Why knock when you can just blow the door down?

Who does this?

Wafer Shaker al Daghma, 34, a teacher at a local UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) elementary school, was killed last Wednesday as she stood preparing to open the wooden door of her home to the troops. According to UNRWA and relatives who found her body, the military used an explosive device on the door which blew most of her head from her body. They then confined the traumatised children – aged from two to 13 – for five hours while the body lay outside the door of the room where they were held.

…Mrs al Daghma’s widower, Majdi, 34, who was out of the house at the time, said his daughter had told him that her mother, knowing that troops were on a search and arrest operation in the vicinity, had put on a headscarf, told the children to go into a bedroom and said that she would open the door when the troops arrived.

An Israeli tank had parked by the outer, open, metal door and the inner, wooden front door was then blasted open.

Is it too much to ask that the IDF knock on a family’s door before blowing it in? How could that possibly be too much to ask?

I wonder what sort of lame excuse will be offered to explain this atrocity. Or maybe they just won’t bother. The IDF displays utter disregard for Palestinian lives. Whatever non-apology apologies were offered two weeks ago after the IDF murdered a family of five sitting down to breakfast meant nothing. And where is the response from Israeli society to this tragedy? Where are the outraged editorials that the IDF killed this woman standing inside her own door, in her own house, preparing to open her door for the Israeli soldiers?

Did I miss them, or was there just…silence?

We are witnessing here the actions of the most miserable people on earth; a people profoundly lost, estranged from the human race and seemingly unable to find their way back. A people who claim to be anointed by God and who use that claim to justify their whims before other human beings. And I look at them and think, No.

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” Matthew 7:15-20

Am I too harsh? Then show me the unflinching condemnation of this atrocity in the Israeli papers, an atrocity carried out not two weeks since the last Palestinian family was ‘accidentally’ destroyed. These events happened last Wednesday. It is now Monday. Surely there has been time enough for Israelis to denounce this brutal and gratuitous murder. Surely.

I looked. Maybe I missed it, or maybe it just never happened.