AP has done worse in its reporting, though this report has some of the usual weasel wording, calling Hamas terrorists “security forces” and so on. And the AP report puts this very interesting bit in paragraph ELEVEN, after reporting on the carnage.
Militants often operate against Israel from civilian areas. Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.
I would have thought such an interesting paragraph might have been, say, paragraph two, because that would have made the story more sequential. Instead, we hear a great deal about the attack and its consequences, and only then do we hear about Israel’s attempt to reduce civilian casualties with warnings before the attacks. But at least the AP mentioned it. It usually does not, though this is common Israeli practice.
Once again, the lie of any moral equivalence between Israel and terrorist Palestinians is made very clear. I’m actually surprised that the AP admitted that Hamas terrorists (called “militants” by the AP) operate from civilian areas. At least the AP saw fit to include Israel’s warning messages to civilians who were perhaps not directly involved in Hamas’ terrorist activities.
Can anyone recall ANY similar warning ever given to ANY population, Jewish, Islamic, European, American, whatever, when Islamist terrorists are preparing an attack? Of course, the whole point of such attacks is usually to kill civilians. And when they attack American military targets, they wouldn’t need to warn civilians anyway, because American forces do not use civilians as “human shields.”
Israel’s major aims are two-fold: to kill Hamas leaders and terrorist personnel, and also to destroy weapons, bomb, and missile caches. Israel has no designs on Palestinian civilians who are not attacking it.
