Palestinians are eating their young

Palestinian Authority security officials are claiming that an Al-Qaeda group attacked an UNWRA run elementary school in the Gaza Strip reports the Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian Authority security officials accused supporters of al-Qaida in the Gaza Strip of being behind Sunday's attack on an UNWRA-run school in Rafah in which one person was killed and six other injured. "There is no doubt that al-Qaida is operating in the Gaza Strip," said a senior PA security official. "Today's attack carries the fingerprints of al-Qaida."

Witnesses told The Jerusalem Post that at least 70 Muslim fundamentalists participated in the attack on the Omariya School, where UNRWA and PA officials were attending a celebration. The director of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, John Ging, was inside the school at the time of the attack. He was not hurt as PA policemen whisked him away to a safe location.

"The protesters surrounded the school and began chanting slogans denouncing the event as immoral," said one witness. "Their main argument was that girls and boys were asked to dance together in violation of Islamic teachings. This is a false claim because I didn't see a mixed gathering." Another witness said the protesters hurled a number of hand grenades and opened fire from automatic rifles as participants prepared to leave the school premises. "It was a big and organized attack on the elementary school," he said. "This is something unprecedented. It's only a miracle that many people were not killed."

The dead man was identified as Suleiman Al-Shaer, a bodyguard for Fatah legislator Majed Abu Shamalah, who was one of the guest speakers at the celebration. According to a third witness, the protesters also opened fire at a vehicle belonging to UNRWA as it left the scene. He said at least two of the assailants were later captured by PA policemen. Five Palestinian journalists who were covering the event were wounded after being beaten by masked gunmen, according to the witness.

Local residents and PA security officials said the attackers belonged to a new Al-Qaida identified with Salafism - a school of thought that takes the pious ancestors [Salaf] of the patristic period of early Islam as exemplary models.

While it is not out of the realm of possibilities for another separate terrorist group to set up shop in the Gaza Strip; I just find it a tad unlikely that a new separate terrorist group is operating this openly against fellow Palestinians because the Gaza Strip is run under a clan-gang system. Keep in mind the Gaza Strip is a small area less than the size of the City of Toronto. It is also a place where either everyone knows everyone or is related to someone who knows someone who knows someone. (Read this excellent report from Ha’aretz called As Gaza Burns for background.)

To accept the thesis of Palestinian security officials is also to accept that an “al-Qaeda” like group prefers to target fellow Muslims when there are approximately 7.5 million Jews surrounding the Gaza Strip on 3 sides. I also find it very suspicious that this group made a point of deliberately targeting five journalists who were at the school covering the celebrations. Sounds like Fatah/Hamas/Islamic Jihad to me. And wasn’t it just last week a Hamas official and acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislature Council was opening preaching in a mosque and calling for the death of Americans & Jews to the “very last one’?

As far as the attack on an elementary school being unprecedented in Palestinian society I must take issue. Long before Beslan; there was Ma’alot. And while one could say Ma’alot represented an attack on “Jewish” school children; hence the difference. I would suggest once a culture crosses this kind of psychological boundary, it is only a matter of time before that same pathology is used against one’s own children.