On Sunday morning, Israel conducted an air strike to take out Hamas operatives on a street
in Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Reporting afterward indicated that three Hamas guerrillas on motorcycles
were struck, and at least seven reported bystanders were killed in the
attack.
The media and the UN promptly went into overdrive to
characterize this incident as an attack on a UN school, because the street where
the Hamas guerrillas were struck was outside the school (which is being used as
a shelter). Rick Moran
reconstructed the event, however, using multiple sources, and pointed out at PJ
Media that the air strike, which appears to have involved a single missile, didn’t hit the school at all. In fact, it looks to have upheld
Israel’s usual standard of precision, hitting the target it was aimed at and
leaving, in the words of the UK Telegraph, minimal physical destruction:
“just a small but deep hole in the road where the missile had
landed.”
That in itself defies the reflexive media
characterization of an indiscriminate shelling attack “on a school.” But blogger Lenny Ben-David also did
some sleuthing on the collateral casualties in the attack, and what he found was
that all but two of them appeared to be military-age males.
[Two tweets from Lenny]
Whether the young adult males were on the street near
Hamas for fell purposes or not, these facts paint a picture different from the
“attack on a school” narrative.
In fact, Israel didn’t attack a school. The IDF attacked Hamas guerrillas. The guerrillas had positioned
themselves, for whatever reason, on the street outside of a school. They were taken out in a pinpoint strike
and the school was never hit, nor was anyone in it or on its grounds
hit.
As a matter of waging war lawfully, the IDF’s action
comports with the standards of international convention. The IDF targeted combatants, and took
care to use as precise a weapon system as possible to minimize collateral damage
in an area that might have civilians in it. Regrettably, there were apparently at
least some children in the area, but it is by no means clear that that factor
was different from any previous instance of the IDF targeting Hamas operatives
in vehicles on city streets. The
targets and their vehicles were outside the school grounds – on the other side
of its perimeter fence – at the time of the strike. The IDF used only the force necessary to
accomplish the task; no more. And
it used that force as precisely as technology allows. It didn’t choose a more destructive
method, which might have guaranteed the kill better but at a higher collateral
cost.
What all this means is that, based on what we know at
this point, Israel’s action was not even questionable, much less
indictable. Far from being
disgraceful, it is an example of the preternatural care and restraint routinely
shown by the IDF.
Yet the U.S. State Department, in a near-hysterical
press release, condemned the attack in intemperate and embarrassingly irresponsible
language.
The United States is appalled by today’s disgraceful
shelling outside an UNRWA school in Rafah sheltering some 3,000 displaced
persons, in which at least ten more Palestinian civilians were tragically
killed. The coordinates of the school, like all UN facilities in Gaza, have been
repeatedly communicated to the Israeli Defense Forces. We once again stress that
Israel must do more to meet its own standards and avoid civilian casualties. UN
facilities, especially those sheltering civilians, must be protected, and must
not be used as bases from which to launch attacks. The suspicion that militants
are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so
many innocent civilians. We call for a full and prompt investigation of this
incident as well as the recent shelling of other UNRWA schools.
We continue to underscore that all parties must take
all feasible precautions to prevent civilian casualties and protect the civilian
population and comply with international humanitarian law.
It’s not actually funny that hardly a word of this
communication is valid or pertinent.
It’s horrifying, because it came from the government of the United
States.
There was no shelling; the number of displaced persons
housed at the school is irrelevant (and seems to have been included for
rhetorical effect), given that the school was not hit, nor was it likely to be;
the exceptional care taken by the IDF is what ensured that the school would not
be hit, even though Hamas was putting the area around the school in danger; and
the suspicion (in this case, the knowledge) that “militants” are operating
nearby does, precisely and emphatically, justify strikes, which is why it is a war crime to hide
military activities behind civilians and/or protected sites.
There is no moral principle of war that the presence
of civilians demilitarizes what would otherwise be a military target, rendering
it ineligible for attack. Rather,
the opposite is true. It is not a
war crime or an inherently vicious or disproportionate act to attack a
combatant. Period. That applies no matter where he
is.
This
is what makes the State Department press release so acutely irresponsible. The money sentence: ... [See rest at
link]
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