel launched its defensive war on Dec. 27 in an effort to stop terror rocket fire from Gaza that has terrorized hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

Thirteen Israelis also have been killed since the defensive war began. Israel, which repeatedly reaches out for peace in the region, says it will press ahead until Hamas halts all rocket fire and stops smuggling weapons into Gaza from neighboring Egypt.

"Israel has taken every measure under the sun to find peaceful solutions," said an Israel security analyst. "Israel withdrew from Gaza three years ago, yet their PR campaign states that Israel still occupies Gaza. An excuse for Hamas to fire rockets and murder dozens of Israel civilians."

"I believe that the IDF has a job to do. They will continue their defensive operations in Gaza until every weapon and rocket is found. Until every smuggling tunnel is closed. And yes, the IDF is killing more of the enemy than Hamas is killing us and that illustrates the Powell Doctrine. The "Powell doctrine" holds that a democratic nation should go to war only as a last resort and then only with overwhelming force. We have nothing to apologize about. Hamas is murdering Palestinians that they use as human shields. Hamas places both the UN and the Press in danger, using their offices. It's how they use PR, it how they use newspapers and TV. For every civilian death, Hamas blames Israel while the world forgets that we left Gaza and have been the victims of daily terror rocket attacks. If Hamas terrorists in Mexico and Canada started to fire rockets and missiles at US cities, how would the US respond, how would any nation respond in defending their citizens?"

 

 

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