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Israeli Airforce Stalls Precision Strike for Pedestrian in Impact Area
Published 2 years ago
Drone footage released by the Israeli Airforce captures the moment a precision airstrike was stalled to give time for a pedestrian to get clear of the impact area.
One thing the Israeli military often catches flak over is their inability to always mitigate collateral damage. There have been numerous instances where PIJ or Hamas members were using civilians as human shields, and these instances have sometimes resulted in innocent civilians being caught in the crossfire between the IDF and the terror organizations inside of Gaza. While the Israelis have done a lot of work over the past decade to reduce collateral damage, sometimes instances like this still occur where the Israelis are forced to alter their attack strategy on the fly.
Prior to this strike being carried out, the Israeli Airforce had conducted what is known as a roof knock. Roof knocking takes place 15 minutes prior to a kinetic air strike and involves dropping inert munitions onto the target area. For over a decade now this method has been used to mitigate civilian casualties in known target locations. While this does afford members of the PIJ and Hamas time to evacuate the area, it does not afford them time to move their warfighting equipment out of an impact area. In this video, we see a random civilian walking by a target area who clearly did not get the memo about the roof knocking.
As a result of the civilian being in the strike area, the aircraft controllers can be heard mentioning the man's presence. They then stall the strike until after the civilian has moved by the target and reached a minimum safe distance away from the munitions casualty radius. I'm sure this guy probably still has some serious ringing in his ears and needs a new change of pants, but he lived because the Israelis showed restraint at a time where they weren't legally obligated to do so.
