Credit should be given where it’s due: this piece by Ethan Bronner — the same reporter who originally gave so much attention to the claims of IDF civilian killings in Gaza — is a sober and responsible followup to his original reporting. And the kind of piece I doubted the Times would run. Perhaps Bronner senses that the ease with which he originally bought into the story looks shabby. Or perhaps he’s simply trying to do his best covering the twists and turns of a complicated story.

Either way, the piece is notable for its willingness to delve into the almost unbelievable difficulties Israeli soldiers faced distinguishing civilian from combatant in Gaza:

“We saw a woman coming toward us,” [a soldier recounted]. “We shouted at her. We warned her a number of times not to get closer. We made hand motions. She did not stop. We shot her. When we examined her body we did not find a bomb belt.”

Israeli commanders defend such actions because they say they confronted armed women in Gaza as well as Hamas gunmen dressed as women and in other guises, like doctors.

“We had a woman run at us with a grenade in one hand and the Koran in the other,” Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister, head of the military’s education corps, said in an interview in which he displayed ethics kits distributed to all commanders. “What we know till now is that there was no systematic moral failure. There were not more than a few — a very few — events still being investigated.”

Col. Roi Elkabets, commander of an armored brigade told of occasions where fire was held. His troops saw “a woman, about 60 years old, walking with a white flag and six to eight children behind her and behind them was a Hamas fighter with his gun. We did not shoot him.”

Having reported extensively on Operation Cast Lead while it was happening, Bronner surely knows that the nature of combat in Gaza demands the careful treatment of civilian-killing stories; as a journalist, he surely sensed that the original claims were thinly-sourced; and as a reporter covering Israel, he surely knows that false atrocity stories are a standard Palestinian PR tactic — and that none of them have ever proven true, from Mohammad Al-Dura in 2000 to Jenin in 2002 to the UN school bombing in 2009. It’s good that he wrote a responsible followup. It’s bad that he gave so much attention to the story in the first place.