Dispatches: Explaining Four Dead Boys on a Gaza Beach
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/17/dispatches-explaining-four-dead-boys-gaza-beach
The Israel Defense Force has an answer to the shelling yesterday that killed four children near the Gaza City port. At a media briefing yesterday, an IDF official reportedly said the attack had targeted an “identified Hamas structure,” and that Israeli forces had misidentified the boys as “fleeing fighters.”
Atrocious as much of the Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza has been, it is hard to imagine Israeli forces deliberately trying to kill Ismail Bakr, 9, and his three cousins, Ahed, 10, Zakariya, 10, and Mohammad, 11, with an apparent missile attack, particularly when they were directly in front of a hotel full of foreign journalists.
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The Israeli argument goes like this: The IDF does its best to avoid civilian casualties. It employs state-of-the-art intelligence to find targets and then uses precision-guided weapons to hit them. And it even calls nearby civilians on the phone and warns them to leave before firing at the target. Hamas, on the other hand, unlawfully hides among civilians. So Hamas is responsible whenever the IDF unintentionally kills civilians – like the inevitable, not culpable, killing of these four boys. Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev said, “The story with these four boys is a tragedy. Let’s be clear: the Israeli military does not target civilians.”
But the issue in the case of the four dead boys isn’t just whether the IDF targeted civilians. It is whether the IDF did its best to avoid killing and wounding civilians. As common sense would dictate, international humanitarian law obliges any attacker before pulling the trigger to make reasonable efforts to ensure that the “target” in its sights is indeed a military objective, not civilian. Palestinian armed groups, too, violate the law when they needlessly put civilians at risk of counter-attacks by deploying in or near homes or other buildings filled with civilians.
