Islamic Jihad’s “presents” for the school kids at Sderot

posted at 11:03 am on September 4, 2007 by Bryan
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As the school year began in Israel, 7 Kassam rockets rained down on Sderot, near the Gaza border.

Twelve Sderot children were hospitalized at Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon Monday morning in the wake of a barrage of seven Kassam rockets fired by Islamic Jihad terrorists in northern Gaza.

The missiles had slammed into various parts of the city, including one that scored a direct hit on a house next to a day care center. A staff member at the day care center told Army Radio that the director ran into the room to give warning that an attack was underway. None of the staff heard the Color Red alert system that provides a 20-second window in which to seek shelter from attacks.

IDF soldiers raced into the building and carried 15 babies out to safe shelter, despite confident declarations by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert a day earlier that all the schools in Sderot were adequately protected against Kassam rockets.

A friend of mine recently moved to Israel. She’s not in Sderot, but she is seeing the on-the-ground reality of Israel’s predicament.

Today was the 2nd day of the new school year for Israelis. This morning, Islamic Jihad sent 7 rockets from Gaza into Sderot. One landed in the courtyard of a daycare. Thankfully, no one was injured, but 12 Sderot children, including some of the babies, were hospitalized for shock. The parents of Sderot are doing what the Israeli government is not: protecting their children. They are not sending them back to school until something is done to actually protect them. PM Olmert and his pitiful excuse of a government have yet to learn the lesson that you cannot negotiate with or appease people who simply and only want you dead.

On their website, Islamic Jihad proudly stated that they sent the rockets as a “present for the start of the new school year.”

Presents for the school year.

As my friend reminds us:

Sderot is a town in the western Negev, near the border of Gaza. In the summer of 2005, Israel carried out the “Disengagement,” expelling every Jew from Gaza: every soldier, every person living there, even those who have lived there for generations. Ariel Sharon pioneered this independently of any deal with Gaza or the PA; they pulled out as a good-will gesture in exchange for absolutely nothing, not even an insincere nod at peace.

Can you imagine having to keep your child out of school because some barbarians, to whom your government capitulated just a couple of years ago, are now launching a couple of rockets per day at your town and the government isn’t doing anything to put a stop to it?

This is what you get when you allow terrorists to succeed: More terror.

Olmert appears to be completely out of touch on the situation in Sderot. He says that the town’s fortifications are enough, and that more fortified schools are being built (they’re not). His Ministry of Education has a novel, short-term approach to the problem.

The Ministry of Education, at least, acknowledged the dangerous conditions in which children are forced to attend their studies and came up with a different solution: hold classes in bomb shelters this year.

All of this has the terrorists crowing.

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