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Another pattern thats unusual," he said. "They use the civilian population as human shields. It's not really unusual. Hezbollah did the same thing in Lebanon. Fighters in Iraq do it there, too, although some in Iraq also deliberately murder Iraqis.
Does the local population let them do this? I said.
Its a problem," he said. "Sometimes we see resistance. But its difficult to judge from our perspective. We see a lot of cases where Katyusha or Qassam rockets are fired from within populated areas. More than that, they came up with a system that was based on the fear that we would find the exact location of the rocket launchers. So they place the launchers with a timer. And ten, eleven, and twelve year old children come and take the launcher away afterwards. Often were faced with fourteen or fifteen year old youth who come, armed, and place charges along the fence. When we see them, even when we see that they are armed, if they are only fourteen or fifteen we only shoot to scare them. We dont actually fire at them. Of course, only if there is no immediate danger to our forces.
Our general instructions," he continued, "not just in the these cases, is if we see a militant who is armed, a terrorist, and there is no immediate danger to our forces, we dont fire if there is a danger that we would hurt the innocents, people who are not involved. But with that, its important to say that when we have such aggressive fighting in populated areas, when theres an exchange of fire between terrorists and the IDF, there are cases where innocent people get hurt. But we warn as much as we can to step back, step away, to clear the area. So we see the terror organizations as responsible when civilians get hurt. And when there is a case and we know that a civilian was killed by mistake or unnecessarily, we check ourselves. When a rocket is fired and we respond with artillery fire, there could be civilians hurt. We dont fire into populated areas. Only to the exact spots where they fired Qassams. If its in the middle of the city, we will not shoot.
Michael Totten reports on human shields, terrorism, Hamas and the IDF's Gaza strategy.
