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- cross-posted to:
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Around 9:30 p.m. in late February, a white Mazda pulled up near a game cafe in the Jenin refugee camp on the northern edge of the West Bank, where a crowd of boys and young men often gathered to socialize.
As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.
Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.
According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”
But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.
Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades.
Those are articles of the Geneva Convention. Protocol I of the Geneva Convention is different. It was added later. The protocols are like amendments.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-51
It clearly lays out what constitutes targeting of civilians. But the fact that you need to be told that killing civilians is wrong says everything that should be said.
Yes, it says you cannot target civilians. Which is why I said if there are only civilians in a game cafe, then it is not a military target.
On the other hand, it does not prohibit targeting combatants. Which is why I said if there are combatants in the game cafe, then it is a military target.
And it does not say that killing civilians is prohibited when attacking a military target, only that any death of civilians must be balanced against the value of the military target.
No, explicitly wrong:
What you are describing is unequivocally a war crime. the ICC didn’t charge Netanyahu with war crimes just for the fun of it.
Killing an enemy combatant is a military objective, so attacking a building containing an enemy combatant does not meet any of those criteria.
The ICC charges against Netanyahu all relate to interference with the delivery of aid. He has not been charged with making indiscriminate attacks.
You seem to think that the presence of a military objective justifies any amount of civilian damage and death. A plain text reading of Protocol I - which you have clearly read for the first time, considering you linked the wrong articles earlier - says exactly the inverse of that. You are interpreting Article 51 of Protocol I to mean what you want, not what it says.
No, I never said it justifies “any amount of civilian damage and death”. Quite the opposite, I said the death of civilians must be balanced against the value of the military target.
Likewise, per the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC:
Finally, I linked the articles that pertain to Israel. Israel is not a signatory to Protocol I.
You didn’t link those because those are the ones Israel singed, you linked them because you didn’t know the difference.
The protocol I provisions on indiscriminate attacks define what and which civilian deaths are acceptable. Indiscriminate bombings - like blowing up a car in front of a completely unrelated building full of civilians - are unacceptable under protocol I. If your argument is that those attacks are moral because Israel is not a signatory of that protocol I’d argue they’re still committing war crimes, they just don’t admit it.
An indiscriminate attack is one that is not aimed at a particular military target. For example, firing artillery randomly into a city, without regard for enemy locations.
If a military target is known to be in a car and the car is attacked, then the attack is not indiscriminate. Even if a civilian is also killed in the attack.
This attack was similar to the US drone strike that targeted Ibrahim al-Banna but also killed a child, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki. On a much larger scale, Allied strategic bombing in WW2 targeted German factories but also killed thousands of German civilians inside and in nearby homes. None of these were charged as war crimes, because attacks against military targets are legally permitted even when it is known that some civilians will also be killed.
Well the Geneva convention didn’t exist during WW2 so that’s a moot point and “the US did it” is not a defense of war crimes. The US wantonly commits war crimes. An indiscriminate attack is not what you described. It is an attack that makes no effort (or insufficient effort) to target only military objectives and protect civilians.
This conversation has reached an end. You don’t understand the issue, and worse don’t seem to want to.