One Day We Hope To Categorize An IDF Target As Military

By Amnesty International

We human rights organizations bear a tremendous responsibility when it comes to exposing and publicizing information on the situation in conflict zones. That is why Amnesty set clear rules and goals for its data gathering and analysis processes. We do not always achieve those goals, but the unmet goals still serve as a beacon, a guiding light toward which we aspire. One of these days, we might even classify a target hit in an Israeli strike as military.

An organization can dream. Usually this organization’s dreams involve the international community taking up pitchforks and torches – figuratively, of course; those are so crude in the modern idiom – against a particular offender of our sensibilities, but that does not mean it is our only dream. We dream of an end to imperialism, or at least Western imperialism; we dream of equality, at least for Muslim majorities; and we dream of the day that we can, without fear of upsetting our colleagues, categorize an attack on Hamas fighters as targeting a military site.

It is a difficult feat to manage under current circumstances, but that does not mean it will forever remain impossible. As long as the site of a Hamas or Islamic Jihad position coexists with, or is very close to, a civilian or religious site, our rules dictate that we define the position as a non-military facility. That can be a home, of course, but the same non-military designation applies equally to schools, mosques, playgrounds, bridges, roads, basements, medical centers, warehouses, beaches, and many other locations. If the IDF were to strike a position that was not also one of these other types of facilities, we would not hesitate to categorize the strike as hitting a military target. Perhaps one day we will have such an opportunity, but, alas, that has not happened yet.

We’ve come close more times than we care to count. That makes it frustrating, but we resolve anew each time, thinking that perhaps next time it will happen. Last summer there were at least two dozen cases in which it initially appeared that the target was military, but then something forced us to reclassify it. It might have been a dead man holding a grenade launcher, but he was in civilian clothes, so clearly he was a civilian target. Or a group of Hamas members directing their rocket-launching squads in the neighborhood, but it became clear that the house belonged to a family, so that was clearly residential, not military. Or, and this happened at least a dozen times, somebody would fire a rocket at Israel, and an Israeli strike on the source of the fire would occur within seconds, but since in some of the resulting wreckage we also found some non-military item, such as bricks or broken concrete, we had no choice but to categorize the site as non-military.

But we are still working at it. And one day, perhaps, we will be able to describe the elusive military target in Gaza.