Tag Archives: Palestinians

The dark side of Hamas

Politics, , , , , ,

Another overt execution of a suspected collaborator occurred today in a public area in Gaza. The New York Times reports:

Masked gunmen in Gaza summarily executed a man here on Friday as a suspected collaborator with Israel on the third day of its deadly aerial bombardments, shooting him multiple times and leaving his body beneath a billboard featuring a Hamas fighter holding a rocket.

The executed man, identified as Ashraf Ouaida, had a poster hung around his neck accusing him of cooperating with the Israelis in the killing of 15 Palestinian leaders.

Wael Mohammed, a taxi driver who was standing on the steps of the Aman Mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, said that around 11:45 a.m. he saw a Jeep pull up on Al Jalla Street, from which two masked men dragged Mr. Ouaida to the dirt circle under the Hamas billboard.

“They took him out from the Jeep with his hands cuffed behind his back, they pushed him under the poster and fired three gunshots at his head from the back,” Mr. Mohammed said. “He was still alive. Then they set his cuffs free and turned him upside down and fired on him again.”

One of the gunmen, Mr. Mohammed said, hung a poster in which Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades claimed responsibility and cited Mr. Ouaida’s alleged crimes.

You’d think this type of behavior would eventually backfire with the population of Gaza. Hopefully it will.

An impending ground war in Gaza?

Politics, , , , ,

Andrew Sullivan laments the direction the Israel/Palestine conflict has gone in recent years:

As I wrote yesterday, it is impossible and wrong to blame Israel for self-defense against Hamas rockets with greater range and power, if not much greater accuracy, than the past. There is no defense of Hamas’s use of terrorism. Equally, the kind of ground assault that now looks inevitable is yet another iteration of the same dead end. Except, this time, for Israel, the region is shifting against it. The visit to Gaza by the Egyptian prime minister yesterday – he and Hamas’s leader together beheld the body of a Gazan boy killed by Israeli firepower yesterday – represents a tectonic shift. And the deeper regional and international isolation of Israel is pregnant with foreboding. If we see another civilian bloodbath in Gaza, four years after the last one, the failures of the Israeli government to seize the opportunity Obama offered them four years ago – indeed to treat the United States president with contempt combined with an open attempt to elect his opponent – will haunt the Jewish state. Greater Israel is as unsustainable as it appears to be inevitable. There was, and maybe still is, a ramp off this conflagration. But Netanyahu and Hamas feed off it domestically – a gruesome and ominous fact.