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IDF bus hit by Hamas anti-tank rocket fired from Gaza

Hamas terrorists desperate for success before an expected ceasefire blow up an empty bus. One solider standing nearby lightly wounded.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

Hamas terrorists fired an anti-tank missile from Gaza Thursday that struck a bus used by the IDF, but the vehicle was empty and the only injury was to a soldier standing near the bus who was lightly injured.

The Izzadin Al-Qassam brigades announced that they had fired the missile at a bus full of IDF soldiers and followed that with a barrage of mortars in an apparent attempt to gain some kind of success on the ground before an expected ceasefire comes into effect late Thursday or early Friday.

“An anti-tank missile was fired from the northern Gaza Strip towards an empty bus. An IDF soldier who stayed by the bus was lightly injured by shrapnel,” the IDF said.

Last week, Hamas killed an IDF soldier in a similar attack on a jeep, and two other soldiers were wounded.

Hamas published a picture of an exploded bus, but the photo it used was actually from a school bus near Gaza that was hit by an anti-tank missile 10 years ago.

The Israeli blogger Abu Ali-Express, who runs a Telegram channel monitoring what the Palestinians are reporting in Arabic, said that after Hamas published the picture of the bus from 2011 on social media, they put themselves in a difficult public relations position with their own Palestinian audience.

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Taking a page from the PR book of the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, Hamas and their fellow terrorists from Islamic Jihad are known to film all the anti-tank missile attacks and upload the videos to social media for propaganda purposes.

“Hamas is between a rock and a hard place in the issue of publishing the anti-tank video,” Abu Ali-Express noted. “Hamas’s audience strongly claims that it is not possible that the photos are of the bus that was hit by the anti-tank missile.”

News reports on Israel’s Channel 11 showed a white bus with some damage, while the Hamas picture is of a yellow bus.

“The audience is waiting for Izzadin Al-Qassam to prove that the Jews are lying when they published the video of the action. What will happen to them when they see that it is the same bus that appears in the [Hamas] pictures?” he commented. “Quite a few Palestinians are likely to be disappointed if Hamas eventually decides to publish the video” of the attack.”