Giora Eiland is a retired Major General from the Israel Defense Forces. As head of Ariel Sharon’s National Security Council, Eiland helped draft Israel’s disengagement plan for removing Israeli military forces and settlers from Gaza.

In an op-ed for Ynet today, “In Gaza, there is no such thing as ‘innocent civilians’,” Eiland provides a rationale for making no distinction between Palestinian fighters and Palestinian children — they all in his mind belong to an “enemy state.”

[W]e must avoid the artificial, wrong and dangerous distinction between the Hamas people, who are “the bad guys,” and Gaza’s residents, which are allegedly “the good guys.” We are dealing with an enemy state, not with a terror organization which is seemingly operating from within an innocent civilian population.

He hardly needed to articulate this view as though it constitutes a policy recommendation, since it appears to be perfectly in accordance with the way in which the Israeli government, its military commanders, and its individual soldiers, have conducted the latest war.

The casualty figures, as compiled by the UN, speak for themselves: