Terrorist cell embedded itself within civilians around Al-Quds Hospital, fired from the hospital entrance at IDF soldiers, and was subsequently eliminated
To be clear, staging militant attacks from a hospital is a war crime.
To make matters worse, it opens up the likelihood and justification of counter-attacks against that hospital and the people in it.
According to international humanitarian law (IHL), health establishments and units, including hospitals, should not be attacked. This protection extends to the wounded and sick as well as to medical staff and means of transport. The rule has few exceptions.
Specific protection of medical establishments and units (including hospitals) is the general rule under IHL. Therefore, specific protection to which hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used by a party to the conflict to commit, outside their humanitarian functions, an "act harmful to the enemy".
Medical establishments and units enjoy protection because of their function of providing care for the wounded and sick. When they are used to interfere directly or indirectly in military operations, and thereby cause harm to the enemy, the rationale for their specific protection is removed. This would be the case for example if a hospital is used as a base from which to launch an attack; as an observation post to transmit information of military value; as a weapons depot; as a center for liaison with fighting troops; or as a shelter for able-bodied combatants.
Nobody should beat around the bush here. Hamas are using injured civilians as a human shield to stage attacks, and in doing so they are inviting retaliation and suffering under well-establish terms of international law. There's not really any particular gray area here. It's horrible, it's unethical, it's criminal, and it's just plain wrong.
This is the thing that pissed me off - the organization that has a humanitarian symbol so strong you can be legally held accountable for using it in a way that lessens its importance acknowledges that attacking a hospital being used as a military bases is a legal part of war. Meanwhile there are people whos education doesn't pass high-school screaming that this isn't legal, or its incorrect, or blaming the aggressor instead of those deliberately putting civilian lives at risk by blatantly ignoring intl rules of conflict.
If you want to throw in your argument against the red cross, spend your life and billions of dollars helping humanitarian issues world wide and then you might have some authority on the matter.
This is modern warfare. War is horrific, innocents get killed, people suffer. We put rules in place to lessen the effects on the innocent and those who circumvent those rules to try make the others look bad need to be removed in the quickest and most efficient way we can - as soon as one group gets away with ignoring the intl rules, everyone can.
I don't think any intellectually honest person that supports Palestine thinks Hamas are the "good guys", they are an evil created and grown directly and indirectly by Israel's actions.
Hi there. How about an old soldier who actually had to know this stuff and use that knowledge in a war?
First off, a single incident isn't enough. A sniper or even a squad doing stuff can be dealt with in other ways. In order to strike a hospital (or any protected target) with explosives you need evidence it's a target of "military or strategic value". This is why Israel isn't just claiming a few sporadic attacks but instead that all of the hospitals are actually command centers.
Second, the protected target can only be hit by proportional force that accomplishes a specific goal. If there's an artillery battery in the parking lot and I level the obstetrics wing with dumb bombs then I've committed a war crime. Smart bombs with very low yields absolutely exist. Another example is the eponymous claim of rooftop rockets. I can hit that with an airburst explosive to prevent structural damage to most concrete buildings. In the context of protected targets these things matter. You don't get a green light to demolish it unless it's basically been hollowed out for military use only.
Third, whoever fires on the protected target is responsible for providing the evidence it was required. And war crimes investigators take a very dim view of "they did it once a decade ago", as a reason. Israel and it's allies have yet to do anything that actually proves the existence of a military or strategic target in places like the UNRWA Gaza headquarters.
It doesn't give them the right to bomb the hospital point blank period, proportionality clauses kick in and it's arguably reason to ground assault it but they cannot ignore the civilian cost of life when they're are other ways to go about clearing the garrison.
Ed: Jesus Christ, 3 seconds on Google prior just can't seem to do.
The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
In other words, the principle of proportionality seeks to limit damage caused by military operations by requiring that the effects of the means and methods of warfare used must not be disproportionate to the military advantage sought.
Sadly I think there's just an overwhelming tendency for bias to make people think "everything my side does is right and everything the other side does is wrong".
Random people on the internet, many of whom are mostly (if not entirely) detached from realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and may only just be learning about it for the first time from social media, have now formed ranks and picked a side that feels right in the moment. I'd ask people to resist the urge to do that, and instead take some time to read into the complete history of the region and the conflict, but I think it's much easier to go along with what other people on the net/TV/radio/etc are shouting.
