Israel’s New Air War in the West Bank: Nearly Half of the Dead are Children
Around 9:30 p.m. in late February, a white Mazda pulled up near a game cafe in the Jenin refugee camp on the northern edge of the West Bank, where a crowd of boys and young men often gathered to socialize.
As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.
Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.
According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”
But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.
Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades.
Do the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? Or are we just going to call any retaliation "terrorism"?
Yeah, it worked great for US forces when they captured uniformed, trained, ranked military in countries we decided were state sponsored terrorists, so they weren't military, just 'enemy combatants' being 'extraordinarily renditioned' to an 'advanced interrogation' in a 'happy play time building' or what ever insane bullshit we were saying when we were 'liberating' oil fields, poppy fields, and other private resources to be carefully maintained by a trusted and legitimate corporation rather than being LOOTED, by a dictator to do evil shit like... build schools and hospitals... but also chemical weapons he bought. And WE KNOW!!! because we sold them to him.
But yes....
They are clearly all terrorists. Particularly when they attack Israeli police or military.
He was suspected of involvement in a shooting at a kibbutz near the West Bank. There is no right to attack settlements with no military value.
You mean like a game cafe
The military value depends on who is inside.
90% of Israelis are military or reservists, making them non-civilians under International Law. So yeah, a kibbutz can be seen as a valid military target.
Not true. Until they are activated for service, they are noncombatants under international law.
Was what I said not true?
They are noncombatants under international law. Noncombatants are not valid military targets.
So Israel is killing a bunch of non-valid military targets and justifying it by saying they were Hamas. Got it.
You don't actually have any standards or morals, and just want to justify everything as "With us or against us"
Using that same logic, most of the Hamas members targeted by the Israelis are also civilians.
Remember, Hamas is a singular governmental organization that kept the militant wing separate from the civilian wing. i.e. Gazan Hospital Administator? Hamas.
That is a literal justification Israel has used to justify killing Gazan civilians, including police officers.
So, which is it? Are IDF reservists military, or are Gazan police and hospital administrators civilians?
You don't get to have both.
Fascinating that “a bunch of civilians” doesn’t factor into that valuation
If there are only civilians inside, then it's not a military target.
If there are any combatants inside, then it's a military target.
Not according to Articles 51 and 54 of Protocol I of the Geneva Convention, but then again who cares about war crimes, right?
Article 51 and Article 54 do not have anything to do with this.
Article 51 bans pardons and article 54 discusses the use of the red cross emblem.
Those are articles of the Geneva Convention. Protocol I of the Geneva Convention is different. It was added later. The protocols are like amendments.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-51
It clearly lays out what constitutes targeting of civilians. But the fact that you need to be told that killing civilians is wrong says everything that should be said.
Yes, it says you cannot target civilians. Which is why I said if there are only civilians in a game cafe, then it is not a military target.
On the other hand, it does not prohibit targeting combatants. Which is why I said if there are combatants in the game cafe, then it is a military target.
And it does not say that killing civilians is prohibited when attacking a military target, only that any death of civilians must be balanced against the value of the military target.
No, explicitly wrong:
What you are describing is unequivocally a war crime. the ICC didn’t charge Netanyahu with war crimes just for the fun of it.
Killing an enemy combatant is a military objective, so attacking a building containing an enemy combatant does not meet any of those criteria.
The ICC charges against Netanyahu all relate to interference with the delivery of aid. He has not been charged with making indiscriminate attacks.
You seem to think that the presence of a military objective justifies any amount of civilian damage and death. A plain text reading of Protocol I - which you have clearly read for the first time, considering you linked the wrong articles earlier - says exactly the inverse of that. You are interpreting Article 51 of Protocol I to mean what you want, not what it says.
So they assassinated him instead of arresting him?
Sooo much legal.
They can't arrest him, he doesn't live in Israel. And killing enemy combatants is legal, for example Osama bin Laden.
I'm sorry I just spent that entire time laughing. The IDF and Israeli Police absolutely have the run of West Bank. It's not called an occupation for nothing.
And when you kill someone without even trying to arrest them inside your civil jurisdiction, it's called murder. At least it is in civilized countries.
Israel is not the civil authority of Gaza. Hamas is.
More important, the attack on the kibbutz occurred during a war between Israel and Hamas. That makes the attacker a combatant, not a criminal. In fact, you cannot legally prosecute combatants unless they commit war crimes.
That's all great. But this is in the West Bank. Not Gaza.
And you can absolutely be prosecuted for a war crime. Your own link says that.
Yes the link said that, and so did I.
Are you suggesting Yasser Hanoun committed a war crime?
If he specifically attacked civilians as part of a war then yes.
Aren't settlements military outposts?
