WITH the BDS movement picking up steam, and as Palestinians head to the International Criminal Court on June 25 in their bid to open criminal proceedings against Israel, and as ties with the US and EU flag, Israel would be wise to not add the UN to its growing list of problems. So when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israel to protect the lives of Palestinian children who bore the brunt of last year's war in the Gaza Strip, the least Israeli reply should have been an offer of financial compensation to the families of the children who died, or apologize for the deaths, or pledge to do its utmost so that it doesn't happen again. But instead, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced what he called the "hypocrisy" of the UN and a “black day” for the organization. Netanyahu made his remarks as the UN issued a new report highlighting what Ban called "unprecedented challenges for children in conflict zones around the world". Netanyahu's counter is that the UN, especially its human rights council, has focused disproportionate attention on Israel. Of course, with regards to the 50-day summer war of last year, the focus and the onus must be on Israel. Ban said that last year was particularly lethal for children in Gaza, where his latest report said that at least 561 children were killed — 557 of them Palestinians. It said 4,271 youngsters were injured, all but 22 Palestinians. The 557 Palestinian deaths were the third highest death toll of any conflict in 2014, after Afghanistan's with 710 child killings and Iraq's with 679 — but ahead of Syria's with 368. At the height of the Gaza conflict, some 300,000 displaced Palestinians were sheltering in some 91 UN schools, several of which were hit by Israeli strikes, killing 44 Palestinians. Israel maintains that it needed to target those facilities because Hamas was using the areas to store weapons and fire rockets. If Hamas was indeed using UN shelters and schools and hospitals to hide their weapons, and if Hamas was camouflaging itself among the general Gaza population to make them harder targets for Israel to find and hit, this made it all the more imperative that Israel cease fire and not shoot until it was as sure as it can possibly be that targeted sites would not include innocent civilians. Had Israeli soldiers had serious concerns that innocents would be in the line of fire, they should never have pulled the trigger. Even in war, there are ground rules to follow that forbid this haphazard way of fighting. War is not a game of 50-50; nor should you shoot and ask questions later. It's all well and good that Israel took what it said were unprecedented measures to avoid civilian casualties, ordering residents to evacuate through leaflets, phone calls, radio broadcasts and warning strikes with unarmed shells ahead of live airstrikes. However, when the fighting starts there are rules protecting non-participants set out in international humanitarian law. If, as Israel says, commanders are not infallible, intelligence is not perfect, and technological systems sometimes fail, then military action in the vicinity of civilians and their surroundings must be measured in the extreme. Israel should consider itself lucky that Ban did not include it on his annual list of parties that kill or injure children in armed conflict. That was only because the report said the heads of the UN agencies on the ground had failed to reach a consensus on whether to list Israel. Had those UN agencies worked with more coordination and cooperation on Israeli war actions in Gaza, the Israeli Army would now be on a blacklist, grouped with the likes of the Taliban and Boko Haram.
