What happened to the Jewish Community of Gush-Katif ?
Israeli officials announced on April 17th that they had arrested two Palestinian teenagers from the village Awarta, about five weeks following the brutal slayings of five members of the Fogel family on the Sabbath eve of March 11th, in the Jewish settlement of Itamar.
The suspects, 19 year old Amjad Awad and 18 year old Hakim Awad, confessed to the murders and carried out a reconstruction of the attack.
Tamar Fogel, 12, who had been out at a youth activity at the time of the killings discovered their bodies on returning home.
“For the family, this is not a complete answer, but without it they could not be given even a partial answer,” commented Prime Minister Israel Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Shin Bet emphasized that the attack had been planned, and that the suspects had tried to obtain a gun days before.
The extended Awad clan makes up about half of Awarta, which has a population of around 7,000.
Nouf Salim Awad, 37, the mother of Hakim, said that her son “was in his bedroom on the Friday night” of the killings. “There are only two possibilities,” she said. “Either he became crazy, or he was forced to confess.”
If, according to Netanyahu, the surviving Fogels now have a parial answer, they would be perturbed to discover the deeper narrative behind the murders.
The murderers owe their thanks to a successful lawsuit brought by “human rights” groups against settlements such as Itamar.
The Awads enjoy special protected status of Israel’s legal system that guarantees work for Arab laborers in the predominantly religious Settlements in Israel.
They are the benefactors of successful legislation funded by various “human rights” groups granting legal status for the “aggrieved” grandchildren of Arabs who fled or were displaced from Israel in 1948 following the declaration by the U.N of Palestine as a Jewish State.
Both the IDF and Civil Administration have complained that they have been pressured each year by the PA, as well as far-left-wing groups within Israel and Europe, to allow migrant Arabs from nearby villages to harvest freely despite security concerns.
The two “human rights” groups that successfully filed the lawsuit against the Settlement of Itamar were the “International Solidarity Movement” (ISM), and the left wing Reform group calling itself “Rabbis for Human Rights.”
The strategy behind this legislation has succeeded in overwhelming the settlements with “discrimination” lawsuits, creating a de-facto entitlement to a “worker’s visa” status as a birthright, retro-active to 1948.
Hundreds of splinter “human rights” groups, such as “Rabbis for Human Rights,” are funded by a number of larger umbrella organizations, such as the “New Israel Fund.”
With millions of dollars at their disposal, they are able to deliver O.J. – style legal teams that overpower settlement autonomy and security by enforcing the importation of workers from hostile neighboring Arab villages.
The same organizations also sponsor “olive harvest” events aimed at forcing Israel to allow unscreened Arab laborers entrance during the olive harvest.
The courts rejected arguments voiced by Itamar residents who expressed fear that the legislation would pave an “E-Z Pass” to Arabs intent on using the opportunity to learn the Settlement’s layout in order to plan an attack.
Residents of Itamar voiced the preference to have their own residents perform all aspects of the harvest, including menial labor. But Israeli Civil Administration officials insisted that safety fears would not deter the “rights” of Arabs from nearby towns like Awarta from entering the Settlements to work the harvest.
Residents from Itamar stated that the Awad cousins behaved suspiciously from the outset.
One of them had been caught taking pictures of the safety perimeter fence and security positions at the Itamar Settlement while the rest of the community was harvesting.
He was briefly detained by local authorities and released.
What actually happened that night in Itamar is not in dispute: the two suspects walked the mile or so from Awarta to the perimeter fence that surrounds Itamar armed with knives, a wire cutter and some kind of hoods or ski masks.
After crossing the fence, they entered the house next door to the Fogels which was empty. They discovered an M-16 assault rifle, clips and a protective vest, which they added to their arsenal.
Upon entering the Fogels’ home, they entered the bedroom of 11-year-old Yoav and his 4-year-old brother Elad. The brothers were slaughtered with multiple stab wounds.
They then entered the room of parents Ruth and Udi, who struggled with the intruders before succumbing to multiple stab wounds.
The killers left the house but then returned, looking for additional guns, which they stole.
At that point (according to both the Shin Bet and the military), the 3-month-old baby girl woke up and cried, so they stabbed her to death as well.
Tamar, the 12-year-old surviving daughter who discovered the grisly scene, took time from her grieving to request that the graphics of the crime scene be released.
One should note that the pictures provide only a partial viewing, for modesty or other reasons.
There are multiple deep lacerations throughout the bodies including the neck, trunkal areas, and extremities.
The visuals are important as they speak to a level of savagery that is unusual among primates – a compulsion to inflict grotesque pain and torture in the process of killing.
Similar acts of savagery have been characteristic of various recent attacks by Muslims on Jews, not only in Israel but across the globe:
•the Haran family by Samir Kuntar in the Mediterranean village of Nahariya in 1979
•The two Israeli soldiers kidnapped in 2006 by Hezbollah
•The beheading of Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan
•The killing of American contractor Nick Berg in Iraq
• The Mumbai attack on the Chabad House in 2008
Six relatives of the killers are under arrest, charged with aiding the killers, which include deputy mayor if Awarta Hassan Awad, an uncle of Hakim, the younger suspect.
This would suggest that the sentiment expressed by the killers might be quite rampant.
Shin Bet has also discovered that the Arab cousins are members of the Palestinian militant group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The mayor of Awarta, Qais Awad (a distant relative of the suspects) said on Sunday that he had “many doubts about this Israeli story” and demanded an “independent international investigation.”
There is significance to the background and context of these killings:
They could not have occurred without the legal groundwork carefully devised, sponsored, and concealed behind the façade of various “human rights” organizations.
The victims also happen to be former residents of Gush Katif, who were evacuated by the IDF as a unilateral peace gesture by Israel in 2005.
Its vast network traverses the Middle East, where umbrella organizations such as the “New Israel Fund” minimizes its visibility by disseminating into multiple splinter-groups, concealed behind a façade of hundreds of “human rights” groups.
The graphic photo images provide a glimpse into the “shadow material” of the “refugees” whose rights have become sanctified by the world establishment.
If Israel (or any country for that matter) wants to survive, she had better start prioritizing whether the judicial system is willing to be an accomplice to such crimes.