Israel declares siege of Gaza as Hamas threatens to start killing hostages
theguardian.com
Highlight:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
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Cool so they're announcing they're doing war crimes?
They never weren't, but they at least had the decency to pretend like they weren't before.
Taking and killing hostages are both war crimes.
Oh, so war crimes are justified as long as the other side does it first?
Potentially, sure. Things like carpet bombing civilian areas, certain uses of minefields, certain munitions, etc are banned by convention but the thing about the Geneva Conventions are that they are a mutual treaty. Your nation agrees not to do it to other signatories or nations or forces that have otherwise agreed to the limitations as well.
In this case? No. Not at all justified. Hamas might not agree to the Conventions, and thus don't benefit from the protections, but the moment they suspended elections they lost the right to claim they represent the Gaza Strip, even if Israel didn't claim it as territory regardless.
Israel is a signatory of the Conventions, and the Gaza Strip is their claimed land, this is a war crime against people they claim as their own, the actions of what amounts to a domestic terrorist network is irrelevant to whether they can starve people into submission.
A standard genocidal tactic of imperialists everywhere, mind you, from the Irish famine, to the Holodomor, to the Bengal Famines.
Israel doesn't claim Gaza though
Fair enough, it's just the rest of the world that says they act like they do whatever they officially claim, while they refuse to recognize everything necessary for Palestine to exist as a functional state.
Oh most certainly. Palestine as a whole isn't a functional state, just the Gaza Strip (albeit under varying degrees of blockade since Hamas was elected and won the civil war). I'd consider the W.B to be occupied/undergoing a slow process of annexation. I think the most realistic solution for the citizens of the W.B is that they at some point in the future get the option to become Israeli citizens with all the rights (and responsibilities) that entails.
How do you explain the illegal Israeli settlements there then?
There aren't any.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_statistics_for_Israeli_settlements_in_the_Gaza_Strip
well, I stand corrected.
You're thinking of the West Bank.
yeah probably
Israel unilaterally removed itself from the gaza strip all most 20 years ago. They only sell infrastructure to the gazan government.
Yes but this particular news story is about Israel publicly announcing a war crime.
One of these is a state. A state with US military support.
And war crimes justify war crimes?
Murder is against the law in western countries but of someone tries to kill you, you can kill them in self defense.
So yea of someone is committing war crimes against you, you can fo ahead and fight back to get them to stop
War crimes are war crimes, doesn't matter if the other side started them first. Israel is stooping just as low as Hamas is with these tactics, you can and should fight in self defense without targeting Civilians
They don't target civilians. Hamas does.
When you build your headquarters inside a civilian hospital, and that hospital gets bombed, you are to blame for the war crime of positioning your HQ in a civilian hospital, not the person who bombs you.
If you build an HQ in a hospital that's (likely? I'd assume so) a war crime. If your opponent then bombs that hospital to bomb you they are also committing a war crime. Some of you are insane, would you agree with the police shooting hostages because "well they took the hostages first, it's their fault we shot them". Fuck no, you'd cry for whoever did that to go to prison. Just because Hamas is stooping so low does not suddenly make it OK for Israel to stoop just about as low.
Yeah I'm aware. Show me on the doll where ((George Soros)) and the ((globalists)) hurt you.
fancy how it always ends up being this according to people defending Israel as rightful. I don't give a shit about Israel being mostly jewish. Should I give them a free war crime pass because they suffered from genocide in the past? That how you think this should work?
I don't care about your beliefs, because you are largely ignorant of the actual situation. I'm calling out the fact that your information sources are blatantly anti-Semitic.
You're just their rube.
In the real world - sadly, yes.
It's legally how the Geneva Conventions work. You are only bound to them if the other side agrees to it as well.
However, Hamas is not the Gaza Strip, it is not Palestine, and Israel claims the Strip as its territory anyways so to claim the civilian population doesn't accept the Convention so they aren't bound by it is ludicrous.
so wait. Siege is a war crime? Not taking a side, I'm just a technicalities kind of guy. Its not like locking people in a house. And don't hostage negotiators do just that in the US? (Could be just on tv). But it's a big place. Fuel and electricity are nice to haves. They should have some amount of food and water stored up. And the southern border is with egypt, so I assume they can't actually do anything about that. Doesn't seem like a straight up war crime. But I have never read yhe definitions they have at the UN.
Using hunger as a weapons against a populace is 100% a war crime, yes.
I just took a gander at the list as a refresher, and it is not 100% a war crime. You can argue this is an unjustified or excessive attack on civilians, but a judge may rule that is is required to defend against the enemy (Hamas).
Item 2.b.25 from the list seems to match up:
"Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions; "
Is the intent to starve civilians or to deprive hamas combatants of any and all supplies?
If you are blocking an entire region from getting food and water then yes, the intent is to starve the civilian population.
Regardless of what we feel is intended or not, that is what war is - hell for everybody involved. Let's just hope that this doesn't get drawn out.
That's not what "intent to starve a civilian population" means. This is not a program of starvation. It's cutting off resources before an invasion
This isn't your homebrew DnD game where you can make rules mean whatever you want.
It is though. A program of cutting off resources would be blocking fuel and other goods, not fucking food and water. Ukraine was rightfully put in the corner for cutting off water to Crimea after 2014. There is no excuse to starving people, it's a horrendous crime which should land the people involved in prison. Besides what do you think will happen now? Who will the Palestinians in Gaza trust more, the murder hobos who got them into this mess or the Israelis who decided collective punishment is an appropriate response? War crimes are called war crimes for a reason, just because one side commits them doesn''t suddenly make it ok to commit them back.
It isn't, and whoever told you it is such is just lying to you.
Idk where you people get your "news" but whatever podcasters you listen to are fucking braindead.
You're exactly equivalent to the dumbest of the MAGA by believing that tripe.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/israel-announces-total-blockade-on-gaza
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67051292
Gaza is completely blockaded, by Israels own admission. If you don't want to call it an attack on the entire population there, please go ahead and stay delusional. This is not OK, no matter who does it. It was not OK when Ukraine did it to Crimea, it's not OK now. It's heinous and despicable.
Lmao of course the propaganda you fall for is pro-russian too.
Well the EU just called it a war crime. So between the text of the rule, the spirit of the rule, and the fucking international body of governments' interpretation of the rule, I think I'm gonna stick with interpretation that intentionally cutting off food, water, and power to the entire region constitutes intentionally cutting off food and water to civilians.
I guarantee you there is 0 fallout in the real world.