Hamas banned the use of children in the military 20 years ago, well established fact that has been well documented!
Hamas do run military summer camps for teenagers as do the IDF - both use it to indoctrinate young people. The IDF also do military camps for foreigners between 14-18 to encourage them to come over and join the IDF.
You keep using the excuse that these kids might be carrying out an attack - show me evidence of any attacks carried out by 8 year olds in the last two years, better still show me evidence of attack carried out by 8 year olds in Gaza in the last decade. How many IDF soldiers have been killed in this conflict by children? I think you’ll find the answer around the 0 mark and yet 20,000+ children have been killed by the IDF. Who is more scary?
Also please do not go on a mother’s site and say that it was okay for a fully grown soldier to shoot unarmed CHILDREN because they broke the rules and should have known better. Children break rules everywhere, all the time, it is not an excuse to shoot them.
On a side note, I challenge the authority of those rules - imagine if I put a yellow line in Tel Aviv and said “anyone who crosses it I can shoot”, would you find that legal or justified?
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The thread on Breaking Ranks on this board had a number of quotes by IDF soldiers from various different ranks within the IDF, I’ve copied a selection of them. These are straight from IDF soldiers.
“If you want to shoot without restraint, you can."
”There are certainly soldiers and officers in the IDF who really, really want to kill all the arabs. Really. That's the reason why they put on their uniforms."
"You can justify a lot in the name of destroying Hamas. You can push the red line very, very far."
”Teenagers would sometimes walk there. The company commander really wanted us to kill them. My platoon commander just told him, "No." Later, the company commander really gave it to him. There's no one above the company commander, and if he tells you to shoot, it's not like you'll be prosecuted for it."
"We fired quite a few warning shots, but we also killed at least one person."
"Every man of fighting age is supposedly a terrorist. And must be killed. No matter if he has weapons or not."
"We saw two teenagers pushing some sort of cart. And the first shot fired was directly to the head. And I was like, "Woah, that's not exactly what I would have done."
"I didn't shoot at any unarmed Palestinians myself, but I did see it happen with my own eyes."
"If you want to shoot without restraint, you can. One time, there was a building that was being used for humanitarian purposes. One of the commanders really, really wanted to target this building. But we told him very clearly, "Mate, this building is off limits." Then he fired a shell at it anyway. And he said, "I saw an anti-tank weapon aimed at me." Now go prove him wrong. Prove him wrong"
"I personally witnessed a relatively high-ranking officer order a tank to take down a building. The building was on the side of the line where they [Palestinians] were "allowed" to be. A man was standing on the roof, hanging laundry, and the officer decided that he was a spotter. He’s not a spotter. He’s hanging his laundry. You can see that he’s hanging laundry. Now, it’s not as if this man had binoculars or weapons. The closest military force was 600-700 metres away. So unless he had eagle eyes, how could he possibly be a spotter? And the tank fired a shell. The building half collapsed. And the result was many dead and wounded. . . . This kind of thing happened every week. And that's just my unit, there are dozens of units on the ground at any given moment."
"If you want to, you can always find a reason to incriminate someone. The question is, what are your standards? How much effort does it take to incriminate a human being? If I wanted to, I could incriminate the entire Strip. Is this building too big, do you find it threatening? Go ahead, shoot."
"At the end of our deployment in the Strip, we submitted a report. The commander's summary. And it said that we "took down [killed] 112 terrorists." I can confidently say that only one of them... Only one! Was even suspected of being armed. That is, the 111 other people we killed, no one even claimed they were armed."