The terms of WW-II were unconditional surrender and the defeated countries were rebuilt and restructured into peaceful societies.
Could you provide a cite for this, in particular your comment that “Hamas may have as their principle goal: The eradication and extermination of every Jew on the planet”?
Thanks.
Yeah, I don’t think that claim is supportable, at least not on paper. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are or may be some Hamas members who do have genocidal aspirations for the complete global extermination of all Jews everywhere, but that’s not what it says in their mission statement.
I hope that all claims of war crimes committed by Israel are investigated and appropriate action is taken, if necessary.
Details:
Cite that Israeli airstrikes are indiscriminate?
Only if those places of worship are not being used by armed forces to conduct military operations. Incidentally, it is also a war crime to use places of worship, hospitals, etc to stage military operations and doing so means that those locations are not protected.
Ahh, yes. The indiscriminate air strike that just happened to kill a high ranking Hamas leader who planned the Oct 7 attacks.
By whom? And did the people making this statement have a plan for how aid can enter Gaza without arming Hamas?
I could go on, but here’s the point. I fully agree that claims of Israeli war crimes should be thoroughly investigated, and I hope that for once Israel is held to the same standard as every other nation in its situation.
…this isn’t a “get-out-of-jail” card. The rules of war don’t allow you to indiscriminately kill innocent men, women, children, don’t allow you to destroy houses, trap people under rubble, just because one side has claimed that a single high-value-target was in the area.
Can you point out where in the Geneva Conventions, or otherwise, what is required to “remove protections?”
Where may I post a comment in response and still relate to the previous comments?
Thanks.
Here.
The piece i listened to on NPR discussed that. And the answer is “it’s complicated”. I wish I’d been able to find it, because it was nuanced and interesting. Also, given the fog of war, it’s extremely hard to know which side of the line any particular attack is at this moment in time. The commentator was pretty clear that the initial Hamas raids were a violation, but most everything since then has been in the “it may be, it depends on details we don’t know” area. There may be trials and a reckoning at some later point, though.
I’m glad we can agree on something!
Cites for the groups alleging that Israeli airstrikes have been indiscriminate are in the Wikipedia article and include UN special rapporteurs, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the United Nation Human Rights Office, and Amnesty International. I would imagine others have also made the accusation.
Investigations by appropriate authorities would need to be undertaken to substantiate or refute the allegations.
Over a hundred people were reported killed and a market and residential complex destroyed. This raises the question of proportionality in that the incidental civilian loss or damages must be proportionate with the military advantages. If this proportionality requirement is not followed, humanitarian law considers the attack to be indiscriminate. I’m not a war crimes lawyer, so I’m not able to assess the particulars of this case. The United Nation Human Rights Office stated, “We have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
Israel’s president Isaac Herzog accused the residents of Gaza of collective responsibility for the war. The Wikipedia article cites various groups and individuals describing the situation as collective punishment, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, the EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and Human Rights Watch.
I’m not a lawyer, but it seems incredibly war-crimey to me to deprive over 2 million innocent civilians of food, water, supplies and so on in order to try and deprive a targeted 40,000 armed individuals of the same.
More population ratio perspectives:
According to latest Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics, it would be more like the equivalent of half a million American children killed, and one and a half million total American dead.
Does that figure include the 82,500 Americans who died when an American rocket misfired and landed on an American hospital?
(Population of Gaza is 2 million to the US 330, that’s a ratio of 1 to 165 so the “500” at the hospital become 82,500 Americans in your analogy)
Are you still claiming it was 30-50 people killed in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion?
Here are various estimates of the number of dead from that incident.
Gaza Health Ministry: 471
Director of the nearby al-Shifa Hospital: 250
American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem: 200
US intelligence agencies: 100 to 300 people, and that the actual number was likely on the low end of that range
What? No, that’s not the point at all. Yes, Hamas (sorry, the Gazan Ministry of Health) wildly overestimated the death toll, doubling it at the very least. That’s not really the point, since even if 500,000 people had died the death count due to Israeli action wouldn’t budge, since it was Palestinian militants who blew up the parking lot of the Al-Ahli hospital (which, unfortunately, was packed full of refugees).
I do not see cause to doubt the Palestinian casualty figures in any significant way.
On the one hand:
On the other hand:
I asked a very simple question: does the casualty count presented by the Ministry of Health still include the 471 people they claimed died at the hospital? Because even if all 471 deaths were real, 0 of them were caused by Israel.
I see the fact that they blantantly fabricated 471 deaths to add to the count (again, even if all 471 deaths were real, assigning them to Israel is a fabrication) as a reason to doubt their casualty count. Clearly, your mileage varies.
Heh. Don’t worry, B - I got it, even if they didn’t.
I don’t know whether the casualty count includes the 471 people that were claimed died at the hospital.
From the AP article:
The Wikipedia page for that day, October 26th, lists 7,028 killed in the Gaza Strip.
Would you dispute that large numbers of Palestinian civilians have been killed in the war?
It’s clear that other nations/groups/interests are attempting to hold Israel to what they claim is a higher moral standard while not at all insisting that Hamas do so.
I think some parties are questioning two things:
- Whether or not said Hamas leader(s) were actually present where the airstrike occurred, and
- Whether killing said leader(s) was worth the number of civilians killed to accomplish that goal
And of course some people are just taking sides and not being rational at all.
Cutting off all supplies to 2.5 million people is a dick move. Such a siege will kill people if it goes on for any length of time, and the longer it is maintained the more people will die.
The questions that come up are “is it worth it?” and “are there any alternatives?” The only alternatives I’ve heard involve a lot of block-by-block urban fighting which would be ugly.
However, with Hamas estimated to be about 25,000 people that’s imposing extreme deprivation on 100 civilians for every Hamas member that might be in Gaza (and the leadership known to be in Doha, Qatar). People outside the conflict are going to act with revulsion to that however much the IDF and Israeli government argue that it is necessary. The fact that roughly half the civilians killed will be children only throws fuel on the fire.
What Israel and the IDF are doing here is NOT a good thing. I don’t think Israel has really made a case that it is the least bad thing to do in this situation. Proving such things in the “fog of war” is nearly impossible, so then you’re back to potential bias on the part of the observer/questioner.
I am curious if British citizens believed the fire bombing of Dresden to be a war crime.