“We thought we located all of them,” an old man, helping in the rescue efforts told a cameramen at the scene. “But then we realized that there is a strong stench of death coming from under the debris. We finally were able to locate them. They were two children.” Two children, aged one and four were the cause of the strong odor. They were carried out from under the debris, one with a completely burnt face, and another dead, with a bewildered face But the stench of death is yet to leave the Gaza neighborhood, a reason that is keeping hundreds of rescuers, children, women and men all gathered to help, occasionally finding a body part and more often chanting “God is Great”, to raise their crushed spirits. The discovery brings the toll of Monday night's F-16 strike to 17 people, including 11 children aged between 13 years and two months. Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a top PA official conveyed the latest figures of the Palestinian victims to Al Jazeera Television, saying that 67 of those remaining in the hospital are children, and that there is nearly 20 people in a very critical condition. The identities of the children found Wednesday were not immediately known, but initial reports say that they might belong to the Matar family, as Mohammed, aged four, Ayman, aged 18 months, and Dalia, aged five, are still missing.

"Israel's missile attack on a densely populated area of Gaza City provoked worldwide condemnation yesterday, but the Israeli Government defended its action robustly. The West and the Arab world united in denouncing the attack, saying it violated international law by targeting innocent civilians. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, hailed the killing of the Hamas commander Salah Shehada as a great success. The deaths of 14 others, including nine children, were said to be regrettable."
Okay, so it's a war, and bad things happen in wartime, unavoidable deaths, "collateral damage," etc. etc., you know the drill. But why does Israel's Prime Minister find it necessary to hail the killing of nine children as "one of our great successes" and congratulate his trained killers for a job well-done? Is he an out-of-the-closet sadist, loud and proud in his desire to inflict maximum pain?
Sharon later backtracked, somewhat, acknowledged that a "mistake" had been made in firing a heavy-duty missile at a thickly-populated apartment complex in the Gaza strip, and tried to shift the blame onto "misleading intelligence." According to the new story, Shin Bet hadn't told them that innocent civilians were in the area.
This was met with widespread disbelief. After all, firing a one-ton missile at an apartment complex – you know, a place where families live – could have had but one result. "To suggest anything otherwise," John Ryan, Ireland's UN ambassador said in the Security Council the other day, "is disingenuous."
Which is just a hifalutin' way of calling someone a bloody liar.
Even Sharon's poodle, otherwise known as the President of the United States, was moved to remark that the Gaza massacre was somewhat "heavy-handed" – although naturally the official US denunciation, as always, reiterated this administration's unconditional support for Israel. As presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer put it:
"The president's concern here is there is loss of innocent lives. The president has been and will continue to be the first to defend Israel. In this case the president sees it differently. … This was a deliberate attack on this site, knowing that innocents would be lost as a consequence of this attack."
Is it finally beginning to dawn on the White House that what we are dealing with in the Sharon government is evil, pure and simple – as evil as Hamas. Probably not, but the unmistakable evidence of something rotten in the state of Israel grows, such as this sickening story in the Jerusalem Post about an IDF company commander and a soldier in the reserves who tortured and sexually abused a Palestinian youth. The Post reports:
"The two were carrying out searches for a man when they discovered his son. The commander threatened the youth with a loaded rifle, before commanding him to remove his pants and underwear. The two then held a flame near the youth's genitalia. In addition the two are charged with sexually abusing the boy and beating him."
The incident occured three months ago, just as Israel's amen corner in this country was declaring the moral superiority of the IDF over the suicide bombers, because, you see, they don't target civilians. If innocents are killed, or injured, by the IDF it is always a "mistake" – and that's why there's no "moral equivalence" between the two sides. Or so the Israel Firsters aver. But here we have even the President's own spokesman acknowledging the obvious: what happened in Gaza was no accident, but a deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians.
