Palestinian delivery workers have been seen smuggling black-market bags of the Colonel’s fried chicken through the illegal tunnels that connect the Gaza Strip to Egypt, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The tunnels, which Israel has been known to bomb, have in the past been used to smuggle weapons and explosive materials to Palestinian terror groups operating in the Gaza Strip.

The widespread Israeli embargo on the Hamas-controlled territory has inspired entrepreneurial smugglers to traffic less dangerous goods across the border.

“It has been a dream, and this company has made my dream come true,” Palestinian Rafat Shororo, told the Christian Science Monitor, which reported that an entire delivery company has been built around the cause.

“The al-Yamama company advertises its unorthodox new fast-food smuggling service on Facebook,” according to the report. “It gets tens of orders a week for KFC meals despite having to triple the price to 100 shekels ($30) to cover transportation and smuggling fees.”

The Palestinian-bound chicken makes a 35-mile trek from Egypt to Gaza, according to the report.

An al-Yamama employee told the Sun that the company has made at least four KFC runs since opening up shop. Palestinian consumers reportedly enjoy the KFC combo meals.

“We ordered and arranged to bring some meals for us and they arrive after four hours,” the employee was quoted as saying.

Hamas is aware of the activity but has yet to ban the fried chicken.

“Sometimes Hamas checks the meal boxes and sometimes the taxi that picks up the orders from Sinai is late,” the employee told the Sun, which included several pictures of KFC deliveries being run through the tunnels.

Middle East observers on Twitter responded to the news with tweets directed at Israel-bashers who have accused the Jewish state of turning Gaza into an “open air prison.”

“Nothing says humanitarian crisis & ghetto-living like paying $18 for cold KFC smuggled into Gaza via Egypt tunnels,” tweeted student Zach Novetsky.

“So KFC now delivers to gaza, via the tunnels,” write another bemused Twitter user. “Takes four hours and doubles the price due to smuggling markup.”

A Hamas rocket killed the son of a Gaza-based BBC reporter, not an Israeli airstrike as originally reported by many Western media outlets, the United Nations has confirmed.

Multiple news outlets, most notably the Washington Post, initially claimed the Israelis were responsible for the child’s death despite conflicting evidence about the incident.

However, a recently issued U.N. report discredits the story and sensationalistic photo of the dead Palestinian baby that the Post published on the front page of its Nov. 15, 2012, edition with the following caption: “Jihad Masharawi weeps as he holds the body of his 11-month-old son, Ahmad, at al-Shifa hospital after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City.”

Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti did not have a comment on the new report and could not say if the Post would be running a correction in the coming days.

The U.N. human rights council investigated the incident and debunked this claim in its latest report, which will be formally presented by the body’s high commissioner on March 18.

“On 14 November, a woman, [an] 11-month-old infant, and an 18-year-old adult in Al-Zaitoun were killed by what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel,” the report noted.

Some observers argued that the U.N. report was not referring to the case of Masharawi due to a factual error in the draft report that was later clarified.

However, a U.N. official familiar with the report confirmed to the Free Beacon early Monday that the report is referring to Masharawi.

“It is indeed the case of the death of family members of the BBC reporter,” said the official. “Our findings indicate that it may have been a rocket falling short.”

Masharawi’s son and sister-in-law were killed after a projectile struck the family’s home during Israel’s most recent war in Gaza, dubbed Operation Pillar of Defense. Israel launched the operation after Hamas bombarded civilians with hundreds of rockets.

The Post and other outlets originally attributed the attack to Israel even though the Israeli Defense Forces maintained that it had not carried out any operation in that area.

The photo, which showed Masharawi crying while cradling his dead child in his arms, prompted a furious response from Israel’s critics.

Some analysts and commentators noted at the time that the photos of Masharawi’s home revealed little damage, indicating that it was not likely Israel was to blame.

The house was shown to be fully intact except for a hole in the roof—damage similar to that caused by Hamas’ crudely built rockets, which cause comparable destruction to Israeli homes.

Soon after the photo hit the front page, the anti-Israel group Human Rights Watch released a report explicitly blaming Israel for the child’s death.

News outlets including the Post dismissed Israel’s denial, however.

The Post defended its use of the photo after pro-Israel media observers cried foul.

Former Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton defended the paper’s actions, claiming that the photo “moves the viewer toward a larger truth.”

Pexton said, “the bomb was dropped by Israelis,” and claimed the Post conducted its own investigation into the incident.

“Post staff then authenticated and verified the facts behind the Associated Press photo,” he wrote. “The dead baby was real. The bombing was real.”

Pexton also claimed that the Hamas rockets, which force thousands of Israelis to live under fire, “are like bee stings on the Israeli bear’s behind.”

