Terrorists brag about causing Gaza civilians to die

The video I posted earlier on Wednesday, showing some Gazans shooting a 120mm mortar towards Israel from the middle of a tree-lined street in Jabalya, was notable for something else (noticed by a commenter): the shooters were dressed like civilians.

No masks (although the Arab TV station that recorded it helpfully obscured their faces,) no guns, no uniforms - just a couple of regular looking guys.

This is a deliberate strategy by the terrorists. Not only are they hiding behind civilians, they are hiding as civilians.

The PCHR for Tuesday counted deaths as it does every day (the English version is not yet available.) It claimed that out of 83 deaths on Tuesday (of which they counted 27 in the UNRWA school), 80 of them were "unarmed civilians."

This makes it sound like the IDF has astoundingly bad aim.

But to understand it, one can read between the lines of this gloating article from the Islamic Jihad mouthpiece Palestine Today:

There is no visibility of the men of the resistance in the streets of the [Gaza] strip. No one sees their means of transportation, and even light weapons can no longer be seen with people publicly in the Gaza Strip. The resistance completely disappeared. Anti-aircraft artillery fires on the aircraft without them knowing the location. The whereabouts of rockets launched from the heart of the strip cannot be seen or known.

According to medical sources, the number of martyrs and wounded of the elements of the Palestinian resistance are few in comparison to the number of civilian martyrs who were killed since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, except for the large number of Palestinian policemen who were martyred on the first day of the war in Gaza.

Abu Mohammed - one of the field commanders in the Jerusalem Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine - said: "The goal is to take the "energy of concealment," to mislead the occupation aircraft and its agents [collaborators.]

In other words, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have made an official tactic out of using civilians as human shields and out of shooting at Israel as civilians. They are proud that the number of apparent (and real) civilian casualties has increased in recent days.

Their war policy is to violate the Geneva Conventions brazenly and officially. Their aim is to maximize the number of civilians killed in Gaza.

The video shows this policy in action. If Israel manages to hit the rocket shooters, they get counted as "civilians," and any bystanders on that street who get killed are icing on the cake for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Since the dead are "martyrs" anyway, they can justify this sick and cynical use of their own people as just another shortcut to Paradise, and each dead civilian is a victory for them, each dead body a literal prize to be photographed and shown off ad infinitum on Arab websites and TV networks.

We've always known this, but they have not usually been as forthcoming about it as this article indicates.