Israel Hayom..
23 July '14..
Not by our hands has civilian blood been spilled in Shujaiyya. It is Hamas, which, like the Nazis before it, seeks to kill Jews simply because they are Jews, and must be held accountable by the world. The women and children who lost their lives there were, in effect, sentenced to death by Hamas, which turned them into human flak jackets.
It is Hamas that has positioned its combatants in nurseries, schools, around UNWRA buildings. Hamas is the one which has deployed its rocket launchers inside mosques, educational institutions and any other civilian structure one can possibly imagine, and it does so openly, unabashedly, declaring that this is its way -- the way of "death in the name of Allah," the path of the "shahid" (martyr), to which it must aspire.
Proof of this was provided by Mahmoud al-Habash, now PA President Mahmoud Abbas' adviser on religious and Islamic affairs and until recently the Palestinian Authority's religious affairs minister, who said: "After the prophecies and righteousness, there is no status more noble in the eyes of Allah than that of shahada [martyrdom]. ... Allah, praised be his name, forbade us from seeing them as dead. ... They even went to their deaths with a smile. ... The shahid, he has privileges with Allah that no one else has."
And this matter -- the culture of death combined with a culture of hatred -- is not merely a theocratic-religious and ideological matter. As early as 2008, Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad said: "Death for the Palestinian people has become an industry, which the women excel at along with everyone else on this Earth. The elderly excel at it, the jihadist fighters excel at it, and the children excel at it.
"Therefore they [the Palestinians], created a human shield of women, children, elderly and jihadists to confront the Zionist bombardment machine, to say to the Zionist enemy: 'We desire death just as you desire life.'"
This is the manner in which Hamas has treated its civilians in the past, and how it is treating them today, whether they desire death or are trying to escape it.
It is understandable when U.S. President Barack Obama expresses his concern over the casualties among Gaza's civilian population. Israel does not seek to kill women and children, but at the same time we must present those who rush to categorize events in Gaza as a war crime with a few questions:
Who actually should be investigated for war crimes by The Hague? Is it the state whose army, unlike any other army in the world, tries to avoid harming the enemy's children? The army that gives advanced warning to residents of a certain area prior to an air attack, even at the expense of losing the element of surprise that can minimize its own casualty figures, in order to save the lives of the enemy's civilian population? Is it the army that drops fliers from the air, "knocks on the roof" (the IDF practice of firing a non-explosive missile at a roof), calls civilian mobile phones, all to warn people to save themselves?
Or perhaps it should investigate the organization whose spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, boasts of using civilians as human shields and calls the practice "effective?" Perhaps The Hague should investigate the organization whose members attack UNWRA for daring to open the refugee camps to shelter those fleeing the war zones following IDF warnings? Should it not investigate the organization that openly declares its objective is to harm the enemy's children?
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9269
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