A Killer Goes Free

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

Source: Guardian Unlimited

Another day, another Palestinian child's killer goes unpunished. This is nothing new. It has happened over and over for years.

The manner of Iman's [the young girl] killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

An innocent girl whose cold-blooded murder will never receive the attention due the barbaric and needless act. Her only crime was to walk within a security zone on her way to school. A warning would have been appropriate. None was given.

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post's operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.

On the tape, Capt R then "clarifies" to the soldiers under his command why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

At no point did the Israeli troops come under attack.

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child's body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. "She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs," he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. "The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face."

The Washington Post reports on the case in a very interesting manner, completely understating the callousness of the action. As a matter of fact, the tone of the entire article is very low-key compared to the Guardian article.

The article states the Israeli officer was acquited by a military court because "she [the girl] was already dead when he shot her". The defendant claimed "he did not identify the figure on the ground as a child" and "I'm happy and satisfied that the truth has come to light, I hope the army will understand its failure, the failure was not on my part."

Alright, so there are a few items making the readers feel he might very well be innocent, but let's see how the Post presents the position of the child:

Soldiers shot 13-year-old Iyman Hams as she approached a military observation post near the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza on Oct. 5, 2004. The soldiers said they thought she was planting a bomb. The girl's family said she was on her way to school.

Then, according to an army indictment, the officer approached the girl's body and fired two more shots _ an illegal practice called "verifying the kill." Palestinian doctors said that at least 15 bullets hit the girl.

Where's the stuff about the child getting up and trying to walk away before being gunned down? How about the bag being shot and not exploding thus proving there was no bomb in the bag? How about the part where witnesses saw the officer turn around and empty his magazine into the child's body after having shot her twice in the head?

I wonder why it is the Post article leaves out quite a bit of the damning evidence lending credibility to the case against the Israeli officer. Why are the facts not more prominently presented? Does the Post not want to foster anti-Israeli sentiment? Well, chew on that for a while, but now, back to this poor girl.

She was no match for young men with rifles and a life's worth of anti-Palestinian programming. Young Israelis are taught Palestinians lives are meaningless. Actions taken against Palestinians will not be punished.

It is sad to see how ethnic and religious differences are used to instill hate, to view others of different groups or beliefs as less than human. When children grow up in environments where this type of brainwashing is promulgated as "normal" behavior, the result is an inhuman being with no empathy toward others. Even though they may function "normally" within their society, they are truly abnormal within humanity.

Comments from an alternative news site:

The girl was clearly no threat. She had been identified by the Israelis as a scared, little girl. The article suggests that the only danger for the Israelis was if she had been sent out to lure them into a trap, which means the way for the Israelis to remain out of danger would have been to stay put. Instead, they go out, are not fired upon, which shows that it was not a trap, and then the accused empties his weapon into her body. However, this hypothesis implies that the Palestinians are such savages that they would risk the life of a small child in such a ploy. Such are the unstated assumptions in much mainstream news reporting on the conflict.

Source: Signs of the Times

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