A thread about this should be a thread about grief and mourning, not about making political points. I was going to say cheap political points, but they aren't cheap when people trade in the grief they should feel for a child being killed to buy them.

I don't know the facts here, nor does anyone. We are fed stories with the details air-brushed out, to suit the propaganda version of the side putting-out the story. I can't believe stories in which when one side kills a child it's an accident, and just one of those things, and when the other does it, it's a calculated crime, justifying all kinds of vengeance.

The killers are maybe the only people who do know the truth, and they aren't talking. Or perhaps they are, and the people who give the orders and put out the stories know as well. Both sides.

The killers know in every case whether they were intentionally aiming to kill children - a boy out shopping with his father, a baby in his mother's arms, a child throwing a stone, framed in a sniper's telescopic sights...

Tragic accidents or bloody atrocities, the children are dead either way. Hundreds of them now.Most of them Arab children, some of them Jewish children. As if that made any difference - only a monster would think it could, you'd think, you really would. But there seems to be no shortage of such monsters for whom that kind of thing does actually seem to matter.

A time for every purpose under heaven. Right here and now, a time to weep. For the children, and the killers. And the people who look on, and turn into monsters, as they pick and choose which deaths matter and which don't.