Appalled.

On Sunday morning, Israel conducted an air strike to take out Hamas operatives on a street in Rafah, in southern Gaza.  Reporting afterward indicated that three Hamas guerrillas on motorcycles were struck, and at least seven reported bystanders were killed in the attack.

The media and the UN promptly went into overdrive to characterize this incident as an attack on a UN school, because the street where the Hamas guerrillas were struck was outside the school (which is being used as a shelter).  Rick Moran reconstructed the event, however, using multiple sources, and pointed out at PJ Media that the air strike, which appears to have involved a single missile, didn’t hit the school at all.  In fact, it looks to have upheld Israel’s usual standard of precision, hitting the target it was aimed at and leaving, in the words of the UK Telegraph, minimal physical destruction: “just a small but deep hole in the road where the missile had landed.”

That in itself defies the reflexive media characterization of an indiscriminate shelling attack “on a school.”  But blogger Lenny Ben-David also did some sleuthing on the collateral casualties in the attack, and what he found was that all but two of them appeared to be military-age males.

Whether the young adult males were on the street near Hamas for fell purposes or not, these facts paint a picture different from the “attack on a school” narrative.

In fact, Israel didn’t attack a school.  The IDF attacked Hamas guerrillas.  The guerrillas had positioned themselves, for whatever reason, on the street outside of a school.  They were taken out in a pinpoint strike and the school was never hit, nor was anyone in it or on its grounds hit.

As a matter of waging war lawfully, the IDF’s action comports with the standards of international convention.  The IDF targeted combatants, and took care to use as precise a weapon system as possible to minimize collateral damage in an area that might have civilians in it.  Regrettably, there were apparently at least some children in the area, but it is by no means clear that that factor was different from any previous instance of the IDF targeting Hamas operatives in vehicles on city streets.  The targets and their vehicles were outside the school grounds – on the other side of its perimeter fence – at the time of the strike.  The IDF used only the force necessary to accomplish the task; no more.  And it used that force as precisely as technology allows.  It didn’t choose a more destructive method, which might have guaranteed the kill better but at a higher collateral cost.