Although I'm sticking to my original opinion that to compare the Israelis to the Nazis is overstated, the gap between rhetoric and reality is rapidly closing. Stylistically, at any rate, what that IDF commander and his accomplice did to a mere child evokes images of leather-jacketed Stormtroopers indulging in their favorite sports.
What's more, these horrors are enacted while Sharon and his advisors bark like a pack of mad dogs, reined in only by the qualms of their American handlers.
As if Sharon is testing the waters to see how much the Americans are willing to put up with, the Israeli government keeps announcing the most heinous measures – establishing exclusively Jewish land holdings, collectively punishing the families of suicide bombers – and pulling back only after an outpouring of criticism. But the Israelis are always careful not to push us too far, and their timing, I must say, is impeccable: wasn't it fortunate that Congress had already completed the final legislation authorizing an extra $200 million in US aid just as those nine kids were being blown to smithereens?
Just how far does Israeli malevolence go?
One of the great unsolved mysteries of the period leading up to 9/11 is the extent of an Israeli spy operation in the US uncovered by Carl Cameron of Fox News and widely reported, including in this space. As we all know, everybody spies on everybody, "friends" and foes alike. But this operation is believed to have been so extensive, and wide-ranging, that the real question in regard to Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11 is, as one US federal agent put it to Cameron, "How could they not have known?" Now, however, more evidence of the Israeli connection is emerging….
Both Israeli and US government officials scoffed at these charges as an "urban myth." Their denials, however, were somewhat undermined by the leaking of the US government's own report on "suspicious activities" by Israelis around US government offices and military installations. The report, culled from information supplied by numerous federal agencies, documents what is obviously a large-scale intelligence operation directed against US government facilities. Now more documentary evidence of the Israeli connection to 9/11 comes with the emergence of the US government's own list of terrorist suspects, two versions of which Cryptome.com has obtained and posted, with the following information as to their provenance:
"A Finnish list of FBI terrorist suspects, dated 3 October 2001, first published about six months ago, may be compared to a similar list published on an Italian site, dated 22 May 2002. The two lists have many of the same names but a fair number of names are unique to each, and the Finnish list provides a 'function' and ID for each suspect."
There are also other differences. The Italian site indicates that this is an official government circular originating with the American authorities and distributed to various Italian financial institutions in an effort to trace the terrorist trail. As far as I can see, all the names on the Finnish list are Arabic. The Italian version, however, has a number of American names as well, one Frenchman, and – lo and behold! – there is our old friend Dominik Suter, listed right between Eyad Suleiman, a native of Kuwait, and Sheikh Amed Salim Swedan, a Kenyan.
Suter, you'll remember, is the fellow behind the mysterious Urban Moving Systems, whose employees were arrested after neighbors reported them laughing and cheering as they watched the World Trade Center burn. These five "Middle Eastern-looking men," as described by witnesses, were Israelis: they were found with box cutters in their van, $4,000 in cash, and multiple passports. Police interrogated them for hours, and transferred them to a maximum security facility, where they were held for months.
Their van was registered as the property of Urban Moving Systems: A raid on the Urban Moving Systems warehouse yielded computers, documents, and other evidence – of what, we don't know. Suter, the owner of the company, refused all comment, and soon fled the country – to Israel.
The inclusion of Suter, an Israeli, and the front man for what even the Forward acknowledges was a Mossad operation, on an official list of terrorist suspects should silence, for good, those who dismiss the Israeli connection to 9/11 as a "myth," urban or otherwise. As a great patriot once said:
"I have in my hands a list…."
On that list, along with Mohammed Atta, and Zacarias Moussaoui, is not only Suter, but also five other Americans – or, at least, non-Arabs with US addresses. What's up with that?
Only God, and the higher echelons of the US government, know for sure. What we do know is this: it is no longer possible to deny that the US government believes Israel had some connection to the events leading up to 9/11. The documentary evidence, along with the reported testimony of patriots within law enforcement, is accumulating to the point where it can no longer be ignored.
Just how far does Israeli malevolence go? I'm afraid we're about to find out….