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Israeli Pilot Tries to Avoid Hitting Civilians

[AP/MSNBC] Apache helicopter pilot Capt. Orr, who has flown dozens of combat missions over Gaza the past few weeks, on Tuesday said he felt sorry for civilian casualties and had aborted missions to avoid them. Orr, 25, felt that aborting some of his targets for fear of harming civilians were among his proudest achievements. "The ones I remember are when I have locked in on a target and I fire and then at the last second I see a child in my cross hairs and I divert the missile," he said. Orr said he does his utmost to avoid noncombatants. "We work very hard to keep civilian casualties as low as possible," he said. "Each missile we shoot is pinpointed to the very meter we want it to go." He personally has called off many airstrikes, even at the risk of letting a rocket-launcher get away, for fear of harming an innocent woman or a child. He said by doing so, he was following both his military orders and his own conscience.
2009-01-14 06:00:00
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