The explosions marked the second time in hours a U.N. school came under attack.

The Israeli Defense Force has shelled a UN school in the Gaza strip, killing 30 and injuring 55. Israel claims that Hamas militants were using the school as a base to mortar their troops, but the UN says that all the dead and injured were civilians. Even if the IDF were correct, something the Right accepts unquestioningly because the IDF never, ever lies like their enemies do, then Israel would only be responding to Hamas' war crime by committing another war crime. You can't get to the moral high ground - let alone win a COIN operation - by allowing the rules of war to be set by barbarians, something that the intellectually and morally bankrupt Right never seems to acknowledge.

And there are good reasons to believe that the IDF is simply lying as part of a propaganda war it admits has been eight months in the planning: the use of indiscriminate white phosphorus airbursts, in contravention of international law as it is understood everywhere except the US and Israel (the 1980 Protocol III to the Convention on Conventional Weapons containsa blanket restriction on dropping incendiary weapons from the air against military objectives "located within a concentration of civilians"); the way in which the IDF is throwing explosives around so freely that almost as many of its people have been killed by its own "errant' tank shells as by enemy action.

Of course they cannot acknowledge this - otherwise their only recourse for all the warmongering they've cheerled in the last eight years would be to commit symbolic sepukku and fall on the swords of their own punditry before vanishing from our public discourse forever.

Crossposted from Newshoggers