Human Shields

One thing I have always found to be personally offensive is the taking of hostages. To me, it is a mark of a coward, or of a barbarian. The use of other people as human shields should be, I think, wrong in everyone's mind. Think on this a moment. How would you feel if an armed individual took one of your loved ones and held a gun to his or her head? No matter the cause the gunman espouses, how would you feel?

Now, even lower on the spectrum is someone who would hold his own family as a hostage. We've all seen it on the news. Someone holds their own family hostage. I always think that is beneath contempt. Maybe I'm judgmental that way. If so, I have no apologies to make for believing that. It is both how I was raised and what I believe from what I have learned through the years.

So it is with absolute disgust that I hear that a well known, wanted terrorist – who knew full well he was a target for the Israeli military – arranged a strategy meeting with other terrorists in his own home with his family all around him. Using your own family in hopes it would provide you a human shield is a hideous violation of what being a husband and father is supposed to be about.

A Hamas militant leader who has topped Israel's most-wanted list for a decade was badly wounded and underwent four hours of spinal surgery Wednesday after being wounded in an Israeli airstrike, security officials said.

The top fugitive, Mohammed Deif, could end up paralyzed, Palestinian security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss his condition. Wednesday's blast marked the army's fourth attempt to kill Deif, held responsible for suicide bombings in Israel. In a 2002 missile strike, he lost an eye.

At least 23 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Wednesday. And an Israeli airstrike early Thursday destroyed the building housing the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Foreign Ministry.

Nine members of one family were killed in Wednesday's airstrike, with an Israeli F-16 warplane dropping a quarter-ton bomb on a home in a crowded Gaza City neighborhood. The strike was by far the deadliest in Israel's 15-day military campaign in Gaza, launched after Hamas-allied militants kidnapped an Israeli soldier.

Israel's air force targeted the two-story house of Nabil Abu Salmiyeh, a Hamas activist and university lecturer, after getting intelligence information that the leaders of Hamas' military wing, responsible for the abduction of the soldier, were meeting there. Palestinian security officials said seven or eight top Hamas officials were present.

The blast wounded 37 people, three critically, said Health Minister Bassem Naim. Hospital officials said Raed Saad, a top Hamas operative, was among the wounded, but details of his condition weren't released.

Putting your family around you in hopes they will shield you from retribution is not the work of a father or husband or a hero. It is the work of a coward and a barbarian.

Please do not comment if you are going to try to make some sort of moral equivalency. There really is none.

Putting your family around you in hopes they will shield you from retribution is not the work of a father or husband or a hero. It is the work of a coward and a barbarian.

Please do not comment if you are going to try to make some sort of moral equivalency. There really is none.