Destroying the School To Save It

By Cernig

The Israeli Defense Force has shelled a UN school in the Gaza strip, killing 30 and injuring 55. Israel claims that Hamas militants were using the school as a base to mortar their troops, but the UN says that all the dead and injured were civilians. Even if the IDF were correct, something the Right accepts unquestioningly because the IDF never, ever lies like their enemies do, then Israel would only be responding to Hamas' war crime by committing another war crime. You can't get to the moral high ground - let alone win a COIN operation - by allowing the rules of war to be set by barbarians, something that the intellectually and morally bankrupt Right never seems to acknowledge.

And there are good reasons to believe that the IDF is simply lying as part of a propaganda war it admits has been eight months in the planning: the use of indiscriminate white phosphorus airbursts, in contravention of international law as it is understood everywhere except the US and Israel (the 1980 Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons containsa blanket restriction on dropping incendiary weapons from the air against military objectives "located within a concentration of civilians"); the way in which the IDF is throwing explosives around so freely that almost as many of its people have been killed by its own "errant' tank shells as by enemy action.

Of course they cannot acknowledge this - otherwise their only recourse for all the warmongering they've cheerled in the last eight years would be to commit symbolic sepukku and fall on the swords of their own punditry before vanishing from our public discourse forever.

Update: From The UN News Centre

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today spoke out against Israel’s “totally unacceptable” attacks against three clearly-marked United Nations schools, where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing conflict in Gaza, with a senior official calling for an independent inquiry into the incidents which claimed dozens of lives.

More than two dozen schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) are serving as temporary shelters to more than 15,000 Palestinians whose homes have been destroyed or who are fleeing the violence.

The agency’s education programmes have been suspended since the start of Israeli air attacks on Gaza, which Israel says it launched in response to rocket attacks by Hamas militants, on 27 December.

Civilians “are seeking sanctuary in UNRWA schools because they have no other place to go and are not able to flee the Gaza Strip,” Mr. Ban said in a statement.

Some 30 people were killed and 55 others injured, five of them critically, when three artillery shells landed at the perimeter of a school, which usually serves as a girls’ preparatory school, in the Jabaliya refugee camp, according to John Ging, UNRWA’s Director of Operations.

Also in Jabaliya, a boys’ school was attacked but it was empty, he said.

Last night, three Palestinians, who had sought refuge in a small co-educational UN school in Gaza City, died when a missile hit the building’s toilet facilities.

The three men who were killed were “Gazans who had fled their home earlier that day,” the UNRWA official said, adding that they thought “they would be safe in a UN school in Gaza City.”

These attacks reinforce the urgent need for a ceasefire to end the mounting casualties, he said, demanding an independent investigation into these attacks. “I sincerely hope that for the sake of those that have died, that it would not have been in vain.”

In a separate incident, seven UN staff were injured, three seriously, along with three patients, when a strike on a nearby building caused significant collateral damage to a UNRWA health centre.

“The location of all UN facilities have been communicated to the Israeli authorities and are known to the Israeli army,” the Secretary-General said.

After earlier strikes, Israel’s Government had been warned that its operations were endangering UN facilities. “I am deeply dismayed that despite these repeated efforts, today’s tragedies have ensued,” he said.

The Israeli attacks against UN sites housing civilians seeking refuge are “totally unacceptable and must not be repeated,” Mr. Ban stressed. “Equally unacceptable are any actions by militants which endanger the Palestinian civilian population."

Comments

[Charles]

Thanks for saying it, Cernig.

This is shaping up to be another failed military venture.

[Jack]

Do you have proof of your allegations or are we supposed to just take your word.

[Steve Hynd]

Jack, can you follow the hyperlinks?

[Privatestock]

I'm amazed by the liberal mind. You seem to think Israel should simply stop fighting and the middle east will suddenly be a peaceful paradise. The day Israel stops fighting is the day Israel is destroyed. A few pictures of wounded children is all it takes for common sense to be completely purged from your mind. The fact that the children were wounded by Hamas booby traps doesn't matter. It's Israel's fault. The fact that Hamas rockets are sent into Israel every day doesn't matter. It's Israel's fault. The fact that every peace treaty ever created in that region has been broken by everyone but Israel doesn't matter. It's Israel's fault. When your friends finally succeed and Israel is no more, will pictures of dead Israeli children make you blame Hamas? No. You won't even see those pictures.

[antimedia]

I guess the YouTube video of mortars being fired directly from the front of the school wasn't enough to convince you that the IDF wasn't lying?

Spare us the tripe about moral high ground. You have chosen to side with murdering scumbags who deliberately expose their own people to injury and death so that idiots like you will see them as innocent, abused bystanders.

[H.]

I'm tired of seeing lefty blogs like this one that posted these propaganda reports and then don't even post updates after the stories are proven false.

See http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090129.wgazaschool29/BNStory/International/home