Oren later penned an op-ed in the Post accusing it and other media outlets of “falling for Hamas’s media manipulation.”

Update, March 12, 8:07 p.m. EST: The original version of this post reported that “Washington Post blogger Max Fisher, who also blamed Israel for Masharawi’s death, did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment asking if he would run a correction to his story.” However, those requests for comment were inadvertently sent to the email address of Post writer Marc Fisher, who did not respond. Max Fisher has since addressed the photo controversy here. We regret the error.

The 42-kilometer run, organized by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), was scheduled to take place on April 10.

UNRWA announced Tuesday that it is cancelling the event in response to the militant group’s total ban on women.

“UNRWA regrets to announce that it has cancelled the third Gaza marathon which was to be held on 10 April,” UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness said in a statement to the Free Beacon. “This follows the decision by the authorities in Gaza not to allow women to participate.”

Gunness said that “registered participants who still wish to come to Gaza” are still welcome to participate in “other events, which will be forwarded to those interested as soon as possible.”

“UNRWA is disappointed with this decision and sincerely regrets the inconvenience this may cause to those who planned to participate in the marathon,” Gunness said in the statement, a similar version of which was posted on UNRWA’s website.

The run was scheduled to take place along “the coastline of the Gaza Strip,” according to UNRWA’s website.

The marathon was scheduled as part of the U.N. agency’s “Summer Fun Weeks” in Gaza, a series of activities meant to appeal to children.

“The Summer Fun Weeks will counter the negative impact of pervasive violence, isolation, and loss of hope; all of which are the result of the ongoing occupation and closure of Gaza,” according to UNRWA, which has been criticized for anti-Israel bias.

Runners from the United States and Europe were expected to participate in the marathon. Also slated to appear was Nader al Masri, a Palestinian athlete who recently participated in the Olympics.

Gazan children also would have been permitted to participate in part of the race.

The IDF titled its rejoinder “How Hamas and Islamic Jihad Use Journalism as a Cover for Terrorism.” The title is a jab at the Times, which had headlined its story “Using War as Cover to Target Journalists.”

The Times claimed that several Palestinians who were killed in precision missile strikes last week during Operation Pillar of Defense were in fact journalists and that the IDF was behaving similarly to the Syrian regime by using wartime to target members of the media.

When challenged by a Buzzfeed reporter, Carr defended his accusations by saying that other organizations had made the same claim.

“The Committee to Protect Journalists, which I treat as a reliable, primary source in these matters, identified them as journalists,” Carr stated. Yet the CPJ’s report cited Al-Aqsa TV, a media arm of Hamas, in claiming the terrorists were journalists, meaning that Carr’s “primary source” was Hamas itself.

Carr also told Buzzfeed that despite having not verified the accuracy of the claims he was standing by his story.

The terror activities of the three Palestinians Carr identifies as journalists—Mohamed Abu Aisha, Hussam Salama, and Mahmoud al-Kumi—are detailed in the IDF’s rebuttal.

Aisha, a member of Islamic Jihad, is shown in a picture wearing an Islamic Jihad uniform. Salama and al-Kumi worked for Al-Aqsa TV, a Hamas propaganda outfit classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. The IDF reported they were also Hamas operatives, paid by Hamas, and identified by Hamas websites as jihadists who are “part of the resistance.”

The IDF also admonished the New York Times for incentivizing the practice by terrorists of masquerading as journalists in order to avoid being targeted.

“[I]f the clear line between terrorists and journalists is blurred and there is no standard for the definition of ‘journalist’ … it is likely that Palestinian terrorists will continue using journalism as a cover for terrorism,” the IDF wrote.

The Times has yet to retract Carr’s story.

The Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) principal objective in Gaza is to rid Palestinian terrorists of sophisticated Iranian-produced rockets that are capable of striking deep into Israel’s heartland, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

These rockets originated in Sudan and were then smuggled into Gaza with Iran’s help, sources said.

The existence of these advanced Fajr-5 rockets reveals the deepening ties between Iran and its terrorist proxies in Gaza and Sudan, where the rockets were housed before shipment.

“To put it simply, it was Iranian-made Fajr-5s, imported via Sudan, that prompted this war,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “Iran’s fingerprints are all over this.”

Hamas terrorists in Gaza were provided around 100 Fajr-5 rockets by Iran. The rockets are capable of travelling nearly 50 miles, putting both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv within their reach. These missiles differ drastically from the crude rockets typically fired by Hamas terrorists.

The Fajr-5 missiles are believed to have been smuggled from Sudan into Gaza via Egypt’s porous Sinai region.

