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Israeli Military Officers Have No Regrets over Use of Lethal Force at Gaza Protests
(Telegraph-UK) Raf Sanchez - A senior IDF commander supervising a team of Israeli snipers at the Gaza border spoke of their mission to stop Palestinians coming through the thin fence that separates Gaza from Israel. "Was there an option where we could stop them cutting the fence and coming into Israel without using a lethal weapon? The answer is no," he said. "They have a hard and deep hatred of Israel and if they came into Israel I think there is no question of what they are going to do." Israeli military officers expressed no regrets over their decision to use live bullets. They spoke instead of pride in their troops and in the success of their military mission: no Palestinians made it through the fence and no Israeli soldiers or civilians were killed or injured. They voiced frustration at what they considered knee-jerk criticism of their use of live fire by people who did not understand the situation on the ground. Major J. described one incident when shots began to ring out as the Palestinian crowd surged in front of the fence. "They started shooting on our positions," he said. Militants opened fire with handguns and Kalashnikov rifles from a Hamas outpost and a rubbish dump directly facing the Israelis, as well as from the middle of the crowd. The gun battle lasted for 25 minutes. One Druze infantry battalion commander said the men under his command had 20 explosives - grenades, Molotov cocktails, improvised bombs - thrown at them each week of the protests.