>Well, if you support Hamas after they butchered civilians
Numerically speaking the IDF have killed a lot more civilians than Hamas. As have the US for that matter, literally hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq.
Numerically speaking the IDF have killed a lot more civilians than Hamas. As have the US for that matter, literally hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq.
The whole Western media and political landscape somewhat fails to appreciate that small, but incredibly important difference lately. Heck, I am even getting Youtube propagan... I mean ads from the Israeli ministry of defence. But as the saying goes "One death is a tragedy, thousands are a statistic".
> But in the coming Gaza genocide, every act of armed resistance by Hamas and Hezbollah will have my support.
- Hamas falsely attributes civilian deaths to Israel (as you can see from the "hospital strike")
- Hamas vastly inflates civilian casualty counts, somewhere between 2-5x as you can also see from the "hospital strike" which was immediately claimed by Hamas to have killed more than 500. US estimates have it between 100-300, and I think the photos of the damaged parking lot are extremely damning for Hamas's claims - yes, an explosion and fire in a crowded refugee camp could kill lots of people, but 500 is absurd.
- Hamas tells civilians in Gaza to ignore text messages from the IDF telling them to evacuate because their residence may be bombed.
- Hamas sets up road blocks to prevent civilians in Gaza from evacuating.
- Hamas sets up military installations and ammunition caches next to or in civilian installations, including kindergartens and mosques. (You can find videos of bombings resulting in massive secondary explosions as ammunition caches pop off.) They hide in refugee camps (https://thehill.com/policy/international/4260111-israel-hama...).
I think it's worth asking whether there is any way to wage a just war against a government like this, that is literally trying to maximize the number of its own civilians killed. And if not, what kinds of behavior does that incentivize?
If you refuse to go to war with Hamas because of this fact, you incentivize that behavior.
I can't really think of a more just case for war than "the government of a neighbor just brutally, intentionally slaughtered civilians in a surprise attack in our country." It doesn't matter whether the neighboring country is a dictatorship or a democracy.
It very much sucks for the people of Palestine that Hamas chose to start a war with Israel and is using tactics that purposefully result in the death of Palestinians. I hope that they stop putting rocket launchers in and next to schools. I hope that they start allowing people to evacuate. I hope that they stop lying to their people about "psychological warfare" in an effort to get more of them killed. I wish that neighboring countries would allow Palestinians to escape the carnage, and adopt strategies that actually support the Palestinian people rather than the Palestinian cause.
But the IDF and Israel do not control that. And I'm honestly not sure what people expect from them. If you can't fight an enemy that hides behind civilians, then hiding behind civilians is an obvious winning strategy. And personally, I don't want to live in a world where the government most willing to sacrifice their own people automatically wins any conflict.
I don't know why "numerically" matters. There is a big difference morally between someone accidentally killed while persuing a legal military target, and intentionally gunning down a rave or children at a day care.
The idea that if someone converts a house into an ammunition store depot it can never be targeted ever under international law is just straight up wrong.
Of course how that translates to what is being done on the ground is very complex. Which is why numerically approaches are wrong - you have to put every incident in appropriate context to judge it
Regarding the house being an ammunition depot: Sure, legitimate target. Blowing up the whole highrise, debatable. Blowing up the neighbouring highrise, even more debatable. And airstrikes are nowhere precise enough for that kind of work.
Insurgents are people who are fighting their own government (with guns) so they are armed, but they're not fighting Hamas, they're fighting Israel, so they're not insurgents.
Many of them don't even wear military uniforms in combat, that makes them unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions and don't have rights. They almost always attack civilians, so they're terrorists.
You know what that doesn't mean? That those people, and everyone in their vincinity, forfeit all, every and each right they ever had. Last time I checked, the IDF had pretty decent rules of engagement around that very question. On paper, and unfortunately rather loosly respected, but still.
??? I don't think that follows. What is your basis for this.
Not all of us agree with this. The idea of “legal military target” grows out of the idea of “just war”, which many of us reject outright.
You may care about the finer legal minutia, but I doubt it matters very much to the death people and their relatives.
Umm, that's literally what distinguishes whether or not it is a war crime*?
Not saying you need to take israeli claims at face value - but if one side accuses the other side of a crime, and the other side says they didn't do it, generally the burden is on the first side to provide proof. Saying it doesn't matter whether or not they actually did it isn't the right response.
* technically its more complex than that. There are times where it could still be a war crime even if civilians weren't targeted specificly. What matters more is the balance between military benefit vs civilian damage.*
Russia pays complete lip service to always trying to make it look like they don't attack civilians (they do) yet are unequivocally accused of war crimes (as they should be).
It got to a point where Israeli officials had no problem publically declaring thinly veiled threats of extermination like:
>On October 10th an Israeli official told a television station: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Daniel Hagari, an idf spokesperson, boasted that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had been dropped on Gaza. Then, he added: “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Again, only a western ally could get away with this with such a massive support at all level from all western countries after such statements.