If a law carries no punishment, is it even a law?

Seems like more a set of guidelines that people are free to ignore whenever it suits them.

It’s unclear.

Hamas clearly and obviously committed crimes against humanity (intentionally murdering civilians, raping, torturing and kidnapping).

Israel, so far, is playing in the gray areas. It’s legal, according to international law, to lay siege on a population as long as it has a definitive and declared military purpose. It’s illegal to do it to intentionally harm civilians or to intentionally starve them.

The main problem is that Hamas is using the Palestinians and hides amongst them. That makes the legal discussion very difficult because Israel can always say that they target Hamas and everything else is just collateral damage.

Unfortunately the Palestinians are getting f’ed from both sides here.

I’m pretty sure cutting of food and water to an entire population is no gray area, it’s pretty unambiguously a warcrime.

so israel is obligated to keep providing vital supplies to the terrorists murdering them? Maybe instead of buying rockets they should have worked on their infrastructure.

If Israel wants to keep occupying an area, yes they do have the responsibility to keep supplying vital supplies to Gaza. Even if some of them would be terrorists. And while some of them could be called terrorists, you do not have permission to deliberately cause harm to everyone in largish area.

You being attacked does not allow you to commit war crimes, genocide or ethnic cleansing. This is not a grey area.

You being attacked does not allow you to commit war crimes, genocide or ethnic cleansing. This is not a grey area.

If someone was about to kill you, and they’re hiding behind another person, and the only way you could stop them from killing you would be putting the third person at risk of being killed as well, do you have the right to defend yourself?

That’s basically the point, on a macro level, that we are all arguing about.

if someone was about to kill you, you would know who they were. you wouldn’t be killing random bystanders.