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Truth and Lies about Gaza War Crimes
Okay, I get it: Joe Biden is upset because there is a war in Gaza, the Israelis are spearheading it (although Hamas instigated it), and the Palestinians are the victims of it (even though some people believe the Palestinians support Hamas). Plus, it’s an election year. Although Biden keeps wringing his hands and making threats in response to how the Israelis are conducting the war, he’s behaving as if Hamas had nothing to do with the war going on. Especially when it comes to accusations of war crimes, the spotlight is focused on Israel. Does Joe Biden even know what a war crime is? You can’t accuse an army of war crimes that do not exist. I thought it would be worthwhile to define war crimes and explain how they are overwhelmingly committed by Hamas, not by Israel.
But if we are going to blame groups for war crimes, we should have clear definitions for doing so:
A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostages, unnecessarily destroying civilian property, deception by perfidy, wartime sexual violence, pillaging, and for any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings including genocide or ethnic cleansing, the granting of no quarter despite surrender, the conscription of children in the military and flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity.
If we study Israel’s actions, you would think that they must be committing war crimes, as Joe Biden repeatedly criticizes them. But those aren’t the facts.
He condemns them for not making “targeted attacks.” But the IDF is providing safe zones and has made targeted attacks.
He thinks they should be providing more aid or make it easier to provide aid to civilians. This is a ludicrous expectation, because additional aid will likely continue to go to Hamas. Besides, there are reasons to believe that the “civilians” are actively supporting Hamas.
He has claimed that too many of the reported 28,000 casualties have been civilians. But the Gazan agency that reports these figures is unreliable, and they don’t separate civilian counts from soldiers. So, there is no way to know just how many people have died or who they are.
He has described the attack on Gaza as “over the top,” and accused the IDF of indiscriminate bombing, which is not true. But Israel has made it clear that it plans to destroy Hamas and their tunnels. There is no easy way to proceed.
If you review every war crime in the list above, you will see that Israel has not committed any war crimes; a person could argue that “proportionality” is not being practiced, but this concept is complex and very difficult to determine, and nearly impossible to apply to the war in Gaza.
If we look at the actions of Hamas, however, we see multiple war crimes. They have committed torture (burning bodies and torturing Israelis as they raided their kibbutzim), taken hostages (from the kibbutzim and participants at a music concert), destroyed civilian property (including homes and buildings on the kibbutzim), deception by perfidy (when they promised to release hostages and reneged), wartime sexual violence (committed at the kibbutzim), and pillaging (as they ran through the homes and buildings at the kibbutzim). And I would claim that their intention on October 7 was genocide: they have made no secret of their intention to destroy Israel and its people.
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You might wonder why I have focused on war crimes. After all, no legal body will probably accuse Hamas of war crimes, and Israel will disregard these types of allegations if they are issued.
First, the anti-Semites have come out in droves, crying that they are pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas. They insist that the accusations against Hamas are lies; at some point, we can hope that the truth reaches them and sanity will reign. I also think these distinctions between Hamas and Israel are very important because for now, the world is mostly supporting Israel. But if Israel is condemned with lies, especially for war crimes they have not committed, it will make Israel’s efforts all the more difficult. Over the years they have been the victims of a mythical history, accusations of unwarranted land grabs, and anti-Semitic tropes.
Let’s keep the record straight when it comes to war crimes.
Published in Foreign Policy
There are some who claim that wiping out Hamas is equivalent to “genocide” of the “Palestinians.” But that would be admitting that ALL “Palestinians” are part of Hamas. Which they would never willingly do, although there is at least some evidence that it’s actually true.
You mean just like it hasn’t been practiced in any other war in human history?
Yeah, that….
Don’t start nothing
Won’t be nothing
– J
True, except you’ve got the people who claim Israel actually started it.
Israel is planning a major attack on Rafah–I hear it’ll be around Ramadan (early part of March). That will rattle some cages…
In the heat of many conflicts accusations and denials of war crimes fly. Both accusations and denials are part of information warfare, but for something to be found a crime it needs more than an accusation, it needs proof. It takes time to properly investigate and document.
The wikipedia page (because of course there is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes ) pulls together information from the 1948 War of Independence/Nakba to the present, which is quite detailed and with a lot of references. From which, an example of reasonably documented war crimes:
No investigations like this are yet available regarding what Israel has or has not done in Gaza this time.
But on point with the current case at the ICJ re genocide/complicity with genocide:
Zafar, it’s too bad that you still don’t realize that I won’t give any credence to your sources. Even Wikipedia can be distorted, but I assumed the war crimes definition was innocuous enough. But you keep trying. It’s what you choose to do. Even if you have to go back 50-60 years.
Of course Israel has committed war crimes. Your own definition includes “intentionally killing civilians,” “taking hostages,” and “unnecessarily destroying civilian property.” Israel has done all of this on a massive scale.
Israel is even seeking to starve the entire population of Gaza. It’s appalling. I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen anything more horrid in my entire life. Maybe the killing fields in Cambodia. Obviously, the death toll from this attempted genocide by starvation isn’t very high yet. Starvation takes time.
