Hamas knew that Israel will retaliate, they placed their military activities specifically into civilian places to either prevent their opponent to fight back while they are killing them and if they fight back they have to get through Hamas’ meat shields. Palestinian knows it (you can find interviews before Oct.7th with Palestinian in Gaza agreeing with the idea) you know it, Israel knows.
Israel also knows that they have limited amount of time to eliminated as much of Hamas as possible before international community turns against them. They play with time and balance on edge.
It sucks, it’s sad and should have never happened. But it’s in no way black and white situation.
If an attack is emanate from a group of terrorists and you are certain to save countless lives, but one or two innocent people are collateral damage, then I think we can understand that it isn’t black and white. Heck, in those scenarios not only do those innocent people die, but you then pay a few million to their families for their losses.
When you instead are leveling a city, blowing up ambulances and hospitals and you literally have one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world on your side, and you’re killing close to over tens of thousands of innocent people to save a hundred or even two hundred, then it is black and white.
French resistance during the second world war knew the Nazis would retaliate; they still operated and hid within the civilian population. There are former towns in France where only crumbling stone, abandoned cars, and a plaque to the dead remains, a vow to never rebuild and never forget. Everyone was killed and their homes burned in reprisal for maquis activity.
Are you saying the French women and children murdered by Nazis are the fault of the French partisans? Is this a grey moral area for you?
Are you equating an organisation that attacks helpless civilians to the French partisans?
Is missing the point your best debate tactic?
EDIT: Reposted higher for visibility:
I don’t think you’re as dense as you pretend to be. But for anyone deceived by straw-manning and performative confusion used as a rhetorical trick, let me be clear.
Using human shields has a specific an codified meaning; all humanitarian organizations who have investigated Hamas or any other Palestinian defense organization have found no evidence of this war crime. International law also makes clear that even if an armed force is improperly using civilian objects to shield itself, its opponent is still required to protect civilians from disproportionate harm.
Killing civilians is wrong. It is wrong when Hamas does it, it is therefore much more wrong when Israel, which has more resources and claims moral superiority, does it on a much larger scale, not just through retaliation bombings the last few weeks, but from before the seige of Gaza going back to the Nakba - massacring civilians, assisting their allies in massacring civilians, poisoning wells, using siege tactics to create an open-air prison and starvation conditions in Gaza, murdering activists, protesters, and journalists by the dozens. In their most obscene moments Israel has murdered children playing on a beach near a hotel populated by international journalists, and protected those murderers with their highest courts, but even more insidious is the culture of arbitrary detention and imprisonment of palestinian children. Not only does the IDF show complete disregard for Palestinian life when choosing their bombing targets, the inhabitants of Gaza rely on potable water and electricity from Israel – and now the Israeli authorities have them cut off. They have built an apartied system, and have engaged in collective punishment.
[Graph demonstrating the difference in scale of civilian deaths by the IDF and the lopsided human toll the Palestinian people have paid over the conflict]
As a commenter living in the west, my opinion has little influence on the tactics of Islamic authoritarians. Israel is much more sensitive to western public opinion. We are complicit with Israel’s crimes if we do not resist.
Hamas has little in common with the French Resistance. But the Palestinians are just as human as the people of Oradour-sur-Glane, and collective punishment is wrong whether it is done by Israel’s criminal leaders trying to distract attention from their political blunders, or Nazis. Apologia for collective punishment and disregard for human life is justification for fascism.
