The Hamas terrorists in control of the Gaza Strip are firing barrages of missiles into Israel and Israel is responding with air strikes and ground incursions. Thanks to the active and effective one-sided and biased broadcast coverage from inside Gaza, especially of Al-Jazerra the Arab world's CNN, pictures of dead and wounded Gaza of children have captured the news. As usual Israel's effort at explaining its reason for resorting to self-defense is deplorably, totally lacking, virtually nonexistent.

The limited news reaching America is that Israel is wantonly attacking civilians with a ferocity hugely disproportionate to the minor disruption of day life Israeli civilians are suffering. You need to know what is really happening. What follows is a concise description.

The Gaza Strip (previously known as "Philistine") has been an active terrorist base against Israel since biblical times. In modern times it is the sweaty, crab infested crusty crotch of the Middle East. In the June 1967 "Six Day War" Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt. But Egyptian President Sadat refused to accept it back as part of the peace treaty that ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel's continued undesired "occupation" of the Gaza Strip did keep the terrorism emanating from it mostly in-check until Israeli withdrew from Gaza as part of the Oslo Peace Accords. Then the terrorists started their own Gaza Strip missile manufacturing industry. And terrorism returned despite the "Peace Accords," and reached unprecedented proportions. Much of this terrorism was aimed against the Israeli civilian settlements built in the Gaza Strip and was blamed on their existence.

Israel decided to take another "step towards peace," with the added benefit of absolving itself from further responsibility for Gaza's population. Israel announced its intention to remove all its presence from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority flatly refused to negotiate with Israel about the withdrawal, except to demand Israel totally obliterate all sign of Israeli presence.

So once the population of all the thriving Israeli communities was uprooted, their now vacant upper middle-class single family homes and industrial and agricultural enterprises were bulldozed into rubble that was left littering the Mediterranean Coast. Only greenhouses bought by foreigners before Israel withdrew, intended to be given to the Palestinian Authority, were deliberately spared. Those greenhouses were destroyed by mobs of Gazans within hours of Israel's withdrawal. All this destruction rendered jobless and destitute the thousands of Gazans who daily worked in the industry and agriculture provided by the destroyed communities. It is hard to grasp why destruction of entire, resort-like neighborhoods, entire communities was preferable to their being claimed as Palestinian "reparations," but then applying Western reasoning to a Middle Eastern situation just does not work.

Now, in the absence Israeli troops patrolling the border between Gaza and Egypt, the Egyptians were entrusted to prevent arms and munitions from being smuggled into the Gaza Strip. They didn't. Nor did the Fatah Palestinian Authority administration and their multiplicity of American trained and equipped Fatah "security services" personnel. Even thought the Fatah's rival Hamas was recipient of the major portion of what was being smuggled. Well, as fate would have it, the Palestinians voted into their legislative council an overwhelming majority of Hamas legislators, throwing out the old, corrupt, ineffectual American supported Fatah government.

Next Hamas Gaza, employed the arms and used the financial aid smuggled to it from the terrorist group's sponsors, Syria and Iranian, and by force of those arms took total control of the Gaza Strip. Fatah barely fired a shot. These American and EU trained warriors did not employ their Western training, choosing instead to use an age-old Middle Eastern tactic. They shed their uniforms, threw away their weapons and fled. Hamas reaped a windfall of arms, munitions, sophisticated equipment and sensitive, secret documents and files.

Now really "pumped-up" by their victory, Hamas began routinely firing its home-made Kassam rockets and mortar bombs into Israel. The ruins of the bulldozed Israeli settlements not only provided hiding places from which to fire, but also firing positions much closer to the Israeli northern Negev desert towns and villages the Hamas targeted. The terrorists also fired from within the densely population neighborhoods of Gaza, using the civilian population for cover and shields. And the terrorists improved their home-made missiles' range, accuracy and explosive-carrying capacity.

Rockets being fired from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot had been going on for 7 years, but attacks had been occasional (nevertheless resulting in 6 deaths and hundreds of wounded). Now Kassam rockets and mortar bombs started coming in barrages. Israel responded in multiple ways, most ineffective, easily characterized as disproportionate, causing civilian deaths and subject to use in the terrorists' misinformation industry.

Next Hamas orchestrated a bogus humanitarian crisis in Gaza based on an equally bogus Israeli siege of Gaza. Of course Israeli PR pundits were caught with their pants down. The foreign press accepted the Hamas manufactured crisis and also Hamas's tortured reasoning that it was entitled to fire its Kassams at the Israeli plant generating the electricity that Israel was supplying to Gaza, but Israel was not entitled in response to the Kassam fire, by decreasing the amount of electricity it was providing to the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip. Like I said folks this is the Middle East. Don't try to figure out how folks here reason. Doing so only gives Westerners extra-strength headaches.

In response to the bogus Israeli siege, Hamas blew-up the wall guarding Egypt's border with Gaza. An unprecedented quantity of arms, munitions and terrorists then freely entered the Gaza Strip. Egypt sat around contemplating its navel. The result is that Hamas received Iran/Syrian GRAD Katyusha Rockets. Hamas began launching them against the Israeli City of Ashkelon several days ago, the first just missing a direct hit on Israel's only hospital on its southern Mediterranean Coast. Israel has been trying to suppress the Kassam, Katyusha and mortar fire by killing those firing the missiles and by destroying the Gaza facilities where the stockpiles of the munitions are stored and the where the Kassam are being manufactured. Israeli airpower and ground forces are being used. The terrorists are using civilians for cover in contravention of all Western notion of "Rules of War." Gaza's civilians are being killed, but are not being targeted, as are Israeli civilians. The following is from an Israel Defense Force press release received last night.

"Two IDF soldiers were killed today (Saturday 1 March 2008) and five other wounded during a military operation in the Gaza strip. The operation, meant to combat the ongoing Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli cities in the western Negev, began on Wednesday (27 February) after a student at the Sapir College in Sderot was killed by rocket fire. A salvo of over 50 Kassam rockets was launched today from Gaza at Israeli cities and towns in southern Israel, injuring 22 residents of Sderot and Ashkelon and causing severe damage to property. The injured were transported to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon for treatment, which was itself the target of a rocket strike earlier in the week. Over 90 rockets have been launched at southern Israel since Thursday.