3 year old Palestinian girl shot in the head

TG12345 wrote: I have a hard time even beginning to imagine how much hatred it must take to be able to shoot a rubber bullet at a toddler.

Me too.  Which is why I'm having a hard time believing it was deliberate.

Praying for peace and justice.

Me too.  Let's start by not being so eager to dehumanize the enemy.  The article on palsolidarity.org (the only Web site to report the story as far as I can find) does not say that the soldier "saw her, took aim and fired".

Maybe there was a rogue Israeli soldier who deliberately shot a three year old, but he would be the exception, not the rule.  In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, it seems much more likely to me that this was a stray bullet.


Edited by Ron Webb - 25 September 2015 at 9:19pm

TG12345 wrote: Have you ever been to the West Bank? I have, and three times.

Yes, I know.  I have read your reports on this forum, and I admire the work that you are doing.  If you had actually been a witness to this incident, I would believe you.

I have seen soldiers shoot Palestinian kids who were throwing rocks.

Yup, I totally believe that.

I have also seen them falsely arrest kids who weren't doing anything, like this summer in Hebron when some school age kids playing soccer at night were almost arrested after a soldier claimed they were throwing rocks at him. Fortunately, a Palestinian man with a camera was there, and what was on film was the soldier throwing rocks at the kids and trying to provoke them. When tha didn't work, he tried to get them arrested. Due to our presence and the video, his commander did not arrest the kids, but the soldier was not disciplined also.

Do you have the video by any chance?  I'd like to see it.

Anyway, IMHO there is still a considerable moral distance between those sorts of things and deliberately shooting a three year old girl in the face.

How would a stray bullet hit someone in a balcony who is nowhere near the stone throwers and above them? I have been to that village also and have seen the houses there, to shoot her the soldier must have aimed upwards. During the clashes, people throw rocks from the street or the road, not from the houses.

I don't know.  Possibly a bullet ricocheted.  Possibly the girl wasn't actually on the balcony.  Possibly the intended target was her father, who perhaps was shooting from the balcony.  It does seem an odd coincidence that it happened to be the daughter of the Nablus police chief who was shot.

There are now several similar sites reporting the incident (e.g. http://palestineinsight.net), in which Fatah leader Morad Eshteiwy claims that Israeli forces directly shot her.  They don't say whether Eshteiwy witnessed the incident himself.

Sorry, but I'm still finding it easier to believe that a Fatah leader would make up a story like this to discredit the Israeli soldiers, than that an Israeli soldier would deliberately shoot a three year old girl in the face.  I know Israelis do a lot of terrible things, but I also know that false accusations are commonplace in conflicts like this.

IMHO the real atrocity here is the very fact that we have an Israeli tank driving down a Palestinian street spraying sewage at houses and people, as shown in this video.  I can hardly think of anything more disgusting or dehumanizing, or more provocative, or less likely to lead to peace, than that.  

TG12345 wrote: So shooting kids for them is not really a taboo, even if these kids are too far away to do any damage to them.

It's not okay, but it's understandable.  You're scared and stressed and hot and miserable, surrounded by people who hate you, in the midst of a conflict that makes no sense at all; then on top of all that, these kids are throwing stones at you, maybe ineffectually but you may not be thinking too rationally about that.  All you know is that they are trying to hurt you, and your instinct is to answer aggression with aggression.  And you know what they say: if all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Well, all the soldier's got is a gun...

Not that I'm excusing either behaviour, but IMHO shooting at a three year old girl standing on a balcony is in a whole 'nother league.  That is pure cold-blooded evil.  If you can easily believe that a typical Israeli soldier is capable of that, then in your own mind you have already dehumanized the enemy.

The people who wrote the ISM report stated she did. In the reports, we are always very careful to report what happened and to be accurate.

The way I read the report, the statement is from Eshteiwy.  I wonder if he was an eyewitness; and if so, I wonder why he would allow his daughter on the balcony while there are soldiers shooting in the streets below.

If the guy was shooting a gun at the soldiers, they would have responded with live ammunition, not rubber bullets.

The report indicates that live rounds were used, in addition to rubber bullets etc.

It also would have been reported in an Israeli newspaper somewhere by now that Palestinians were shooting a gun at Israeli soldiers.

Maybe it was.  Have you looked?  I tried searching for it, but I'm not sure whether the incident occurred on Friday, Sept. 25, or on the previous Friday, Sept. 18.  I did find a lot of violent incidents reported in the Nablus region, just in the last couple of weeks.  Maybe the media don't even regard it as particularly newsworthy anymore.

Or maybe the soldier, having accidentally shot a three-year old in the face, thought it prudent just to keep his mouth shut about the whole thing.  That's probably what I would do.

I don't defend Fatah or like them, but I see no reason to believe why he would have been shooting at the soldiers from a balcony.

I see no reason why an Israeli soldier would deliberately shoot a three year old kid either, but anything is possible I guess.  Certainly if a foreign army came down my street spraying you-know-what and firing rubber bullets at kids, and if as police chief I had a gun on my hip, I'd be sorely tempted.

===
I guess my main message here is that if you want to convince people like me (not that I need much convincing to begin with) of who the real aggressor is, and which side the world's condemnation needs to focus on, I would concentrate my message on the skunks and the destruction of the water supply and similar acts.  With stories of casualties or body counts or missile attacks or the like, it's too easy to get into questions of who fired the first shot and whether it was in self-defence or whatever; but videos like the one I saw are irrefutable evidence of moral degradation and pure purposeless depravity.  They should be played on nightly newscasts all over North America.  Then maybe something might change.

Or not.  I must confess I'm losing hope.


Edited by Ron Webb - 27 September 2015 at 6:09pm

May Allah help the Palestinians.