DREADFUL things happen daily in the Gaza Strip in the violent ritual
of the five-year-old intifada but the escalating number of fatal
injuries to young children is an abiding cause for shame. The latest
statistics from UNWRA, the United Nations agency which looks after
refugee Palestinians, make sobering reading. Between January and
November of last year two children were killed in disturbances in the
area. Since last month 10 children under 15 years of age have been
killed. Five were shot dead by the Israelis in less than a week, one by
a Jewish settler who opened fire when his car was stoned, and four by
the army. Two of the dead were little girls; one aged 10 was shot in the
back with a rubber bullet as she went with friends to school and
another, aged nine, was shot in the back while fetching milk for her
mother. The issues involved in these deaths are complex and need to be
examined closely but nothing can remove the enormity of what is
happening.
It must be acknowledged that using military forces to control
situations of civil riot is a dangerous exercise. The British Army has
recognised the peculiar difficulties such duties entail and has coped
passably well. The Israeli Defence Forces are trained in riot control
and are armed with a series of escalating warnings before any shots can
be fired. Set down on paper they appear reasonable, though it is surely
untenable that shots should ever be fired at children with stones. The
control exercised over Israeli troops in Gaza does, however, seem to be
uneven. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had to order one unit out of Gaza
last month for a series of incidents which led to deaths among
Palestinians in which the open-fire rules appear to have been ignored
completely.
The rise in numbers of fatalities among children, some of whom have
patently not been indulging even in stone-throwing, requires an
explanation. Mr Rabin's Labour-controlled Cabinet contains a number of
Ministers, from the Meretz Party as well as Labour, who are more liberal
than their predecessors and who are becoming increasingly anxious. At
the Cabinet meeting last Sunday Environment Minister Yossi Sarid
complained about the killings and demanded that the army use more
caution to ensure children's safety. His complaint was justified but it
is the responsibility of the Israeli Government to ensure that political
will is applied to the situation and that greater control in Gaza be
exercised over both military personnel and tactics.
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