> The turrets feature heavy duty 7.62 calibre machine guns tied into a network spanning the entire border. If any turret detects human movement, the entire chain of guns can train their sights and concentrate firepower on the interloper. Some turrets are also able to fire explosive rockets.

> With such overlapping fields of fire, even heavily armored vehicles would be quickly eliminated. The effect on a human body would be overwhelming, disproportionately violent, and would leave little in the way of human remains.

You can tell this is not written by a person with any military knowledge or with an agenda against weapons.

Non peaceful borders have been manned with such weapons operated by humans for more than a century (in the case of machine guns). And generally, if you can shoot one bullet and kill someone, you don’t use keep shoot hundreds of bullets, and if you can stop a threat with bullets, you don’t launch a rocket at it.

Israel doesn’t launch rockets at people next to the border. And tries to avoid killing unarmed people (for example by aiming for the legs). I assume every sane military does the same. Killing unarmed people, besides obviously being immoral, is bad strategically as well.

(This comment deals with a specific paragraph, and not the actual interesting issue raised by this article, which is not unique to Israel I presume, and is practiced by all military industries capable of building such weapons today)

EDIT: well, I had it coming. I didn’t mean for it to become the classic Israel vs Palestinians flame war - just wanted to point out the realities of borders, wars and weapons which I suspect most HN readers are not exposed to. But again, I should have seen this coming. :(