No. And this wasn't a settlement, it was a kibbutz within Israel.
Which kibbutz did he shoot at and was he convicted of anything or is a suspicion enough to kill Palestinians?
Settlers have no right to be in the settlements, either.
Also, suspected isn’t enough.
The kibbutz was in Israel, and Israelis have the right to be in Israel.
And as an armed member of Hamas, he was a military target even if he wasn't involved in the kibbutz shooting.
It's a war, they're both allowed to attack each other. Palestinians are going to lose though, the two sides are not equal.
All this peacefire talk is just a nice way of framing the Palestinian surrender. The only question is how long Hamas will keep fighting before they are forced to give in.
Ehhh not exactly. We describe it as a war when Israel is doing the killing (37k civilians dead) but we describe it as a terrorist attack when Hamas does the killing (<1000 civilians dead).
You're not wrong
Why do you count all those dead as 'civilians'?
Because they are. Unless you have proof they were not.
If you're suggesting that no Hamas fighters were killed in this conflict... Yeah not gonna waste my time on that
Were they in the refugee camps?
Was who in which refugee camp?
Enemy combatants in the kibbutz
No, they're allowed to defend themselves. You're not allowed to start a war, that's a violation of international humanitarian law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_ad_bellum
And before you reply, no, history did not start on October 7th.
History for Israel started on May 14, 1948, 8 hours before the British protectorate ended.
The war started on May 15, 1948, when 5 Arab nations invaded Israel because they weren't happy with the UN borders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War
Israel fought back, and has been fighting back ever since.
"Fighting back" by heavily bombarding a Palestine area that has no offensive means due to decades of slowly administered austerity measures. From a land their diaspora didnt own for the last 2000 years...
To be fair they literally asked for it and continue to do so by taking and not releasing the hostages.
Edit: It doesn't help that when killed the other civilians refer to them as martyrs. The whole thing is incredibly ugly and done for imo stupid reasons on both sides.
Israel is was holding hostages before October 7. You are implying that Israel asked for October 7.
No need to lie. Israel isn't innocent, but Hamas has a demonstrated reliable record of using civilian deaths for their ends. They are counting on your naivete to gain sympathy and support and you're falling for it when in actuality this is their ducks coming home to roost.
Surrender. Release the Hostages. Crisis averted. Do they? Nerp. Instead its "you're killing civilians like we've intentionally aimed for for decades! Unfair plane!"
No factually Israel had kidnapped Palestinians from the West Bank and held them hostage before October 7.
You understand 'imprisoning terrorists' /= 'holding hostages' right?
Yes these are different things. How is this relevant to Israel taking Palestinians hostage?
Because imprisoning terrorists is what it is correctly called
The difference is due to the military control Israel has over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinians are tried in a military court with no civil rights or representation, tortured into false confessions, and incarcerated with routine torture, sexual abuse, and denial of basic medical care. That includes hundreds if not thousands of children.
Palestinians denied civil rights (HRW) including Military Court (B'TSelem)
Palestinian Prisoners in Israel including Child abuse - Save The Children
Torture and Abuse in Interrogations - B'TSelem
Thousands of Palestinians are held without charge under Israeli detention policy - NPR
Urgently investigate inhumane treatment and enforced disappearance of Palestinians detainees from Gaza - Amnesty
Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests
"no offensive means" except the rockets and a military of tens of thousands of people with guns
As for living there a long time... are you fucking stupid? Jerusalem is in Israel, and the Kingdom of Israel (which is in that vicinity) is mentioned in the original Hebrew fucking bible, which was completed around 2000 years ago. Jews have been living in that region since Judaism became a thing.
No. Israel has 13bil in millitary means just from this year from USA, while Gaza is starving. Fuck off.
Just open other books as well. Plenty of books talk about lands controlled by long forgotten kingdoms. And many of these are actually history books, instead of religious gospel from influential figures.
Yes, Israel is stronger than Palestine. Is that a crime? Palestine still regularly attacks Israel, they had to build a fucking missile defence system because of it.
Are you actually claiming jews didn't live in that region for the last two thousand years? There are thousands of historical records beyond just the bible proving that they did.
Israel is a weak little bitch that relies on daddy America while pretending to be the toughest kid in the neighborhood. An old book does not justify genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Hamas is an even weaker little bitch that relies on money and arms being smuggled in from Muslim countries to fight against Israel.
Gaza has a GDP per capita of $800 PER YEAR. Israel is around $60,000.
Hamas is a terrorist organization. You'd think Israel, as an internationally-recognized country, would be better than a terrorist organization, but apparently not. In fact, Israel has been more brutal and less reasonable than even Hamas in many cases.
