Reply #1: Not surprising at all. Anyone here remember Robert Stethem? [View All]

He was a Navy Petty Officer, a Diver, on a TWA flight out of Athens 22 years ago. He was executed (after being tortured) in Beirut with a bullet to the head by a couple of Hizb'Allah goons and tossed on the tarmac.

This sort of "representational killing" while reprehensible, isn't new or uncommon in the region. I'm betting that the attitude is that there are 'no civilians' in the Hamas vs. Fatah battlefront, in the view of the perpetrators of these murders.

It's a bit different than the standard beheadings that have lately been popular with Western victims primarily in Iraq (because we find that especially gruesome, you see), but this particular method has no doubt been chosen because it is a REAL attention getter. Messing up the body with a long fall makes it tough to do the ritual washing prior to burial, certainly; and letting the families, friends and military cohorts know that the guy was alive on the way down, well, that's terra-icing on the cake.

It's a "We mean business" statement, and, while horrific, is probably viewed as more of a War SOP tactic than as a war crime over that way.

It's like hostage taking--culturally reprehensible in the USA, it's seen as a 'par for the course' strategy over that way, and one with a very long history, too.

It's all a matter of perspective. One person's "take no prisoners, with us or agin' us" attitude is another person's war crime (for the record, I'm with the "war crime" crew, but I am simply noting that there is, even if we might not like it, a cultural divide on this issue).

At any rate, the gloves are really off now. This is an unfortunate mess. I don't see how they'll be able to stop this absent abject surrender from one faction, likely FATAH unless they can do some serious retaliatory damage, as Hamas seems to have the upper hand right now, or fight to the end....