they’ve had 4 months to organize and divorce Hamas publicly. They could even help locate the tunnels. The idea that Hamas is independent from Palestinians is a meme.
I would love to see your organizational skills on full display, while you’re under a massive bombing campaign, and while electricity and water and Internet and food are intermittently absent.
How, exactly, are they supposed to do that when just walking towards the Israelis waving a fucking white flag gets you shot? By the Israelis, I mean.
Senior Israeli officials have made it very clear they have exactly the same “there are no civilian Palestinians” attitude you have. Including the children, I might add.
You think the Palestinians don’t know this?
Well, I tried.
They have been organized, by Israel into concentration camps. Indeed they could have a public meeting and vote to divorce themselves from Hamas. What might that accomplish?
Oh, and here’s a cite for what senior Israelis say about Palestinian children:
And here, an article on the broader “All Palestinians are Hamas” rhetoric that also debunks the deceptively more reasonable-sounding “a majority of Palestinians support Hamas” version:
Rafah is about to get cleared, so presumably civilians camping there will have to move somewhere else yet again. Allegedly Israel has promised Egypt something would be arranged to keep refugees from spilling into Sinai.
Not really. This is like saying the French caused WW2 by building the maginot line.
Look, the thing that many here seem to be missing is that Hamas attacked. They were the aggressor. They freely and of their own will decided to launch a massive terrorist attack into israel, commit atrocities and kill innocents. Waging a war of aggression was one of the Charges laid at Nuremberg as a war crime. They knew massive retaliation was coming and they did it anyway.
Thus, all the palestinian deaths, all the misery, the hunger, the destroyed hospitals- whatever- that is the fault of Hamas and no one else. They attacked Israel. Hamas did this to their own people.
I dont know why. But all that happened after is on Hamas. Period.
Hamas made a sneak attack, launched a war of aggression- just like the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. And just like the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese- all the bombings etc that occured after that- all that misery- was laid on the Governments of the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. Civilians were killed- Hitlers fault. Hospitals were bombed- Hitler’s fault. or Tojo. Not FDR, not Churchil- the leaders of the aggressor nations- all the fault was theirs.
So all the whining about the IDF destroying hospitals or whether the jewish children was decapitated or simply just murdered in cold blood- it is all for naught. Hamas was the aggressor- they made the useless and atrocity filled sneak attack. All the suffering of their own people is their fault.
By this ludicrous justification Israel could nuke Gaza and kill every single human that lived there and you’d say Israel is not to blame.
The USA Nuked Japan in WW2, and Truman was not to blame- Tojo was.
But since israel and most other nations have promised not to use Nukes, now, there is a difference.
There’s such a thing as proportionate and disproportionate responses. Your argument ignores this. Israel is responsible for its own actions, and not every single thing they’ve done has necessarily been justified.
So, to be clear, if Israel turned Gaza into radioactive glass tomorrow, the only moral issue you’d see with that is that they’d broken a promise?
That they used Nukes which is an international violation. The use of Nuclear weapons is wrong.
Sue for peace. Help Israel locate Hamas and the hostages.
…no they haven’t.
In the very opening days of the war, on the 13th of October, 1.1 million people were given the order that they had 24 hours to head south.
They’ve been on the run ever since. 1.9 million people have been displaced. Most multiple times. Many only able to carry what they have on their backs. Their homes now inaccessible, either destroyed, or if they attempted to return, risk being killed by IDF snipers or drones.
An estimated 1.5 million people are now living in and around Rafah. Most in tents. There is almost no food, very little access to water. 600 people sharing one toilet.
Palestinians are in a daily battle to just stay alive. If it isn’t Israeli bombing or snipers or drones…it’s disease, infection, lack of basic healthcare, or famine.
The idea that people, many who haven’t eaten for days, are somehow able to “organize and divorce Hamas publicly” is laughable. Ridiculous.
A meme is a “concept or idea that spreads virally from person to person.” So by this definition: is Hamas being independent from Palestinians a meme?
Sure.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Because it is true. This wasn’t supposed to be a war on the civilian population of Gaza. It was supposed to be a war on Hamas.
This is a meme. A talking point.
And it’s way overblown.
For starters: the idea that there are tunnels everwhere in Gaza, but the IDF, which is in the process of casually bombing and controlled-demolishing and bulldozing and razing apartment buildings and Mosques and farmland and cemeteries can’t find these tunnels says everything about how the IDF aren’t taking that mission particularly seriously, but also perhaps that the tunnels aren’t as ubiquitous as Israel claims.
These are both international violations. You realise that, right?
It isn’t “whining about hospitals.” It’s the deliberate decision by Israel to ignore the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law to shut down the healthcare system in Gaza.
And along with the siege, this is a death sentence. No food, no water, no power, no healthcare, no escape…if this doesn’t stop now we are looking at hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians before the end of the year.
There is no escaping using this word any more. What Israel is doing here is genocidal. Its ethnic cleansing. The tactics and the strategy adopted by Israel here have only one of two conclusions: Palestinians forced to leave Gaza, or hundreds of thousand of them will die.
