A massacre

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Bradley Burston wrote yesterday in the Israelian newspaper Haaretz:

I want to apologize for the unforgivable.

It is time for us to stop "understanding" why we kill so many Palestinian civilians.
It is time for us to stop explaining away the deaths we excuse as the unfortunate and incidental by-product of a terrible war.

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If it had been only an isolated incident, a tragic aberration, I would have kept my peace, said nothing, just moved on.

But the same crime, the same - let's call it by its real name - atrocity, has been committed time and again, under the same circumstances, for the same reasons, with the same indefensible result.

Someone in an Israelian Defence Force uniform, in a position of responsibility, gave an order.
We will probably never know who.
Nor will we know who loaded the shell into the tank gun, if that was, indeed what happened, or who armed the air-to-surface missile, if that was what happened, who sighted the target, who gave the order to fire, who carried it out.

21 death Palestinians including women and children, 22 death Palestinians including women and children, 23 death Palestinians including women and children, 24 death Palestinians including women and children, 25 death Palestinians including women and children, 26 death Palestinians including women and children, 27 death Palestinians including women and children, 28 death Palestinians including women and children, 29 death Palestinians including women and children, 30 death Palestinians including women and children, 40 death Palestinians including women and children, 50 death Palestinians including women and children,

The army said it fired two missiles at Palestinian militants near the tin shack of the Abu Meatik family, detonating explosives carried by the militants, sparking a "secondary explosion" that struck the home.

Witnesses said that a tank shell sheared through the roof and killed everyone inside, among them Rudina Abu Meatik, 6, her brothers, Saleh, 4 and Mousab, 15 months, and her three-year-old sister, Hana, 3.

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What we do know is that a mother in Beit Hanoun, a devastated area of northern Gaza from which Qassams and mortars are fired at Israel, was seeing to the breakfast of her four small children Monday morning when their world exploded.

We know that they are all dead.

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We console ourselves, here on the Israeli side of the border, that, unlike the suicide bomber, the box cutter terrorist, the drive-by machine gunner, the Merkaz Harav gunman, the deaths of the children and their mother in Beit Hanoun were a terrible case of bad fortune.

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We salve our doubts by stressing - and this is true - that the Israeli army never intentionally targets non-combatants. We protect our fragile consciences by suppressing case after case of Palestinian civilian casualties.

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We deflect our guilt by shifting the blame to Hamas, to the Jihad, even - and for this I apologize seventy-fold - to the failure of Palestinian civilians to rise up and stop the terrorists.

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We are prepared to excuse it again and again. We excused it when we heard the news today, just as we excused it in November, 2006, when an Israelian Defence Force artillery piece killed 19 people in Beit Hanoun, some of them children still sleeping in their beds when the shell hit.

No more.

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It would pay, in this regard, for us to review the reasons why Palestinian mortars and Qassam rockets fired at civilian centers are considered a war crime. "Because Qassams are not capable of accurate targeting, it is unlawful to use them in or near areas populated with civilians," Human Rights Watch said after a Qassam killed a Sderot mother of two children, days after the 19, mostly women and children, were killed in Beit Hanoun.

It would pay, in this regard, for us to recognize that despite cutting edge technology, we can aim neither tank shells nor missile with assurance.

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"International humanitarian law prohibits direct attacks against civilians and civilian objects as well as indiscriminate attacks and attacks that cause disproportionate damage to civilians," the organization declared. "A prohibited indiscriminate attack includes using weapons that are incapable of discriminating between civilians and combatants or between civilian and military objects."

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We all know why we send in the assault helicopter, and the tank, and the fighter-bomber, and use them against Palestinians. We use them for the same reason we pulled out of Gaza. To spare our own soldiers. We know that occupation takes huge numbers of troops. We use armor against humans in order to limit the exposure of our own soldiers to risk.

The way we use them, however, kills children.

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And while we're at it, let the Israeli who is stunned and stricken by Palestinian terror, begin to acknowledge that incidental killings of civilians are our shame, our war crime, our suicide bombs, the massacres for which we, virtuous as we believe we are, are directly to blame.

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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Hamas for the rocket attacks, but also had strong words for Israel.

"While recognizing Israel's right to defend itself, I have also condemned the excessive use of force by Israel in Gaza. The suffering caused to civilian populations as a result of the large-scale violence and destruction that have taken place over the past few days has saddened me profoundly,"

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The U.N. Security Council called for both sides to immediately end the violence, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that the campaign could last "for some time," and his Cabinet voted to call up 7,000 reservists.

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"It's very bad, people are running in all directions because of the bombings that are happening everywhere," Karen AbuZayd said from Gaza City.
AbuZayd is the commissioner-general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which provides assistance to about 80 percent of Gaza's 1.5 million residents.

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Iyad Nasr, the Red Cross spokesman, said Israeli sanctions had left Gaza's hospitals "almost incapable of functioning" even before the weekend's attacks, and those facilities are now "bleeding every resource available."

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Angry protests took place in several cities around the world on Sunday against Israel after its air strikes in Gaza killed at least 270 people and wounded hundreds more. In London, hundreds of demonstrators battled riot police in an attempt to enter the Israeli Embassy, according to media reports.

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"We are in an all-out war against Hamas," Barak told a special session of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

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Gaza families were sleeping in stairwells and corridors in hopes of avoiding the Israeli airstrikes, which have targeted Gaza City's largest university, as well as mosques that Israel claimed were being used to store weapons, build rockets or hide militants. Israel announced Monday that it would also attack private residences if they're used to house militants.

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In messages that have left many Palestinians rattled, Israel has been placing calls to Gaza residents to personally warn them that their homes, or adjacent buildings, were targets.

Among those trapped in their homes was Wafa Kannan, a 27-year-old Gaza City resident who's been camping out in a narrow apartment corridor with her mother and two brothers since the strikes began on Saturday.

Over the weekend, Kannan's mother received a recorded call on her cell phone from the Israeli military. When she heard who was calling, she hung up. Minutes later, the same call came to the landline in her apartment warning her to leave if she was storing weapons.

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White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe defended the Israeli attack on Gaza.
But added that the Bush administration was urging Israel to avoid civilian casualties.

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And more than 1.400 Palestinian men, women and children injured.

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For the full story of Bradley Burston in the Israelian newspaper Haaretz, click on
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/978661.html






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