Israel's targeted killings work...

The Israelis are continually reducing the number of civilian casualties in their strikes against terror...this article is from Alan Dershowitz...

Reducing the number of civilian casualties in the attacks on Gaza was one of the first tasks…IAF chief, Eliezer Shkedi, marked out for himself. The data improved commensurately. From a 1:1 ratio between killed terrorists and civilians in 2003 to a 1:28 ratio in late 2005. Several IAF mishaps in 2006 lowered the ratio to 1:10, but the current ratio is at its lowest ever ­-- more than 1:30.

In other words for every 30 legitimate combatants killed by the Israeli air force’s campaign of targeted killings, only one civilian is killed. Even this figure may be misleading because some of the civilians are anything but innocent bystanders, while others, such as young children, surely are. Every death of a civilian is a tragedy to be avoided whenever possible, but civilian deaths are an inevitable consequence of warfare. This is especially so when terrorists deliberately hide among civilians and fire rockets from civilian areas, as Hamas and Islamic Jihad frequently do.

No army in history has ever had a better ratio of combatants to civilians killed in a comparable setting. Israel’s ratio is far better than that of the United States, Great Britain, Russia or any other country combating terrorism. Yet this remarkable improvement has hardly been reported by the international press. Neither have human rights organizations taken appropriate note of it, especially considering the extraordinary and disproportionate criticism directed against Israel when the ratio was worse. Nor have these organizations noted that the selective employment of targeted killings in 2007, coupled with other defensive actions, have resulted in the lowest number of Israeli civilian deaths and the lowest number of Palestinian civilian deaths in recent times.

This is a story that should be widely reported and carefully analyzed. Silence in the face of this improvement is misleading, since it leads many to believe that there have been no improvements since the dark days of the Intifada. Misleading by silence is as grievous a journalistic sin as misleading by mistake. The time has come to correct this sin and set the record straight.