The Hamas terrorists controlling Gaza never waste a crisis.  The senseless murder of teenager Mohammad Abu Khedir by Israeli teens, acting out revenge for the triple kidnapping and murder of teens Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frankel, was used as justification for massive rocket barrages on Israel.

Those barrages have now reached Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.

But while the Israelis prepare for a long, deadly war with warplanes, 40,000 reserve troops, ships and tanks, Hamas is preparing for a different war.  Hamas’s war is fought with thousands of cheap rockets, human shields, video cameras, and the world press.

Hamas welcomes the escalation, they want Israel to come in to Gaza with tanks, so they can properly arrange atrocities for the press to obligingly report.

Israel is the only country in the world who takes the time, has the technology, and the will to warn every civilian in a building they are about to bomb before they bomb it.  Israeli drones, radar, and Iron Dome system track each rocket launch to its source in seconds.  As the bombers are scrambled, the IDF calls every cellphone in the building to warn them to evacuate.

The New York Times reported on this yesterday, laying bare the human shield strategy in Gaza.

The call came to the cellphone of his brother’s wife, Salah Kaware said Tuesday. Mr. Kaware lives in Khan Younis, in southeast Gaza, and the caller said that everyone in the house must leave within five minutes, because it was going to be bombed.

A further warning came as the occupants were leaving, he said in a telephone interview, when an Israeli drone apparently fired a flare at the roof of the three-story home. “Our neighbors came in to form a human shield,” he said, with some even going to the roof to try to prevent a bombing. Others were in the stairway when the house was bombed not long afterward.

But the NYT didn’t seem to mind the atrocity of using human shields to defend rocket launches against civilians, insead reporting that Israel’s targeted warnings to Gaza civilians as “contentious”.  HonestReporting.com called them out on it.

But faced with a watertight confession that Palestinians are using IDF warnings in order to act as human shields, Steve Erlanger and Fares Akram drop the ball. Instead of focusing on Hamas’ policy of deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way, the New York Times brands Israel’s measures to avoid civilian casualties as “contentious”.

More from the NYT article:

But the events on Tuesday were another example of a contentious Israeli policy in which occupants of a building about to be bombed or shelled are given a brief warning in Arabic to evacuate. The Israelis have used such telephone calls and leaflets for years now, in a stated effort to reduce civilian casualties and avoid charges of indiscriminate killings or even of crimes against the rules of war. [emphasis mine]

Israel faces a long, bloody battle to quiet the rockets launching from Gaza.  Unfortunately, they face a bloodier battle in the press, when terrorists are hailed as heroes and human shields are treated as honorable.