Axe-wielding terrorist kills boy, wounds 7-year-old in Bat Ayin

from The Jerusalem Post
April 2, 2009

Government spokesman Mark Regev condemned the attack as a "senseless act of brutality against innocents."

Speaking by phone from the scene, Magen David Adom paramedic Ronen Bashri told The Jerusalem Post that ambulances and emergency response teams were called to the settlement after receiving a report of an axe attack.

"We found a seven-year-old boy fully conscious with a head injury caused by a sharp object," Bashri said. "And we found a 16-year-old whom we had to declare dead on the scene."

Nativ's funeral will be at 5:00 p.m. in Kfar Etzion.

Magen David Adom chairman Eli Bin told the Post, "I can confirm that an axe caused the fatal head injury." He added that the injured boy was struck by a sharp object, possibly the same ax. "Both victims sustained head injuries," he said.

The attack ended after one resident who saw the younger boy running from the terrorist stepped in and disarmed the man.

Roadblocks were set up throughout the area in an effort to capture the attacker, and security forces immediately launched an investigation to determine how he entered the community. The initial assumption, that the terrorist was an Arab laborer and had therefore not aroused suspicion, was refuted when it became clear that the settlement only employed Jewish laborers.

The IDF said the possibility that the terrorist was holed up in one of the houses in the settlement had not been ruled out, while Palestinians reported that after the attack, Israeli security forces surrounded a house in the Arab village of Kherbat Tzafa.

IDF sources also said that the army was preparing for the possibility that Jewish settlers would avenge the attack by striking back at Arabs in the West Bank.

Bat Ayin is home to religious settlers who have refused to build a security fence around their community, as is the rule in most other settlements, saying fences are a sign of insecurity.
There was no word on whether the attacker acted alone.

Less than an hour after the attack, the Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. A murky terrorist group calling itself the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh also claimed responsibility for the attack in an e-mail sent to the Associated Press.

THE FOLLOWING REFLECTS JUST HOW SICK HAMAS AND ISLAMIC JIHAD ARE:

For its part, Hamas called the attack a natural response to the "occupation."

"This attack was committed in the framework of the resistance," Ayman Taha, a spokesperson for the group said. "This is a reaction to the continuing occupation and the continued building of settlements."

"This is a natural reaction," he said, "especially against the backdrop of Israeli attacks. We are a people occupied, and it is our right to defend ourselves and to act in every way and with every means at our disposal in order to defend ourselves."
Following the attack, Magen David Adom went on its highest level of alert across the West Bank.

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So who did bomb the Iranian arms trucks in Sudan?

from DEBKAfile Special Report
March 29, 2009

The only solid fact emerging from the fanciful "reports" traded between Western and Middle East media over the bombing of an Iranian arms convoy bound for Hamas in January is that Tehran's arms shipments to Hamas via Sinai and the Gaza tunnels continue at full spate.

Somehow, as the "reporting" unfolded, the US attacker morphed into the Israeli Air Force.
Western imagination outdid itself Sunday, March 28, when the London Sunday Times claimed that Israeli intelligence used drones to bomb the convoy in Sudan, possibly even Eitan UAVs, whose wing span is like that of a Boeing airliner, and that missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv were the target.

If this claim and reports in other Western media - asserting glibly that Israeli drones or warplanes had sunk an Iranian ship in the Red Sea - are correct, they would signify:

1. That Israel and Iran are at war;

2. That Tehran has decided to take Israeli attacks on the chin and not respond. Does this sound like the Iranian leaders we know?

3. Israel has declared war on Sudan with two attacks.

4. And, most importantly, Israel's armed forces have failed to stem the flow of Iranian arms to Gaza.

In the original disclosure which started the hare, an Egyptian newspaper Al-Shurooq Tuesday March 24, reported that in January, a US Air Force AC 130H taking off from Djibouti destroyed an Iranian arms convoy of 17 trucks in North Sudan on its way to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, killing 39 passengers.

The Egyptian paper ran the story the day before Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir arrived in Cairo. It stressed that the Sudanese authorities had conducted "a full blown dossier'" on the attack, consisting of "images, forensics as well as remains of weapons and satellite phones."
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Three Israeli Airstrikes Against Sudan!

March 27, 2009
from ABC News

ABC News' Luis Martinez reports:

Israel has conducted three military strikes against targets in Sudan since January in an effort to prevent what were believed to be Iranian weapons shipments from reaching Hamas in the Gaza Strip, ABC News has learned.

Earlier this week, CBSNews.com was the first to report that Israel had conducted an airstrike in January against a convoy carrying weapons north into Egypt to be smuggled into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

But actually, since January, Israel has conducted a total of three military strikes against smugglers transporting what were believed to be Iranian weapons shipments destined for Gaza, a U.S. official told ABC News.

The information matches recent reports from Sudanese officials of two airstrikes in the desert of eastern Sudan and the sinking of a ship in the Red Sea carrying weapons.

Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, would only say, "No comment," when contacted by ABC News on the matter.

Sudanese officials initially said this week that 39 people riding in 17 trucks were killed in a mid-January airstrike conducted by an unidentified aircraft in a desert area north of the Red Sea port of Port Sudan.

Today, a Sudanese Foreign Ministry representative said there were two separate bombing raids against smugglers in January and February. The Sudanese minister for highways was more specific, saying the airstrikes took place Jan. 27 and Feb. 11.

Arabic broadcaster Al-Jazeera also reported today a Sudanese official's claim that Israel had sunk a ship carrying weapons.

Israeli officials continue to refuse to confirm or deny the reports of airstrikes, but Thursday Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “Israel hits every place it can in order to stop terror, near and far."
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