Terrorists hiding behind children doesn't make them immune to attack, morally or legally

Israel haters were given a huge gift this week courtesy of anti-government protester Shira Eting.

Eting, interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, said, "I was a combat helicopter pilot…. If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions."

The modern antisemites have been having a field day with an attractive and articulate Israeli woman matter of factly saying that Israelis knowingly shoot missiles into homes that kill children. Here we have proof of how monstrous Israelis are - even leftist Israelis!

A number of years ago, I looked at a B'Tselem report on families killed in their homes during 2014's Operation Protective Edge. Even that incomplete report showed that many families were acting as human shields for the terrorists - sometimes the shields were the terrorists' own families, and sometimes the terrorists were sheltering in an innocent family home. 

I did further research and listed over a hundred children who were used as human shields to protect terrorists, often senior terrorists.

This is only what I could find out with open source research. But it proves the point: Israel is not going to bomb a house unless it has excellent intelligence that the house is a legitimate military target. Perhaps a senior terrorists is inside, perhaps a weapons cache is underneath, perhaps a command and control center is in the apartment next door. 

As long as the military advantage outweighs the collateral damage, this is a moral decision and also legal under international law.  While we are not privy to the specific calculus that Israel uses in making those decisions, it employs teams of lawyers to review every airstrike and goes to great lengths - never reported in the media - to ensure that it minimizes mistakes. Israel goes above and beyond the requirements of the Laws of Armed Conflict in its own policy decisions. 

Eting caused more harm to Israel with her out of context quote than the proposed judicial reforms she is protesting could possibly do. But she wasn't wrong in what she said: in the real world, in real wars, decisions must be made that sometimes mean children would die. 

In the case of Gaza, that is entirely the fault of the terrorists who deliberately choose to locate military targets in residential areas. 

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