[New Jersey Jewish News] Debra Rubin - Imagine you are a soldier in the field when a suspected suicide bomber comes at you. Should you shoot or not? "Eight seconds - that's all you have to decide," said Col. Bentzi Gruber, a reserve commander in the Israel Defense Forces. Speaking April 22 to a group of Rutgers University students, Gruber showed actual films from the recent Gaza operation. The students saw cars loaded with explosives detonating, secret tunnels, and booby-trapped houses. Gruber also showed Gazans grabbing and using children as shields as they run across streets. "They do this because they know we won't shoot," said Gruber, who outlined how the IDF strives to minimize civilian casualties even in the middle of war. "We won't do it. A Palestinian kid and a Jewish kid are the same thing to me." If a pilot spots a terrorist in a taxi with four children, he said, "we won't shoot even if this terrorist killed 10 people yesterday and four soldiers today. We will wait and find him another day." Gruber used footage of a man with a rocket launcher on a crowded street as another example of a non-shooting situation because of the potential danger to innocent civilians. These policies have held down collateral damage to civilians to rates far below that of U.S. forces in Iraqi hotspots like Fallujah, according to Gruber. "If Tijuana started to launch rockets into Los Angeles, how long do you think it would take the U.S. Army to respond - three days, three months, three years? How about three seconds?" By contrast, Israel suffered more than three years of missile attacks in the south before launching the Gaza initiative. Palestinians also use ambulances, schools, mosques, and homes to hide caches of weapons and launch rockets and as hiding places for fighters, he said. He showed film of terrorists climbing into an ambulance as he instructed the audience to count with him. He stopped the film as the seventh armed man climbed in.
2009-05-01 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive