JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling. “Listen,” said Dr. Marwan Abu Sada as fighting raged around Shifa Hospital.

  • enkers
    link
    fedilink
    120
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Kinda similar to the “human shields” argument. When I read comics growing up, when a villain takes a hostage the answer was never “kill the hostage” except for the edgiest of antiheroes, yet here we are with “human shields” being used as a justification to kill civilians. It’s fucking wild.

    • @ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      24
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I wonder if a lot of people’s idea of war has been shaped by the recent American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which were wars of choice where at least in theory American soldiers were fighting largely for the benefit of the natives. Countries that believe they actually need to win and don’t have the option of just giving up and going home fight wars in a very different way. Consider for example World War II, the proverbial “good versus evil” war fought by the generation that originally came up with the comic book characters you read about. The Allies certainly didn’t hesitate to kill enormous numbers of Axis civilians in the course of destroying military targets. (IMO the Allies actually went way too far and a lot of the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan served no military purpose, but I suppose they were more worried about bombing too little than they were about bombing too much.)

      • @Nobody@lemmy.worldOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        202 years ago

        The total war tactics of WW2 are unthinkable by modern standards, but it’s hard not to sympathize with an outgunned army fighting for their home. They fight because they’d rather die than lose.

        Maybe instead of fighting people in that position, you talk to them and work out a peace deal. If they’re willing to be reasonable, end the violence.

        • @fiah@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          -7
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          If they’re willing to be reasonable

          they’ve shown time and time again, through actions and words, that they are not

          • NoneOfUrBusiness
            link
            fedilink
            42 years ago

            Now there is a conflict with no good solution available for Israel.

            There is, but it’d require gasp giving up on their expansionist ambitions, and the only one willing to do that was Rabin, who got assassinated for it.

              • NoneOfUrBusiness
                link
                fedilink
                12 years ago

                As long Hamas is there, there is a security threat and Hamas can hide behind civilians. But even if Israel dismantles the current Hamas structures, in a few years they or something similar will be back.

                If the Israeli occupation of Palestine stops, Hamas will either disappear on its own, mellow out into a normal government or become just another terrorist organization like the IRA in Ireland. That’s usually how it goes.

                • @Horst_Voller@feddit.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  22 years ago

                  How long will the mellowing out take and how many Israeli civilians will die during that? Half of the people in Gaza were born after Hamas came into power.

                  Ireland is a viable economy on it’s own. The average education level in Gaza is abysmal, there are no resources, little farmable land,… There is no perceivable way for Gaza to function as a independent part of Palestine independent of either Israel or Egypt. So what’s the plan here?

                  Egypt wants nothing to do with Gaza anymore. I don’t think anyone in Israel would support incorporating Gaza into Israel and grant citizenship to it’s inhabitants.

                  Just closing the border and largely keeping out there is what Israel did the last two decades and that is exactly what ended up in an unprecedented terror attack on Israeli civilians.

              • @theluckyone@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                02 years ago

                If Israel continues to treat the Palestinians as they have historically done so, it’s likely there will always be a Hamas or their equivalent.

              • @fluke@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                302 years ago

                Didn’t happen in a vacuum though, did it.

                Do not confuse me saying that with sympathising with Hamas. It is possible to recognise that both sides have bloody hands, and have done for decades.

                • @steventhedev@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  -152 years ago

                  Can you explain what you mean by “Didn’t happen in a vacuum”?

                  Best I can figure is that you disagree with the act itself, but agree with their motives or desires. But I really don’t want to assume, and would prefer to understand from you.

      • @freagle@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        72 years ago

        So, in WW2, the vast vast vast majority of the fight against “evil” was done by the USSR, because the Third Reich had, as one of its pillars, the destruction of the workers’ movement and the enslavement of the Slavs. The USSR lost far more than any other party to the war because the Third Reich made the war of choice, dehumanized the Slavs, and engaged in genocidal mass murder as a choice. The USSR defeated 80% of the Third Reich’s forces.

        On the flip side, the American and British government and business communities were pro-fascist. They funded the rise of the Third Reich, they funded domestic and international eugenics programs, they were deeply invested in apartheid states and women’s oppression. (By way of contrast, the Brits and Americans used women as prostitutes to support the war effort while the USSR had women all over their military as snipers, tank operators, pilots, machine gunners, etc.)

        So given that context, let’s look at the end of the war and what happened after. At the end of the war, the US wanted to make sure that the USSR didn’t liberate the rest of Western Europe from the Third Reich because they were anti-communist. The USA led the Western allies to Germany to create a border with the USSR (also a member of the allies, remember). It was this insistence that divided Germany into East and West Germany. Berlin was in East Germany because the USSR was the predominant victor in the war.

