OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Haaretz: IDF Indiscriminate Killing

"Reality shows that under Ariel Sharon's government, violent friction has become the only contact between Israelis and Palestinians and the government is doing nothing to instruct the army to behave in a restrained manner in its ongoing security operations."

The dry account provided by the army said an armored force entered the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza early yesterday morning to strike at Islamic Jihad activists. According to the Israel Defense Forces report, a firefight ensued between armed Palestinians and the armored force and the IDF identified direct hits on 10 armed men. The result is that at least nine Palestinians were killed in the incident, five of them from the Islamic Jihad. The Palestinians said an 11-year-old boy and three workers were killed and an ambulance driver was wounded.

It was another one of those routine reports that the Israeli public has grown used to. Apparently the public is accepting a situation in which military activity in Palestinian towns is accompanied by indiscriminate killing.

With a kind of collective shrug, the killing is excused as something self-evident in the circumstances of the war, in which it is difficult to distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians. Nobody disputes the need to chase down activists from terror groups that want to strike in Israeli population centers, and the circumstances of the incident are such that occasionally innocent civilians can be accidentally harmed because terrorists operate in their midst.