“If not now, then when,” Netanyahu reportedly said in the conversations with American officials. “Action must be taken in all areas to increase pressure on Iran and impose crippling sanctions on it.”

Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is remorseful over the whole affair.

Just kidding.

“They can continue to use this case (against Iran) through the media but it was a blow to their arrogance,” said the Iranian leader in reference to the United States and other Western powers.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

2:32PM: Hours before the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, around 150 palestinians have thrown stones at a group of Jews visiting the Temple Mount.

The incident began when a group of tourists entered the Temple Mount compound accompanied by a police force. At a certain stage, some 150 worshippers started gathering around them and calling out towards them.

Some of the worshippers began throwing stones at the group. The police force fired stun grenades in an attempt to gain control of the riot. Nine police officers were lightly injured by stones. Six of them received medical treatment on the site and the rest were evacuated to hospitals.

Fifteen worshippers were injured by stones and two were lightly hurt by the stun grenades and were evacuated to the al-Maqasid Hospital in east Jerusalem. Adult worshippers attempted to calm things down, while the group of tourists was removed from the site.

The palestinian Ma’an News predictably have a different take on events.

At least 26 people were injured and eight arrested as fierce clashes broke out at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday.

Three of the 17 wounded Palestinians sustained serious eye and head injuries, sources said.

Israeli police said nine officers were also hurt.

Clashes erupted after groups of Israelis entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday morning, reportedly under the guard of Israeli police. Palestinians threw stones, chairs, and shoes at the Israelis, while police injured 17 Palestinians during attempts to forcefully disperse them with batons and stun grenades.

On Thursday, the Al-Aqsa Foundation warned that Israeli police were planning to permit settlers entrance to the area. Officials in East Jerusalem predicted that the break-in would occur on Sunday under the pretext of marking Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.

In other words, Jewish people peacefully visiting the holist site in Judaism = break-in. How’s that for peace and tolerance?

Interestingly enough, some of the wording of the Ma’an News report seems to have been changed. According to Elder of Ziyon, this is what the Ma’an report was saying over an hour ago:

At least 13 Palestinians were injured as fierce clahes broke out at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem on Sunday morning after Israeli police permitted settlers to break into the area, witnesses said.

Two of the injured Palestinians reportedly sustained serious injuries to the eye and head. Israeli police said two officers were also hurt.

On Thursday, the Al-Aqsa Foundation had warned of an impending incursion. Officials in Jerusalem said extremists were preparing to break into the holy Muslim area, and accurately predicted that the break-in would occur on Sunday under the pretext of celebrating a religious holiday.

Confrontations erupted after groups of Israelis broke into the compound, reportedly under the guard of Israeli police. Palestinians hurled stones, chairs, and shoes at the Israelis, while police tried to disperse the Palestinians by force, injuring nine people right away, and four more throughout the morning.

It’s almost as if Ma’an realized they had to tone down the language a bit, since it was even too much of a stretch for them.

12:32PM: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again thumbing his nose at the Obama administration and the West.

10:18AM: Hot on the heels of our peace partner Egypt showing their fond feelings for us comes Turkey doing the same thing.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday his country would push the Security Council to discuss a report by United Nations investigators accusing Israel  and Palestinian gunmen of war crimes in the Gaza war.

“We will definitely take the position to discuss this issue on the Security Council,” Erdogan told reporters.

9:00AM: According to some palestinian “political analysts,” Israel’s pinpoint strike on the three Islamic Jihad “ticking bomb” terrorists was not to prevent rockets from being fired on Israel, but rather for more devious purposes.

An Israeli airstrike that killed three Palestinian fighters on Friday night was targeted at Islamic Jihad in a calculated move intended to disrupt a precarious calm in the Gaza Strip, political analysts told Ma’an on Saturday.

The strike targeted Islamic Jihad in hopes that the group would respond violently, thus embarrassing the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, which has assiduously enforced a unilateral ceasefire since the end of Israel’s three-week war on Gaza last January.

I’m just surprised they didn’t claim it was to kill the men so we could steal their organs.

7:54AM: Here’s the latest video of Zionist occupation soldiers carpet bombing Gaza city in order to stop three laborers from delivering pipes to a nearby construction site.

Aussie Dave: Err, sorry there. I invited Richard Goldstone to guest post, but I’m guessing that was not a good idea. Here’s what really happened.

IAF Targets Three Terrorists on Their way to Launch Rockets at Israel

Last evening, Friday, September 25th 2009, An Israel Air Force air-craft targeted and identified hitting three terrorists east of Gaza City who were on their way to fire rockets at Israel’s southern communities.