        But then what of Japan. Before the USA nuked Japan, the USA and Japan were negotiating terms of surrender. The USA had made a very strict and ultimately untenable set of terms. Japan replied that they needed some domestic face saving in order to prevent their country from descending into violent and bloody internal revolution immediately. The USA received that message, and then chose to nuke 2 civilian cities. There was no emergency. The US wasn’t fighting for survival. Everything had already been secured. The USA was in active negotiations and Japan was participating (albeit through third parties because of the political sensitivity). The USA made an active deliberate choice to nuke civilians unnecessarily.

        Why? Because communism was their real enemy. It was the reason they got involved in the war, it was the driving force behind their strategic decisions. They got involved against communism, they went to Germany against communism, they partitioned Germany against communism. And they nuked Japan as a show of force, or to demonstrate how bat shit they were, to create conditions of fear and restraint.

        But if that were true, then wouldn’t the USA have just launched a war against communism? They did. They launched wars of choice against Vietnam and Korea. They destroyed Cambodia. They bombed Laos. The most bombed countries in the world were bombed by the USA, with multiple countries having the USA drop more bombs on them than all bombs dropped by all parties in WW2 combined.

        They continued their eugenics programs for 20 more years after WW2, they advanced their chemical weapons programs and deployed atrocity after atrocity in these wars of choice, mostly against civilians.

        Are people in the USA used to wars of choice? Yes, because in essence all USA wars have been wars of choice, even before the USA existed. Was it a necessity to invade The Phillipines? How about Grenada? Overthrow the Iranian government? Afghanistan in the 80s? Was it an existential necessity to genocide the indigenous peoples of the Americas, poisoning their water, destroying their ecosystems, destroying their agriculture and their sources of food?

        The entire Western European project, which became the North Atlantic project, is about wars of choice - brutal wars of choice of genocide through war, through rape, through collective punishment, through environmental devastation, through eugenics, through slavery, through death camps, through occupation and extraction. The number of necessary wars the USA has been in is so vanishingly small that the very few exceptions prove the rule.

  • @HowMany@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    43
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Because Israel is committing war crimes. Because Israel has stated, unequivocally, that Palestinians are animals and must be scourged off the face of the earth.

  • @kromem@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    222 years ago

    Given most people aren’t reading the article, the particularly relevant points:

    International humanitarian law lends hospitals special protections during war. But hospitals can lose their protections if combatants use them to hide fighters or store weapons, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. […]

    In an editorial published Friday in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a warning to combatants that the burden of proof is on them if they claim hospitals, schools or houses of worship have lost their protected status because they are being used for military purposes. And the bar for evidence is very high.

    “If there is a doubt that a civilian object has lost its protective status, the attacker must assume that it is protected,” Khan wrote. “The burden of demonstrating that this protective status is lost rests with those who fire the gun, the missile, or the rocket in question.”

    TL;DR: If Hamas is conducting military operations from hospitals, they can be legitimate targets in the eyes of international law, but precautions still need to be taken to avoid civilian casualties and the case for their military use should be overwhelming, not amorphous or tenuous.

  • @MuuuaadDib@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    32 years ago

    Crazy thought, why don’t we just not bomb hospitals? Anyone?

    Or how to make people hate you more than Hamas, a book by the IDF.

    • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      72 years ago

      And if rockets and other weapons really are being fired from hospitals? What do you do then?

      • @CaptFeather@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        12 years ago

        That’s up to them to figure out how to do it with the least amount of civilian casualty then. Moot point anyway considering nothing has come out with overwhelming proof of Hamas using the hospital as cover.

        • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          12 years ago

          We already know Hamas is in that hospital and have fired at least one anti-tank rocket out of it.

          There’s also the time Islamic Jihadists fired missiles from right next to a different hospital.

          Hamas has always used civilian infrastructure to attack from, it’s their MO. They want Palestinian civilians to get killed by Israel.

  • @nautilus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    12 years ago

    Why are hospitals in Gaza under Israel’s crosshairs? Why? Is it truly that difficult to step back and think for a moment about why Israel would want to erase the current populace entirely?

    Amazing, what a mystery

    • @Sentau@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      132 years ago

      A significant portion of the Palestinian population in the Gaza strip were not even born when this ‘goverment’ was elected. They came to power over a decade ago and grabbed it by force so it is more or less a forced millitary leadership at this point

    • @Count042@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      9
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Hey look, another person that would have shit on Nelson Mandela and the AFC in the 80’s for necklacing and being terrorists and not accepting the legitimacy of apartheid south Africa.