Sudan, a longtime ally of Iran, acted as a “key transit point” for these weapons, Schanzer said.

“[Sudanese capital] Khartoum has long been a transit point for Iranian-made rockets to Gaza,” he said. “The smuggling route goes up through Egypt and across the Sinai [desert] into the tunnels and into Gaza.”

Israel was the prime suspect after a weapons facility in south Khartoum mysteriously exploded in late October. The Jewish state’s attack on the Yarmouk military manufacturing facility was preventive in nature, experts said.

“I am convinced that the October bombing of an IRGC weapons factory in Khartoum was part one of this operation,” Schanzer said. “The Israelis learned of a large cache of Fajr-5s and destroyed it there.”

“But it appears that around 100 of them had already made it into Gaza,” he added. “This prompted the Israelis hunt down the Fajrs during this latest round of fighting.”

Several of the Fajr-5 missiles have landed near Jerusalem in the last week. Others have crashed by Tel Aviv, forcing more than a million Israelis to take refuge in bomb shelters.

Smuggling has become easier and less restricted in Gaza following the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was known to bar the passage of sophisticated weaponry such as the Fajr-5 missiles.

“One of the main ways that Hamas acquires weapons is via an extensive network of tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border,” the Israeli Defense Forces stated in a report earlier this month. “Since Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, the terrorist group’s smuggling efforts have increased. With funding from Iran, Hamas has improved its stockpile of weapons.”

Israel’s current military incursion into Gaza is different from its 2008 Operation Cast Lead, Schanzer said.

“Cast Lead was about Israel sustaining too many rockets” from Gaza, he said. “This is about Israel trying to get rid of a certain kind of rocket. They had a very specific goal here.”

Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren condemned Iran’s arming of Hamas in a recent interview with Fox News.

“Our problem is not our border with Gaza,” Fox News quoted Oren saying on Monday. “Among the rockets being fired at us are the Fajr-5 rockets, which come directly from Iran. We know that Hamas terrorists have trained with the Iranians. There’s a strong connection.”

Terrorists in the Gaza Strip have also made use of Iranian-made M-75 rockets, which have reached areas near Jerusalem. The long-range rockets are believed to have been assembled with Iran’s help.

It was believed that Iran pulled funding for Hamas as economic sanctions and other factors lightened Tehran’s purse.

“There’s a prevailing assumption in Washington that Iran has been on the out with Hamas and that is absolutely wrong,” Schanzer said. “Iran likely never left because it probably took months to smuggle these [weapons] in—the surprise here is that Iran is still very much a player in Gaza”

Fighting in Gaza dovetailed with a series of military drills in Iran that are being viewed as a warning to the West.

Iran has also helped hackers in the Gaza Strip launch cyber attacks on Israel, according to reports.

“The Iranians may not have ordered the day and hour for Hamas to launch its missiles, but they have been the guiding hand behind Hamas’ rearmament,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq.

Others believe Israel’s campaign in Gaza is a prelude to an attack on Iran. The IDF has launched more than 1,300 air assaults on targets in Gaza.

“The last 6 days of fighting may in fact be a prelude to what looks like an increasingly inevitable military strike against Iran’s nuclear program,” said Jennifer Griffin of Fox News on Monday.

Iran’s increased presence in Gaza creates a new reality for Israel.

“Those who deny Iranian involvement with Hamas are like the new Truthers, those who couldn’t be convinced that Al Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 no matter how many times Bin Laden claimed credit,” said Rubin. “Let’s just hope the White House and Langley aren’t filled with these new Truthers.”

On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets. Israeli officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multiuse building where many local broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al Arabiya, had offices.

That attack, which struck a computer shop on the third floor, sparked a blaze that sent plumes of dark smoke creeping up the sides of the building. Video footage showed clouds of smoke billowing.

The Times leaves out the story’s single most relevant piece of information: Four senior Islamic Jihad terrorists were using the media building as a hideout. They were killed in the Israeli strike.

Both Islamic Jihad and the IDF noted the presence of terrorists in the building, and that they were eliminated in the strike. As in a previous report on Gaza, the New York Times appears confused about the presence and actions of terrorists in the territory.

The senior PIJ cadre was operating in a media building. They were’t there to be interviewed. They were using reporters as human shields.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 19, 2012

A direct hit was identified on the target. Four senior members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad were known to have been in the media building.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 19, 2012

BREAKING: Gaza group Islamic Jihad says Israeli strike on media center killed one of its top militant leaders.

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 19, 2012

Israel is “running out of targets” after launching more than 1,300 coordinated attacks on terrorist entities and weapons facilities in the Gaza Strip since the start of Operation Pillar of Defense, Harel told reporters during a conference call organized by the Israel Project Monday.

