Palestinians Shift To Rockets That Only Kill Palestinians; NGOs Still Blame Israel

“We get much more political mileage out of killing our own children than killing theirs.”

Gaza City, August 7 – Militant leaders in this coastal territory have come to appreciate that the propaganda value of dead Gazan children outweighs even Israeli military casualties, and have therefore begun to calibrate their weapons to fall short within the Gaza Strip, knowing that they can still accuse the Jewish State of causing those deaths and having media and international humanitarian groups echo the claim without skepticism.

Officials in both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – the latter representing the primary actor in the latest round of fighting with Israel – acknowledged Sunday the shift in text-message exchanges from protected bunkers of the type that the Palestinian leadership neglects to construct for citizens. They cited the global brouhaha that ensues whenever a Palestinian child dies during conflict with Israel: Palestinians blame Israel even when the death occurred when a Palestinian rocket misfired, and groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch take the Palestinian accusations at face value.

“We get much more political mileage out of killing our own children than killing theirs,” admitted Fawzi Barhoum of Hamas. “We previously assumed we had to do a certain amount of damage to Israel to get them to respond the way we want, which means hard enough to kill our kids, whom we’ve conveniently placed in proximity to military positions or stockpiles. Then we can go on about genocide, massacres, you know the drill. But we came to realize most of the global media don’t care about the facts or context, and we don’t even need to be hitting Israel with rockets for our ‘Israel bombs children’ claims to get major play in the media. We can just launch rockets at ourselves and say Israel did it, and it just takes so much less effort for the same outcome.”

The shift troubles some in the Iran-led anti-Israel alliance that supports both Hamas and PIJ. “I hope that at least they still get to aim some rockets at Jews,” cautioned Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah, a longtime Iranian proxy. “It feels wrong, to me, to have all these rockets at your disposal and not dedicate at least a respectable portion of them to killing the enemies of Allah. I understand the argument for effectiveness, PR-wise. It just feels like a missed opportunity to cause Jews suffering, which has always enjoyed a place of pride among the leadership in this region. I don’t want to depart from venerable tradition so readily.”

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