Smoke billowed from a beachside shack in Gaza City on July 16, 2014, after two missiles fired by Israeli drone operators killed four young boys mistaken for militants.
Shells that tragically claimed the lives of four Palestinian children playing football on a Gaza beach four years ago were fired by an Israeli armed drone, a secret report obtained by the Intercept reveals.
The incident, in which Israeli rockets
killed four children and injured others,
all related to each other and aged from 9 to 11, was condemned by multiple journalists who witnessed the horrific attack and shared pictures of the aftermath in 2014. Back then, the
Israeli forces said that the boys had been mistaken for Hamas targets.
The document obtained shows that the strikes were launched from an armed drone, and
its operators failed to get permission from their command. The report, which the Intercept says is "the most direct evidence to date that Israel has used armed drones to launch attacks in Gaza," includes testimonies from the drone operators, commanders, and intelligence officers who took part in the attack, revealing how the attack unfolded.
Comment: Israel has tried to keep its use of armed drones to terrorize the Palestinian populace secret, so this is some of the best evidence confirming how common they are, and how lax the rules of engagement are when it comes to identifying 'targets'.
Even if the drone operators were unaware they were firing on children, that doesn't explain
this:
Israel's chief military prosecutor decided that no further criminal or disciplinary measures would be taken, since the investigators had concluded that "it would not have been possible for the operational entities involved to have identified these figures, via aerial surveillance, as children."
Efroni did not explain why that was impossible. Two days before the strike in question, Israel's military PR unit had released another video clip in which drone operators could be heard deciding to halt strikes because they had identified figures in their live feeds as children.
Comment: Israel has tried to keep its use of armed drones to terrorize the Palestinian populace secret, so this is some of the best evidence confirming how common they are, and how lax the rules of engagement are when it comes to identifying 'targets'.
Even if the drone operators were unaware they were firing on children, that doesn't explain this: