"There is little to distinguish between the behaviour of Israel towards Gazan non-combatants and that of the SS to say, the response to the assassination of Hiedrich by decimating Lidice." - Jim Carroll

I would say that there was a great deal of difference.

So Lidice was "decimated" was it?

Here is what DID befall the population of that small village:

"On 10th June 1942, members of the German Army field police and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape.

All men of the village were rounded up and taken to the farmstead of the Horák family on the edge of the village. Mattresses were taken from neighbouring houses where they were stood up against the wall of the Horáks' barn. Shooting of the men commenced at about 7 a.m. At first the men were shot in groups of five, but Böhme thought the executions were proceeding too slowly and ordered that ten men be shot at a time. The dead were left lying where they fell. This continued until the afternoon hours when there were 173 dead.

The next day, seven women, along with nineteen men who had been working in a mine, were sent to Prague, where they were also shot.

All the women and children of the village were taken first to Lidice village school. They were then taken to the nearby town of Kladno where they were detained in the grammar school for three days. The children were separated from their mothers.

Four women were pregnant and were sent to the same hospital where Heydrich died. They were given abortions and then sent to different concentration camps. One hundred and eighty-four women of Lidice were loaded on trucks on June 12, 1942, driven to Kladno railway station and forced into a special passenger train guarded by a large escort. In the morning of June 14, 1942 the train halted on a railway siding at the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. On their arrival the Lidice women were first isolated in a special block. The women were involved in leather processing, road building, textile and ammunition factories. Lack of hygiene, epidemics and contagious diseases spread and took most of the women. Some went mad and others were murdered.

Eighty-eight Lidice children were transported to the area of the former textile factory in Gneisenau Street in £ódŸ. Their arrival was announced by a telegram from Horst Böhme's Prague office which ended with, the children are only bringing what they wear. No special care is desirable. The care was minimal. They suffered from a lack of hygiene and from illnesses. Under commands from the camp management, no medical care was given to the children. Shortly after their arrival in £ódŸ, officials from the Central Race and Settlement branch chose seven children at random for Germanisation.

The furor over Lidice caused some hesitation over the fate of the remaining children, but in late June Adolf Eichmann ordered the massacre of the remainder of the children. On July 2, 1942 all of the remaining 81 Lidice children were handed over to the £ódŸ Gestapo office, who in turn had them transported to the extermination camp at Che³mno 70 kilometres away, where they were gassed to death in Magirus gas vans. It is almost certain they were killed on the day of their arrival. Out of the 105 Lidice children, 82 died in Che³mno, six died in the German Lebensborn orphanages and 17 returned home."

So a bit worse than decimation, the village was also completely razed to the ground - utterly levelled. All-in-all including the populations of other villages some 1,300 people died because of Heydrich's assassination. No such parallel exists in anything connected with Gaza, where according to the UN Hamas terrorists deliberately used the civilian population as "human shields".

WP a chemical weapon?? Hardly, but that would be a simple matter of looking it up, it certainly is not listed as a chemical weapon, but is mentioned under a "Conventional Weapon Protocol". Such facts however will not sit well with Jim