Tsk Tsk, Israel!

After the most recent resurgence of the Gaza/Israel dispute, the UN Human Rights Council paid Jerusalem a little visit and pointed the war crimes finger at them. A Sec-Gen's representative visited last month and charged Israel with the following crimes: using children as human shields, depriving civilians of relief supplies, summary executions of women, and knowingly hitting civilian targets. From Reuters: "Israeli soldiers shot a father after ordering him out of his house and then opened fire into the room where the rest of the family was sheltering, wounding the mother and three brothers and killing a fourth."

It's fairly obvious the Palestinians are getting the short end of the stick in any conflict with Israel. However, it seems the Israelis are entirely apathetic about blowing the rules of war (OK, insurgency, skirmish, whatever you want to term it - last time I checked, Hamas is still the legit government there) completely out the window. One general commented that " If you want to know whether I think that in doing so we killed innocents, the answer is, unequivocally, yes."

Israel is defending their actions because apparently the international community is ignoring "the terrorist and other threats we face." But with Israel lobbing rockets at UN schools in Palestine, among other things, the war crimes accusation isn't too far off. Yeah, even with the terrorist, etc threats.

On a similar note, the nonchalance the Israeli soldiers seem to feel about the Palestinian civilians can now be found on Threadless! Not really but this t-shirt controversy is pretty disgusting. Not that the US military is completely free of these little jokes.