“We are moving quite fast to a turning point,” he said.

While it is legal according to international law for Israel to target sites in highly populated areas, “it wouldn’t be moral or very smart of the Israel side,” Harel said. Israel will have to decide whether to escalate hostilities or strike a truce with Hamas. 

“It’s thinner and thinner and we will have to decide what to do,” he said. “We are about 24 to 48 hours from this junction.”

More than 30,000 Israeli troops remain at the Israel-Gaza border in the event a full-scale ground incursion is ordered. Nearly 75,000 IDF reservists also are on stand-by should a ground assault be necessary to stop Hamas’ attacks.

Hamas would face “a lot of casualties” if Israeli forces launch a ground operation, Harel said, adding that such an operation would “be bad for both sides.”

Hamas continues to fire hundreds of rockets at Israeli citizens: A rocket struck a school early Tuesday in Ashkelon, a town in Israel’s southern region that is regularly targeted by Hamas militants.

More than 90 schools, 61 kindergartens, and three million Israeli citizens are within striking distance of Hamas, according to the Israel Project. Nearly 2,000 rockets and mortars have struck Israel thus far in 2012.

Militants have launched 45 rockets at Israel since the early morning hours of Monday and nearly 900 have fallen since the IDF began its military operation last week, according to an IDF spokesperson.

Three Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets were fired towards Tel Aviv on Sunday, further revealing Iran’s role in the arming of Hamas terrorists.

Israel has made a concerted effort to avoid civilian causalities in Gaza and has treated Palestinian patients in its own hospitals, according to reports.

It also has delivered multiple truckloads of humanitarian aid into Gaza during the conflict, including medical equipment and food, according to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Hamas has increased its anti-Semitic propaganda since hostilities began.

“From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life,” the terror group said in a video message broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV, according to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

Another video promises fierce reprisals on Israeli soldiers and citizens.

“Oh occupier, we are coming towards you. Leave our land,” the video states, according to PMW. “All of Palestine is ours. There is nothing here for you but death. There is nothing here for you but to be killed and to leave.”

Hamas has been launching rockets near civilian homes, mosques, and schools in an effort to increase causalities among its own people, according to footage it recently broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV.

Iran has sought to stoke tensions since hostilities broke out, providing Hamas terrorists with sophisticated weaponry and urging other Arab countries to send troops into Palestine.

“Regional countries should send their forces, weapons, and equipment to the Palestinian people so that they will be used for confrontation with the Zionist regime instead of being used to cause attrition and confrontation between two Muslim groups in Syria,” Ali Larijani, chair of Iran’s parliament, was quoted as saying on Sunday according to the Mehr News Agency.

Larijani also took aim at President Barack Obama in his remarks.

“U.S. President Barack Obama fulfilled its shameful election pledge [to support] the Zionist regime through expressing satisfaction with the attacks, and after getting the go-ahead from the West, the Zionist regime presumptuously organized a savage attack and openly announced that it would mount an operation due to the Palestinian resistance’s military capability,” he was quoted as saying.

Seventy-four percent of Republicans said the operation is justified, along with 59 percent of independents. However, only 41 percent of Democrats said military action was justified.

Israel has targeted terrorist infrastructure and leaders in the Gaza Strip since November 14 in what it has named the “Pillar of Defense” operation. Hamas and allied terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip launched hundreds of rockets at Israel and blew up an army Jeep driving in Israeli territory with an anti-tank missile. More than a thousand rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel since the fighting began.

It has not been two weeks since the president’s reelection and already foreign policy crises are metastasizing. Israel’s justified retaliation at Hamas rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip may escalate into the second Gaza war in four years.

But the Middle East of 2012 is not the Middle East of 2008. Gaza neighbors an Egypt governed not by the secular dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak but by the religious-inspired democracy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt has its own problems with the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip who smuggle arms and contraband across the border. But how will Morsi respond when his countrymen demand retaliation for Israeli attacks on Muslims? Does he have the legitimacy or cunning to maintain peace with Israel while avoiding revolution in Tahrir Square?

The so-called Arab Spring has tipped the balance of power against Israel. The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank is in disarray. Israel’s allies who rule the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan are beset by deadly protests over the cost of fuel.

The bloodletting in Syria has intensified. The death toll is reaching 40,000. Jihadists are flooding into the country where they hope to raise the black flag of al Qaeda. The Syrian-Turkish border simmers as the fighting spreads to Lebanon, where Hezbollah watches and waits on orders from Iran.

