Uh-oh.
Schmale made the cardinal mistake of deviating from the groupthink that Israel randomly targets and kills civilians for no reason whatsoever. And when someone goes against the official line, there is hell to pay.
Hamas - which literally targets civilians and brags about it - condemned Schmale and was soon joined by the other groups in Gaza who send rockets indiscriminately towards Israel (and often Gaza itself.)
Obviously, Schmale spoke the truth. Israel's airstrikes were more precise than in any previous war. The ratio of combatants to civilian casualties was higher than in any urban war in history. It is literally impossible to avoid killing children when the terrorists deliberately hide themselves, their weapons and their command centers among children, which has been proven over and over again.
Schmale has apologized over and over for telling the truth. His latest linked to the New York Times photo essay of children killed, saying, "Looking at this harrowing documentation, I deeply regret that my comments about the precision of IDF strikes are being misused to justify what cannot be justified. Killing children breaks the rules of war and must be independently investigated. There must not be impunity!"
Which is interesting, because while one actually had to read the article carefully, the NYT did mention that some children were killed by Hamas rockets. It was not "documentation" about how each child was killed; any real investigation would find that most were killed because they were near a legitimate military target and a warning would have caused the terrorist target to get away. Some were killed by Hamas rockets and some were killed by miscalculation by the IDF (an airstrike on tunnels under the Shati camp accidentally knocked down two buildings that Israel didn't anticipate and therefore didn't warn the residents resulting in the deaths of 8 children.)
Even the UN itself admits that most of those killed by Israel were terrorists. Gaza has a population of 2 million people, and if 50,000 of them are members of terrorist organizations, that would mean that indiscriminate bombing would result in a 95% civilian death toll - not less than 50%. The death toll would be ten times higher.
The statistics prove what Schmale said - the airstrikes were carried out with precision.
Two seconds of thinking would also show that if Israel wanted to target children, there would be thousands killed. Two more seconds of thinking would show that Israel not only has no incentive to kill innocents; it has a very powerful disincentive. Five more minutes of research would reveal videos of how the IDF has called off airstrikes when children and other civilians were seen in the area.
But those who are pillorying Schmale don' t care about facts.
Today, there was a protest in Gaza demanding Schmale be fired. 10,000 people attended. It was organized by UNRWA's own union. The head of the UNRWA Staff Union, Amir al-Mashal, said, “We will not calm down except with the departure of the director of UNRWA operations and his deputy due to their major failures." He added, ridiculously, that Schmale's statement - one of the few times that an UNRWA official actually said the truth - violated UNRWA's "neutrality."
This entire episode proves that journalists, officials and politicians are not interested in facts. They have an agenda and they will only choose to accept the facts that support that agenda.
And no one is willing to admit that the agenda is to demonize Jews.