People should keep in mind that there's a 3rd side to every conflict: the side of the innocent people who have found themselves caught in the middle of an armed conflict that they never wanted or asked for. The Israeli student who was shot to death at a festival, the old Palestinian woman whose family were buried alive in a knocked-down building, the young child who was taken hostage by Hamas scared and alone, and the Gaza teenager who has lost all possibility of the normal, peaceful life and education that so many of us take for granted. Their side is the only side that anyone should be on. And it's those very innocent civilians who Hamas are knowingly putting in danger by treating them as human shields in a way that openly invites retaliation.
When you stop to think for a minute about what's really going on here, and when you've taken even the bare minimum amount of time to read up on the history of this conflict (one of the longest-running geopolitical conflicts in modern history), it's not hard to understand that both sides really do have blood on their hands. There are no "good guys" other than the people who have managed to stay innocent, and as the conflict goes on and the desire for revenge burns in people's hearts, eventually some of those people will become "bad guys" too.
And that's just a very sad thing, because if nothing else it means that there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Ok, let's send them to the Hague I guess? Why do you think this is an important point? Hamas isn't actually a legitimate organization that signed on to international law and would ever care what "legitimate warfare" is. They just went into Israel and murdered a bunch of civilians. If these fighters are caught whether the UN thinks they were wrong is the least of their problems.
And none of that makes Israel attacking a hospital (or just the blatant collective punishment) justified.
Hamas are the legal representative government of palestine mate. For all intents and purposes according to law, this is two countries at war, not a fight against a terror group, but a hostile state
Proximity shielfing isn't really the classic human shield idea. It's like "human shields*" with an asterisk and six paragraphs of footnotes showing how countries like Israel use the idea of proximity shielding to commit human rights violations untouched.
How many war criminals from US, Russia have been charged and are rotting in jail? Bush, Obama, Trump? or does this law only apply when you want to use PR for your war contractors against brown people?
"According to international humanitarian law" my ass.
Beyond these crazy and terrible events, I'm left wondering what the big picture end game was here? Was it to block Israel from normalizing relationships with neighbouring foes, or is it a part of a bigger play by foes of Israel to highlight the injustices from their point of view?
This sacrifice of the innocents on all sides is a terribly high price on humanity and how long an eye for an eye will take to play out in the generations to follow.
That's exactly it. Hamas has previously and continues to do all it can to destroy any hopes for peace and Israel's far-right has been happy to leverage them for the same reason.
Palestinians and Israelis suffer and die while a few powerful men maintain or gain power from the situation.
Hamas can't have peace otherwise a more legitimate government takes over and continues toward a two-state system (they had in the past made a wave of suicide bombings to derail the peace process). Israeli far-right doesn't peace either (they've shot one of their PMs in the past over this) as that would put a stop to their ambition of power and colonizing more Palestinian land.
Israeli reporters have shown how the current Israeli PM and his party had passively allowed the financing of Hamas to come into Gaza (enemy of my enemy...) so they would keep destabilizing any peace talks and fight the more moderate Palestinian parties.
In short, Hamas is horrible and keeps provoking Israel and Israel keeps biting the bait and reacting exactly as Hamas expects them to do: doing their own round of horrible atrocities in a vicious cycle of suffering and death which breeds the next generation of extremists.
Anybody looking at this issue purely as a military problem is missing the big picture.
deposing that far-right israeli leadership would be the first step toward fixing this whole mess. many israelis (around 75%) want netanyahu gone immediately after the war and it seems like their approval ratings have gone down as a result of this conflict, in contrast to the general trend of right-wing governments benefiting from war in most situations.
if the west can put pressure on israel (and that it can, without american weapons most of the surrounding muslim countries would love to genocide the hell out of israel), this is where that pressure needs to go. finish the war, get hamas out of at least the government of gaza (fully disbanding them will be a longer process, but at least don't put them in control), and then execute a regime change in israel as well. get rid of both governing parties that caused this mess to begin with and then their successors can hopefully actually work towards peace.
The big picture is that in both countries groups/parties want to have the other people gone. Preferably with international support or the support of neighbouring countries.
Everytime they entangle themselves in a conflict, on both sides the number of radicals and extremists grows and with it the power of extremist parties.
