Israel's case for bombing is based on lies about Eilat attackers coming from Gaza

By Max Blumenthal (Mondoweiss)

In the last two days, Israeli forces have killed at least 15 residents of the Gaza Strip and wounded over 30. Among the dead are two young boys (see here and here), while the wounded included a reporter from the Ma'an News Agency and his pregnant wife. Militant factions in Gaza have responded to the Israeli assault by launching several homemade rockets at Southern Israel, leaving two injured and no one dead.

The Israeli army claimed that it initiated the assault on Gaza in order to kill two alleged militants who supposedly "masterminded" a brazen and deadly terror attack near the Israeli city of Eilat in August of last year. The army also claimed the two were planning a new operation. According to Al Jazeera English's Jerusalem correspondent Paul Brennan:

The Israeli army is saying these two people it targeted with its clinical airstrike on Friday night were senior militants who were plotting an attack.

The Israeli army says that last year’s attack on the road that runs alongside the Egyptian border, where eight people were killed and 25 Israeli soldiers were wounded, was masterminded by the two men they targeted.

"Zuhair Al-Qaissi and Mahmoud Al-Hannani were said to have been behind these attacks, and the Israeli army said that these two men were planning a similar attack and that is why they launched their aerial clinical attack.

The Jerusalem Post, which functions as a virtual bulletin board for the Israeli army, told a similar story: "The IDF said it decided to bomb Qaisi’s car due to intelligence that he was plotting a large terrorist attack along the border with Egypt," the paper reported, "similar to the one the [Popular Resistance Committee] carried out last August that killed eight Israelis."

As is so often the case, the Israeli army is lying through its teeth. According to the army's own investigation of the Eliat attack last year, the attackers were not from Gaza as Israeli government spokespeople initially claimed -- they were Egyptian. The army's investigative findings were first reported by Alex Fishman, the military correspondent for the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharanoth, who had treated the earlier attempts to blame Gaza's Popular Resistance Committees for Eilat with extreme skepticism. Bloggers Idan Landau [Hebrew only], Richard Silverstein and Yossi Gurvitz also marshaled evidence shredding the army's case against Gaza. more

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