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in before some clown claims this is a good thing.

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in before some clown claims this is a good thing.

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first off i could give two shits what a UK paper says.

second this is what happens when you send rockets into israel while hiding behind civilians.

too bad

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5939611.ece

Israeli soldiers admit to deliberate killing of Gaza civilians

The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.

The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military academy who declared that he was “shocked” at the findings, come as international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive against Palestinian Islamists.

The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.

“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

"I gathered the graduate students of the course who fought in Gaza, to hear their impressions from the fighting. I wasn't prepared for any of the stuff I heard there. I was shocked,” Mr Zamir said. “I think that the writing was on the wall, but we just didn't want to see it, we didn't want to face it."

One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir, himself a deputy battalion commander in the reserves, that the army “fired a lot of rounds and killed a lot of people in order for us not to be injured or shot at.

"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder. Each storey, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?"

The same unnamed NCO said that his commanding officer ordered soldiers on to a rooftop to shoot an old woman crossing a main street during the fighting, which a Palestinian rights groups said left 1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.

"I don't know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don't know her story,” the NCO said. “I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder."

Another NCO recounted a military blunder that led to a mother and her two children being shot dead by an Israeli sniper. "We had taken over the house… and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left… The sniper on the roof wasn't told that this was okay and that he shouldn't shoot… you can say he just did what he was told… he was told not to let anyone approach the left flank and he shot at them.

"I don't know whether he first shot at their feet or not, but he killed them," the soldier said.

The soldiers’ accounts were submitted anonymously at a meeting at the academy around a month ago. The Israel army said that it had started an investigation, but that this was the first time it had heard such testimony, despite having debriefed troops itself.

Breaking The Silence, an organisation of former soldiers who gather witness accounts from troops in the Palestinian territories, said that its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead, as the war was known in Israel, had revealed a similar picture of the fighting.

“It’s definitely in line with what we are hearing,” said one of the researchers.

Another disturbing element reported by the soldiers was the role of military rabbis in distributing booklets that framed the fighting as a religious war. “All these articles had a clear message: we are the Jewish people, we have come to the land by miraculous means, and now we have to fight to remove the Gentiles who are getting in our way and preventing us from occupying the Holy Land… a great many soldiers had a feeling throughout this operation of a religious war,” said one soldier.

There were also accounts of soldiers being ordered to throw all the furniture out of Palestinians’ homes as they were taken over.

“We simply threw everything out the windows to make room and order. The entire contents of the house flew out the windows: refrigerator, plates, furniture. The order was to remove the entire contents of the house.”

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Ah yes, the first person openly supporting the murder of civilians shows up. Congratulations on being morally bankrupt.

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These people allow Hamas to run in their town, and fling rockets into Israel and you say we are "morally bankrupt" because we might turn our heads when they get offed?

I think you're on the wrong website.

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Ah yes, the first person openly supporting the murder of civilians shows up. Congratulations on being morally bankrupt.

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Ah yes, the first person openly supporting the murder of civilians shows up. Congratulations on being morally bankrupt.

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i missed the part where i openly supported the killing of civilians and i'm sure if i did i'd get the ban hammer pretty quickly.





by the way your missing the pro-terrorist rally being run by eric holder in phoenix. better hurry.

i missed the part where i openly supported the killing of civilians and i'm sure if i did i'd get the ban hammer pretty quickly.

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Just like every German allowed Hitler to rise to power (they voted him in!) and then launch a genocide as well as attempt global conquest.

Are you saying we should have simply killed every German civilian during WWII, used them as live target practice without a second thought?

I think you need to learn some critical thinking skills.

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I don't have a problem with it. The terrorists have no problem targeting women and children payback is a bitch.

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to be fair.. we nuked/firebombed japan...

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in before some clown claims this is a good thing.

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I'm not convinced there are any 'innocent' civilians in Gaza.

Hell they indoctrinate their kids with Mickey Mouse like characters to hate and inspire them to be martyrs and kill Israelis, Palestinian mothers are proud of their Suicide Bomber kids. Given this, just how in the fuck can anyone truly know who is innocent???
It could cost a soldier his life to trust  a Palestinian who he thought was innocent......

I have not walked in an Israeli soldiers boots; and knowing what I know, I for one will not judge him...

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And just why the fuck should I care if the joos kill every motherloving pali on the face of this goddam planet? Scuse my french, but this shit is so old it has worn out my give a fuck.

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Just like every German allowed Hitler to rise to power (they voted him in!) and then launch a genocide as well as attempt global conquest.

Are you saying we should have simply killed every German civilian during WWII, used them as live target practice without a second thought?

I think you need to learn some critical thinking skills.

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Well, you know the old saying...

"Lay down with dogs,
get shot in the face by an Israeli sniper"

IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.

The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Haaretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation.

The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces' claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation. The session's transcript was published this week in the newsletter for the course's graduates.


The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. "There was a house with a family inside .... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof," the soldier said.

"The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."

According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

"I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way," he said.

Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.

The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader's soldiers complained that "we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist."

The squad leader said: "You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."

More soldiers' testimonies will be published in Haaretz over the coming days.

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Just curious what we'd be doing if mexico was shelling us and bombing our cities.....

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first off i could give two shits what a UK paper says.

second this is what happens when you send rockets into israel while hiding behind civilians.
too bad

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Sounds like a policy of total war to me. I fail to see a problem.

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How many false reports of US soldiers killing civilians have we had in the papers over the last seven years?

Hundreds?

Thousands?

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sure glad you dont run the show

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I hear that the Isrealis also shot rockets into Gaza hoping to kill civilians, and that they encourage their children to become suicide bombers and to target women and kids....


I'm sorry, I think I mixed that up.

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So I guess you just "fail" then.