Once again, it was unintentional. Once again, it was not genocide, absolutely not genocide; after all, genocide is determined not only by the horrific number of fatalities but also by intent, and this time there was no genocidal intent, after all.
When Hezbollah killed 12 children in Majdal Shams two weeks ago, Israel was up in arms: "massacre," "murder" and "unspeakable cruelty." Did anyone in Israel truly think that Hezbollah intended to kill 12 Druze children in the occupied Golan Heights? But with regard to Hezbollah, the issue of intentions never comes up; they are always murderous. If 12 Druze children were killed, it means that Hezbollah intended to murder them.
The Israel Defense Forces is a different story. It has purity of arms. It is not a murderer. But the people who were killed Saturday at the Tab'een school in Gaza City were killed just exactly as children of Majdal Shams were killed on their soccer field – and the culpability in the killing is identical.
In the past 10 days the IDF bombed eight schools, killing a double-digit number of displaced persons in each of them. A record was set early Saturday morning, when around 100 people were killed while getting ready for their dawn prayer at the mosque adjacent to the school. Some of the victims had arrived only recently, after fleeing from their previous refuge after it was bombed. Some of them had lost part of their families, which were now erased for good.
The images on Al-Jazeera were shocking: teenage girls crying out at the sight of their parents' bodies, colorful synthetic blankets wrapped around body parts of a number of people. They rose for worship and were slaughtered, like at the hands of Baruch Goldstein, but nearly twice as many, by the army.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit issued its usual declamations, which no one in the world buys anymore: "Prior to the strike, numerous measures were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and intelligence information."
If 100 people were killed after all the touching measures the IDF took, imagine how many would have been killed if it had not taken these steps. The attempt to claim that the Palestinians overstate the casualty figures because the Palestinian Health Ministry is controlled by Hamas is also pathetic. The Israeli Health Ministry is controlled by the Shas party. So what? The military has never been able to refute the Palestinian Health Ministry to a significant degree.
It's impossible already to accept this nonsense, especially when this is the eighth school in 10 days. The stories about Hamas command centers in the schools are also hard to swallow: The army has yet to present even one solid piece of evidence for the existence of a command center in any of the eight shelters that were hit. This is of course irrelevant for the Israelis, they justify everything in advance; everything is ethical, but no one besides them is still willing to accept it.
This must be said: Even if there were such a "command center" – a vague term – there is no justification for killing dozens of helpless, destitute, frightened people, including many children. Not every "command center," which is sometimes a single Hamas police officer in hiding, justifies mass killing. Actually, never. When this happens eight times in 10 days, there is clearly a policy. An intentional policy of war crimes.
The possibility that the most unnecessary and most criminal war that Israel has ever fought is liable to end spurs the government, and especially the military – the military is culpable for such crimes – to make one last effort to kill as many as possible, without discrimination and without restraint. Eight schools in 10 days is an urgent matter for The Hague. The jurist who can refute the accusation has not been born.
In 1996, in Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon, the IDF killed 102 displaced persons in a UN shelter in Kafr Kana. Then, too, Israel tried to deny and recite excuses; a few days later it was forced to end the operation. The killing Saturday will not, to our horror, lead to a similar result. Israel is already a different state, and its military is different too. Their hearts are hardened, like the hearts of most Israelis.