…hospitals are allowed to remove and store weapons from combatants under the conventions, so obviously they were going to find some weapons at the hospital.
And where is the evidence of this?
The claim isn’t that " Al Shifa had no weapons." Hospitals can securely store weapons. This is allowable explicitly under the conventions. Which makes the forensic detail of the collection of those weapons even more important, and the gathering of those weapons for a photo op kinda meaningless.
We always knew there were tunnels. They were built decades ago. Tunnels aren’t proof of a command and control bunker.
And this doesn’t explain the other hospitals. And it doesn’t explain why all of these hospitals are no longer functional.
That everyone knew about that were built decades ago.
That none of the thousands of people that took shelter in the hospital, that none of the medical staff or patients, ever saw.
But even if the IDF did engage combatants at the complex, once they had taken them out they still had an obligation to keep the hospital functional…something they didn’t do here or at any of the other hospitals in the north.
My point was that the incredibly despicable actions of the two American murderers mentioned don’t impact IDF doctrine or impact whether the IDF considers “all Palestinians to be fair game”; rereading through the back and forth I can see my post interpreted the other direction as well, so I’ll clarify that yes, the actions of those despicable murderers are certainly influenced by their consumed coverage of the situation in Gaza.
They did this before October 7, and still got October 7. And were still accused by the Palestinians and their sympathizers of apartheid, genocide, oppression, Gaza being an “open air prison”, etc.
We can’t, of course, discuss the specifics of what you’ve said here, because discussion of some of those terms aren’t allowed in this thread. But people are allowed to accuse countries of doing things. I can accuse my own country of crimes, I can accuse other countries of doing bad things.
…more deliberate targeting of medical infrastructure:
With the hospital in the north out of action, and the war now moving to the south, we are now seeing the hospitals in the south start to reach breaking point, just two days after the pause.
If things follow the pattern we’ve seen so far in this thread, what we will see over the next month are the hospitals in the south get overwhelmed, then over-taken, then shut down.
And we have speed limits and dividers on the highway and still sometimes people die in accidents. But we don’t shut down the roads.
And while there have always been accusations against Israel, the nature and intensity of those accusations has changed a lot since the war got going. The main campus of a college i visit weekly was closed recently due to protests. That’s the first time that’s happened in at least two decades.
My response was to puzzlegal who suggested that purely defensive measures were likely to be more beneficial to Israel than the military action that is currently underway. My point was that even with purely defensive actions, Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians had not benefited either in regard to the Palestinians’ views of Israel, nor in any material progress toward peaceful co-existence. In no way was I suggesting that you cannot make accusations (disagree with them though I might) against Israel.
No, but those are accidents. If, to use motor vehicle fatalities as an arena, there was a sudden uptick in drunk driving fatalities, the response has been to raise the drinking age, lower the BAC threshold for prosecution of the offense, and stronger consequences for offenders. When human beings make choices to do something harmful, increasing the disincentive to make the harmful choice is the natural societal response.
They’ve built walls. They’ve use Iron Dome and similar systems to shoot down rockets that are likely to hurt people. These are purely defensive actions.
I wouldn’t necessarily be too sure about that. Saudi Arabia and others are normalizing relations with Israel because a whole host of incentives line up to make them do so, and because of the decline of Pan Arabism and the rise of Arabic Nationalism.
Even before the recent normalization, there’s a reason why the Arab countries stopped going to war with Israel decades ago.
Continued progress towards normalization could be a huge boon in accomplishing a two state solution.
