It’s a question of proportionality. I’m generally sympathetic to the impossibility of waging war without civilian collateral damage, but Israel is clearly taking very little care to minimize civilian casualties with indiscriminate artillery fire and air strikes, and on the heels of an already legally questionable attack on Hezbollah just previously.
Civilians die in war. It’s ugly. I get that. But there’s no excuse for any supposedly modern and civilized state to not attempt to minimize civilian casualties proportional to the military objectives targeted.
I don’t think it’s clear that they are not trying to minimize civilian casualties, it’s hard to imagine a more targeted attack than the pager attack.
I don’t know what the numbers are like for the Lebanon part of the war, obviously, but in almost all modern conflicts we see that between 25 and 80% of casualties are civilians. I imagine we’re on the high end here as hezbollah like to fight and hide amongst civilians and use them as shields.
I struggle to see how you can combat such an organization without heavy civilian casualties, no matter how you go about it. I’m not saying the Israelis are not making mistakes or even being disproportionate at times, but I just can’t see how you’re going to fight hezbollah without heavy collateral damage.
I don’t know what the numbers are like for the Lebanon part of the war, obviously, but in almost all modern conflicts we see that between 25 and 80% of casualties are civilians.
Bruh, in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Coalition forces were (rightly) condemned for using insufficiently discriminate force, our civilian casualty rate ranged from 15%-30%, with the higher proportion present in Iraq during the initial stages of the ‘shock and awe’ invasion.
Gonna go ahead and say if Israel is getting significantly worse numbers than in Fallujah, with the US in Fallujah having 2004-era tech and intel in a region that we were not well-established in, and Israel having 20 years of development in computerization of the military and a long-standing intelligence presence in the area, something is seriously fucked.
I imagine we’re on the high end here as hezbollah like to fight and hide amongst civilians and use them as shields.
Firing from a populated residential area in order to use civilians as a shield is commonly accepted as a war crime.
Likewise, indiscriminately shelling the residential area in response is also commonly accepted as a war crime.
I struggle to see how you can combat such an organization without heavy civilian casualties, no matter how you go about it. I’m not saying the Israelis are not making mistakes or even being disproportionate at times, but I just can’t see how you’re going to fight hezbollah without heavy collateral damage.
Like I said - I’m not unsympathetic to the fact that collateral damage IS going to happen. But Israel’s actions have been anything but proportionate.
This “human shield” line is Israel’s most effective propaganda to date. They’ve used it repeatedly with Hamas and now rolling it out in Lebanon to waive away concerns about killing civilians
When you unpack it it is a meaningless statement. All military command centres in the world are in urban locations.
NATO is in Brussels. The UK Ministry of Defence is in London. Mossad is in Tel Aviv. Are all these countries using “human shields”?
It is not smart to have your most important military centres sitting in an isolated field somewhere.
You know both Hezbollah & Hamas exist today because of Israel. If Israel had found a solution to peacefully co-exist with their neighbors, we wouldn’t be here today commenting on this article. Israel has historically used disproportionate measures toward, anyone who opposes it. Just look at the graph of rockets fired by Hezbollah or Hamas vs those fired by Israel, and mind you none of them have an iron dome to protect their civilians and still Israel is playing the victimhood card.
The only way to bring long-lasting peace would be for Israel to grant Palestinians civil rights, and start treating them fairly, and not build plenty of checkpoints, and walls, and evict them, practically making their lives miserable. It is kind of sad, that all this is coming from a nation that was oppressed so much during the years, but yes, they seem to have learned nothing from their own history.
Ah yeah „they are human shields“ while IOF soldiers were filmed literally spanning wounded Palestinians over the hood of their jeeps and also let them walk into tunnels first so that they’d eat any potential booby trap.
No. They are not using human shields, you have no proof for that, but there’s proof that Israel is doing this systematically. And even if they would be doing that, it would be still murder to kill civilians.
Israel is a genocidal settler colonialist apartheid entity which needs to be abolished, Palestine needs to be decolonized so that people there can live in peace, equality and safety. None of this is possible while Palestinians are oppressed. This is the solution, Israel extending their genocide to Lebanon on the other hand isn’t.