The three terrorists hit were Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives residing in Gaza City, and part of a terrorist cell that has been firing rockets into Israel for the past few weeks, including rockets that hit the city of Sderot during the holiday of Rosh HaShana (the Jewish New Year) a week ago. The names of the three terrorists are Mahmoud Mussah Rammadan Bana, Kamel Hamdan Ibrahim Dakhdukh and Mohamed Salem Barawi Marshoud.

Approximately 50 rockets and mortar shells were launched at Israel during the last three months, totalling more than 250 since the end of Operation Cast Lead and more than 750 in 2009. Throughout 2008, over 3300 rockets and mortars were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel.

The IDF will respond harshly to any attempt to break the calm in Israel’s southern communities.

7:22AM: Here’s the latest interview with Richard Goldstone (in Hebrew with English subtitles)

Apparently, Giant Abdul is aiming his rifle at the Mediterranean, Mohammed is shooting his RPG at Egypt and Ahmed is firing his submachine gun at the Negev.

Even funnier is the caption:

“Factions are preparing for calm”

Any better ideas for captions?

Haniyeh: “That’s impressive. No matter for how long I stop shaving, I can never get it to grow longer than this.”

You see, slowing down the killing of Jews is really not good for palestinian unity.

Islamic Jihad said on Friday in Gaza that the four-month truce with Israel has gone on too long, harms the national liberation movement and serves as a mechanism to divide Palestinians.

Sheikh Nafeth Azzam, a leader within Islamic Jihad, made the comments in Khan Younis during a ceremony commemorating the assassination of Islamic Jihad leader Al-Shaqaqi.

—-

But Azzam stressed that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas should cease negotiations with Israel as, according to him, “they do not benefit Palestinians.”

Meanwhile, another Jihad leader said that “attempts to legitimize Israeli actions are failing.” The leader, Khader Habib, told the crowd that “the jihad will continue to resist Israel.”

That is until one fateful day..

This week is no exception.

Galilee region police have recently arrested two Israeli Arabs they believe belonged to a cell of Islamic Jihad operatives that planned to kill Israeli pilots, scientists and university lecturers.

News of the arrests, which took place during August, emerged after a gag order was lifted Thursday. Police claim that the network also planned shooting attacks on checkpoints in the West Bank, and that it attempted to make contact with Islamic Jihad’s leadership in Syria.

The Shin Bet security service was also involved in uncovering the cell, in which three Palestinians from the West Bank town of Ramallah are also suspected of being members. According to the police, the cell possessed weapons, held training exercises and was in the advanced stages of preparation for a shooting attack on an Israel Defense Forces checkpoint near Ramallah.

The two Israeli Arabs are Shfaram residents Anis Safori, 20, and Hussam Khalil, 19. Safori is a communications student at Ramallah’s Bir Zeit University; Khalil studies electronic engineering in Jordan.

Ok, so there’s nothing weird about some Israeli Arabs biting the hand that feeds them. But what piqued my curiosity were their targets – Israeli pilots, scientists and university lecturers. At first I thought that pilots were targeted because of their operational importance, but when considering the inclusion of scientists and university lecturers, I discounted this as the reason.

Then it hit me.

Only the best of the best are able to become IAF pilots. As for scientists and university lecturers, you have to be rather intelligent (although in some cases, one could wonder).

So here’s my theory: the terrorist cell were specifically targeting highly intelligent Israelis, in an effort to deal a blow to Israeli scientific achievment and accomplishments, since the palestinians are seemingly unable to accomplish or achieve anything themselves. Beyond sinking to new depths of depravity, of course.

In other words, since we can’t achieve, we’ll stop you from doing so.

Update: I just noticed..one of the arrested Arabs is named Anis.

That’s the second Anis we’ve seen this week.

Now the thing about a ceasefire is that it comprises of two parts – “cease” and “fire”. Clearly, the terrorists are focusing on the “fire” part, while ignoring the whole “cease” thing.

And speaking of focus, the AP’s is still on painting Israel as the villain. Here’s their headline for the story on today’s Qassam attacks:

Rockets hit Israel, which says truce broken

As if the firing of rockets into Israel does not really constitute a breaking of the truce; rather, it is merely an Israeli claim.

The report also mentions that today’s Qassam attack was to avenge Israel’s killing of an Islamic Jihad fighter, but does not mention the relevant fact that he was planning an attack on Israel, with ammunition, explosives and rifles being found in his apartment.

Yeah, that’s the AP for you. Biased and now charging money to silence those of us trying to point this out.

The Australian has more on how he was turned into worm food.

Just before sunset on April 30 one of Gaza’s most loved teachers Awad al-Keek drove slowly away from his school.

He may have heard the foreboding whump of an Israeli Apache attack helicopter as it swept in low through the hazy spring sky. Others in the southern town of Rafah certainly did. The Apaches are always a soundtrack of trouble brewing, invariably followed by a crescendo of explosions and sirens.

