THE Prime Minister claimed Iran attempted “to harm innocent Israelis” in his address from Downing Street on Tuesday. Yet the targets were military ones: Israeli military air bases and Mossad headquarters. The Iranians warned the US an attack was imminent, and didn’t fire enough missiles to overwhelm Israel’s anti-missile systems, which they could have in co-ordination with the Houthis, Hezbollah and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq.
The IDF meanwhile continues its practice of targeting civilians by attacking a hospital run by Hezbollah’s charity wing in Beirut. Human Rights Watch found in the 2006 war most Hezbollah rockets were fired from hills kilometres from any settlement - and likely missiles aren’t stored in settlements either, as Lebanon is much larger than Gaza. There will be no condemnation of this from Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Antony Blinken.
Just as no western leaders condemned the IDF killing 13-year-old schoolgirl Iman Al Hams in Gaza in 2005, by the testimony of the soldiers involved knowing she couldn’t be a suicide bomber as they had already hit her schoolbag, which she then dropped, when they wounded her 100 metres away from them, before killing her as she crawled further away. Nor an IDF sniper killing a 16-year-old boy outside a hospital in Jenin in July 2023, CCTV footage proving he wasn’t armed or killed in fighting. Nor when IDF tank crews killed six-year-old Hind Rajab and her uncle’s family in his car in Gaza.