Three civilians killed as Israel widens Gaza sweep

[54anickel]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mideast5nov05,1,7496741.story?coll=la-headlines-world

GAZA CITY — Israeli forces widened their 4-day-old offensive in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing five Palestinian fighters and three civilians, including a 13-year-old girl hit by a sniper bullet fired into her home.

Moving five miles south of their initial targets in the town of Beit Hanoun, Israeli troops and tanks fought gunmen for four hours near Jabaliya. Four men from the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamic movement that leads the Palestinian Authority, were killed in the battle, Palestinian officials said.

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Israel has come under international criticism for the operation, which has subjected homes to searches or demolition, forced most of Beit Hanoun's 37,000 people to stay indoors, and obliged nearly every unarmed male resident to undergo interrogation. Most of the detainees have been released.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan voiced concern at the violence and death toll and urged Israel "to exercise maximum restraint, do their utmost to protect civilians and to refrain from further escalating an already grave situation."

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[Scurrilous]

1. Listen to Maj. Gen. Stern

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"A bloodbath is taking place in Beit Hanun, the Israel Defense Forces runs rampant and kills at least 37 people in four days - and Israeli public opinion yawns with indifference. A brigade commander tells his soldiers, who killed 12 people in one day: "You've won 12:0," and the soldiers grin broadly. This is the moral nadir we have reached, following a long slide down a slippery slope: Human life has become cheap.

Proof of this came at the end of the week from the big mouth of Major General Elazar Stern, the head of the IDF Personnel Directorate, who occasionally says true things. "The IDF's excessive sensitivity to human life led to some of the failures in the Lebanon war - and this should not happen," Stern told Channel 7. Stern should be praised for these forthright words: Those who embark with unbearable lightness on a futile war of choice cannot allow themselves the luxury of showing sensitivity for the lives of their soldiers. In war, soldiers not only kill, but are also killed. This should have been stated in advance.

But the general's remarks are also tainted with hypocrisy: Those who over a few months kill more than 1,000 Lebanese and 300 Palestinians for dubious reasons do not have the right to speak about sensitivity to human life. The fact that the public protest against the war did not take off demonstrates that after having lost all sensitivity for the lives of others, we are also gradually losing sensitivity for the lives of our children who are killed in vain. The contempt for human life starts with the lives of Arabs and ends with the lives of Jews.

What a long way we have come since the talk, as hypocritical as it may have been, about "the purity of arms." This concept has been totally deleted from the lexicon. What a long way we have come since the time when we took pride in the fact that, unlike the Arabs, we tried not to kill innocent civilians. And now we have arrived at the shocking reality of the second Lebanon war. For example, the number of people Israel killed is not only almost 10 times higher than the number of people Hezbollah killed, but the number of soldiers Hezbollah killed is three times higher than the number of Israeli civilians they killed, while the number of Lebanese civilians killed by Israel is about three times the number of Hezbollah fighters. So whose arms are purer? A journalist from The Guardian who is currently in Israel was shocked to hear that these figures have not been the subject of public discussion here."

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