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Peace Process

'Too many terrorists to speak of peace'


By Ryan Jones
October 26, 2005

It is ludicrous for Israel and the West to be speaking about there being momentum towards regional peace when anti-Israel terrorism remains the order of the day in the Gaza Strip, said Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal, whose town has born the brunt of ?Palestinian? Kassam rocket attacks.

?How can we speak of a political process with 2,000 terrorists in Gaza?? asked Moyal on Army Radio Wednesday morning.

Those terrorist forces lobbed another five Kassams into Sderot from nearby northern Gaza Monday afternoon. Another rocket was reportedly fired overnight Tuesday.

Israel responded by firing artillery shells and a handful of missiles at open fields and empty buildings used by the ?Palestinians? for terrorist activities.

Moyal slammed what he called the ?soft? response to the ongoing aggression against his town.

?This is not the response we were expecting following the barrage of Kassam rockets,? he told Ynet. ?The IDF should not respond to their attacks, but rather immobilize them completely.?

Moyal recalled in an interview with Israel Radio that the Sharon government had publicly vowed that any rocket attacks from Gaza following Israel's ?disengagement? from the Strip would elicit a military response ?unprecedented? in its severity.

Failure to make good on that threat would only encourage the terrorists to fire more rockets, the mayor warned.

He said that sooner or later Israel would be ?compelled to implement an 'eye-for-an-eye' policy, targeting civilians in Gaza following attacks against Israeli civilians in southern Israel.?

Ongoing restraint is ?not necessarily the moral route if it leads to another attack against innocent Israelis,? Moyal noted.

Moyal was joined by IDF officials who confirmed the Palestinian Authority was apprised of terrorist intentions to launch Kassams prior to Monday's attack, but did nothing to prevent the aggression.

?We turned to the PA and demanded they deal with it,? a senior officer told Ynet. ?In our estimation, this would not have been such a difficult task - if they would have deployed their people at the launching sites and 'taken care of' one or two terrorists, the barrage could have been prevented.?

The Islamic Jihad claimed credit for the bombardment, which it said was in response to the killing of its top ?West Bank? field commander during his attempted arrest by IDF soldiers in Tulkarm on Sunday.

Louie Sa'adi was shot dead after he and a wanted Fatah terrorist accompanying him opened fire on the Israelis.

Its signed agreements notwithstanding, the PA had failed for years to arrest Sa'adi, who was believed to be personally behind the terrorist murders of at least a dozen Israeli Jews.

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