Freies Politikforum für Demokraten und Anarchisten

palestina libera · Beiträge: 1665

To justify its unchecked violence in Gaza, Israel invariably spotlights the arsenal of rockets Hamas allegedly amassed. Amnesty echoes this story line. Thus, the reader learns from Unlawful and Deadly that, as far back as 2001, Hamas had been stockpiling short-range rockets; that it then “developed longer-range Qassam rockets”; that “in more recent years, armed groups in Gaza have produced, upgraded or smuggled in thousands of BM- 21 Grad rockets of different types, with ranges varying from 20km to 48km, and acquired or produced smaller numbers of medium and long-range rockets,” including “the Iranian Fajr 5 and locally produced M-75 (both with a range of 75km), and the locally produced J-80 rockets with a range of 80km”; and that “during Operation Protective Edge, the al-Qassam Brigades claimed to have fired R-160 rockets, a locally produced version of the M-302, also with a range of 160km.”[1] “The majority of Israel’s 8.3 million people, and all 2.8 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank,” Amnesty ominously concludes, “are now within range of at least some of the rockets held by Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza Strip…. [T]he circle of fear has widened.” But how real has been the threat posed to Israel by Hamas’s rocket arsenal? (For charity’s sake, Amnesty’s weird inclusion of West Bank Palestinians in the “circle of fear” will be set aside.)

https://www.byline.com/project/13/article/163