It's sad how fast the Israeli's forget
 

that they were the ones being picked off just as it was described in this article not too long ago.


Whenever concerns are expressed over civilian casualties inflicted in Israeli military operations, the country's generals and political leaders are quick to insist that theirs is the "world's most moral army." That claim was challenged by human rights observers over Israel's recent offensive in Gaza, although such criticism is reflexively dismissed by Israel as driven by pro-Palestinian bias. But when the allegations of abuses come from Israeli soldiers involved in the fighting, they can't be as easily dismissed.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak was forced to repeat the "world's most moral army" mantra on Thursday, this time to reassure his own countrymen shocked by allegations published in the Israeli media from six veterans of the Gaza operation. The six soldiers, whose identity is being kept confidential, made their claims in an address last month to cadets of the Yitzhak Rabin military academy, of which they are graduates. Among other claims, the soldiers alleged that an Israeli sniper had shot a woman and her two children who walked in the wrong direction after being ordered out of their home by Israeli troops. In a second incident, a sniper supposedly killed an unarmed elderly woman who posed no apparent threat to Israeli troops. And the soldiers ascribed these incidents to overly permissive rules of engagement. See pictures of Israel's Gaza offensive)
"I simply felt it was murder in cold blood, said the soldier who witnessed the scene, quoted in the daily Haaretz. He went on to explain sarcastically, "That's what is so nice, supposedly about Gaza. You see a person waking on a road... He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take that woman out, the moment you see her."
After the anonymous soldiers' testimony was splashed across the media in Israel and abroad, the military police on Thursday said it would investigate the alleged killings. Their allegations renewed an ongoing debate between Israelis who defend the Gaza assault and those who say it failed to accomplish its goal of crippling Hamas, but stained Israel's reputation. On Friday, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman dismissed claims of the gunning down of the mother and her two children as "heresay", but said that the account of the elderly woman's death was still being probed. But those were just two of the incidents alleged by the six soldiers.
Human rights investigators suggest that what the soldiers' allegations and eyewitness accounts from Gaza residents suggest is that, in an effort to maximize the safety of their own soldiers entering Gaza, Israeli commanders may have let their ethical standards slide. Retired general and former security chief Ami Ayalon concurs. The Gaza operation, says Ayalon, "compromised the I.D.F.'s ethos, which was once built on ethics, sacrifice. And today, after the Gaza offensive, it is based on force alone."
A soldier identified as Aviv from the Givati Brigade, one of Israel's elite combat units, reportedly described to the military cadets his inner conflict over obeying orders to use indiscriminate firepower while clearing out an eight-story apartment building. "We were supposed to ... burst through the lower door, start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?"
Aviv explained that his commanders had blurred the boundaries between combatants and civilians: "From [the officers] above, they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained ...inside Gaza City was, in effect, incriminated, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled," Aviv alleged. "On one hand, they really don't have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand [the officers] are telling us they hadn't fled so it's their fault." Faced with having to slay the 40 families cowering in the building, he was able to persuade his superiors to let him warn the tenants, giving them five minutes to leave or "get killed."
In the Israeli military offensive, 1,434 Palestinians, including 960 civilians, were killed, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Center in Gaza. Three Israeli civilians were killed in the course of the same operation, and 10 soldiers, four of them by friendly fire. The lopsided death toll, and the fact that so many civilians were killed, has drawn fierce criticism of Israel's by human rights agencies in Israel and abroad. And the consequences could extend from the political to the legal realm.
U.N. human rights envoy Falk said that Israel's apparent failure to distinguish between military targets and civilians could "constitute a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law." He also said that rocket fire by Palestinian militants that indiscriminately targeted Israeli towns could also constitute a war crime, and urged the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the actions of both sides during the recent conflict. With mounting pressure at home and abroad to account for the high Palestinian civilian death toll in Gaza, Israel's claim to have "the world's most moral army" is likely to be subjected to the test of evidence in the months ahead.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009032...08599188685600

heading straight for fight club

Holy shit. Summary please. I don't read wall of texts.

^ QFT +1

if the muslim world do anything to back palestine up it will be world war 3

what's a hypotenuse?

X2

The longest side in a right angle triangle.

~David Ben Gurion 1st Israeli Prime Minister

The entire world could see that war crimes were going to happen. As written in The Economist during the first week, scores of journalists from the news wire agencies were being shut out of Gaza, and were only allowed information given through the Israeli military.

Here's something that pissed me off even more though!
Did you know in 1988 the fucking Americans under the first Bush shot down an Iranian airliner accidently, killing 290 people, and NEVER APOLOGIZED!?

SWWEEEEETTTTT

what the fuck does that have to do with the israeli/palestine conflict. lol

Bush Sr never apologized for it because it was Ronald Reagan who was the President in 1988.

:lol

:haha:

The event triggered an intense controversy, with Iran condemning the shootdown as a "barbaric act." In mid-July 1988, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati asked the United Nations Security Council to condemn the United States saying the downing "could not have been a mistake" and was a "criminal act," an "atrocity" and a "massacre." George H.W. Bush, at the time Vice President of the United States in the Reagan Administration, defended his country at the United Nations by arguing that the shootdown had been a wartime incident and that the crew of the Vincennes had acted appropriately to the situation at the time.[16] The Soviet Union asked the US to withdraw from the area and supported efforts made by the Security Council to end the Iran-Iraq war. The remainder of the 13 delegates that spoke echoed the US position saying one of the problems was that a 1987 resolution to end the Iran-Iraq war had been ignored.[17] Following the debate, Security Council Resolution 616 was passed expressing "deep distress" over the downing, "profound regret" for the loss of life, and stressed the need to end the Iran-Iraq war as resolved in 1987.[18]

The US government issued notes of regret for the loss of human life and in 1996 paid reparations to settle a suit brought in the International Court of Justice regarding the incident. It never admitted wrongdoing, or apologized for the incident. In August 1988 Newsweek quoted the vice president as saying "I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are." Bush used the phrase frequently[24] during the 1988 campaign and promised to "never apologize for the United States" months prior to the July 1988 shootdown and as early as January 1988.

What's sad is that we voted for such a douche bag and his son. But not like we had a brighter bunch to choose from anyway.

The difference is that it was never the VP's job to publicly apologize for the actions of it's military. If anyone was to apologize, it's the President.

seriously cliffs

Israel is all like "Yo, it's the palestinians who suck", but now Israel's soldiers are all like "Dude, we saw a sniper kill some old lady, some other lady and her 2 kids" and now everyone's all like "dude, srsly Israel, wtf?"

:inout:

this is news worthy how?