Thanks, but your dead Gaza

Gaza City
July 05 2006

"Thanks, but your dead Gaza"

You can have one of those days when it seems that all you ever hear back on the IFB , is that your shot has been dropped for breaking news. The missile launches by North Korea overnight our time, have meant that events in the Middle east have moved down the news agenda.

The trouble was that we had a bloody good live shot up and running, we were by the American School looking down into the greenhouses that the new long range Qassam missile had been fired from into Southern Israel. The new missile has a range of ten km's or six miles and has added a new dimension to the terror strikes that the militant wings of Hamas and islamic Jihad can use. Last night one of the groups fired from the greenhouses and it landed in a school in Ashqulon. The Israeli's have taken this threat very seriously, and in reality this is a far bigger issue than the kidnapping of the soldier opver a week ago.

So for a good couple of hours we were on the hill running a live shot back to New York, with a constant barrage of artillery landing about a mile or so away, after hearing the thud of outgoing we waited twenty five seconds and waited for the bang of impact.

However in the scheme of the world today and North Korea playing with even bigger missiles, almost every live shot was pre empted , first by the UN Security , then by President Bush speaaking , the UN Ambassadors speaking , then Condoleeza Rice speaking. The Control Room kept coming back to us and asking us to hang and then something else would break. Ken Lay the disgraced former Enron chief suddenly dies in Aspen and another story pre empts us.

Earlier in the day an explosion in the Zeitoun district had everyone scramble out there, but the moment everyone had their cameras out, masked gunmen from Islamic Jihad point the kalshnikovs and told all media to leave. Apparently a bomb factory had what we call an Internal accident and two guys working on bomb and missille making mangaed to blow themselves to kingdom come.

This morning also had a great start being woken at 5:54am by a Sonic boom and then listening to hotel staff cleaning up broken glass for the next thirty minutes.

If they just became regular with the sonic boom attacks I would not need an alarm clock