For them peace is only when the others are gone. That is why it seems so unlikely that they are open for peace talks as long as these right-wing extremists are in power.
Many don't want to hear this, but for Hamas their biggest chance in the war is that Israel loses international support. They have no issue with sacrificing Palestinians for this, quite the opposite.
Has it seriously not occurred to zionists that there's a middle step between doing absolutely nothing and leveling the entire building? Send troops in there to liberate the hospital. A lot fewer innocents will die, and yea more IDF troops will die that way, but in what fucking universe is it preferable to murder civilians than to run a risky military operation? Even if Hamas kills a bunch of patients or doctors in retaliation there will surely be more survivors than if you just bomb the place. But nope, apparently Israeli lives are worth infinitely more than those of Palestinian civilians, so the best solution is to murder all Palestinians so they're not a "threat" to Israel
...bombing hospitals, refugee camps, schools, and endless civilians is a good thing... and explains Israel's behaviour and rhetoric in a pretty straightforward way.
...of course, killing all those kids makes the question "why are Hamas bad" a bit awkward... I know! Saying it's bad to murder children is anti-semitic now - that's not an obvious, massive self-report!
I don't personally care to judge whether Israel or Hamas are worse - they're both monstrous, genocidal murderers, killing innocent civilians... But only one of them has the ability to actually deliver on their genocidal intentions, and they're making headway.
No sane team lead would accept a mission like that.
That's just asking for massive friendly casualties.
Kicking in doors has an extremely high death toll, especially if it's a known base, of course they're going to level it instead of committing a team that's definitely going to get blown up by ied's and killed in ambushes.
In order to effectively suppress and seize that hospital, you're asking that at least 100-200 friendlies die during the operation to take a building that's a known travel route to their tunnels which house thousands of hamas and related fighters and their kit.
Given the level of failure of the intel community in Isreal right now, no one operations side is going to take their word that it's safe to send a team into that hospital.
It's a hospital when it's in operation, right now it's a terrorist base of operations SPECIFICALLY because it was a hospital.
In otherwords you value the lives of 100-200 IDF soldiers over the lives of many more Palestinian civilians. Considering you probably think 12,000 Palestinian deaths is a proportionate response to 1,200 Israeli deaths that's no surprise
Ground News is missing the most important part. Nobody has seen the evidence to corroborate the statement. This is as credible as mobile chemical labs until that happens.
Second, this is what the Infantry exists for. No professional military is going bomb a functioning hospital without serious evidence of a large troop concentration there. Just saying you don't want to take casualties is not an excuse in international law or military culture.
A lot fewer innocents will die, and yea more IDF troops will die that way, but in what fucking universe is it preferable to murder civilians than to run a risky military operation?
A lot fewer innocent palestinians. Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat? I agree wholeheartedly that the attacks must stop and a ceasefire should be declared but comments like this which just present a simple solution and outright ignore the obvious reason that is not happening just distract from conversations we should be having.
Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat?
Because they were instrumental in creating that terrorist threat in the first place, not only by perpetrating ethnic cleansing but by directly funding Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterbalance against the secular PLO.
Shouldn't your reasoning mean that we should only sacrifice German, US and British soldiers there?
It is their fault Israel exists like it does now. Every Israeli or Palestinian who dies is an innocent and only US Americans, Germans and Brits should be killed by Hamas.
But what about the reasons for the world wars? So it's actually Italians who should go and die there! Since it was the Romans actions that lead to the situations which evolved into the first world war!
enormous compared to what? because I'm seeing so many hamas defenders in lemmy and they never concede basic facts. it looks like it's tiny and ineffectual compared with the hamas propagandists.
Oh, social media machine? You mean the same that Qatar and Iran operate? The same that Elon Musk, you know, CEO of Twitter, met with Qatari media mongrels months before the attack. The same Qatar that houses Hamas leadership.
It's so powerful that I even need to include that, yes, Israel also has one. But it's doing a pretty shit job evidently.
Lemmy is a hive-mind as much as Reddit is/was. Anyone who claims its somehow better here is either lurking or part of the hivemind (just find the downvoted comments in this thread and think about how you would vote)
Meh, I take all the news and developments with large lumps of salt for this topic especially.
