Reply #30: A Mortar, Sir

[The Magistrate]

Is moved and operated by several people; they are weighty objects, and to move them up into position serreptiously, and flee with them to safety quickly, both take some doing. Thus the sight of a small group would not have suggested anything but participants in the attack. It is not as if a distinctive costume is worn by the combatants in such a situation, after all, and the older members of the group, certainly, would have seemed likely fighters. The younger people might not even have been seen at all; it is unclear what sort of vegetable cover was present. More detailed information might well settle both our doubts concerning this matter, obviously.

But there remains the factor of the mortar team's decision to deploy themselves in the midst of civilians. This was clearly a deliberate decision by those men, as there has not been any suggestion the persons killed arrived in the field after the departure of the mortar crew. Those men made a deliberate decison to use their fellow Arab Palestinians as human shields, and that is a crime of war no matter on which side it is committed. It is hard to believe they could not have found a point in range of their target away from any Arab Palestinian civilians.