Dear Editor,
I wish to express my astonishment about the appalling Israeli army tactics in the recent war in Gaza.
To the best of my knowledge, never in the entire history of warfare (in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of wars the world has ever experienced) has there been such poor military behaviour.
I saw news reports on TV of it. I could not believe my eyes. I watched it over and over again.
Israel has set a new standard in warfare: it plumbed the depths and should leave the rest of the world ashamed for our inaction.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but the element of surprise is arguably the most significant factor in any battle. It is crucial to shortening battles, winning battles, and minimising casualties on both sides.
Three things shocked me :-
1. I saw that Israel’s army dropped leaflets, way in advance, saying exactly which areas they were going to target and which they were not, even giving clear explanatory maps of safe areas and routes to these.
2. I saw that they went to the incredible trouble of painstakingly assembling every single telephone number, of every single house and apartment, in every single district of Gaza and then simultaneously and repeatedly telephoned to warn people that their home was a target (e.g. because there is a missile stored there, or a tunnel there, or someone is shooting from it, or there is a terror tunnel).
3. I saw that then they often dropped a small, loud but harmless, warning bomb, to precede the main one, to give civilians even more time to leave.
Meanwhile, the Hamas fighters immediately hid in their tunnels, and demanded on television and in newspapers that civilians stay put, and even deliberately rush to the roofs of threatened buildings, leaving defenceless civilians to stay and die in appalling numbers. Even a senior Iranian commander castigated Hamas’ shameless complicity to murder: http://www.timesofisrael.com/top-iranian-criticizes-hamas-for-civilian-casualties/
Surely, giving warnings and telegraphing your tactics so openly is really terrible military tactics, hugely endangering your own soldiers and allowing your enemy to escape? It seems blatantly obvious that they went to such ridiculous lengths, in order to minimise civilian casualties.
With this in mind, doesn’t it strike you as utter hypocrisy for some British politicians to criticise Israel for being “disproportionate”, especially when Hamas flagrantly and purposely fires deadly missiles at kindergartens, schools and apartment blocks.
It’s very peculiar to find that no-one is rioting on the streets, lambasting Hamas for war crimes. Double standards anyone, (un?) conscious antisemitism perhaps?
Returning to the point about warnings, why are so many people and politicians accusing Israel of war crimes, when they should actually be accusing every single other army in human history (that did not give those three warnings, thus endangering their own soldiers in order to save the lives of enemy civilians) of war crimes?
Best regards,
,,,
PS In passing, and purely on behalf of dictators everywhere, I would also like to thank Israel for diverting the entire world’s attention from some utterly disgusting crimes:-
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in Syria and Iraq where they behead Christians and Shia Muslims and stick their heads on poles or eat their body parts for the camera;
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in apartheid Tunisia where they sentenced a woman to death for becoming a Christian,
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in Pakistan where they stone women to death if they marry a man the family does not like … etc etc ad nauseam
salaamshalom16 