In a 1/10/09 LA Times op-ed, noted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz makes an interesting argument:

Several months ago, the head of the Israeli air force showed me a videotape (now available on YouTube) of a Hamas terrorist deliberately moving his rocket launcher to the front of a U.N. school, firing a rocket and then running away, no doubt hoping that Israel would then respond by attacking the rocket launcher and thus killing Palestinian children in the school.

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Consider a related situation: An armed bank robber kills several tellers and takes a customer hostage. Hiding behind his human shield, the robber continues to kill civilians. A police officer, trying to prevent further killings, shoots at the robber but accidentally kills the hostage. Who is guilty of murder? Not the police officer who fired the fatal shot but the bank robber who fired from behind the human shield.

And, who is guilty if the police open fire in that crowded bank after the robber has run away? As Professor Dershowitz has noted, Palestinian rocketeers generally flee before Israeli bombers can arrive. The inescapable conclusion is that, if the Israelis bomb that U.N. school, their purpose is not to kill the rocketeer, who has almost surely fled, but rather to use the rocketeers recent presence as a pretext for the very predictable outcome of killing scores of Palestinian children.

So, what would be Israel’s motivation for doing such a thing? I don’t know, but there are two common reasons for people to practice such violence:

  • Retribution — Palestinian rockets have killed a couple of Isreali children in the past year.
  • Intimidation — Israel wants the Gazans to vote for someone other than Hamas next time. (But note that violence against civilians for political ends is the very definition of "terrorism," a crime against humanity.)