A UN resolution in May urged combatants to refrain from bombing medical facilities.
Missing from his analysis is that the most effective civilian-casualty-minimization strategy would be to, you know, refrain from bombing areas that are heavily concentrated with civilians.
In a letter sent to Ambassador Khalid bin Salman on Thursday, the nine lawmakers asked the Saudi government to refrain from bombing the port of Hodeidah and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire around the port.
Britain has so far refrained from bombing Isis in Syria.
They refrained from bombing the convoy, the Special Forces major said, because they could not confirm that it did not include civilians.
Syria's Kurds have done rather a good job of governing themselves more generally (helped by the fact that Mr Assad refrains from bombing Kurdish areas as he does zones held by mainstream Sunni Arab rebels).
Metin Gurcan, a retired major in the Turkish Army now working as a security analyst, told me that, in the ensuing month, Turkey refrained from bombing ISIS again, while the number of strikes against Kurdish fighters surged into the hundreds.
Military planners had deliberately refrained from bombing the compound so that they could retrieve intelligence information -- including documents -- and, they hoped, to capture some of the Taliban leaders themselves.
Judge Goldstone could have contended that just as Israeli leaders themselves have frequently called off pinpoint assassinations of terrorists because civilians were in the line of fire, so too they should have refrained from bombing and shelling Hamas targets in Gaza when that bombing and shelling was bound to exact a large civilian toll.
Though the Pentagon was aware of those plants weeks ago, it refrained from bombing them, possibly out of concerns about the political and diplomatic fallout from attacks on facilities that could have legitimate agricultural or industrial purposes, or fear of spreading poisons.
