Haaretz reports:

In an affidavit to the High Court presented Thursday, the deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Major General Dan Halutz, said that the IDF would have abandoned the July 2002 assassination of a senior Hamas operative had it known in advance that 16 civilians would also be killed.

[…] The judges had asked to hear Halutz’ opinion on the matter following an interview he gave to Haaretz in which he related that, as Air Force chief at the time of the assassination, he had told the crew of the plane that had dropped a one-ton bomb on Salah Shehade’s Gaza apartment building that they “can sleep well at night… Your execution [of the operation] was perfect.”

Yet Dan Halutz was quoted in Haaretz a while back in what may seem as a contradictory remark:

“…the military was aware that the wife of Salah Shehadeh, the leader of the Hamas military wing, was near him when an F-16 warplane dropped a one-ton bomb on his Gaza home in July 1992, killing the two of them and 12 other civilians. Halutz said this was the only case in which non-combatants were knowingly placed in the line of fire.”

You gotta be pretty stupid (or a liar) to think that dropping a bomb on the most densely populated place in the world won’t cause civilian deaths – including a wave of terrorist attacks against Israelis themselves.

Mostly childrens died in the bomb-dropping ordered by Halutz. Halutz was quoted in Ha’aretz for saying, “if you nevertheless want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb’s release. A second later it’s gone, and that’s all. That is what I feel.”

Dan Halutz should be put on trial immediately for war crimes.