They remind us about the wrangling over the Gaza war's casualty count, when Hamas (and a good part of the mainstream media) argued against Israel over the definition of civilians. They point out that Hamas has acknowledged that, really, there's no distinction between the Hamas regime's civilian police and the Hamas regime's "resistance" groups who attack Israelis, preferably Israeli civilians (that's what makes them terrorists).
The source is TIME Magazine which writes this:
Referring to both the uniformed police and the plainclothes Internal Security, one civilian says, "They're all Qassam." The government does little to deny it. "Many of the Qassam operate within both the Qassam brigades and the Internal Security," Interior Ministry spokesman Ehab al-Ghossain tells TIME. "In our laws, we do not prevent any resistance fighter from joining the police or a security service, provided that he is committed to the rules and regulations of the department he belongs to . . . We make sure that their activities, outside of their official jobs, remain separate."Sounds obvious to anyone watching Gaza's descent into the black hole of history. But the disgraceful Richard Goldstone report into the war between the Hamas regime and Israel in Dec'08 and Jan'09 saw things quite differently. It examined (among other matters) the Israeli attacks on Hamas police, including an air attack on a passing-out parade of police cadets in Gaza City on 27th December 2008 in which many police were killed.
Goldstone's report
"finds that there is insufficient information to conclude that the Gaza police as a whole had been “incorporated” into the armed forces of the Gaza authorities... The policemen killed cannot be considered to have been combatants by virtue of their membership in the police... From the facts available to it, the Mission further believes that there has been a violation of the inherent right to life of those members of the police killed in the attacks of 27 December 2007 who were not members of armed groups by depriving them arbitrarily of their life in violation of article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."From the facts available to it, is what it says. How nice it would be to imagine Goldstone owning up to the limitations of his prejudiced coterie of agenda-driven lawyers and their extrenely myopic outlook. Nice, but it's never going to happen.
Hamas are laying the groundwork for what many Gazans expect to be mandatory conscription. Thus the smokescreen that Goldstone and colleagues provided for the Hamas jihadists is bound to cause considerably more loss of life on both sides of the divide. And disclosures like the one publicized by TIME and Honest Reporting will have zero effect. Demonizing Israelis as war criminals is a far more resonant tactic in international forums than owning up to how the tentacles of terrorism that have thoroughly captured Gazan society.
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