Mistakes like the killing of around 93 Palestinians in a bombing of a building serving as a shelter in Beit Lahia (Gaza) indeed tragically happen in all wars with major airpower involvement (think of the bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz by USAF, it was an example for carelessness and disregard, but some of these cases won’t be avoidable overall). The scandal should not be the carnage itself, as horrible as it is. It is quite likely that the IDF indeed targeted some spotter with binoculars (even a civilian doing spotting in support of the operations of militants is thereby directly participating in hostilities and becomes a legitimate target) and that they did not know about the sheltering people. This means it was not a massacre. But on the other hand this might well be another example of the apparent overall recklessness and carelessness of Israeli targeting pracices during the current war in Gaza, where non-combatant casualty cut-off values by far exceed everything from previous wars, where such decisions are completely left to the discretion of individual officers (who might be vengeful, bored or otherwise undisciplined), where there is no accountability (let alone punishment), where there is no culture of questioning decisions based on implications for Palestinian civilians, where a quick and dirty and zero risk approach is prefered over careful intelligence work, where all the mass fatalities (often barely covered by local media) are proactively denied or justified even before there is any investigation, and remain uncovered by local media. This is at least what we can draw from the +972 Magazine reports drawing from various IDF sources. I wish that the lower daily fatalities compared to last fall/early winter were for improvements within the IDF, allein mir fehlt der Glaube.
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