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Comment by foxglacier | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, they could be. Have you read those sources? Here's something I found from Amnesty International.

6.1.1 DIRECT ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS OR INDISCRIMINATE ATTACKS It lists 15 cases of air strikes which it uses to support its claim of killing/harming members of a group which is part of the definition of genocide. However, all/nearly all of them say "Amnesty International did not find any evidence of a military objective.". So it seems possible Amnesty just doesn't know the secret military information and Israel didn't disclose it to them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Do you believe there can't possibly have been any military objectives that make those air strikes legitimate?

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/

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If a state attacks, just for example, civilian hospitals (which typically do not contain valid military targets) then, in my view, the burden of proof lies on the attacking state.

Leaving aside, of course, the fact that attacking a civilian hospital, even one that has some military targets in it (say wounded combatants), would also certainly mean killing or injuring many invalid targets, and at that point you should really provide not just evidence of a military target but also evidence that you couldn't attack the target in any other way and that the target is valuable enough to justify the deaths of innocent people.

Which Israel has not done, and really, can't do. Because there really aren't many targets worth bombing a hospital for.

Well yea if there was a trial. But now it's just a trial by media and guilty until proven innocent. That's not a good way to reach the correct conclusion.

Hamas had bases in hospitals. Not just wounded fighters being treated. They stored weapons and housed fighters in them. They also built underground bases directly underneath hospital buildings. They specifically chose hospitals because they thought that would protect them from being attacked but it does make those hospitals a legitimate target.

Do you mean the claim that there was a command center under al-Shifa hospital? That was debunked over 18 months ago by multiple sources. None of the attacks on hospitals have been justifiable under the Geneva Conventions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67453105 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/idf-evidence-s...

Those aren't debunkings, they're "Israel hasn't convinced us yet."s.

> So it seems possible Amnesty just doesn't know the secret military information and Israel didn't disclose it to them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Do you believe there can't possibly have been any military objectives that make those air strikes legitimate?

We don't know for sure that Hind Rajab wasn't planning attacks when she was supposed to be learning the alphabet either.

Maybe she was leading a Hamas cell with a crayon, but the intelligence is too crucial to share!

This style of argument is absurd.

One person being killed isn't a genocide or extermination.

No killing one person is not genocide, it's a murder.

Killing 10,000's of women and children from a specific ethnic group, razing a significant percentage of buildings to the ground and forcibly displacing almost 2 million people while using starvation as a weapon of war, that's genocide.

What else could they have done?

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