The mullahs in Tehran are stronger than they were in 2008. They quashed the Green Revolution in 2009 and are four years closer to obtaining nuclear weapons. They have free rein in Iraq where America no longer has troops. The Iranian nuclear program has survived cyber attacks, sabotage, the assassination of scientists, and economic sanctions.

Has the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei paid a price for his government’s support for international terrorism, attacks on U.S. troops, and manifold human rights abuses? Is the moon made of cheese?

A military showdown over the Iranian nuclear program has been repeatedly delayed. The moment of decision once again has been pushed back, this time into next year. Will the threat of force be any more credible six months from now?

Iran’s enemies are preoccupied. Israel must deal not only with Hamas but also with the possibility that the bloodletting in Syria could spill over the border, which already has seen the first cross-border violence since 1973.

And the United States is clueless. Its political class is reeling after its most celebrated general in decades resigned from his post as CIA director when the FBI exposed his affair with a journalist.

The credibility of the military and intelligence establishment has suffered a grave blow at a critical juncture. A second Obama term will see new, and most likely more dovish, faces at Defense, State, and CIA. Obama seems inclined to replace Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with loyalist hacks. These replacements will have to negotiate the complicated internal politics of bureaucracies as they attempt to implement Obama’s questionable policies.

Wish them luck. Congress is in the opening phases of its investigation into what happened at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11. The unanswered questions: Why were requests for security from Benghazi denied? What was the military response to the 9/11/12 attack, and was it adequate? And why did U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice appear on five Sunday talk shows spouting CIA talking points that other parts of the government knew to be false?

The White House has struggled to answer these basic inquiries. But larger ones remain. Has the president’s drone campaign actually deterred a resurgent jihadist network? What of the 66,000 U.S. troops that remain in Afghanistan? What will be their mission over the next two years, and will some of them remain there after 2014? Does the administration have a strategy to deal with Pakistan, a nuclear state beset by internal strife, fundamentalist movements, and an antagonistic intelligence service? How will Obama deal with the emerging Islamist democracies of the Maghreb?

A responsible press would be relentless in its exploration of these important issues. The press we have is still giggling over post-election comments made by Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and basking in the Republican Party’s quadrennial bout of self-examination. One reporter went out of her way during Wednesday’s press conference to congratulate the president on his reelection—just another member of the team!

The media have bought Obama’s line that Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) are somehow picking on Rice by criticizing the White House on Benghazi. They’ve turned an important national security story into political psychodrama. This was the president’s first press conference in eight months and the correspondent for the world’s most important newspaper asked him about global warming.

Obama has succeeded in shifting the ground of debate toward increasing taxes on the rich. The advocate of a “balanced approach” to debt reduction seems far more interested in the tax-hiking end of the scale than the budget-cutting one. With a single exception: defense. The president is remarkably cavalier about the $600 billion in automatic defense cuts that will result if there is no fiscal deal on Jan. 1, 2013.

But that should not be surprising. Obama has not hid his preference to shift the emphasis of federal expenditure even further toward cash transfers. He has cut defense at every opportunity and is unlikely to change his mind now.

“It is time to focus on nation-building here at home,” the president says. Does he understand that the indebted and risk-averse nation he is building “here at home” is not equipped to deal with the rising tide of conflict abroad?

Leibovich also discussed an early morning attack that claimed the life of senior Hamas operative Ahmed Jabari.

“As you heard, our first target was a vehicle in central part of Gaza,” Leibovich said. ”Inside the vehicle was Ahmed Jabari, born in 1960, the head of the Hamas military wing who was involved in numerous terror attacks on Israelis, as well as [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit’s kidnapping. This is a man who has a lot of Israeli blood on his hands.”

The Israeli Defense Forces targeted 20 different terrorist sites throughout the day, according to Leibovich.

“The second phase of the operation was an aerial attack, which targeted 20 different targets, all underground, which served as launching pads for various kinds of rockets,” she explained. “Among these rockets were Fajr-5 rockets, Iranian-made weapons which can reach a lot further than the ordinary Grad missile.”

All options remain “on the table,” including an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza.

Israel has “no intentions” of either stopping the attacks on Gaza or moving troops into the Sinai region despite declarations from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-controlled government that aggression against the Palestinians must stop, Leibovich said.

Leibovich made it clear that Israel will no longer stand by as terrorists fire hundreds of rockets into communities and military outposts across Israel’s southern region.

“The focus of the operation is crippling the terror organizations while defending Israeli civilians,” she said. “It’s not natural for an Israeli—for anyone—to live in a shelter for such a long time.”

“This situation obviously cannot continue,” Leibovich said. “This is why we’ve launched this operation. We’ve reached the point where enough is enough.”