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- cross-posted to:
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At least 313 Palestinians have been killed as Israel struck 426 targets in Gaza, its military said, flattening residential buildings in giant explosions.
Among those killed in Gaza were 20 children. About 2,000 others are wounded, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said more than 20,000 Palestinians left Gaza’s border region to head further inside the territory and take refuge in UN schools.
Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson of the NGO Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRC), told Al Jazeera that their medical teams were facing “great challenges” in Gaza, adding that they had called on the international humanitarian community to open humanitarian corridors so that NGOs like them could safely carry out their work of helping people in the Gaza Strip.
On Saturday night, Energy Minister Israel Katz said Israel would halt the electricity supply to the besieged territory. The Palestinian enclave – home to some two million people – has been under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade.
Al Jazeera’s Youmna ElSayed said humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip were in “constant deterioration”.
What used to be 120 megawatts of electricity has now decreased to only 20MW, provided by power plants that are paid for by the Palestinian Authority, ElSayed said.
Meanwhile, healthcare institutions had to rely on spare generators to continue operating through the night due to Israel’s decision to halt the electricity supply while residents were left to endure the darkness with the unsettling backdrop of explosions not far away.
300-400 people in Gaza were killed. Do you think those were just Hamas militants who had it coming? Including the 20 children? The kidnappings and wholesale murder of civilians were terrorism, but so is this. No one is proposing sympathy for Hamas, but whatever Israel claims about their “moral army”, they’re killing civilians.
Of course not, but it’s also absolutely impossible to conduct military operations in a city as denselt populated as Gaza without some amount of collateral damage. Hamas also intentionally conducts attacks out of civilian infrastructure so that when Israel retaliates, Hamas can point to headlines about Israel attacking schools and mosque.
Genuine question for you: if you’re Israel, and you know that attacks are coming from an apartment building or a mosque, and you know that if you do nothing, some of your people will die (by the way, one of my friends from Israel lost his house Saturday morning to a rocket attack), what would you do?
The IDF strategy of notifying civilians via messages and roofknocking missiles seems to me like the best that can really be done unless you think that they should simply do nothing and let Israelis be killed. But this is a genuine question: what would you actually propose they do given the situation?
I think you’re far too trusting when Israel says “we destroyed that because it was a clear and present danger”. It’s like the torture justifiers that jump to scenarios about dirty bombs with a ticking clock, when in reality it’s usually just used to see if they can learn something useful. The Israeli armed forces regularly destroy entire buildings for things that have nothing to do with the building itself being an immediate risk to life and limb, and assuming these 300+ people are just unfortunate and unforeseen casualties needed to save lives is giving a benefit of the doubt that isn’t earned.
How many civilian casualties is the right number so your friend’s house doesn’t get destroyed? 2? 5? 20? And if the problem is rockets fired by people from the roofs of buildings why are they responding by destroying the buildings? They’re no less able to evacuate from a building than the people living in it. Either the guys are gone and will just fire from another building or you know where they’ll be and could use an anti-personnel response. The real reason is that they want to make a statement. And if that statement kills some civilians, that’s ok and maybe even desirable. People would probably be pretty upset if more Israelis died than Palestinians.
And they’ve made those sorts of statements for decades. None of this is a sad but unavoidable step to create a safe and secure future. It’s just the same old same old, feeding an interminable cycle of death. (And that goes double to the Hamas terrorists who triggered this.)
For sure, I’m not at all saying that the IDF is blameless or has never done anything wrong. At the same time, it evidently is not their intention to simply wipe out all Palestinian buildings and people off the map, as they could very easily do it if they actually wanted to.
Ultimately, I do believe some manner of military response is justifiable when you’re being constantly subjected to rocket attacks intentionally targeting civilians. It’s deeply unfortunate that there’s no way to do that without risking civilian casualties, but Hamas could absolutely conduct attacks out of evacuated or military buildings. Hamas does absolutely nothing to prevent Gazans from dying, because every dead Gazan is a story they can use for propaganda. Given those circumstances, there are only so many options in response, and I can’t really blame Israel for not accepting “do nothing” as an answer.
It’s not “blow up building” or “do nothing”.
Just to note, there are reports (I am following the Guardian’s blog) that IDF did not “roofknock” in at least one occasion yesterday, suggesting that maybe they stopped the practice. We have very little news from Gaza for obvious reasons though.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised at that. I can’t imagine the IDF is feeling all that much restraint at the moment.
Well, sure, but war crimes are war crimes.