I believe both that Hamas is operating behind human shields to curry favour against humanitarian law, and that the IDF is more or less indiscriminately harming civilians, refugees and militants of Palestine all in the same brushstroke to excuse extermination as merely retaliation (also against humanitarian law in case that's not clear to anyone)
I checked the Arabic news scene for "AI" and whatever they call Israel thanks to Google AI and Yandex translate. They label every single "negative" photo,video,audio AI as things created by Israel.
Their heads aren't in the sand, they are indoctrinated which makes the situation truly horrible. There were teenagers getting medals in Hitler's last days.
As a side-note I guess they are trying to bury your opinion like they do in the evil site not knowing this place was founded by FOSS ideals which they don't have a clue about.
It's weird how you are okay with genocide against Palestinians, including all the classic hallmarks of genocide via settler colonialism (displacement, apartheid and blockade, massive civilian damage, etc) that we've seen countless times since the Native Americans, but if anyone says that's wrong you immediately cry anti-Semitism. Israel is not the one in danger of being genocided here, they're the ones perpetrating it. Even lots of Jewish people can see it. To mix up the colonial ethno-state of Israel with all Jewish people is real, deceptive purposeful propaganda.
I honestly haven't seen any. Every single person other than pro-Apartheid pro-Israel types seems to be making a very clear distinction between Palestinian civilians and Hamas.
So weird seeing people carry water for Hamas. It blows my mind.
After learning that there were indeed fighters, weapons, and tunnels just like Israel said, contrary to what a certain popular news outlet said.
If Israel rolled up without any opposition, no one would have died.
Now imagine what would happen to civilians if Hamas were allowed to roll up on an Israeli hospital unobstructed (refer to the attack on Oct. 7 for more info).
The people in the hospital can't do anything about what Hamas does and doesn't do, as unfortunately within Gaza they can do whatever they want because they have the guns. Hamas committing war crimes doesn't justify committing your own war crimes.
Now imagine what would happen to civilians if Hamas were allowed to roll up on an Israeli hospital unobstructed (refer to the attack on Oct. 7 for more info).
While there's definitely Hamas supporter and anti-jew around, when people call for humanitarian ceasefire and stop attacking hospital, they aren't supporting Hamas, but somehow it got included into one because that doesn't fulfill some people's agenda and believe, and the same people will instead carry water for IDF and Netanyahu, the force and people who disproportionately attack Gaza as a retaliation for 7th October attack, collective punish the people of Gaza and displaced millions, attacking media because they didn't show the same perspective as them, literally murder journalist that tend to publish unfavourable news against Israel, establish illegal settlement in West Bank using far right terrorist, using disproportionate force to disperse Palestinian protestor, arrest Israeli politician that criticise them, shoot a child with live bullet to disperse protest, arrest Palestinian without reason, treat Palestinian in a way that basically fit ACAB, deliver luggage-full of cash to Hamas leader, so on and so forth. Aren't your mind blown? Or is that not an issue because one side is clearly evil so the other side should be okay to conduct evil?
No, if the IDF were allowed to roll up with no opposition, people would still have died. They want to ethnically cleanse Gaza, Hamas just gives them a "good" excuse to do so. If it weren't for the 10/7 attack they would just maintain the status quo of shooting children for throwing rocks and making it hard to get aid into Gaza
You're right, the Palestine people should just let themselves be oppressed by the state of Israel. Now that the country has been bombed for over a month, they should welcome IDF soldiers with open arms. /s
In the Gaza Strip the government was the Hamas government of 2012. Following two Fatah–Hamas Agreements in 2014, on 25 September 2014 Hamas agreed to let the PA Government resume control over the Gaza Strip and its border crossings with Egypt and Israel, but that agreement had broken down by June 2015, after President Abbas said the PA government was unable to operate in the Gaza Strip.
Everything is a team sport these days, and just like you can either be team Jacob or team Edward but can't be undecided, online etiquette rules dictate that you can either be team Hamas or team IDF.
And no, team 'civilians' doesn't count. Too much grey area for people to know whether you are on their team or not. They'll need to read your entire comments to know if they should downvote you or upvote you.
Could you imagine?
That's probably a war crime in and of itself.
So hurry up and pick a side and stop making discussing international conflicts online so complicated with your 'nuance' BS.
