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...
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.
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.
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