Despite being warned of an inevitable increase in Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries, Israeli military commanders drastically reduced the ’safety’ margins policy which separated artillery targets from the populated civilian areas of occupied Gaza earlier this year. 6 human rights groups warned Israel’s high court of the potential danger after the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) reduced the ’safety range’ in Gaza from a 300-meter separation to just 100 meters. That reduction put civilians within range of the IDF’s high-explosive shells, which have a killing radius of up to 150 meters.

Details of the new policy went largely unnoted until the international outcry over the latest artillery incident by Israeli gunners which killed 19 members of an extended family in their sleep. The civilian deaths were caused when a volley of tank shells hit a populated civilian area in the town of Beit Hanoun. The incident occurred after senior Israeli military officers had already recognized that such indiscriminate artillery fire did not counter opposing rocket fire. Human Rights Watch says that since September 2005 Israel has fired about 15,000 rounds into occupied Gaza while Palestinian militants have fired around 1,700 back.

As more details of the Beit Hanoun incident have emerged, including Israel’s admission that the shells that killed the family were in response to the firing of Qassam rockets, probably from a car driven into the area by militants the previous day, they have raised more questions than they have answered. The IDF has claimed a fault in the artillery radar system’s co-ordinates for the missiles changed the margin of error from 25 to 200m, but that still does not explain why it waited until the following day to return fire to a general area - a policy that the Israeli peace group B’Tselem describes as a “war crime”.

To further illustrate the difference between militant Palestinian terrorism and Israeli state-sponsored terrorism, 14 civilians were killed in 2 years from Palestinian rockets fired into Israel between June 2004 and July 2006. In contrast, the IDF has killed 126 Palestinians in just 4 weeks in response to these Palestinian rockets.

Lieutenant Colonel Ron Ben Yishai, defense correspondent of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, wrote; “Artillery is a weapon system designed to ‘cover’ territory and not hit specific targets, particularly when it is used as ‘preventative fire’ at territories rather than a specified target. These facts are well known to IDF officials, particularly after the recent Lebanon war when about 130,000 artillery shells were fired. Now it is clear that the effectiveness of this weapon against Hezbollah fighters was marginal, while the economic cost was astronomical and reached millions of dollars.”

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