FROM BEER SHEEVA, ISRAEL

IT IS THE ULTIMATE crime against humanity: the killing of babies. It is doubly terrible if they are mutilated. Germans in the First World War were said to have impaled babies on their bayonets. Germans in the Second World War probably did impale babies on their bayonets. And worse. Hamas is accused of beheading babies.

“No one will forgive that,” says psychologist Dr August Feud, of the Revenge Institute in London. “It’s a crime not just against humanity but against being human. People who do that to babies dehumanize themselves. No one will pity their fate. Netanyahu can unleash hell on them and few will care. You can see it already on television news with reporters discussing Israeli casualties while bomb after bomb hits home in Gaza. Vengeance is an irony-free zone.”

Eye for Eye Magazine editor Alfred Blind says that sometimes insurgents will mutilate quite deliberately, “to do something so dreadful that their enemy cannot ever forgive it. It’s a lure, a cold lure, to get your enemy to do his worst. If these stories are correct, then Netanyahu should recognize that he is being lured in. They do not want to be forgiven.”