Haaretz editorial (Thursday): Pointless destruction

From Haaretz (Tel Aviv)
Dated Thursday May 20

Pointless destruction

Our worst fears have been realized. At least eight civilians, most of them school children, were killed yesterday and dozens were wounded when a tank shell exploded in the middle of a demonstration by hundreds of Palestinians in Rafah. The pictures broadcast to the world were difficult to look at. This is a tragic incident which the Israel Defense Forces clearly did not expect to happen, but when an army wages warfare in a populated area, this is the result. This disaster follows on the heels of the disturbing scenes from Rafah over the past few days, of the destruction of houses, of walls pockmarked by shells, and of hundreds of families fleeing on foot or on wagons pulled by donkeys.
It is painful to see yesterday's dead and wounded, heartbreaking to see the small children carrying bundles on their backs. It is a distressing sight to view old people and women gathering possessions and fleeing north out of fear of shooting and bulldozers. They do not know whether they will be able to return and whether their pitiful homes - 80 percent of the homes in the refugee camp do not have concrete roofs and are covered by tin or asbestos - will still be there.
Until the start of the intifada, the houses in the Rafah refugee camp were only a few meters from the border. But since October 2000, the IDF began tearing down the houses closest to the border because of exchanges of fire, and now houses standing at a distance of up to 300 meters from the border have been marked for demolition. According to UNRWA figures, 88 buildings have been destroyed in Rafah over the past few days and 1,064 people have been rendered homeless. Since the start of the intifada, 1,309 structures have been destroyed and 11,000 people left homeless.
All this destruction has done nothing to lessen the number of incidents and casualties nor the chain of bloody clashes.

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to be able to beleive:

"This is a tragic incident which the Israel Defense Forces clearly did not expect to happen"

one would have to beleive the IDF are REALLY stupid - what did they intend to happen when they fired the missile into a crowd?

in their tactics and their callous disregard for civilian casualties. Just as a rightwing publication denied that the Palestinians were killed by the IDF, we now have the US denying that it killed people at a wedding party in Iraq.

Try this test: turn the sound off in your TV when the news is on. You will quickly notice that you cannot tell whether the video is from Gaza or from Iraq when they are showing news of civilians being killed. You cannot tell whether you are watching the Palestinians intifada or the Iraqi one.

It's refreshing to see someone who feels how I felt when I saw the footage from Gaza. Painful, heartbreaking and distressing sums it up for me. I guess someone should send this guy a memo that he shouldn't be expressing such things until the 'truth' comes out, and that until then claims that the Arabs did it and gloating over discrepancies in the death-toll is the only way to act...

The last paragraph bears repeating:

'Not everything is permissible in the name of security. The military operation in Rafah is clumsy from the operational point of view and its results are destructive. If there are indeed any security achievements, these will be outweighed by the serious harm done to the town of Rafah and its residents - and also to the IDF.'

Violet...