kromemIsrael raids Gaza's Al Shifa Hospital, urges Hamas to surrender
Biden said this was a line Israel should not cross.
I look forward to his ignoring this and sending more weapons, and ordering the US military to fly more drones over Gaza.
When asked by reporters at the White House what his message to family members of hostages was, he said: “Hang in there, we’re coming.” […]
White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters on the presidential plane, Air Force One, that intelligence confirmed the militant Hamas group, which rules Gaza, used tunnels underneath Al-Shifa and other hospitals to conceal military operations and to hold hostages.
I’m not sure how you interpret “we’re coming” by Biden regarding hostages that US intelligence says are being held in the hospital currently being raided, but it certainly doesn’t seem like Israel is doing this at odds with Biden’s intentions.
If anything, Biden’s red line of “hospitals must be protected” seems like it might be behind the IDF claim in the original article of:
The IDF forces include medical teams and Arabic speakers, who have undergone specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment, with the intent that no harm is caused to the civilians.
We’ll see what the next few hours hold, but Biden’s comments just a few hours before and the US intelligence publicly weighing in certainly looks like this is intended to be a hostage rescue operation which the US is at very least aware of if not actively involved in.
Mass grave inside Israeli-encircled Gaza hospital, no plan to rescue babies
Palestinians trapped inside Gaza's biggest hospital were <a href="/world/middle-east/people-trapped-inside-gazas-al-shifa-planning-bury-dead-bodies-2023-11-14/">digging a mass grave</a> on Tuesday to bury patients who died under Israeli encirclement, and said no plan was in place to evacuate babies despite Israel announcing an offer to send portable incubators.
It’s absurd to claim that IDF wants “no harm to civilians”. They wouldn’t be bombing residential neighborhoods on the scale they are if they had that goal.
donutsIs Hamas not the slightest bit culpable for using a hospital to stage militant operations?
Is it not a brazen war crime to use the sick and injured as a human shield?
Hamas militants should be nowhere near any hospital, school, place of worship, or other place where civilians and noncombatants may be gathering. To use places like this as a base of operations is both cowardly and completely against international norms and laws. The IDF would have zero justification for any military operation at Al Shifa Hospital had Hamas not made the horrible decision to use it, and the suffering people within it, as a shield. Hamas are not ignorant and they know that by using the hospital as a strategic location they are putting a target on it, so why would they do it?
Hamas 100% wants to provoke IDF killings of Palestinian civilians. This is not a shock, this is how modern guerilla/terrorist/resistance wars work (pick your adjective).
The Vietnamese resistance under Ho Chi Minh were the most masterful recent practitioners, but the IRA, LTTE, etc also deployed this.
Israel is playing into Hamas’s their hands and will get about as much benefit from their killings, reputationally and politically, as the US did in Vietnam.
No one here at all says that. What people are saying is that those in the hospital should not have to pay for Israeli shit or for Hamas shit just the same
Obviously I agree with that. I think all sane and reasonable people agree with that.
At the very least, civilians should have somewhere to go to escape from the fighting, and the sick and injured especially should be able to seek treatment in peace.
Make no mistake though: if Hamas really have been using this hospital as a strategic location for keeping hostages or other militant activity (so far the publicly available evidence suggests that they have been, though, you know, fog of war and all that), then what they are doing is cowardly, shameful, harmful and criminal, as they would be knowingly putting patients in harms way by essentially inviting proportionate counter-operations on the hospital from the IDF.
Is Hamas not the slightest bit culpable for using a hospital to stage militant operations?
Sure, but the difference is that that the IDF is actively murdering with weapons that we are giving them.
Also, if Hamas is subject to the Geneva convention then they are a legitimate state authority. Are you sure you want to take that position? Because it means that literally everything that Israel is doing in Hamas is a war crime.