Civil War Heats Up

In Palestine. It appears than an intellegence war (oxymoron that one) is going on between Fatah and Hamas. Killing three children. This is old fashioned politics at its best.

GAZA CITY - Three young children of a senior Fatah official and their driver were killed in a drive-by shooting in Gaza today, amid mounting tensions between the party of moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and the ruling Islamist Hamas movement.

The three Baalusha brothers - Salam, six, Osama, seven, and Ahmed, eight - were killed along with their driver, Mahmud al-Habil, when unidentified gunmen opened fire on their car near a school in the Rimal district of Gaza City, medics and security officials said.

The boys’ father, Baha Baalusha, a colonel in the Fatah-dominated Palestinian intellegence services and a former investigator there, was at home during the attack, they said.

He escaped an assassination attempt several months ago. Four other children who were on their way to school in the area were wounded, one seriously, in the attack that left the Baalusha car riddled with dozens of bullets, medics said.

Blood-splattered schoolbags, books and a sandwich bag lay on the backseat of the car after the attack, which came a day after unidentified gunmen opened fire on the convoy of the Hamas interior minister, Said Siam, in Gaza City. No one was wounded in that attack.

This is self government Arab style.

I was optimistic about the Iraq venture, especially in the immediate aftermath of the toppling of Saddam. Now? I'm still opitmistic, but I think the time line needs to be extended. Instead of 5 or 10 years I think we will need 50 or 100 years.

We could do a lot to speed things up if we could reduce dependence on ME oil significantly in the next 10 or 15 years.

There is a way to do it using the Bussard Fusion Reactor. It would make feasible steam extraction of oil from depleted fields and the production of cheap alcohol fuels. Extending current supplies and creating new ones.

For a quite a few practical reasons liquid fuels make a lot of sense for transportation. Fast fueling. Installed infrastructure. High energy density. Plug in hybrids and battery powered vehicles make sense if you have hours to recharge. When you want to refuel in minutes the losses get prohibitive. The losses go up as the square of the charging rate.

So how did we go from the Palestinian Civil War to automoblile infrastructure design? Beats me.

Update: 11 Dec'06 1852z

There is some speculation that the killing of the children was intentional.

Officials assumed the intended target of the attack was Baha Ba'lousha himself, who was not in the car, but whose absence could not be determined because of the vehicle's blacked-out windows.

However they could not rule out that the gunmen intended to kill his children.

If this latter supposition, it would mark a new deterioration in the internecine violence in the Gaza Strip, where to date only senior officials or leading militants have been targeted by rival Palestinian groups.

No faction claimed responsibility for the attack, and police were not releasing any information about their investigation.

However, legislators for Abbas' Fatah party gave a clear hint as to whom they held responsible and urged the president to dismantle the Hamas-led government and appoint a new, emergency one in its pace to deal with what they called 'the security chaos in the Gaza Strip'