At least 13 people have been killed in a blast outside Gaza City’s biggest hospital, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says.
BBC Verify has verified graphic videos showing badly injured and possibly dead people lying outside the hospital.
The Israeli military has confirmed it struck an ambulance that it says was being used by Hamas operatives.
It did not say where the air strike took place.
“An IDF aircraft struck an ambulance that was identified by forces as being used by a Hamas terrorist cell in close proximity to their position in the battle zone,” it said in a statement.
…
Back in the early days after 9/11, some brilliant genius made a Flash game to explain the problem:
You have a crowded marketplace filled with people in stereotypical Arab dress, and one terrorist. He’s easy to spot because he has a gun.
Take your mouse, point and click on the terrorist, boom. Dead.
The collateral damage from killing the terrorist impacts the civilians around him creating 3-5 more terrorists. You can’t “win”, there will always be another terrorist. Your own actions perpetuate them.
The idea being to teach the player that the violent action of killing the first terrorist is, itself, the wrong action. “The only winning move is not to play” and all that.
The problem for us, as citizens of the 21st century, is that first action and which side took it is so far removed from living memory that all we get is a continual string of arguments of “Well you did x” and “but you did y” and “we wouldn’t have had to do y except that you did z”.
We aren’t going to get ANYWHERE until someone steps back and says “Yes, what Hamas did were war crimes, and what Israel is doing in response are ALSO war crimes.” One does not justify the other.