Then you jump to comparing the GDP of Gaza, which has the entire weight of Israel and the west sitting on it, with the GDP of Israel which has the full backing of the west. Kind of hard to produce things when you've got a neighboring country hell-bent on ethnically cleansing all of your land and the most powerful countries in the world funding them to carry it out.
I wouldn't think Israel would be better, because the whole fighting strategy of guerilla terrorist organizations like Hamas is to make it impossible to fight cleanly. That's why they meet up in residential locations surrounded by women and children, and set up resources in schools, hospitals, etc.
This strategy isn't unique to Hamas, it's used by pretty much every group around the world who are fighting civil wars from a weaker position.
I'm not saying that the reason they're poor isn't because of Israel, I'm simply saying that they are poor as fuck and therefore the funding for their terrorism is coming from elsewhere.
The Israeli imposed closure on Gaza began in 1991, temporarily, becoming permanent in 1993. The barrier began around Gaza around 1972. After the 'disengagement' in 2007, this turned into a full blockade; where Israel has had control over the airspace, borders, and sea. Under the guise of 'dual-use' Israel has restricted food, allocating a minimum supply leading to over half of Gaza being food insecure; construction materials, medical supplies, and other basic necessities have also been restricted. This has been a deliberate tactic of De-development.
Gaza Policy Forum summary: Experts agree that Israel’s dual-use policy causes acute distress
The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development - Third Edition by Sara M. Roy
It certainly didn't. The settlements and Zionist aggression led by the head of the Labor Party, David Ben-Gurion, planned for the forcible transfer (Plan Dalet) of the Palestinians while rejecting any Bi-National State Solution in favor of Partition.
Before 1948, Palestinian Leadership repeatedly advocated for a Unitary Binational State for decades: Palestinian Arab Congress advocating for Unified State 1928, Arab Higher Committee advocating for Unified State 1937, Arab League advocating for Unified State 1948
Plan Dalet
Declassified Massacres 1948
Details of Plan C (May 1946) and Plan D (March 1948)
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
One State Solution - Foreign Affairs
Oslo Accords 'peace' process: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ
History of peace process - The Intercept
The Arabs were certainly in favour of a single state solution. An Arab-led single state, that is.
Maybe because the entire state of Israel was created by the British on what was at the time Palestinian land, and nobody else agreed to that. I'm not sure it's an invasion when a third party is saying it's someone else's now.
The entire state of Israel was created by the UN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Special_Committee_on_Palestine
That's the plan that the Arab nations didn't like and invaded Israel over.
Theodor Herzl died in 1904-
Yea, he died in 1904, 44 years before the invasion of Israel.
Just because some dude said "we should strive to take the land" fifty years prior doesn't give those countries a right to invade.
Nothing happened during that time.
Nothing at all happened before even that... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%931939_Arab_revolt_in_Palestine
We can keep going back a thousand years if you want, this fight between the Muslims and Jews has records of attacks occurring between the two groups for at least that long.
At the end of the day the ottoman empire lost in WW1, the country got split up, and some of the people living there didn't like the new UN plan and called in their friends to invade.
Multiple sides fought, Israel won. If we want to reverse that shit, we should be demanding the reversal of the US invasion (and return all north america to native americans), we should be demanding the return of Finland(and a few neighbors) to Russia, we should be demanding the Chinese return their country to it's previous government (which is hilariously in Taiwan)... none of which we're going to do. So why should only the Palestinians get special return to original owner treatment?
The simple answer is they shouldn't.
Because bad things happened in the past, we must allow bad things to happen in the present and future. The logic is sound.
The border things in Israel happened a long time ago. Israel has had official control of the Palestinian territories for decades.
The bad things that are happening now are primarily caused by Hamas attacking Israel.
there’s the problem
The US government has had control of the states for decades.
Is that a problem too?
When exactly did we decide that borders were no longer allowed to change when someone lost a war?
Might makes right. Isn’t that the same irredentism that Putin used to invade Ukraine? 🇺🇦
Sounds good to me. Let's do it.
(Although Finland should keep its independence; it was captured from Sweden by Russia, before that it wasn't a single country, though its inhabitants were pretty close culturally.)
Wow, You actually don't realize that Hamas is not a political organization in the West Bank. So, it isn't even a war.
You're literally justifying the murder of children here because they are Palestinian. You don't even have the fig leaf of saying that it is a population that voted for Hamas.
You're literally justifying the unjustifiable murder of children.
Almost all of the deaths are happening in Gaza, there's very little fighting going on in the west bank right now.
Can you read for me the title of this post, please?
I'm not certain, but I may be hallucinating words and need to verify that you're not just changing a goal post to justify the slaughter of innocent children that literally have nothing to do with Israels war against Gaza.
RTFA
Hamas isn't in the west bank. This is straight up butchery and terror by the Israeli government.