Over Abir. Te gast: Gideon Levy.

Was it the stun grenade that hit her head, the shock caused by its explosion or the rubber bullet fired by the Border Police? Does it make any difference? Did the Border Policeman intend to kill a child of 11 – or not? What difference does it make? The real question is why Border Policemen come almost daily to Anata, doing the devil’s work, as it were, just when children are on their way home from school? What are they looking for, for heaven’s sake, near a school in Anata, a West Bank town located northeast of Jerusalem? The Border Police come, the schoolchildren throw stones, the police fire and kill another innocent little girl – and nobody is called to account. The Shai (Samaria and Judea) police district is investigating, but not the Police Investigation Department.
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By Gideon Levy, Haaretz

The numbers don’t lie. They never do. In the past month, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces was 45 times greater than the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians. The Palestinian dead included 13 minors. All in one deadly month. The last name on the list is Ayman Abu-Mahdi, a 10-year-old boy who had come home from school and gone out to get a little air with his siblings and friends. He was sitting on a bench in front of his house. The time: 15 hours before the cease-fire in Gaza.
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By Gideon Levy, Haaretz

This is Islam al-Atamna. A girl of 14. She is sitting in her black mourning clothes. Eight close relatives – including her mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts – were all killed before her eyes, one after the other. They were killed in the street after they awoke at home in horror at the sound of the first shell that exploded and then fled outdoors, where the next shells caught them.
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By Gideon Levy

Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought. There is no other way of describing the circumstances of their killing. Someone who throws burning matches into a forest can’t claim he didn’t mean to set it on fire, and anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can’t claim he didn’t mean to kill innocent inhabitants.
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Te gast: Gideon Levy
Haaretz.

Let the chips fall where they may, the saying goes, but this time the chip was a terrifying concrete beam that was sent flying into the air hundreds of meters from a house the IDF bombed in the middle of the night. It landed in the bedroom of a 14-year-old girl, Dahm al-Az Hamad. Sometimes children are killed, but this time the girl was her parents’ only child. Her mother is paralyzed. Sometimes tragedies happen, but the tragedy of the Hamad family is almost too much to describe.
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Te gast: Gideon Levy

Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must
know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of
Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the
Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other
word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling,
indiscriminately.
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To failure’s credit
By Gideon Levy

The bad (and predictable) news: Israel is going to come out of this war with the lower hand. The good (and surprising) news: This ringing failure could spell good tidings. If Israel had won the battles in an easy, sweeping victory of the kind Israelis prayed so much for, it would have caused enormous damage to Israel’s security policies. Another slam-bam win would have brought disaster upon us. Drugged with power, drunk with victory, we would have been tempted to implement our success in other arenas. Dangerous fire would have threatened the entire region and nobody knows what might have resulted.
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Days of darkness
By Gideon Levy
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