Gushing, Slobbering Puff Piece about Gaza ‘Rocket Scientists’
Rocket Scientists
By Sharon Weinberger
Indeed, Abu Saif was surrounded by a small gaggle of young men who, like members of a celebrity entourage, seemed to have little purpose other than to enhance the importance of their star.
Abu Saif, a rocket maker for the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, is a fan of Google Earth. One recent evening in Gaza City, I sat next to him as he showed me how he used the popular satellite mapping program to target sites within Israel.
“The technology is always improving,” he told me. “Our struggle started with the Kalashnikov, and then it moved to the suicide bomb, then the locally made rocket, and now the Grad rocket,” he said.
Google Earth comes in. The satellite mapping tool that was created with help from the CIA’s venture capital arm has now become a favored tool for rocket makers, who use it to help aim their artillery. Maps are quickly outdated, and don’t provide, as Google Earth imagery does, the precise locations of buildings, roads, and other potential targets.
It wasn’t so much Google Earth that had brought me to Abu Saif, but rumors that Gaza’s rocket men were importing new technology, including guided missiles, to target Israel.
Rocket makers enjoy an air of mystery, and to meet Abu Saif (a nom de guerre, meaning the “father of Saif”), I was instructed to drive down a specific street in central Gaza City, where a young man jumped into the car and guided us to the meeting point. With electricity available for only a few hours a day in parts of Gaza City, we stumbled up several flights of a darkened stairwell illuminated only by our cell phones.
In 2008, when rockets were raining down on southern Israel, journalists would frequently visit the “factories,” where militants would make the crudely built weapons, called Qassams, named after the militant wing of Hamas. Lately, however, the rocket-making business has slowed (militants these days abide by an uneasy cease-fire made by Gaza’s notoriously fractious militant groups), and my meeting with Abu Saif took place in a small room of an apartment decorated with an orange floral print and a matching plastic orange flower arrangement; as we spoke a young child cried in the background.