We can’t continue to dance around that term any more. South Africa in their submission to the International Court of Justice made a compelling case, the court almost unanimously agreed with it and have ordered Israel to stop, the statements from Israeli leadership make it crystal clear, the tactics on the ground leave no doubt.
No amount of “blaming this on Hamas” will ever change that. Israel have agency. They can decide how to conduct this war, and they have chosen to wage it this way. This is on them.
I wasn’t aware they took a vow of silence. Israel is estimating it will take a year to defeat Hamas. maybe they’ll get their voice.
…whether or not they choose to speak out bears no relevance on anything that is happening on the ground.
It literally doesn’t matter.
The way that Israel has conducted this way has involved multiple well documented war crimes. And if it continues to conduct the war in the way that is has it will result in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
What you seem to be advocating for here, the collective punishment of a civilian population to force them to “find their voice”, is a war crime. The civilian population have no obligation to “speak out.” However, Israel, the occupying power, have obligations under the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law which they are failing to uphold.
It’s a war. Hamas’s solution is for Israel to stop fighting and leave. An interesting solution when you’re losing.
If the Palestinians don’t do anything then they are advocating a continuance of the war.
Again- Hamas attacked Israel- Hamas is to blame for those hospitals, not Israel.
No amount of blaming stuff on Israel will change the fact that Hamas sneak attacked Israel and is thus totally responsible for everything that happens to their people. Hamas knew Israel would strike back- Hamas choose to attack anyway. Hamas chose to attack.
Yes. Did we stop bombing the Nazis just because innocents might die? No, the Nazis had to surrender. Hamas can- at any time- turn over the hostages and surrender. They have chosen to let their people suffer in a war they cant win.
…at the moment? It’s hardly a “war.” Not now.
It’s an attempted genocide by Israel. They are attempting to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Characterizing what we are observing now as a “war” doesn’t really match up with the facts on the ground.
Hamas have called for a ceasefire that would result in the release of all of the remaining hostages, yes.
Its a solution.
If you could find any significant number of Palestinians openly “advocating for a continuance of the war”, that would be evidence that they were advocating for a continuance of the war. So I’ll take what I’m hearing from Palestinians on the ground over this. And Palestinians on the ground are almost all calling for a cease-fire. To end the “war.” The opposite of what you say.
But you don’t have that.
Palestinians aren’t doing nothing. They are trying to survive. They are using their hands to dig through rubble to try and rescue survivors.
And I know that there is no magic sequence of words they could use to convince you otherwise. But I’ll say it again: Israel have obligations under the Geneva Conventions and International Law to not shut down hospitals, to be proportionate in its bombing campaign, to not cut off supplies necessary for life. If Israel had conducted this operation in compliance with international law, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Hamas committed a terrible act on October 7th. It was a war crime. A crime against humanity. I supported Israel’s right to defend itself, and even largely remained quiet during the early days of the war.
But Israel doesn’t get a pass on its war crimes. And in the face of unimaginable mass death, we speak up now, or we find ourselves on the wrong side of history.
Israel made the decision to surround the hospitals.
Israel made the decision to put them under siege for weeks, to not let anyone one in or out, to shoot anyone who attempted to do so.
Israel made the decision to raid the hospitals.
Isreal made the decision to kick out the people sheltering in the hospital.
Israel made the decision to plant evidence in the hospitals.
Israel made the decision to kick out the patients.
Israel made the decision to detain the medical staff.
Israel made the decision to destroy essential infrastructure, so that the hospital could not return to full functionality.
Israel decided to violate the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law. These rules are in place for a reason.
Israel is to blame for what happened to those hospitals. This isn’t even worthy of debate.
It was hardly a “sneak attack.”
That has no bearing on whether or not Israel is obliged to follow the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law.
Because Israel are obliged to follow the rules. It doesn’t matter who hit first. That doesn’t change the rules.
Israel is getting blamed for the things that they are doing. It isn’t anything more complicated than that.
The reason why the rules of law have changed is because how we decided collectively that the way we used to conduct wars had an unacceptable toll on the innocent.
This doesn’t change Israel’s obligations under international law. It doesn’t change the fact Israel are committing multiple war crimes every single day.
All after Hamas made the decision to attack Israel. Thus all that is the fault of Hamas.
Hamas doesnt follow international law or the geneva conventions. In fact it is listed internationally as a terrorist organization.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Council establishes dedicated sanctions framework and lists six individuals
The Council today established a dedicated framework of restrictive measures that will allow the European Union to hold accountable any individual or entity who supports, facilitates or enables violent actions by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
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University of California, Berkeley
https://lawcat.berkeley.edu › files › fulltext
"The conclusion that unlawful combatants, including terrorist organizations and organizations that harbor them, are not subject to Geneva Convention protection also has other important consequences besides national security and the collection of life-saving military intelligence."
Thus no nation has any obligation to follow the Geneva conventions when dealing with terrorists.
So no- Israel did not violate the Geneva conventions, etc.