Saleh Awad, a plump father of nine from a poor nearby neighbourhood, listened and watched with great trepidation. Using an Israeli SIM card in his Palestinian phone, he had just called his handlers at the Jewish state’s intelligence headquarters in Tel Aviv and told them al-Keek was in the car with the local brains trust of the militant group, Islamic Jihad.

The boom that followed left one of Islamic Jihad’s darkest secrets in shards of flesh and twisted metal. Al-Keek, the chief rocket engineer of Islamic Jihad, was dead. So were four of his colleagues.

The month since has revealed a series of bitter realities for all stakeholders in the tragic arena of Gaza; the UN Relief and Works Agency which paid al-Keek’s teacher’s salary for at least the past two years, the shell-shocked locals of Rafah and hunted militants among them, and the Israelis who have since seen Awad – one of their most valuable informants – caught, exposed and condemned.

Al-Keek’s family was still in mourning and UNRWA still in crisis when Islamic Jihad launched the hunt for whoever gave up their most crucial scientist. As the militant group was pasting a martyr’s poster depicting al-Keek’s smiling face alongside a logo of its military wing, the group’s footsoldiers were asking angry questions all over town.

The body of the gentle, Western-leaning man of education by day and warlord by night was shrouded in an Islamic Jihad burial cloth as hooded men shouldered it through the hot, forsaken streets of Rafah to the crowded graveyard nearby. But al-Keek’s wife and two daughters wanted little to do with the sheiks and militant chiefs who came to pay their respects. They feared their husband and father’s clandestine role in life would haunt them in death. And it has.

UNRWA has suspended his family’s access to his pension pending the results of an investigation, even though the family disavows his links to militancy.

The family’s denials matter little on the streets where al-Keek’s poster takes pride of place on lampposts, concrete walls and shopfronts already covered with yellowing images of other dead men.

Written in Arabic under the logo of Islamic Jihad’s military wing, the Jerusalem Brigades, is a tribute that reads: “The martyr and the leader Awad al-Keek, the leader of the manufacturing and engineering unit who was assassinated by the enemy’s cowardly planes in Rafah on 30/4/2008.”

As is often the case when the game is up, Islamic Jihad, like other Gazan militant groups, was more than willing to reveal what their slain comrade had done even though his assassination again exposed their security failings.

The curse of collaborators has crippled militants’ ambitions in Gaza almost weekly for the past two decades. But rarely had a snitch been able to do this sort of damage.

Al-Keek had been making rockets for the two years he was a science teacher at the School for Refugees, where he had recently been promoted to deputy headmaster. Under the cover of night in a local warehouse, he had apparently set up a production line that churned out well-engineered rockets, with steadily improving range and targeting abilities.

From southern Gaza, the rockets had been shuffled to the frontlines of the northern Strip from where they were fired incessantly into Israel by militants who daily ran the gauntlet of rockets fired from drones and Apaches and shells shot from tanks. No weapon had wreaked more terror on Israelis than the type of rocket engineered by al-Keek. All over Israel, they are known colloquially by the name Gazans long ago gave them: Qassams.

Awad was at home when the hooded men from The Jerusalem Brigades burst through his door in mid-May. A series of street whispers had led them to him, and he was talking within days. What he had to say confirmed his interrogators’ darkest suspicions and provided answers to how at least five other of the group’s chieftains had also been hunted down, many in the months before al-Keek was blown up.

“My name is Saleh Awad,” he began awkwardly in Arabic during a forced video confession. “I live in Rafah. I am a refugee from Semsen (a former Arab town in what is now Israel). I am married with nine children. I used to work in the Palestinian intelligence. I started working with the Israelis on July 1 2007 a few days after the takeover of Hamas. My contact was an Israeli intelligence officer ‘Sami’.” Continuing with the downcast eyes of a soon-to-be-dead man he said: “I rejected the idea when he first called me. I said yes on the first of July. He asked me to buy an Orange (Israeli network) SIM card. But I said I already have one and he asked me to call him so that we know each other’s number. He gave me a password that we were to work by.”

Every time Awad called his handler in the Israeli domestic security service, the Shin Bet, he was to start his conversation with a two-word password which would let his handler know he was not calling under coercion. The password was “Yousef Ward”, he said.

Awad was told to turn up at an arranged spot on the border fence and collect his payments. After he facilitated his first assassination he collected $US400 ($426). In early April he received a similar sum for giving up an Islamic Jihad rocket launcher named Osama al-Hoby.

The price on the Islamic Jihad men’s heads is measly compared with the sums being forked out for terror targets in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Iraqis who provided information about men named on the US military’s infamous deck of cards in 2003, were routinely paid rewards of $US1 million. The head of Hezbollah’s military wing, Imad Mugniyeh, who was slain in Damascus in February, was worth $US5 million to whoever served him up.

