Suffer the little children
From an interview with Jacob Lew, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Biden’s ambassador to Israel:
When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?
The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.
Sorry, what did you just say?
In many cases, the original number of casualties—
No, I meant the thing about who the children were.
They were often the children of the fighters themselves.
And therefore what follows from that?
What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.
Lew says children of fighters are legitimate military targets
When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?
The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.
Sorry, what did you just say?
In many cases, the original number of casualties—
No, I meant the thing about who the children were.
They were often the children of the fighters themselves.
And therefore what follows from that?
What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.
Lew says children of fighters are legitimate military targets
Yes, initial news reports are often wrong and exploited by propagandists to further their narrative.
But can you deny the conclusions of serious, independent organizations that study events over time and document them extensively? B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
[Read the report and weep.]