Note: This post originally ran during the Christmas holiday, and is being repeated for those who may have missed it.
The Iranian proxy terrorist group Hezbollah transfers thousands of dollars for every Kassam rocket attack launched by Palestinian terrorists from Fatah and Islamic Jihad, the Jerusalem Post reports. The scale escalates if the attack kills or wounds Israelis, and the money originates in Iran:
According to Israeli intelligence information, Hizbullah is smuggling cash into the Gaza Strip and paying “a number of unknown local splinter groups” for each attack.
Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) sources said the Islamist organization paid several thousand dollars for each attack, with the amount dependent on the number of Israelis killed or wounded. …
According to the officials, while Islamic Jihad was behind most recent rocket attacks – including the one on Tuesday night that critically wounded 14-year-old Adir Basad in Sderot – several splinter terrorists groups are also involved and have received direct funding from Hizbullah. … Islamic Jihad gets the money via its headquarters in Damascus while Fatah’s Tanzim terror group and the Popular Resistance Committees receive payment from Hizbullah in Lebanon.
All of the money originated in Iran, the officials said.
Once again, Iran shows why negotiations on any kind of security arrangements for Iraq or anywhere else in the Middle East will prove fruitless. Iran occupies the central position for terrorism throughout the region; it assists the militias in Iraq, it supports the Hezbollah push to overthrow the Lebanese government, and now we see that it directly funds the Palestinian terror attacks on Israeli citizens. It even funds Fatah terror groups while Ehud Olmert insists on propping up their leader with a hundred million in cash.
Olmert, meanwhile, has implemented a policy that hopes to maintain a cease-fire that doesn’t really exist. While the missile attacks continue from the PA areas supposedly participating in this cease-fire, Olmert has freed the IDF to attack only “pinpoint” locations where the Kassams originate. Olmert insists that the cease-fire has great strategic importance, because — get this — Israel’s restraint had earned it “a lot of understanding and appreciation” around the world. Not only that, but the cease-fire had given Israel some undefined future “leeway”.
Leeway to do what? Stop abiding by a phony cease-fire? I must have missed all the “appreciation” thrown Israel’s way for its restraint. Israel has shown restraint for years in not giving the Palestinians the total war that for which they have voted and for which they have given ample provocation, and it has bought them nothing from the global community except criticism even from their friends, who sometimes seem to prefer Israel as victim rather than as victor.
I’m all for peaceful solutions, but that takes two sides that want peace. Israel clearly wants peace with the Palestinians, while the Palestinians want Israel and nothing less. And one of the reasons why that remains so is because of Iranian funding for the extremists and terrorists who get richer with every terrorist action. The ISG got it backwards; only when we convince the other states in the region that their support for terrorism carries an existential threat to their regimes will there be peace in the Holy Land, and not the other way around.