(The Times of Israel) – Cities and communities in southern Israel faced an intense barrage of rockets overnight Friday-Saturday, with several heavy waves of projectile fire targeting Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, Sderot and the surrounding areas.
The bombardment came as the Israeli military continued to strike numerous targets in the Gaza Strip since midnight, taking out rocket-launching sites, terror cells and a Hamas intelligence center, according to the Israel Defense Forces.
One of the rockets fired from Gaza in the middle of the night made a direct hit on an apartment building in Ashdod, while another landed in the Ashdod port, hitting a fuel reservoir and causing a massive explosion that sent huge flames into the night sky. No injuries were immediately reported in either incident.
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republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:
The rioting by Israeli Arabs in October 2000 did not include attempts to set fire, with petrol bombs, to Jewish homes and shops, nor were synagogues set on fire. In 2000, chanting Israeli Arabs protested all across the country, declared their solidarity with Palestinian terror groups, and when the protesters got completely out of hand and became rioting mobs intent on attacking Jews, 13 of the Arabs rioting throughout Israel were shot.
Setting a cemetery ablaze causes damage, but does no harm to anyone living; everyone in the cemetery is already dead. But the targets of the Arab mobs in Lod were very much alive and at risk of death – the Jewish shopkeepers in their shops that were set alight, the Jewish families in their homes, when petrol bombs were thrown through the windows, the Jews praying in synagogues where flames suddenly erupted. No Jews in Lod have attacked Arab-owned shops or houses, or mosques. The difference matters.
Throughout central Israel, the Arab attacks spread: in Ramle, right near Lod, more attacks on Jewish homes and cars; major fires consumed a restaurant and hotel. In the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, the locals blocked roads so that the forces of order – the Israeli police – would keep out. On the coast, in Jaffa, a car was set on fire and Arabs and Jews clashed, Even in the overwhelmingly Jewish Tel Aviv, fights broke out between Arabs and Jews in the very center, Habimah Square, of the city.
The rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza emboldened the local Arabs, who now wanted to show that they could make common cause with Hamas in helping to “strike terror” at Israelis from within.
Israel was supposed to be the Jewish National Home, a refuge for world Jewry. The Israelis are used to fighting for their survival against the armies of Arab states. They are used to fighting terror groups, too – Hamas, Hezbollah, PFLP, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But in Lod, many of the Arabs with whom they have lived side-by-side, among whom they had grown up, people whom they had allowed themselves to believe were reasonably content as citizens of Israel, with all the civil, religious, and political rights of Israeli Jews, suddenly turned on their Jewish neighbors. Within two days of the first Hamas rockets landing in southern Israel, and just a week after Arabs on the Temple Mount had started flinging rocks and Molotov cocktails at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below, and at the Israeli police on the Temple Mount itself, and only a few weeks since Arabs had begun to attack Jews on the streets of Jerusalem, and to upload using the TikTok app videos of their attacks, to share them with other Arabs who they were sure would enjoy the spectacle, the Arabs of Lod went on a rampage.
Some Jews in Lod were caught between the rockets fired at the city by Hamas in Gaza, and the Israeli Arabs, whose vicious fanatical frenzy worried them so much that they did not use public shelters lest they be “attacked by mobs” of hysterical Arabs.
Having endured the violence of Arab mobs setting on fire Jewish shops, homes, cars, and synagogues, the Jews of Lod – many of whose parents were refugees from Arab lands – managed to get back in the only way they could, with what were apparently two or three incidents of rock-throwing at Arab cars (no one hurt as a result), an understandable reaction to being goaded beyond endurance by so much Arab mob violence.
Reacting to the ongoing riots in Arab-Jewish cities across Israel, Meretz MK Isawi Frej said “anyone who calls themselves a public figure in Arab society must call for restoring calm.”
“I call on [the Joint List’s] Ahmad Tibi, Ayman Odeh along with Arab mayors: This is the test of your leadership. Don’t hide. Don’t only speak out during elections. It’s your job to go out and influence,” Frej said….
Frej, an Arab, called on Arab MKs and mayors to denounce the rioters and call for calm. So far he has gone unheeded. No other Arab leader has yet spoken out. That failure must certainly alarm Israeli Jews.
What must Israeli Jews be thinking when they confront the spectacle of those whom they thought of as their peaceful Arab neighbors, with whom they shared so much, suddenly allowing themselves to be whipped up enough to set fire, in Lod alone, to three synagogues, to destroy Jewish-owned shops, to firebomb Jewish-owned homes, and to attack at random Jews whom they came upon in the streets of Lod?
In his statement, Rivlin said he asked Younes “to do everything in his power to calm things down. The people of Israel, Jews and Arabs alike, must hear the Arab leadership sounding a clear and strident [si] voice against this wild violence, against damage to synagogues, against this wild behavior. The police will do all that is required to restore the peace. I ask for cooperation from the Arab leadership to restore calm and law and order to our streets.”
Rivlin’s cri de coeur for Israeli Arab leaders to speak out has still not, by the following week, been heeded. The Border Police have been called in to restore order in Lod, where the Arab mob violence has finally been suppressed. But the former trust between Arab and Jew in Lod, and in other mixed cities, too, have been broken by the Arab mobs that have been attacking, sometimes murderously, the Jews among whom they live and who have done nothing to deserve such treatment.
The pope does his first TV interview and calls people fools... Who did he insult…
The pope does his first TV interview and calls people fools... Who did he insult…