Saturday, January 03, 2009

Hamas Forcing Civilians To Stand On Roofs



Omri over at Mere Rhetoric has the story of how Hamas is trying to maximize civilian casualties:

The IDF has made frequent use of what is known as "knocking on the roof": Militants are warned by phone when a residential building used to store arms will be bombed, and told to vacate the premised together with their neighbors. The weapons caches are hit only after the residents leave. Hamas has tried placing civilians on the roofs of such buildings when the phone call warning comes in. In these cases, the IDF fired antitank missiles near the building, and in a few cases the residents left.

So Israel has been using cell phone to warn civilians before hitting weapons-filled civilian infrastructure - "knocking on the roof." Of course providing the warnings allows Hamas to move out some of the missiles. But the Israeli consider that a small price to pay for minimizing civilian casualties. Now Hamas has found an even more egregious way to exploit Israeli humanitarian concerns, above and beyond just putting rocket launchers close to and inside homes and schools.

Israel warns the Palestinian civilians whom Hamas has endangered. Hamas uses those warnings to endanger their civilians even more dramatically. Israel gets blamed for Palestinian civilian casualties. Makes perfect sense.


I don't want to hear any more horse manure about how those evil Jooos are targeting civilians...if the shoe was on the other foot,would the ghouls in Hamas care a damn about Jewish lives?


2 comments:

Jack Steiner said...

This will be included in my next roundup of posts and news about the war.

Anonymous said...

Misdirection is the key.

Israel should call these civilians, and say a different building in the area is about to be bombed. The Civilians in the real building to be banned would still leave the area with a bombing nearby coming.

Hamas gets people to enter the wrong building to maximize civilian casualties, while the real building actually gets bombed, effectively minimizing civilian casualties and denying Hamas that PR tool.

Plus, just image the psychological effect. Hamas might need to rethink things finally.