[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]

1.

The Guardian here makes great play of the fact that the autopsies carried out on those killed on the Mavi Marmara show that five of them received gunshot wounds to the head and one was shot between the eyes. The piece quotes a pro-Palestinian activist in the UK as accusing the Israeli commandos having had a "shoot-to-kill" policy.

2.

I can understand reasoned opposition to the blockade of Gaza, the decision to use deadly force to take the Mavi Marmara and anger over the resulting deaths of nine people. However, the attention being given in the Guardian story, and many other media, to the fact that five of the nine died from shots to the head seems to me to reveal more of an obsession with the supposedly uncanny marksmanship and marked bloodlust of Israeli soldiers than anything else. What of those who died from wounds to other parts of their bodies? Do their deaths fall into a separate moral category from those of their comrades?

3.

The Guradian story says,

Note here the use of the word "intensity". It's not clear to me how someone can be killed with intensity. This fragment and the article as a whole seem predicated on the notion that there is some sort of kind, decent and fair way to kill people with gunfire and that the Israelis chose some other, more vicious and treacherous, way.

4.

Some will say that the wounds suffered by the dead can provide us with a more accurate picture of what happened on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara in the early hours of Monday morning. That would be true in the context of an impartial investigation but we are not going to have one of those; Israel controls the scene where the men died and those who killed them and it handed over their bodies to the Turks without doing an autopsy of its own. Furthermore, in the context of an impartial inquiry all the wounds suffered by the dead would be significant, as would a host of other factors.

5.

Britain, the United States, Canada and a number of European countries are currently engaged in a war in Afghanistan. Their armed forces regularly shoot Afghans dead. While there is considerable opposition to the war in some of the countries with expeditionary forces I can't recall a single instance of opponents of that war drawing attention to the particular kinds of gunshot wounds suffered by Afghans and speculating about what those wounds might reveal about the morality or truthfulness of the force that did the killing.

6.

Seán Savage, Danny McCann and Mairéad Farrell were members of the Provisional IRA. On March 6th, 1988 they were shot dead by British Special Forces in Gibraltar. McCann was shot five times, Farrell eight times, and Savage between 16 and 18 times. At the time of their deaths they were unarmed, presented no danger to their attackers and were shot without being given a chance to surrender.

7.

There is no nice, restrained and decent way to kill someone with a firearm. It may seem like an exercise in redundancy to say so but once the decision to use deadly force is taken then the force used is likely to prove deadly and, from the point of view of those using it, had better be deadly. Nonsensical talk about a "shoot to kill" policy on the Mavi Marmara - as if there could be any other reason for soldiers to shoot someone - combined with an excessive focus on certain kinds of wounds says more about those responsible for them than it contributes to a reasoned critique of Israel's policy and actions.