Nigeria, April 22 -- Few armed forces have managed to make murder and executions the stuff of procedural aberration rather than intentional practice. Killing civilians and unarmed personnel is the stuff of misreading and misunderstandings, albeit arrived at with good conscience. And so it was that the killing of 15 aid and emergency workers in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces on March 23 could be put down to "professional failures, breaches or orders and a failure to fully report the incident", a finding identified by an investigation conducted by the same organisation into its own personnel.

In marking its own report card, and giving it a credible pass, the IDF found, using the dulling terms that make murder an afterthought, that the ...