Congratulations Lauren and Philip

Well that was fun!

The other side. . .

Unless you live in on the dark side of the moon, you probably heard about Israel's successful assassination of Nizar Rayan several weeks ago. Rayan was apparently the ' third most senior Hamas leader in Gaza.' Surprisingly there was significantly less hand-wringing and cries of humanitarian tragedy than I've come to expect; most of articles I've read seemed to present a fairly balanced view of the event.

That's not quite the whole story though. A few weeks later the February edition of Maoz Israel arrived and found the article excerpted below:

Tapping on the Roof (full article)

A few days ago one of the leaders of the “military” wing of Hamas, Nizar Rian, was killed by an Israeli air strike on his house along with 14 others (including 4 of his wives).

That strike was the result of careful intelligence gathering. When Rian was located, Israeli army and government legal advisors went through a painstaking process of bringing the strike before court judges to verify its legality according to the Geneva conventions.

Fifteen (15) minutes before the strike, the Israeli army called on the telephone and asked the people to leave the house. When they received the call, they gathered people up onto the roof as a human shield. The Israeli helicopter pilot saw them, and as they figured, he didn’t want to hurt them.

The pilot then fired a missile into a field next to the house to warn them. They still did not leave. Then he fired onto them a non-lethal weapon to cause them to flee. Only after they left the roof did he fire the shot that destroyed the house.

When the missile hit, there were a series of other explosions, indicating as assumed by the Israeli army, that the house was used for weapon storage.

The policy of notifying the civilians of a coming attack is called by the Israeli army, “Tap on the roof,” like knocking on a door before you enter a house.

Asher Intrater – Maoz Israel Report, February 2009

Not surprisingly, it's been a rare occurrence to find an article in the mainstream media reporting this sort of careful behavior by the Israelis (although it does happen occasionally). Usually they're portrayed as the evil Jewish butchers carving up 'palestinians' for the shear fun of it. This trend is slowly changing as the actions of Hamas and Fatah more undeniably aggressive, but so far the emphasis has been on the 'slow' not the 'change.'

If only we could transplant just a little of the Israeli Defense Force's self-restraint and high valuation of their enemies lives to a few other militaries. . .