This is all occurring right out in the open, on video, for anyone to see who cares to look.
I find the disconnect in our views of the present situation interesting and puzzling. I see Biden shamefully aiding and abetting Israel’s crimes. Others see Biden as somehow wrongfully holding the Israelis back.
Even an Israeli paper, Haaretz, reported 11,500 children killed in Gaza, as of about 2 weeks ago. That’s about 300 Palestinian children for every Israeli child killed on 10-7. Apparently, this is not enough for some people. Indeed, some people seem upset at anyone who isn’t cheering on the killing with sufficient enthusiasm.
Well that’s pretty direct. [Edited to add: see your point about the Kahan Commission. Buncha Hamasniks maybe?]
Well I wasn’t going to quote the whole article. Just gave examples of what I thought were reasonably documented accusations of war crimes.
I don’t get why attacking Rafah during Ramadan is worse than attacking it at any other time? It’s not going to make a difference to the civilian casualties.
I will bite for the moment. They are not intentionally killing civilians. They are not taking hostages. And they are destroying property where Hamas hides out.
Haaretz us full of bologny. No one knows how many people have really died.
I don’t see the differences in our views that way at all. I find your viewpoint detestable and misguided and I am not at all puzzled. This is your standard type of answer.
I just find it’s too much work to separate those sources that might be credible from those that are not. Especially when some sources are deeply anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist.
And I really don’t get the argument that supposedly Israel is somehow required to supply food etc to the people who have been attacking them.
That last is slippery. What is “necessary” depends on war goals.
If Israel’s goal is to drive Gazans into Sinai – and that’s been apparent for some time – then destroying civilian property (and infrastructure that makes life possible) is “necessary”. But it’s still a genocidal act. Because the Convention’s definition of genocidal acts includes:
Which would also cover stopping food from entering Gaza. The numbers so far are small – and in fact in the wiki article examples they are also relatively small – so killing fields of Cambodia (or Plain of Jars in Laos) is perhaps overstating. But the whole point of the Convention is that the world steps in before genocide occurs, or if it is occurring, stopping the death toll from reaching numbers like that.
Honestly I think that’s why it seems more awful. Because of social media we can all see it ourselves, unfiltered and uncurated by the political orthodoxy of where we live. It’s the first such conflict that I can think of where the great and the good have utterly lost control of the narrative for a critical mass of the Western public.
You can see it on X (twitter) feeds. Those increasingly hysterical posts about the hostages – and they’re right call attention to them, taking civilian hostages is definitely a war crime – by accounts that undermine their own credibility by remaining utterly silent about the 30,000 dead in Gaza. And they usually get ratioed, and getting [consistently] ratioed isn’t a sign of winning the narrative war, it’s a sign that it’s lost.
Nothing says perfidously undermining Israel like $14 billion in aid and a Security Council veto of a ceasefire resolution.
Fair enough. But the fact that the wiki article included references to official Israeli documents raises its credibility in my eyes. If the article excluded them it would be more suspect for bias. jmho.
I don’t want to find the articles that might be true. And ONE MORE TIME, I don’t want data that’s 60 years old.
I dismissed anything political on Wikipedia.
Oh, for Pete’s sake. War is hell. Israel is fighting illegal combatants who don’t follow the laws of armed conflict. Because Hamas prevented civilians from leaving, dress like civilians, and fight from civilian locations, Hamas is responsible for civilian casualties caused by their own actions. People who have clutched their pearls for years have enabled these tactics to succeed and thus led to widespread use of such tactics.
Zafar is biased. As long as there is Hamas, let the war continue.
Everybody is biased RH. It’s part of being human.
But bias doesn’t preclude telling the truth. Unless we can’t tell the difference.
Confirmation bias can make it difficult to acknowledge that something is true, especially when it causes us cognitive dissonance. Some time back you pointed out that this was sort of my thing with gay issues – correctly.
Confirmation bias is an issue for everyone –especially when the issue is dear to us.
When a “holy book” calls for the extermination of the Jews…
@Zafar, what is your assessment of the IDF’s ongoing operations in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital? War crimes or valid military actions?
Hamas knew exactly what it was doing when it broke the ceasefire which was in place on October 7th. Through its leaders, it has boasted that the blood of the people of Gaza will help its cause. It has threatened to carry out similar attacks “again and again”. It has made only outlandish proposals for a ceasefire, and it continues to wage war. It didn’t have to start the war, and it could have stopped it at any time. It still could. How it gets a pass from so many countries and people proves only that morality is an option, not an obligation.
Some of them are open enemies, while others pretend to be peaceful friends.
Egypt and some of the others have a lot of nerve first creating the “Palestinians” and then basically dumping them on the rest of the world to clean up.
I don’t know Dave. It’s ongoing, and the only sources of information are either clearly parties to the conflict or accused of being parties to the conflict. It would be good if independent investigations can happen.
The IDF is attempting to dislodge Hamas while permitting the hospital to continue to operate, obviously on a limited basis.