Brigadier General Spector: I asked myself why it was necessary to kill 15 children in order to liquidate one terrorist
December 13, 2007 8:21 am Israeli Refuseniks, Terrorism versus aerial bombingSpreading his wings - Haaretz, December 8, 2007
…a Channel 1 reporter asked: “Brigadier General Spector, are you a ‘refusenik’?”
Though he did not initially grasp its full significance, the question itself was enough to make him queasy. He asked the reporter to repeat it. “At the time I was not proficient enough … I was not effective enough at responding, I hadn’t yet completely organized things in my head. I admit that what bothered me most then was not the moral aspect of the IAF, but its combat level. I asked myself why it was necessary to kill 15 children in order to liquidate one terrorist.”
And what about the moral angle?
Spector: “With regard to the moral aspect, I thought at first that there had been a mistake - that maybe the pilots and their commanders didn’t know there were civilians there, even though it’s not so logical to expect that in a densely populated area like Gaza, Shehadeh, of all people, would be in civilian-free surroundings,” Spector notes, referring to the July 2002 operation in which the IAF bombed the apartment building in which Salah Shehadeh, the head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, resided with his family.