The NYT, last week, reporting on indictments springing from the Gaza conflict of ’08-’09:
Beyond that, the [Israeli] military said a battalion commander was indicted on suspicion of deviating from “authorized and appropriate” army behavior and from an Israeli Supreme Court ruling when he authorized a Palestinian man to act as a kind of human shield by entering a house where militants were sheltering in order to persuade them to leave.
It seems to me that the Times is suggesting that the Palestinian man wanted to go into that house. (As does Xinhua in its report).
Did he want to? Read a portion of the Goldstone Report on this incident (beginning at paragraph 103), which terrorized Majdi Abd Rabbo, 39, and his family, and tell me if you think the Times’s language is fair. Excerpts:
The soldiers ordered him to call his children one by one. He started with his eldest son, aged 16, who was ordered by the soldiers to strip naked. The same process was followed with the two other sons, aged nine and eight. He then called his daughter, aged 14, who was told to press her clothes to her body and turn around. His wife, who was holding their baby daughter, was also told to press her clothes to her body, and then to take the baby’s trousers off.
Majdi Abd Rabbo stated that the soldiers then forced him to walk in front of them as they searched the house, room by room, holding a firearm to his head….[Majdi Abd Rabbo was then handcuffed and detained for hours before being used to search "HS/08," his neighbor’s house] The soldier said that they had killed the fighters inside the house and told him to go into the house and come back with their clothes and weapons. He protested, saying that he just wanted to find out if his family was safe. The officer told him to obey their orders if he wanted to see his family again. He refused to go, and was kicked and beaten by soldiers with their weapons until he gave in.
He approached HS/08’s house from the street. The entrance was destroyed and blocked by rubble. He went back to the officer and told him that he could not get in. The officer told him to go through the roof instead. He went into his own house, which he found empty, except for a soldier. This reinforced his anxiety about the fate of his family. At this point, there was no major damage to his house. He crossed the roof and went down the stairs into HS/08’s house. He was scared that the fighters would shoot at him and shouted, “I am a Palestinian, a neighbour. I am being forced to come into this house.”..
He went back outside, again crossing over the roof of his house. As he approached the soldiers, they pointed their weapons at him and ordered him to stop, strip naked and turn around. After he dressed again, he told them what he had seen….
Majdi Abd Rabbo told the Mission that he and his family were traumatized by what had happened to them and did not know what to do now, having lost their home [Israelis blew it up] and all their possessions. His children were all suffering psychologically and performing poorly at school. Five months later, in June 2009, Majdi Abd Rabbo was still having nightmares.