According to IDF forces, as reported in fourteenwordsnews.com, the evil terrorists did a cartoonishly convenient thing that justifies the worst atrocities we've been getting beat up in the news for
Graffiti was also found in the area that said "blacks rule"
Well, that's misleading. The article acts as if they're doing it from the hospital. They're firing from the road. There's nothing given in the article indicating they had anything to do with the hospital.
At this point I need to ask: Are these all different hospitals being attacked or is everyone still reporting about 1 specific hospital that was attacked?
The IDF has targeted over 21 hospitals at this point, funny that people got caught up on the one hospital situation and don't care about the other 20 anymore.
The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.
The fact that sick or wounded members of the armed forces are nursed in these hospitals, or the presence of small arms and ammunition taken from such combatants which have not yet been handed to the proper service, shall not be considered to be acts harmful to the enemy.
Hamas clearly in public buildings using civilians as shield. Palestinians clearly know and don't care. Nothing will stop me from hating on both Hasmas and Israel. And I am slo losing patience for Palestanians for supporting Hamas and not condemning their action.
Just like reddit, people here can't accept narratives other than mainstream liberal. Sure, there are Gazans that want Hamas out but they are minority. Hamas is a grassroots organization that defeated the party that preferred the two state solution. Hamas was and still is backed by majority of Palestanians. Just look at the Palestanian protesters in the west. NONE of them condemned Hamas. NONE.
are they sitting next to a hospital on purpose? or does this just happen to be the vantage point in an extremely dense city crammed with every type of building?
fuck Hamas, but engaging military targets isn't terrorism
Pull that RPG out of nowhere because they didn't already weapons and explosives stored in a hospital as that would be a war crime and the exact reason a military force would attack a hospital in the first place?
That's why staging attacks or garrisoning troops at hospitals, thus turning the sick and injured into human shields, is not only a horrible and inhumane thing to do, but also a war crime.
At some level Hamas knows this, and so the question is why they would do even do it? Is it because they think that using human shields is an effective deterrence? Or is it because they want to provoke an IDF counter-attack against a hospital so they can use it in their propaganda? Either way, it's a war crime on Hamas' part and generally terrible for the innocent people in Gaza.
But there are a whole lot of people who have decided to excuse everything Hamas does and cast everything Israel does in the worst light possible. That's what I personally have a problem with. Hamas and its sponsors are despicable excuses for human beings who put slaughter Israeli civilians and put Palestinian civilians in harm's way. That needs to be fully acknowledged. At the same time, I see a lot of people in the US who are ignorant of the failure of leadership in Israel. They place all blame on Palestinians without realizing that Israel's leadership has played a role in sabotaging peace talks.
No one sane loves Hamas. But it takes some serious mental gymnastics to pretend the Israeli government is justified in what is going on in Gaza right now.
People like the above imagine a country could defend itself while rigidly adhering to a “never under any circumstances attack protected buildings even if we’re currently being shot at out of one”.
I wonder how people like this imagine war works.
Y’all remember that Reno 911 episode where they’re chasing some perp and he crosses some state or county line and they all just stop and throw up their hands because he left their jurisdiction? It’d be like that except the guy is shooting at you.
Are you referring to the people who acknowledge that the IDF are just as much of terrorists as Hamas? Because that’s true, and it doesn’t make you a Hamas supporter.
Hamas are terrorists. Israel is a terrorist state.
Israel has oppressed and murdered Palestinians for decades. Hamas responded by slaughtering thousands of Israelis. Now Israel is responding by committing genocide.
There are no good guys. It’s terrorists fighting terrorists, while innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire and being massacred in the tens of thousands
Fuck off with your feaux-intellectual instigative bullshit. You look stupid.
Israel has oppressed and murdered Palestinians for decades. Hamas responded by slaughtering thousands of Israelis. Now Israel is responding by committing genocide.
Are you referring to the people who acknowledge that the IDF are just as much of terrorists as Hamas?
Just want to clarify, you see no difference between a group who avoids civilian deaths when possible and another group who actively seeks to kill civilians?
Seriously. Any civilized country would take the murder of 1200 of their civilians and just move on. Like, the abducted are way over there in Gaza. Just leave ‘em for Mohamed’s sake.
So Hamas was operating their fighting force out of a hospital. Does that mean it’s okay to fight them there???