Jerusalem, Israel – Last night, at 8 p.m., an Israeli woman, Shirel Friedman, 35, was killed by a direct Gaza missile which hit her car. Two other Israelis were injured in the five-missile salvo, while another 20 were admitted to hospitals for shock treatment.

The timing of the attack coincided with the preplanned visit to Sderot of Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who accompanied European Union envoy Javier Solana to a meeting at the Sderot municipality, where Livni had announced earlier in the day that she wanted to acquaint Solana with the human implications of the missile attacks on Sderot.

Since the Livni-Solana meeting was announced as a leading news item on the Israel Government Broadcasting Authority radio newsreel all day, the joke that circulated all day in Sderot was that the Palestinians in Gaza, who know Hebrew and follow the Israeli news, would greet Livni and Solana with a salvo of missiles.

By he end of the evening, this was no joke. Twenty missiles had hit Sderot. A riot broke out near the Sderot municipality, after an angry crowd reacted to the killing of Friedman. As the crowd chanted slogans calling for strong military action in Gaza, some of the protesters through debris at the municipality and broke windows of the town city hall. Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert arrived on the scene and promised stronger action against Hamas.

In response to the new round of attacks, Ahmad Yousif, a senior advisor to Hamas leader and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, told the Palestinian news agency Ma’an that he refused to order a halt to launching missiles at Israeli towns and farms. Yousif depicted the missiles being hurled at Israeli targets as “fireworks which alert the world that there can be no solution except forcing Israel to halt its hostilities.”

David Bedein can be reached at Media@actcom.co.il. His Web site is www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com

©The Bulletin 2007

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David Bedein
David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.

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