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.
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.