The price on al-Keek’s head has not been revealed, though it is unlikely to be anywhere near the bounties being paid for the region’s other big fish.

But relativities are starkly different in Gaza, which has been under a crippling siege for more than two years. Most Gazan public servants have been on a reduced salary, if they are paid at all, since last June, when Hamas seized outright control of the Strip during a brief and brutal power struggle that tightened the Israeli-led boycott.

Even the $US400 for his first job proved a weighty sum for Awad. Each target he offered up earned him more.

“I told the intelligence officer that (al-Hoby) person works with the Islamic Jihad and launches rockets and so he asked me to follow him,” he continued. “I first followed him by motorcycle as he went to Khan Younis (a city in central Gaza). The second day I watched him hiding towards Tal Al Sultan neighbourhood and I gave (the handler) information about what al-Hoby’s car looked like. When the Israeli rockets struck, al-Hoby was killed instantly along with another Islamic Jihad member, Karam Hammad.”

With both men out of the way, Awad was requested to deliver the main prize. “He asked me to follow Awad al-Keek and I told him that this person works with Islamic Jihad as the engineer of heavy weapons and was producing rockets.”

Before he was finally tracked down, Awad went on to provide information about a weapons depot in a local mosque near his home. “Sami called me that day about 4pm asking me about the situation, and I told him everything was still there and that there were some Palestinian policemen sitting there as well. He called me again about an hour before they shelled the mosque. I also gave him some information about three tunnels in Rafah (which had been used to smuggle goods and weapons from Egypt).”

The seven policemen out the front of the mosque were killed and the weapons silo levelled.

In mid-May, Awad was forced to make his final call to his handler. With Islamic Jihad recording the conversation, he said: “I can’t talk to you today, I’m tired and sick.” The spook replied: “I didn’t like the way you talked to me yesterday, what is the password.”

“Salah, Salah,” Awad replied. The Shin Bet immediately knew the game was over.

Summary executions of accused collaborators have been common in both Gaza and the West Bank, and Awad was initially slated to be shot straight away. However, the senior leadership of Islamic Jihad intervened, sending him and another captured local ringleader of informants, Saleh Abu-Zayed, to the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, which deals with internal security in Gaza.

“This cell was one of the most dangerous in the Gaza Strip because of the length of time they had been dealing with the Israelis and the quality of the information they had provided them,” said Sheikh Nassiz Azzam, a joint-leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. “Abu Zayed had been dealing with them for 12 years. Awad was not that long, but his help was immense. He was directly responsible for the killing of the leader al-Keek and he did huge damage to the cause and the Palestinian people.”

Explaining the unusual step of handing both men over to what serves as a justice system in the legal vacuum of Gaza, he continued: “Everybody is dealing with this cautiously. There is great sensitivity over this file and we don’t want anyone to exploit the issue of collaborators for their own ends. After we interrogated them we handed them over to Hamas. We have conclusive evidence that they have committed many acts of sabotage and have been directly responsible for killing many members of the resistance.

“Awad admitted he had monitored and followed al-Keek and played a direct role in his murder. We have asked (Hamas) to give a heavy sentence as a deterrent and to protect the resistance and Palestinian society.”

Awad remains in a security prison in northern Gaza where his fate will be determined within weeks. He is way out of his handler’s reach and kept away from his family, who now face a lifetime of shame in Rafah.

UNRWA, which screens employees for militant links and asks them to sign contracts that vow no ties to political violence, or terror, is looking at how it can further tighten screening measures.

Even in a place so accustomed to betrayal, the fate of the furtive teacher and the doomed spy are haunting the landscape.

A Palestinian truck bomber attacked a key border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel early Thursday morning, the Palestinian militant group Hamas said.

Army Radio reports that there were no injuries in the explosion at the Erez crossing on the northern end of the Gaza-Israel border.

A spokesman for the Islamic Jihad group said they carried out the attack in cooperation with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s more secular Fatah faction. Jihad described the attack as a successful martyrdom operation.

An Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman confirmed that there had been an explosion in the area. No IDF soldiers were hurt.

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Hamas said the bomb-laden truck was driven by a suicide bomber. Residents in the Gaza Strip who live over 30 km (20 miles) from the crossing reported hearing the blast.

Israel’s Channel 10 television said troops had prevented the truck from getting close to the crossing by firing at it before it exploded.

Notice also how Islamic Jihad described it as “a successful martyrdom operation” even though they did not manage to kill any Israelis.

Last week, US President George Bush said:

“It breaks my heart to see the vast potential of the Palestinian people, really, wasted.”

I’m guessing the palestinians agree. They have the potential to kill many more Jews.