...pretty soon you're going to be tagged as anti-semitic!

Seriously, the human rights violations are not excusable. Good post.

... is probably impossible. Is Physicians for Human Rights unbiased? Many of these groups decry every Israeli bullet and sit in silence when rockets fly.

With the Hamas policy of deliberately placing weapons and troops among the civilian populace - to include hospitals and schools - it is very difficult to truly know what was purposeful on IDF soldiers, and what was unavoidable. At the same time, in such ferocious conditions, and with the apparent increasing influence of religious parties in military units, all of this could be horribly true.

Once again the question arises: what exactly did Israel gain from this war?

Well as exhibit B

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072466.html

The moral has gone out of the Israeli cause.

When your opponent uses protected status symbols (UN/Press/Medical) for tactical military advantage, one should expect some blowback from that. Israel has, I think, perhaps gone too far, but the history of Hamas and Hezbollah using such protected symbols can't be ignored either. For example, there have been a few incidents over the years where Hamas used vehicles emblazoned with "UN" to try to get close enough to assault Israeli positions. During Cast Lead, UN and other ambulances were confiscated by Hamas to facilitate tactical movements of their fighters.

Israel can do better, but it's hard not to appreciate the position they are in given the long history of their enemies using protected status for tactical advantage. It would be nice if groups like PHR at least acknowledged that fact.

The title is just a general feeling that many of us who have served in the IDF and read the daily papers here have. In Israel we are highly unimpressed with Haaretz who are getting more and more into sensationalist reporting than ever before.

If their articles were true then other papers and news sources would be following up on them too. Vot? This story isn't good enough for ze other papers, already?

Try the Yediot English news: http://www.ynetnews.com

And specifically, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza-war-crimes

Either way people who wear silly masks and costumes while spouting venom will be placed properly outside of political power. Or barbaric behaviour will become acceptable conduct.

I find it unacceptable that people make judgements about any army before getting some real evidence. It now turns out that the soldiers alleging crimes were reporting rumours, which in turn have been refuted.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/world/middleeast/28israel.html?ref=world

http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=35&x_article=1647

People seem not to note that the soldiers are talking openly about the alleged incidents because they think it is wrong, that the Israeli press and the public do not approve, and that the IDF command is making it very clear that this is not the way that Israeli soldiers are supposed to act. ( Even the disgusting T-shirts will soon be banned. )

Israelis want their soldiers to behave morally because, in this small, inter-connected society, everybody has friends and family in the army ( and this goes on for 20 or more years of reserve duty ).

The openness of Israeli society means that crimes can not be hidden, and families do not want their children to “be immoral” or to “commit war crimes”.

Bloggers here ought to at least read the various viewpoints of US and other officers about the reality of urban warfare against insurgents that hide amongst the civilian population.

http://abumuqawama.blogspot.com/2009/03/tactical-indiscipline-and-its-strategic.html

Good faith consumers of news take such reports at face value. Why wouldn't they?

They don't know that Israel fiercely disputes the Hamas-fuelled assertion that most of the Gaza dead were civilians, with the IDF formally stating on Thursday that the "vast majority" of Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead had been found to be "terror operatives" - a total of 1,166 dead, of whom 709 had firm terrorist identifications, 295 were noncombatants and 162 men who had yet to be classified.

They don't know that Israel credibly argues that several key UN bodies and personnel highlighting Israeli atrocity allegations have a dismal track record of anti-Israel bias.

They don't know that even the patchy information released by the IDF makes plain that many of those "medical personnel" mourned as victims by the Gaza authorities and the disseminators of their narrative were actually Hamas gunmen.

They don't know that the reprehensible "humorous" T-shirts are not a widespread phenomenon.

They don't know that the head of the pre-IDF academy who compiled the targeting-the-innocent allegations went to jail for refusing to serve in the West Bank, that key soldiers involved now say they were discussing "rumors" and have no direct evidence of any such crimes, and that the central terrible charges of "cold-blooded" killing have been refuted after investigation by the relevant unit's brigade commander.

As The Jerusalem Post was told by the IDF on Thursday, "In the [central] incident of the alleged shooting of the mother and her children, what really happened was that a marksman fired a warning shot to let them know that they were entering a no-entry zone. The shot was not even fired in their general direction... The marksman's commander ran up the stairs of a Palestinian home, got up on the roof, and asked the marksman why he shot at the civilians. The marksman said he did not fire on the civilians. But the soldiers on the first floor of that house heard the commander's question being shouted. And from that point, the rumor began to spread. We can say with absolute certainty that the marksman did not fire on the woman and her children... We know with certainty that this incident never took place."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1237727553147&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull