Yesterday,  here in Philadelphia, I watched as a large grey four-engine jet with the distinctive fat squarish-looking fuselage of a military C-17 lumbered eastward far overhead, almost certainly one of the earliest of many such massive cargo planes bound for Israel loaded with heavy ammunition, bombs and who knows what other horrors designed by the sick minds of engineers in the US arms industry. Those industrialized killing products are bad enough in the toolkit of our own military, but they should definitely not be provided to as a gift to a country that plans to use its overwhelming might to destroy the lives of countless civilians as part of a collective punishment for the acts of fighters they have no control over— especially people who are at the complete mercy of Israel, unable to leave their fenced and walled-in "open-air prison" of Gaza.

When the Nazi Wehrmacht's troops advanced through Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union in Europe's Eastern Front, they were notorious, when encountering the slightest resistance from smaller villages for destroying such towns and burning them to the ground, killing everyone in them—man woman and child—as a collective punishment.

Such collective punishment was long a war crime and is encoded as a war-crime in the UN Charter which based its rules of war on the Nuremberg Tribunal that followed World War II.

Israel's IDF has for years ignored international law and done much the same thing in a more targeted but equally criminal fashion, destroying homes and often in the process killing innocent women and even children if suspected Palestinian "terrorists" were believed to have lived there. This tactic was applied even if the "terrorist" in question had been captured or killed already.