Sunday, August 09, 2009

Targeting the Sick

The Israeli Air Force bombed smuggling tunnels in Gaza, in response to militant attacks on Palestinian medical patients crossing into treatment for Israel. That's right -- Palestinian radicals fired on their own civilians as they were seeking medical treatment.

Disgusting.

4 comments:

PG said...

I found the article a little unclear -- "On Sunday, Gaza militants fired mortars at a crossing into Israel just as Palestinian patients were being transferred for treatment, a Palestinian official said."

Is the claim that the Gaza militants were deliberately targeting their own civilians, or that the Palestinian civilians just happened to be at the crossing at that time? Bad either way, of course, but much more disturbing if militant ideology has gone to the point that they are deliberately trying to prevent ill Palestinians from obtaining treatment, rather than merely being indifferent as to who gets hurt (which has been typical of their ideology all along).

Rebecca said...

Slightly off topic - why are we calling these people "militants"? It seems to me that if they're deliberately firing mortars at civilians, they fall into the "terrorist" category.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the first comment, it is impossible to know if the terrorists (or militants, if you insist) knew that they are targeting Palestinian patients. (It boils down to whether they had been observing their target or not.) However, they were clearly targeting one of the crossing points between Gaza and Israel. Given the (lack of) relations between Hamas and the Israeli government, the crossing points are solely used for various humanitarian purposes. As a result, attacking these can be interpreted as a calculated attempt to prevent humanitarian aid. By the way, it is not the first, or second, time that the crossings between Gaza and Israel were attacked.

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