They keep firing at Israelis; most people keep looking the other way

This Ongoing War

The Sabbath has just ended and we're catching up on the news of the past 30 hours or so.

Ynet is reporting that on Friday night, yet another of the many thousands of Qassam rockets held by the terrorists of Hamas-controlled Gaza was fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip. It landed and exploded in a community somewhere in the Ashkelon Coast region with no injuries reported. What are termed "structures" were damaged, but details are not yet available. Israel customarily avoids, where it can, giving away usable information about how accurate or inaccurate the rocket-rich terrorist thugs are so as to minimize anything that might conceivably enable them to score more deaths, injuries or substantial damage in the Israeli communities they target. Being terrorists, the gangs supervised by the Hamas regime in Gaza care not one bit about collateral damage, since there is absolutely no such thing in their form of war. They usually don't even pretend to be trying to achieve military gains. It's ordinary people living ordinary lives that are their goal.

Ynet reports as well that Palestinian Arab sources in the Gaza Strip reported earlier Friday evening that another Qassam rocket fired in the general direction of Israel from Gaza Strip exploded in midair. It quotes the IDF Spokesperson's Unit saying they are not aware of such an incident.

There's real concern about the terrorists stepping up the scale of their warfare against us. Maan, the Palestinian newsagency, said this evening that the Egyptians intercepted what they termed "a stash of bombs" that included anti-aircraft missiles and several tons of TNT, today in the Sinai peninsula. The report says it was evidently being prepared for shipment to Gaza.

There is a considerable degree of chaos in the Sinai now that the government in Cairo has gone through major lurches after the fall of the Mubarak regime a year ago. Related to this, and magnifying its quite dangerous effect, we also know that

"Hamas has established forward bases and rocket production facilities in the Sinai Peninsula in an effort to protect them from Israeli air strikes... By establishing the facilities in Egypt, Hamas aims to protect its assets since it believes Israel will not strike targets inside Egypt due to the affect it would have on bilateral relations."

We have reported here about a dozen separate attacks in Sinai on the Egypt-Israel gas line over the past twelve months. It's a worrying situation for many reasons. One is that almost no one outside of Israel is worried.

The terrorism-addicted rulers of Gaza are problem enough. But our larger neighbors are problematic in themselves. Despite Israel's requests to Cairo to increase to restore order in Sinai and prevent attacks, the Egyptian military (says JPost) has refrained from dismantling the Hamas infrastructure in the peninsula. Israel consented to more than a dozen Egyptian army battalions entering Sinai last year (Egyptian forces there under limited under the terms of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty) and they are still there. But they are achieving what is politely called "limited success" and it's plain that terrorist activity and arms smuggling into the Gaza Strip (including advanced weaponry and missiles sourced from looted Libyan military storehouses) are continuing largely unhindered, tonight's report notwithstanding.