By Barry Rosenfeld
“We went into Shuja’iya, to discover and destroy the Hamas’ terrorist tunnels. We discovered there an entire underground city, with multi-shaft, wide tunnels, with Wi-Fi & air-conditioning systems, concrete walls, and stocked to the ceiling with weapons and explosives. Some of the tunnels are so wide, that they can ride back and forwards on Vespa-type scooters. And then came the worst! The Hamas ‘fighters’ started sending towards us 13- and 14-year-old Palestinian children, running at us, wearing explosive-laden suicide-bomber belts!! Those children were death-trapped, and became human bombs, by the community’s adults!! We were trained to fight adult soldiers or any other skilled adults, enabling us to defend our families and countrymen. But this?? We had no other option but, in self-defense, to shoot them at as far a range from us as we could, before the ‘responsible adult’ that sent them used his mobile phone to detonate the belts, and kill us. One of the injured soldiers ended up by saying, ‘I do not know if I’ll ever be able to sleep again; the pictures of those poor children, killed by my gun, will probably never leave me!’”
This was posted on Facebook by an anonymous soldier serving in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in the IDF, Israeli military. It brings to mind a similar incident that occurred in Jenin in April of 2002, as part of Operation Defensive Shield, when IDF forces fought to remove terrorist cells from that city that were targeting Israeli towns in suicide attacks. On the 27th of March of that year, Hamas had carried out an attack at the Park Hotel in Natanya at a Passover Seder, in which 30 civilians were killed and 140 injured. Most of the victims were senior citizens, over 70, who did not have families in Israel. Several were Holocaust survivors. The IDF decided to attack Jenin saying that it “served as a launch site for numerous terrorist attacks against both Israeli civilians and Israeli towns and villages in the area.” (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
It was during Operation Defensive Shield that as many as 12 IDF reservist soldiers were killed in one incident when they were approached by a young boy wearing an explosive device and failed to fire on him. When he exploded his suicide vest all of the soldiers were killed. Having learned this lesson, the IDF has been forced to train its soldiers to not hold their fire when they have reason to suspect that a child is wearing such a vest. This explains the atrocity in Shuja’iya where the soldiers were given no choice but to die or to protect themselves.
The children of both the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority are trained from a young age to set as their chief and foremost desire, the opportunity to die for their Muslim beliefs. This is taught not only in the schools but on children’s television programming. There have been reports for years of such children’s programming in the Palestinian territories. This is especially true of the Gaza Strip and of Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV, whose shows routinely teach Palestinian children to not only hate Americans and Jews, but to kill them –preferably through acts of martyrdom, or suicide bombings.
A report released by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs states: “Palestinian children in Hamas-controlled Gaza are being taught to take an active role in terrorist operations against Israel and are thus placed in mortal danger by those who should be responsible for their safety and well-being. The children, too young to fully understand even the meaning of death, are taught to aspire to such ‘martyrdom’ in children’s television shows produced by the Hamas.”
Martyrdom is drummed into their blood. They eat sleep and live it daily, in what they hear at home, at school and on television. It should therefore be no surprise that Hamas has been able to successfully use children during the present conflict as human shields and as remote bombs. And all the time the Western media turns a blind eye to what is going on and continually places all of the blame on Israel for the horrendous deaths of these innocents.
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