Genius Alert: Palestinians Call Drones Deadly Weapon

Well, duh.

Maybe pretty soon these terrorist scumbags will realize the missiles they fire at Israel on a daily basis are also deadly.

And maybe, just maybe, if they ever stopped, then the dreaded drones won't be raining hellfire down on their sorry asses.

Palestinians say they know when an Israeli drone is in the air: Cell phones stop working, TV reception falters and they can hear a distant buzzing. They also know what's likely to come next — a devastating explosion on the ground.

Good. I like that. A few seconds to ponder what they've wrought.

Palestinians say Israel's pilotless planes have been a major weapon in its latest offensive in Gaza, which has killed nearly 120 people since last week.

Including civilians, don't you know. Still, why should it matter, Hamas has declared victory, right?

"Our experience is that the drone missile is successful in hitting its targets, and it's deadly," said Dr. Mahmoud Assali, a Palestinian physician who works in the emergency room of a northern Gaza Strip hospital that has often treated Palestinian gunmen hit by Israeli drones.

"The drone has a zone of around 15 meters (50 feet) where it decimates everything. It targets people and leaves them in pieces," Assali said.

Israel is at the forefront of the drone technology that is increasingly being used in hotspots around the world. The unmanned craft provide a deadly and cost-effective alternative for armies to target enemies, without risking their own pilots' lives and reducing civilian casualties in heavily populated areas.

How unfair!

Meanwhile, Time has already whipped out the dreaded Q word:

A Gaza Quagmire for Israel?

People, update the style manual already.

Tit-for-tat clashes in Gaza may escalate into the next quagmire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before the current fighting started, Israeli officials privately scoffed that they could live with an occasional Hamas or Islamic Jihad rocket fired into their territory by the Palestinian militants in Gaza. But that changed last week when Hamas, angered at the loss of five senior commanders in an Israeli air strike, began targeting Ashkelon again, sending a dozen powerful Grad missiles into the Israeli port roughly five miles from Gaza's northern frontier. In retaliation, the Israelis stormed into northern Gaza.

Of course, this Time boob is too busy calling this latest skirmish a quagmire to note the Grad missiles are coming from Iran. Minor tangential point, I surmise.

The Israeli army on Monday said that all the long-range rockets fired by Gaza militants against southern Israel during the latest round of violence were manufactured in arch-foe Iran.

Speaking to the parliament's powerful foreign affairs and defence committee, a senior military intelligence official said that over 20 Katyusha-type rockets, also known as Grad, were fired against Israel since last Thursday.

"We are talking about regular Iranian-made rockets," an official quoted the intelligence official as saying.

The 122-millimetre rockets have a range of about 20 kilometres (12.5 miles) and carry a large payload which caused heavy damage to buildings in the southern coastal town of Ashkelon, which bore the brunt of the Grad rocket fire.

Gaza militants have in recent years fired thousands of short-range makeshift rockets and mortars against southern Israel, but have only rarely fired the longer-range Grad-type rockets.

Israel believes that over 100 such rockets were smuggled into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip through its porous border with Egypt in recent months following the Hamas violent takeover of the territory, a security official has told AFP.