Kids Shot While Waving White Flags

If this isn't a war crime then the term should never be used again.

Israeli tanks and bulldozers soon took up hilltop positions around Abu Freeh's home, and Khaled Abed Rabbo's five-story house in the valley below was one of those in the line of fire.

More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7 , Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli solider calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside.

When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

"We were waiting for them to give us an order," Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. "Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot."
Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said, 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip . It's part of a growing pattern of alleged abuses that have raised concerns that some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during their 22-day military campaign in Gaza .

"The evidence we've gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly strong," said Fred Abrahams , a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch working in the Gaza Strip . "All the research so far suggests they shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags."

Now when reading this article I kept thinking about how a lot of people are fine with just dismissing the loss of life in the Gaza Strip as "collateral damage". In trying to come up with why that is I started thinking about a scene at the end of the movie "A Time To Kill". It's hard sometimes to empathize with the "others". So for those who aren't moved by a story like this one I ask that you push play on the video and go to about 2:31 and think about what Matthew Macanoughey is telling the jury. Then look back up and read this account again, and imagine that these kids were relatives of yours. I would bet that it will change your opinion.