By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
Over the course of 20 years, the US and its coalition allies in Afganistan killed approximately 50,000 civilians and there we calls for war crimes investigations. In the course of one month Israel has killed over 10,000 civilians.
I did two tours in Afghanistan and can tell you now, they are not bending over backwards to minimize it. They are using this as an excuse to indemnify themselves from war crimes prosecution.
“Bending over backwards” is a bit excessive… but maybe “slightly reclining in their chairs”?
At least they’re doing “something”, instead of bombing out of the blue… and if it works to indemnify themselves from war crimes prosecution… yay, international law at work, right?