Ha’aretz editorial: On the way to school:

Five children killed is an intolerable price, the fruit of the policy according to

which Israel sets itself very loose limits in its war against Palestinian violence.

But not everything is permitted, not even in the war against terrorism, or against

the mortars that are trained on IDF camps and on the settlements at the

extremity of the Gaza Strip.

One thing that’s not permitted, for example, is to plant explosive devices on a

path used by children on the way to school. That has to be beyond the pale,

utterly forbidden, without ifs or buts, because of the danger posed to civilians by

the bombs. Whereas in the West Bank Israel seems to have set itself a few red

lines, the impression is that in the war to defend the vacuous settlements in the

Gaza Strip it has abandoned all restraint. In Gaza, far from the eyes of the Israeli

media, the game has different rules. The explosive devices Israel has planted

there is proof of that. After the liquidations, the arrests without trial, the shelling

of homes and the wholesale kidnappings, now come the bombs, which don’t

distinguish between children and terrorists.

On the slippery slope that Israel’s moral character is sliding irreparably, this is a

new nadir. A state places explosive charges where children are likely to pass

and then claims that only the other side practices terrorism? We have to admit

that an act of this kind can be considered an act of terrorism, because it strikes

at the innocent and doesn’t discriminate between the victims, even if the

intention was not to kill children and even if the goal was the war on terrorism.