Today's Guardian includes an article that appears to be excusing Israel of responsibility for the massive death toll it has inflicted on Palestinian civilians. But, more significantly, it includes a lot of useful - and damning - information about just how "indiscriminate" Israel's weapons really are.
This interests me a great deal because I have been warning about problems with the interpretation of international law used by leading human rights groups on this very point since the 2006 Lebanon War.
At that time I got into a dispute with Human Rights Watch's Middle East policy director, Sarah Leah Whitson. Her organisation argued that Hizbullah was committing war crimes by definition whenever it fired rockets at Israel, even if it hit military targets, because those rockets were primitive and inherently inaccurate.
By contrast, HRW claimed, Israel's missiles were precise and therefore their use was not inherently inadmissible. Its view was that Israel did not commit war crimes by firing its missiles; the obligation was on observers to show that they had not been used within the rules of war - which is a much harder standard of proof. For more on this debate, see my articles here and here.
In practice, HRW's argument was nonsense, as was clear even in 2006. During that war, Israel dropped millions of cluster munitions - little bomblets that serve effectively as land mines - all over southern Lebanon, endangering the whole civilian population of the area.
Comment: So, apparently, the Israeli army is now rounding up people and executing them on the spot. Have they decided that it's time for the 'Final Solution' to be implemented in Palestine?
We fully expect the Israeli PR machine to tell us that the Palestinians somehow did this to themselves. But if the Zionists are going for the final push in their decades-long strategy of ethnic cleansing, it will be hard for them to keep up with the lies for too long.