I thought William Gladstone was dead? 😉

That makes his retraction even more appalling,.

Would Israel exonerate Hamas if it, by accident, hit an Israeli hospital when its target was a nearby army base?

I don’t know about Israel, but the law would exonerate a combatant so long as it took reasonable steps to avoid civilian casualties.

In the instance cited – sure, accidents happen and a missile might miss. The relevant questions might be “how close was the hospital? Was the accident forseeable?” etc.

During Cast Lead Israel went to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties in some instances – even to the extent of telephoning individual households to warn of an impending attack on a nearby military target.

Hamas, by contrast, do not seem to make any effort to warn civilians within the danger zone. On the contrary, last week they deliberately targeted a school bus.

Let me get this straight, when Goldstone found that Israel had committed war crimes that was of enormous moral significance, but when he subsequently finds or comes to believe that Israel did not commit war crimes, that ‘changes nothing’? And still some people claim that Israel’s opponents are never motivated by irrational hatred of the Jewish state!

Even if it could be proven that the United Nations school was destroyed by accident, what difference would it make? It was destroyed.

A careless driver skids and hits a child; another driver swerves and coldly takes its sibling out. Should they receive equivalent sentences and do they pose equivalent dangers?

you’d have thought the lesson would be for Israel to actually comply with the next investigation of this kind, wouldn’t you?

somehow, however, i doubt we’ll see that.

“you’d have thought the lesson would be for Israel to actually comply with the next investigation of this kind, wouldn’t you?”

Because they can only expect people to draw the worst possible conclusions if they don’t, after all.

Because they can only expect people to draw the worst possible conclusions if they don’t, after all.

Funny reasoning – though that doesn’t explain why Israel refuses to cooperate with such enquiries or investigations.

“though that doesn’t explain why Israel refuses to cooperate with such enquiries or investigations”

Maybe they suspect that the deck is stacked against them:

“The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion”

Blah blah.

Israel handed Gaza back.
What happened? Peace? Moderation?
NAH!!!!

Mass jump in kidnappings, ever more extremist religious laws and the entire place turned into the world’s largest rocket launching site!

And oh yes…Rocket launchers PURPOSELY sighted on top of civilian housing!

OH how Hamas cares for its people!

As was said by the Israeli PM in his U.N speech…So the message is simply place your weapons inside civilian areas and you are guaranteed no action will be taken to stop you using them. Great.

Buy hey, British soldiers die all the time because of their desire to avoid civilian deaths. Killed by their fanatic enemy who simply shoots through, blows up, any and all civilians in the way to get to them.
God forbid an evil Western soldier accidently/unavoidably kills a civilian though while trying his best to keep him and his comrades (indeed OTHER civilians) safe.

You liberals won’t stand for that!

Davey Boy

You are clearly misiformed. When it co mes to the U.S. backed Israeli military, there ARE no mistaken targets. They are utilizng the most advanced technology known to man, and have every inch of Gaza under surveillance at all times via both spy technology as well as paid informants.

At 11:30am on December 27, 2008, Israel launched the campaign titled Operation Cast Lead. It began with an opening wave of airstrikes in which F-16 fighter jets and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters[105] simultaneously struck 100 preplanned targets within a span of 220 seconds. Does that sound like a military campaign that drops bombs in indescriminate locations?

The headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was also shelled on January 15. Are you suggesting that Israel was unaware of a United Nations office within the confines of Gaza?

At around 3:30pm on Tuesday, 6 January 2009, the Israeli artillery attacked the al-Fakhora School in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing over 42 people, including 14 children. Again a mistake?

Al-Fakhora School is not the first school to have been targeted by the Israeli forces recently. On the same day, the Israeli army had attacked two schools that had been opened by UNRWA to shelter Palestinian families displaced by the fighting. All mistakes Davey boy?

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: “The locations of all UN facilities have been communicated to the Israeli authorities and are known to the Israeli army. After earlier strikes, the Israeli government was warned that its operations were endangering UN compounds.”

Entire water network infrastructures were totally destroyed during “Operation Cast Lead” Another mistake Davey Boy?

I am sorry “Davey Boy…. but “The willful targeting of civilian areas violates the prohibition of willful killings enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention and is a war crime that incurs individual criminal responsibility.

@ BenSix

>> A careless driver skids and hits a child; another driver swerves and coldly takes its sibling out. Should they receive equivalent sentences and do they pose equivalent dangers? <<

I think we can agree that the damage done is the same, and that, for the family of the child, and the child himself, the motivation or reason for the crash is largely irrelevant. In terms of danger posed, there is a difference, agreed, but the Goldstone report was to look at what had happened, not assess danger posed in the future.

My point being that after all the debate over intention, motives and means, the results are the same, and that's what we should be concentrating on dealing with. The rest, for all those who suffered during Operation Cast Lead, on both sides (but again I stress that the damage in Gaza was much greater), is a side point.