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More on Israel
Nov. 6th, 2023 07:44 amSo I read somewhere that the Israeli military dropped a bomb on an apartment complex, because a major Hamas command center had been intentionally built underneath it, and under international law siting military installations in close proximity to civilians (and therefore making them targets and/or using them as human shields) is a war crime.
I haven't fact-checked all that, but it's all quite plausible, and I don't care. There's plenty of blame to go around, and motes in every eye.
You can make an argument under international law that building a Hamas command center under a civilian apartment building is itself a war crime. But that legal argument doesn't bring back hundreds of dead civilians. That legal argument doesn't erase the Mogen David painted on the bomb that killed them. That legal argument doesn't make their survivors hate Israel any less, or make them any less likely to join Hamas themselves to take revenge. That legal argument doesn't make Israel any safer or its current military campaign any more productive.
Besides, Gaza has 1.65 times the population density of Manhattan. Where could Hamas have possibly built anything that wasn't adjacent to lots of civilians? Perhaps when they won their election in 2006 they should have knocked down a civilian neighborhood to build a Hamas-only headquarters with "Bomb Here Please" painted on the roof in Hebrew. But I don't imagine many Hamas personnel would report to work in such a building, even those of them doing something constructive like organizing trash pickup while others planned how to slaughter Israelis.
At the start of its retaliation, Israel ordered the civilian population of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south. There are, of course, logistical difficulties in moving a million people from a place with twice the population density of Manhattan to another place that's already denser than Manhattan, on 24 hours' notice. Especially when the local government, Hamas, is trying to prevent them from moving (it wants its human shields, of course), and Israel is still dropping bombs on both north and south and the roads in between. And one could forgive Palestinians for doubting that they'll ever be allowed to return to their homes in Gaza City after the current violence calms down, or suspecting that if they do, they'll find Israelis living there.
I do not in any way support or defend Hamas's slaughter of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 200 more, on October 7. But Israel seems to have taken every opportunity, even arranged the conditions, to give themselves an excuse to slaughter as many Palestinians as possible. They've already taken at least five eyes for every eye, extracted at least five teeth for every tooth, and show no signs of stopping.
Israel's stated goal is to completely destroy Hamas, apparently by killing every individual who was a member of Hamas and therefore complicit in the October 7 attacks. I've seen estimates that Hamas has about 30,000 personnel. If Israel has extremely good intelligence and targeting, and can manage to kill only ten civilians for every Hamas member, that's 300,000 civilians, about 15% of the (prior) population of Gaza. If the intelligence and targeting are less good, it could easily approach 100% of the population of Gaza. Which we might call a final solution to the Gaza problem.
I haven't fact-checked all that, but it's all quite plausible, and I don't care. There's plenty of blame to go around, and motes in every eye.
You can make an argument under international law that building a Hamas command center under a civilian apartment building is itself a war crime. But that legal argument doesn't bring back hundreds of dead civilians. That legal argument doesn't erase the Mogen David painted on the bomb that killed them. That legal argument doesn't make their survivors hate Israel any less, or make them any less likely to join Hamas themselves to take revenge. That legal argument doesn't make Israel any safer or its current military campaign any more productive.
Besides, Gaza has 1.65 times the population density of Manhattan. Where could Hamas have possibly built anything that wasn't adjacent to lots of civilians? Perhaps when they won their election in 2006 they should have knocked down a civilian neighborhood to build a Hamas-only headquarters with "Bomb Here Please" painted on the roof in Hebrew. But I don't imagine many Hamas personnel would report to work in such a building, even those of them doing something constructive like organizing trash pickup while others planned how to slaughter Israelis.
At the start of its retaliation, Israel ordered the civilian population of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south. There are, of course, logistical difficulties in moving a million people from a place with twice the population density of Manhattan to another place that's already denser than Manhattan, on 24 hours' notice. Especially when the local government, Hamas, is trying to prevent them from moving (it wants its human shields, of course), and Israel is still dropping bombs on both north and south and the roads in between. And one could forgive Palestinians for doubting that they'll ever be allowed to return to their homes in Gaza City after the current violence calms down, or suspecting that if they do, they'll find Israelis living there.
I do not in any way support or defend Hamas's slaughter of 1400 Israelis, and kidnapping of 200 more, on October 7. But Israel seems to have taken every opportunity, even arranged the conditions, to give themselves an excuse to slaughter as many Palestinians as possible. They've already taken at least five eyes for every eye, extracted at least five teeth for every tooth, and show no signs of stopping.
Israel's stated goal is to completely destroy Hamas, apparently by killing every individual who was a member of Hamas and therefore complicit in the October 7 attacks. I've seen estimates that Hamas has about 30,000 personnel. If Israel has extremely good intelligence and targeting, and can manage to kill only ten civilians for every Hamas member, that's 300,000 civilians, about 15% of the (prior) population of Gaza. If the intelligence and targeting are less good, it could easily approach 100% of the population of Gaza. Which we might call a final solution to the Gaza problem.
