(New Republic) Yossi Klein Halevi - Israelis know that the IDF does not deliberately kill civilians. We know this because we are the IDF - because our sons, our neighbors' sons, have been fighting in Gaza. We know that dead Palestinian civilians serve the interests only of Hamas, not Israel, whose military operations in the past were either curtailed or halted altogether by an errant shell that exploded in a classroom or a refugee shelter. We know that houses in Gaza were booby-trapped, that schools and mosques concealed arms caches and entrances to tunnels and were repeatedly used as launching pads for rockets. And we knew, from previous experience, that the Hamas figures of civilian casualties would turn out to be lies. The good news is that we've once again surprised ourselves with our resilience. The writer is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
2014-08-29 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive