Whether Mosques and hospitals are legitimate targets in war is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether or not Hamas maximises civilian casualties.
You ever been to Israel? You can’t throw a stone in any direction without hitting a bomb shelter. That’s what it looks like to live in a country with a hostile neighbour under a government that actually cares about its citizens.
In Gaza, you’ve got tunnels aplenty. Tunnels with electricity, and supplies, and air-conditioning that stretch longer than the London Underground, according to some. Hamas is never short of money for tunnels.
So why, if Hamas do care about their citizens, have they never ploughed a little of that tunnel money into doing the one thing that would be absolutely guaranteed to reduce their own civilian casualties and build some bomb shelters?
The answer is simple: They don’t care. Their citizens are more use to them dead than alive.
Neither I, nor anyone else in this thread is arguing that Hamas doesn’t do horrible things, and we all agree that Hamas doesn’t actually have the best interests of the Palestinians in Gaza in mind.
Conceding that, and conceding that Israel has both the right and the duty to defend itself and the Israeli people from future terrorist attacks does not mean that Israel is now free to act without criticism in its war in Gaza. Let me quote you from earlier in this thread:
“That’s because Hamas understands that their best weapon against Israel is photos of their own dead kids.”
If you believe this is true, than isn’t Israel being foolish to hand Hamas their best weapon? You should be leading the criticism of the IDF for making such an obvious blunder.
There are currently 650, 000 refugees in Gaza. There are currently 700,000 illegal squatters in the west bank settlements. It’s a match! Remove the illegals and resettle the Gazans.
Any evidence that Hamas had intentionally maximised civilian casualties.
And you don’t have any. “Not attempting to build bomb shelters” which would have been destroyed in an instant if discovered is not evidence of that.
Have you seen the difference between how Palestinians were treated and how Palestinians lived compared to how Israeli’s lived before October 7th?
Palestinians are treated like second class citizens. Surveillance state. Every Palestinian has a story about how either they have been detained and beaten by IDF forces or their family have been detained and beaten. Fishing boats can’t go out too far or they get sunk. Aid was already at a trickle through the border crossing even before the start of the siege.
The “number of bomb shelters” is not a metric of “how much a government cares about its citizens.” It’s a measure of how much that government oppressed the Palestinians, how they subjected them, humiliated them, tortured them, killed them, starved them, and how much they feared a reprisal because they understood exactly what they were doing to them.
Well no.
This is what Israel claims exists. And to a degree, some of that is based on Hamas “puffery”. But like almost everything that we’ve heard, it isn’t a claim that appears to match the reality on the ground.
Because it wasn’t an “absolute guarantee.”
Because Israel would never have allowed any shelters to be built.
Because I think the claims of how much “tunnel money” there was is almost certainly an exaggeration.
This isn’t the answer. I’ve given you the answer.
More accurately: the Israeli leadership consider Palestinians are more use to them dead than alive. Which is why they are killing so many of them, and why they have shut down the healthcare system, and are blocking so much food and essential aid from crossing over the border. It’s why, as documented in the South African submission to the International Court of Justice, they so casually and so explicitly made genocidal statements.
Hamas planned 10/7 for two years. They knew for a fact that Israel would bomb in retaliation. They didn’t build a single bomb shelter in these two years. That’s criminal negligence. It’s also clear evidence that Hamas want their death toll to be high.
If you were Hamas, would you have built bomb shelters? Yes or no. Please explain your answer.
…if I were Hamas I wouldn’t have done October 7th.
And if I were the Israeli government I would withdraw all the settlers, release every Palestinian prisoner detained without charge, immediately ban any use of beatings, humiliation and torture by my soldiers and police, and start a truth and reconciliation commission to address decades of criminal behaviour towards the Palestinian people.
Lets not forget the Nakba, Deir Yassin, Abu Shusha, Tantura, Lydda and Ramle, Saliha, al-Dawayima, Qibya, and countless other massacres. It didn’t start with suicide bombings, (which, I want to make clear, I do not defend.) just like this didn’t start on October 7th.
That is good news, but I don’t know that publicizing it was a great idea. What happens to the rest of the hostages if Hamas gets the idea that their use as leverage is slipping away?
I’d exchange them for something valuable before the opportunity was lost. Presumably, Hamas is going to know they were rescued regardless of whether it’s publicized or not.
…more warcrimes committed by the IDF as they move to shut down Nasser Hospital.
I watched this play out in real-time. Unreal. Watching this guy alive one minute, talking to people, and in a body-bag the next.
Over the last couple of days, the siege of Nasser Hospital have come to its inevitable close. After shutting down Al Shifa, Nasser Hospital had become the largest (relatively) functional hospital in Gaza. It also provided refuge for over 10,000 people. A few days ago all missions from WHO to resupply the hospital were denied by the IDF. Today from Dr. Mahmoud Shammala at Nasser Hospital:
From Doctors without Borders:
And the fall of Nasser signifies the next phase of the war. There is effectively no healthcare system in Gaza any more. The hospitals in Rafah are People in Rafah are starting to leave and risk getting shot by snipers and drones by heading north into the dystopian landscape. Several more targeted strikes on reporters as they were working or driving around Gaza. Credible reports from the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights that Egypt are rapidly constructing a security buffer zone surrounded by walls in the event of a mass exodus from Gaza. (link provided to Twitter, need to click-through for a translation) I suspect the major assault on Rafah will be held off until construction here is near-complete.
The IDF raid will be soon. It will follow the pattern of all of the other hospitals. Many of the patients won’t recieve care, food or water. Medical staff will be detained and disappear. After a few weeks, the IDF will damage the hospital just enough so that it will be impossible to ever bring it back to full strength. Then they will abandon the hospital.
…Hamas haven’t been using hospitals for their war efforts.
Israel have shut down 24 hospitals so far and haven’t shown that any of those hospitals have been used in a manner that would allow them to be targeted. Not in the opinion of any reputable expert in international law.
These are war crimes at an industrial scale.
And even if Hamas were using hospitals for their war efforts, Israel has a responsibility as both the occupying power and because its supposed to have “the most moral army in the world” and as the “only democracy in the Middle East” to do much better than this. It’s completely unconscionable to completely obliterate the entire healthcare system for 2.2 million people. Cancer patients will just die now. Mothers will give birth on the streets.
The hospitals are just a microcosm of the utter depravity of Israel’s response to the Hamas war crimes of October 7th. The deliberate, collective punishment of the Palestinian people. People are actually dying of starvation now. This will only get worse. Famine, disease and infection will kill more Palestinians that have been killed by bombs.
And nobody in this thread can argue that they weren’t warned that this was coming. This was the inevitable result of the siege. It was always going to happen. It was never a secret. Israeli leadership were clear of their intentions right from the start. With Egypt rapidly constructing a buffer zone and the assault on Rafah looming, with 70% of homes destroyed, schools, Mosques, universities, government buildings, historic sites all flattened, the healthcare system obliterated, and 1.5 million people squeezed into an area only 25 square miles wide, this “war” is being waged quite unambiguously by Israel with genocidal intent.
…I’ve been documenting what’s been happening at the hospitals here in this thread for months. That includes posting and sharing statements from Israel on why they have targeted each hospital, and rebuttals of that evidence from independent humanitarian agencies and media organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
I’m entirely confident in my statement. Feel free to review my arguments and the relevant citations that I’ve posted throughout this thread, I’m not going to repeat myself.
“Uh huh” isn’t a rebuttal.
And as I said: even if Hamas were using hospitals for their war effort, Israel have obligations under the Geneva Conventions, International Humanitarian Law, as the occupying power, and for the sake of humanity to not obliterate the healthcare system for 2.2 million people.
…I said “I’ve been documenting what’s been happening at the hospitals here in this thread for months.”
There isn’t much to document about how Hamas have been “using hospitals for their war efforts” for one simple reason: they haven’t been.
Because they are hospitals. They were being used before October 7th to do all of the things that hospitals do. And after October 7th they still had to do everything that hospitals do…as well as deal with thousands of people being bombed.
The idea that Hamas have been using hospitals for their war efforts is a propagandist one, not an evidence based one. It’s a talking point, repeated over and over again until many people simply believe it to be true.
But if you are going to be shutting down an entire healthcare system, then you need better evidence than a couple of videos filmed on October 7th, a few random empty tunnels, a handful of weapons with no chain of custody. This isn’t evidence hospitals were being used by Hamas for the war effort. It certainly isn’t evidence that the healthcare system needed to be shut down.
My viewpoint regarding the war was that for the first few weeks I made a deliberate decision not to say anything. Because there are real people on these boards who didn’t need to hear what I had to say.
I imagined that Israel were going to respond proportionately. That it would target Hamas. “Israel has a right to defend itself” I said to myself.
But that wasn’t what they did. And that isn’t what this is. This isn’t self-defence. They are destroying Gaza and making it impossible for Palestinians to live there any more. Its ethnic cleansing. Its an attempted genocide. And I’m not going to be silent about that.
The very first thing they did was order everyone in the north of Gaza to leave in 24 hours. They’ve been driving people to the south, using bombs, controlled demolition and bulldozers to clear houses, roads, apartment blocks, civilian infrastructure.
Its ethnic cleansing. Not guerilla warfare. It’s been that from the start. It’s never been about Hamas. Israel don’t even know how many Hamas people they have killed.
Ant it isn’t about the hostages. Israel doesn’t give a damn about the hostages. Israel have literally killed more of the hostages than they’ve rescued.
They are driving people to the south, destroying much of everything on its way. The intent couldn’t be more clear here.