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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.
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.
Even using your definition, an attack which kills a single bystander civilian could not possibly be considered indiscriminate.
You seem to think that even a single unintended civilian death is a war crime, which means that you don’t understand international law.
Whether you like it or not, the ICC has acknowledged that belligerents are permitted to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives even when it is known that some civilian deaths will occur.