Beit Hanun

Funeral procession in Beit Hanun, Gaza

The news of the tragedy in Beit Hanun last Wednesday, where an errant IDF artillery shell killed 19 Palestinian civilians, was depressingly familiar. The immediate cause was a "technical failure in the artillery's radar system", but it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that responsibility lies with those who authorized the use of artillery fire in this area in the first place. Some might cast the net of responsibility farther than this. Although I do not accept all of his premises and proposed solutions, I can't help agreeing with the prophetic (I use this word deliberately, neither to malign nor to exalt the man) words of Gideon Levy, who writes, in a column sarcastically titled "No one is guilty in Israel," (Hebrew, "אין אשם בישראל") that

what happened at Beit Hanun, what happened in Israel on the day after and what is continuing to happen in Gaza day after day is a far more frightening [failure] than the calibrating of a gun sight.

See also Amos Harel's analysis of the "Palestinian Kfar Qana."