Word: rocketings
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Hamas, through its Damascus-based leader Khaled Meshal, has indicated acceptance of Israel's basic requirement for a truce - an end to rocket fire - but only if the truce, along with ending Israeli military strikes, also opens the border crossings that would allow normalization of economic life in Gaza. Hamas insists that it ended the cease-fire precisely because the truce had failed to lift the economic siege of Gaza...
While some Israeli political leaders have spun this episode as a decisive showdown, Israel knows that its military offensive is unlikely to end Hamas' political control of Gaza or even to eliminate the movement's capacity to fire rockets into Israel. Israel's objective is to force Hamas to stop all attacks on Israel from Gaza. Or, to put it another way, to restore the cease-fire Hamas abandoned on Dec. 19, on terms more acceptable to Israel. Polls taken on the first day of the bombing showed that while 81% of Israelis supported the military campaign, only 6% believed...
Despite the heavy casualties inflicted by days of bombing, Israel believes it has not seriously impaired Hamas' ability to fire rockets at Israel. But by targeting the basic infrastructure of Hamas governance in Gaza - everything from police posts, a government building and a university to the private homes of Hamas leaders - Israel is trying to set a crippling price for continued rocket attacks...
Members of the militant group Hamas depend on the weather as well. For them, the cloudier it is the better. Firing off Qassam rockets into Israel is an inexact science. But given enough time to position the rockets properly - time which an overcast or rainy day can provide - Gaza's rocketmakers are far more likely to hit their intended targets. That's what happened on Monday evening when, as rain blanketed Gaza and much of Israel's south coast, a rocket launched from Gaza struck a playground in Ashdod, killing a mother of four as she waited at an adjoining...
...clouds, Israeli warplanes continued to pound Gaza, destroying buildings allegedly linked to Hamas. In one incident, witnessed by this reporter from a hilltop overlooking the northeast corner of the Israel-Gaza border, an Israeli F-16 dropped a half-ton bomb on what appeared to be half a dozen rocket launchers. Even as the heavy woomph of the bomb hitting the ground reached us, about three miles away, one of the rockets blasted skywards, likely triggered by the exploding bomb...