Top of the world, ma!"
Posted on 02/24/2006 2:53:44 PM PST by IonImplantGuru
BALATA REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank — Israeli troops on Thursday killed five Palestinians, including a top militant who said just a day earlier that he would never be caught, in Israel's largest military sweep since pulling out from the Gaza Strip last summer.
Three of the dead were gunmen from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades — a violent offshoot of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party — killed during a shootout in their hide-out in the Balata refugee camp.
The deaths brought to eight the number of Palestinians killed by army fire since the Balata sweep began Monday. The military said 15 fugitives have been arrested.
Dozens of jeeps patrolled Balata, an Al Aqsa stronghold and a haven for weapons dealers, and sealed it off from the adjacent city of Nablus. Al Aqsa fugitives have been moving from hide-out to hide-out since the army raid began.
Al Aqsa confirmed three of its members, including senior member Mohammed Shtawi, a fugitive, had been killed. On Wednesday, Shtawi told an AP reporter that earlier in the day soldiers surrounded his hide-out for five hours, but he and several friends slipped away. "They will never catch me," he said at the time.
(Excerpt) Read more at azstarnet.com ...
Those gps tracking chips they now implant in AP reporters seem to be working well.
How many examples do we have now of reporters somehow having access to terrorists?
You mean access to the man who is now dead?
I keep thinking of that old Guy Clark song - "If I could just get off of this LA Freeway without gettin' killed or caught..."
If he wasn't a hol(e)yman... he is now. ;)
I can't tell you how much I like that.
Top of the world, ma!"
But you can't hide from God.
I love the IDF early-retirement plan for terrorists.
It works for me.
Well, I guess they didn't literally catch him. I kind of equate "catch" with being arrested and put in jail rather than getting killed.
"Oh so very satisfying.."
Yeah.
With all due respect, the Almighty had nothing to do with this -- it was military security all the way.
"Does anyone actually believe the Palestinians will ever actually agree to a meaningful peace with the Israelies?"
I'm sure most people don't and the few who sincerely do are idiots. On the other hand, it is the position of most of the world, not because it's truly believed, but because it relentlessly puts pressure on Israel to always make new concessions in pursuit of "peace".
Israel has pretty much decided what the border will be by staking out the path of the "fence" (which is partially built at this time). Bush agreed with the idea that Israel would never give back all of the conquered territories---so that is about as much international approval as Israel can expect to ever get. (Just eyeballing a map of the situation, a map that never appears in newspapers that imply that Israelis want to take over about two-thirds of the West Bank vis-à-vis the fence, I would say the Israelis are going to snatch about 1/7 or so of the West Bank, utilizing the fence.)
One of the problems Israel is, in effect, working out right now in Gaza is, what do you do about the missiles? That problem will presumably be a lot worse when the final partition counts.
Another problem is that there are tens of thousands of Israeli settlers currently living on the wrong side of the fence. Moving all of them looks to be politically impossible for the time being. A few are currently being removed from illegal settlements---that is to say settlements that were never approved by the Israeli government in the first place. This relatively minor procedure is being met with violence on the part of the settlers and is already having an effect of partially carrying Israeli society apart.
The problem of pursuing this rational solution is made worse by fundamentalist Jews, now being joined by fundamentalist Christians, who claim, in effect, that the West Bank in it's entireity was given to the Jews by God. That means that removing any of the settlers is a sin and will result in the destruction of Israel or something like that.
Or, to put it another way, adding to the threat to Israel's existence caused by religious craziness on the Muslim side, we now have religious craziness on the Jewish and Christian side.
The Izzies have a great network of paid Paleostinian informers plus I think they are monitoring phones and cell phones. Their West Bank border fence is a very good one and twice in last month they've offed (with missiles no less!) Muslims that got close to it
There is a lot more biblical locations and shrines on the West Bank than in Gaza.
A wise policy we would do well to adopt.
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