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ignoramous 5 hours ago

> All the hospitals are now rubble

Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).

[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

cholantesh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.

HappyPanacea 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat

ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...

Hmm.

HappyPanacea 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you understand the difference between being not in uniform in order to infiltrate enemy territory and being not in uniform in your own territory?

ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy

> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...

(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)

HappyPanacea 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.

ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue

Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?

> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?

Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.

HappyPanacea 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?

The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.

> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.

When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)

ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.

You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."

Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.

> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?

German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.

> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?

I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67745092

km3r an hour ago | parent [-]

The spirit of the law is reducing the civilian cost of war. Its hard to argue that Israel's few incidents of wearing civilian clothes for special operations increased the odds of civilian costs compared to the same operation done in uniform. Meanwhile, Hamas's lack of uniforms has led to significantly increased civilian cost.

LorenPechtel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, Israel has done some infiltration like that. Not proper, but you're pointing out a molehill while ignoring the mountain.

ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When the molehill is a war crime, sure.

anderber 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So is the mountain, though

ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. You will not find me defending Hamas war crimes, of which there are many too.

cess11 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.

They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.

LorenPechtel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?

And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.

And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?

And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??

And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.

ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?

From the article we're discussing:

"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."

I would describe that as a walk-back.

cholantesh an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>"Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.

I guess we're in agreement that Reuters isn't engaging with the topic neutrally.

glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.

dathinab 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil).

Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.

This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.

But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.

---

(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.

(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).

mikkupikku 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.

richardfeynman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The reason is that it's false. All hospitals are not rubble.

baq 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

weird_tentacles 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.

IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.

weird_tentacles 5 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

dang 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...

> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.

> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.

Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.

(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)

> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.

This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.

wk_end 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.

I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.

It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.

And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"

It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.

eirini1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.

I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.

wk_end 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?

worik 9 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Do you think it should?

No.

This is asymmetrical warfare

The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders

throwaway3060 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If that was true, then why does it seem this conflict has gotten much more attention than the Russia-Ukraine war, which is on a much larger scale?

ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The power imbalance probably plays a role.

Certainly no one's donating Patriot batteries and F-16s to Gaza.

(I'm also not sure I'd consider the Russia/Ukraine war to be… undercovered in the press.)

magic_hamster an hour ago | parent [-]

The only country out of the four mentioned who was given a donation of arms is Ukraine.

ceejayoz 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

That’s a gutsy claim. Delusional, but gutsy.

https://www.ajc.org/news/what-every-american-should-know-abo...

RobertoG 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

War is always terrible and a mess. The problem is that the intention is, very clearly, ethic cleansing. And that, is, not in accordance to international law. That's the reason they target humanitarian workers and journalist. And the reason they block things like baby formula from entering Gaza. Because the worst are the living conditions to the population, the better.

If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.

Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.

By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/#/screen/home

worik 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

> is, very clearly, ethic cleansing

Yes. But.

Those are weasel words. The correct, honest word, is genocide

magic_hamster an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.

You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.

ebbi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.

themafia 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> according to accepted conventions

Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?

The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.