Never mind that Hamas will STILL have hostages after the deal is done. That Gaza is ruled by an organization stating they’ll continue doing an Oct 7th again and again.
It takes both sides to agree to a better future.
It takes both sides to agree to a better future.
Keep in mind:
Israel killed 100x more civilians than Palestine during this conflict, and more damage was done to Gaza than any European city during wwii. 90% of the population is displaced. 10% are casualties. Israel intentionally blew up all the civil infrastructure (hospitals, doctors, engineers) first.
There are > 17,000 children that have no adults to care for them any more. That’s 10 orphaned kids for every Israel civilian casualty in the middle of a famine with no support infrastructure.
Israel actually built a lot of the civilian infrastructure, including the largest hospital in Gaza. It's pretty clear those places are being used as terrorist hideouts and to launch rocket attacks. Why is it acceptable to shoot rockets purely targeting civilians while breaking a cease fire agreement?
There is no absolute evidence that any of Hamas' hostages have been raped or tortured - according to released hostages, they were treated very well! AFAIK the only known instance of Hamas murdering a hostage was when a fighter lost it after Israel killed his entire family - all the other deaths have been a result of Israeli bombs (because if you want hostages back, you bomb them... right?!).
And as you doubtless know, many of the "peaceful civilians" are actually serving IDF members...
And as you also doubtless know, Palestinian hostages are routinely raped and tortured to death in Israeli dungeons - there is a wealth of evidence.
> It's pretty clear those places are being used as terrorist hideouts and to launch rocket attacks.
This is what Israeli Hasbara do - repeat unevidenced claims until people accept them as "truth". But it's lies, there isn't a shred of evidence that Hamas as used even a single hospital as a "terrorist hideout". You know who has repurposed Gazan hospitals for military ops? Israel - every accusation is a confession with them.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/26/middleeast/amit-soussana-...
What do you mean there is no proof? There are mountains of evidence.
https://time.com/7207459/israeli-hostages-gaza-ceasefire/
You wrote in your comments that the hostages were treated well. This is absolutely not the case.
There are plenty of hostages, btw, who have openly discussed that they were raped repeatedly. I don't have the stomach to reread the hostage accounts but they are easy to find online.
> There is no absolute evidence that any of Hamas' hostages have been raped or tortured - according to released hostages, they were treated very well!
Hamas literally executed some: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/01/middleeast/israel-gaza-ww...
But yeah, other than that, treated very well!
BTW, Israel has killed at least the equivalent of one Palestinian child every 30 minutes since October 7th. That is just mind-boggling evil at an industrial scale.
You need to go deeper. The best article I've scene on the subject for some moral clarity is here:
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-bright-line-between-good-...
No, this is not pretty clear. This is pure Israeli propaganda.
Keeping hostages is a war crime. A fair thing would be for Hamas to follow its obligations under international law and unconditionally release them (before anyone says, well israel did X which also isn't allowed, 2 wrongs don't make a right).
> more damage was done to Gaza than any European city during wwii
How are you quantifying this? I'd be surprised if Gaza has more damage than say Dresden.
> Their courts have no jurisdiction over them
Israel is the occupying power. International law requires that an occupying power provide law & order, so it does have the authority to persecute people who commit crimes (although they are required to keep the laws the same as they were pre-occupation, with some exceptions).
They are also allowed to keep prisoners of war (although i am not sure if hamas counts as that as they are a non-state group). They are allowed to persecute war crimes that enemy combatants commit (as long as they give a fair trial)
> have no issue calling anyone a terrorist.
The phrase "terrorist" doesn't really have much meaning under international law. Israel is free to call its enemies dirty names if it wants, there isn't any rule against calling your enemies mean names.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231120-880-palestinian-c...
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ar/customary-ihl/v2/rule96
It very clearly fits the definition.
Like if they randomly started grabbing people up in order to trade them, it would very clearly meet the definition, but it doesn't seem like that is what happened.
Also more generally, they hold hostages to compel Palestinians to obey and not resist.
If true, (and the person was not a combatant) that would certainly count as taking a hostage, provided that was the primary reason they detained said person. However if they detained someone primarily for some other purpose and then traded them later, that is a different story.
> Also more generally, they hold hostages to compel Palestinians to obey and not resist.
If you mean they detained someone who was doing some action or intending to do some action in order to compel other people not to do similar things, that probably doesn't count.
If you mean they detained some random person that wasn't involved at all in order to compel someone else to do or not do something, that probably would count.
That has nothing to do with why i don't think administrative detention constitutes hostage taking as defined by the geneva convention. Obviously if some hypothetical israeli court approved of hostage taking it would still not be ok.
Maybe Israel could start by turning over everyone subject to an outstanding International Criminal Court warrant. (Starting with Netanyahu, of course.)
I’d have picked Warsaw. Completely destroyed while clearing out the ghetto after the uprising which was brutally suppressed. It has some grim parallels too.
Warsaw was closer, but only 85-90% of its buildings were destroyed by the Nazis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Warsaw
The statistic I heard was “more than any city in wwii”. I figured that Hiroshima (67%) years or Nagasaki (37%) were worse.
Gaza crossed 90% of all buildings in May, so I shouldn’t have qualified my statement with the word “European”.
Edit: I found one partial counterexample: The firebombing of Tokyo killed about 10x more people than Israel did during this conflict, but didn’t do nearly as much damage (as a percentage) to buildings: https://www.britannica.com/event/Bombing-of-Tokyo