Hamas Used Gaza Hospital as a Command Center, U.S. Intelligence Says

Rapidcreek@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 68 points –
Hamas Used Gaza Hospital as a Command Center, U.S. Intelligence Says
nytimes.com
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Even if it did, and I wouldn't take Israels best ally as complitelly objective fact, you don't just bomb a whole hospital full of civilians

From the Israeli point of view yes you do.

Hospitals being a forbidden target is important, civilians dying is not, because they don't care about civilians.

It's sad to see how something intended to become a Jewish nation after 2k years and so on became a dumbed down pidgin version of 1950s' late European colonialism.

To defend that israel does not commit war crimes, I have seen zionists claim that if civilians are used for military purposes (involuntary human shield), they become valid military targets ._.

Could that same argument be applied to army reservists in a country with mandatory military service?

I'd say that arguement is stronger because they had their whole life to prepare not to serve a genocidal army, instead of being made to participiate in war with no choice or warning. If we evaluate both using the metric of Free and Prior Informed Consent we see one is measurably worse.

It's because of the Geneva Convention (origin of the modern concept of war crimes.)

It's designed to be applied mutually, if only one side does then it's basically non-functioning.

Absolutely not. We already had this argument in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan. War crimes are war crimes. You can get away with some of the more esoteric ones for not fighting a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but slaughtering civilians en masse is a crime full stop.

I understand that many of the humanitarian safeguards and international law can be disadvantageous when only one side gets things right.
But those are important guarantees, they are even used to differentiate the supposedly "good and civilized", if they are discarded every time they are inconvenient, aren't they just dead letter?

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Yup. I think there's a difference between the factual claim of whether Hamas has operations on the hospital grounds vs the justification for the type of military action taken against the hospital. I think it is possible to accept there is truth to the Hamas operations center being located there and still condemn the military tactics used against the hospital due to civilian casualties and harm it caused. Unfortunately those 2 things seem to be conflates that acknowledgement of Hamas being there is implicitly condoning Israel's actions.

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