JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling. “Listen,” said Dr. Marwan Abu Sada as fighting raged around Shifa Hospital.

  • HowMany@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Because Israel is committing war crimes. Because Israel has stated, unequivocally, that Palestinians are animals and must be scourged off the face of the earth.

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        Oh, Hamas is airstriking hospitals and refugee camps too? No? They’re not? Only Israel is doing that?

        Why wouldn’t this genocide be blamed on the ones committing it? Use your head.

      • Count042@lemmy.ml
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        Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.

        And before you bring up human shields, the only ones to do so were the Israelis in operation Cast Lead. Read up on it of you don’t know. If you do and still say this, then you’re a genocidaire and I don’t give a shit what you say.

        • VentraSqwal@links.dartboard.social
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          I’m reading through the Wikipedia article and don’t see anything about the Israelis using human shields. Part of it mentions Hamas using human shields, hiding under hospitals, keeping weapons in houses or mosques, etc.

          Can you help narrow it down for me which part you’re talking about?

          • Count042@lemmy.ml
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            https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150152009en.pdf

            Page 48.

            Israel does a good job of making the world forget their actions.

            According to testimonies, in several cases Israeli forces also forced unarmed Palestinian civilian males (mostly adults but in two cases also children) to serve as “human shields”, including making them walk in front of armed soldiers; go into buildings to check for booby traps or gunmen; and inspect suspicious objects for explosives. These practices are not new. Numerous such cases have been documented in recent years and the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that such practices contradict International law and prohibited them in October 2005.73

      • Mir@programming.dev
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        Can you please reread what you just said? You’re saying it’s okay to kill children and innocent people in order to kill someone else you actually want to kill?

      • Madison420@lemmy.world
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        You really think using human shields is really a good excuse to bomb hospitals. “they’re using hostages! Quick teach those hostages a goddamn guided 2000lb lesson!”

          • Count042@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Get the fuck out of here justifying genocide.

            Never again was for everyone.

          • Madison420@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Look hamas killing “millions” is unlikely given they haven’t topped 5000.

            Coolio. So lemme grab your kids take them hostage and you can tell me again that murdering me and your children is the only solution to hostage situation.

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        There is clear evidence that at least some hospitals were alleged to be Hamas operation centers but in fact were not. But even if they were operation centers, would you still think it’s justified? How many Hamas members are worth how many “accidental” deaths of hospital staff and patients? Who would even dream of making such a formula? It’s sick.

        The issue at hand is about hospitals being destroyed, not about the Israel-Palestine conflict on the whole. Please save your “no side is right” language for an issue where that actually applies.

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    What a terrible headline. If APNews thinks it’s a war crime, it has a duty to say so. You can’t just write a headline like this without drawing the obvious inference.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
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        It is written in the passive. That’s intentional; it’s a classic approach that writers use to dodge the issue. It’s not OK and we shouldn’t excuse it.

      • stewsters@lemmy.world
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        Well it’s kind of open to interpretation, which may be why they didn’t want to directly say that, just imply it.

        Article 19 of the Geneva convention:

        The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.

        Now are firing qassam rockets “harmful to the enemy”? Probably.

        Has due warning been given? Maybe? It’s not well defined what that means. Does roof knocking count? Do you need to submit a form to their embassy?

        I think the big problem is that the kind of warfare we are seeing here is unlike what they saw when they wrote those laws.

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    Given most people aren’t reading the article, the particularly relevant points:

    International humanitarian law lends hospitals special protections during war. But hospitals can lose their protections if combatants use them to hide fighters or store weapons, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. […]

    In an editorial published Friday in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a warning to combatants that the burden of proof is on them if they claim hospitals, schools or houses of worship have lost their protected status because they are being used for military purposes. And the bar for evidence is very high.

    “If there is a doubt that a civilian object has lost its protective status, the attacker must assume that it is protected,” Khan wrote. “The burden of demonstrating that this protective status is lost rests with those who fire the gun, the missile, or the rocket in question.”

    TL;DR: If Hamas is conducting military operations from hospitals, they can be legitimate targets in the eyes of international law, but precautions still need to be taken to avoid civilian casualties and the case for their military use should be overwhelming, not amorphous or tenuous.

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    Because Israel is trying to genocide.

    They don’t care about Hamas, they just want Palestine gone.

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        We aren’t. But anyone that voices an opinion against Israel in my country is labeled an anti-Semite, so people stay quiet.

        Also Putin is doing the same, global out rage, no one really stepped in due to politics

      • John Richard@lemmy.world
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        Because if you don’t support genocide you are an antisemite, and only one of those can destroy your political aspirations (hint, it isn’t supporting genocide).

      • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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        Most civilians aren’t but they’ve found out in 3 weeks time that they live all live in pretend democracies and not real ones. Mask off we’re the Russia now.

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        Ever seen an oil tanker turn? That is the the way the world works with Israel slowly and not quick to judge. The rest of us though have had enough, fuck Israel and no funding of them whatsoever.

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      Oh, well if bad people did bad thing, that definitely justifies bombing civilians, which totally isn’t a war crime.

  • nautilus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    Why are hospitals in Gaza under Israel’s crosshairs? Why? Is it truly that difficult to step back and think for a moment about why Israel would want to erase the current populace entirely?

    Amazing, what a mystery

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      Not sure why you’re being downvoted… Israel an ethnostate, and what we’re seeing here are the early stages of a genocide. Look at any other ethnic cleansing in history, and you’ll easily see the parallels.

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        Well, I’m not sure early stages fits, that’s calling for a group to removed and Israel has been bombing water wells, while monopolizing all water supplies and providing only dangerously! small amounts of unclean water. Without question, this has caused unneeded deaths. Simmiliarly for electricity and food supplies.

        It’s tragically been a genocide for a long time.

        • whatwhatwhatwhat@lemmy.world
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          You know, I was trying to tread lightly, lest the Zionist apologists show up to try and redefine “genocide”.

          But the reality is this:

          • Tens of thousands of civilians are being murdered (shot, bombed, starved, water supply poisoned) by Israel’s military.
          • Israel is an ethnostate which believes that their race makes them god’s chosen people.
          • One of the Israeli government cabinet members has declared that the Palestinians in Gaza must be eradicated, and that he would drop a nuclear bomb on Gaze if he could.

          When you use the U.N.’s definition of genocide (“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”), the picture is pretty clear.

          • FoundTheVegan@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Absolutely. I hope I didn’t sound pedantic or talking down, my intent was just to have more details higher in the thread in case some of those zionist shit poster tolls take over the bottom. You’re 100% right on every point and I wish you weren’t.

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        War does not automatically equate to being a genocide just because people due. Otherwise, every war in history would.be genocide.

        There are Arabs & Palestinians that serve in the IDF too and have killed Palestinians. There are other Arabs in Jordan and Syria who have also gone to war against Palestine.

        You are using incindiary rhetoric to win an online argument, but your description doesn’t fit the facts.

        • Count042@lemmy.ml
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          You’re literally using the same arguments every genocidal government has used to justify their genocides in history.

      • Argonne@lemmy.world
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        Israel is definitely not an ethnostate. It has 20% Arabs. How many Jews does Palestine have?

        • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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          Calling a state an Ethnostate doesn’t mean you’re saying the population is entirely of one ethnicity. It means one ethnicity is given a privileged status above all others.

          Israel was founded when Zionists purged Palestinians from their homes and forced them into Gaza and the West Bank in order to create a Jewish majority state. That makes Israel an ethnostate by definition.

        • Count042@lemmy.ml
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          Israel has a law requiring Jewish people maintain demographic majority.

          It is the definition of an ethno state.

          Not only that, but it is a removed supremacist ethno state.

          Look up how they treat the Beta Israelis.

    • OneNot@lemmy.world
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      I don’t know why people insist on this narrative. Isn’t the truth horrible enough? Hamas is allegedly using hospitals as shields, which is horrible. Israel is willing to kill countless civilians to get at Hamas, which is also horrible.

      • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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        Because it’s what Israeli politicians and government officials actually believe. They aren’t even quiet about it. It’s genuinely not hard to prove the genocidal intent of the Israeli government.

        Unfortunately western media just tends to gloss over it all. I’m not sure if reporters can’t fathom the US supporting ethnic cleansing or if they just want to avoid the flack they’d receive by being honest. Either way, it’s unfortunate because well meaning liberals are left to assume Israel genuinely cares about stopping Hamas and aren’t using them as a pretext to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip.

        • cuibono@lemmy.world
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          Unfortunately western media just tends to gloss over it all. I’m not sure if reporters can’t fathom the US supporting ethnic cleansing or if they just want to avoid the flack they’d receive by being honest.

          Please watch a documentary that covers any of the previous foreign wars the US has been in, especially those that came about before the internet boom (or better yet, one before and one after). I personally like to recommend the Panama Deception because it’s free on youtube and pretty short and succinct (only 90 min). On top of that Panama is still currently dealing with the issues started and maintained during the “wars” discussed in that documentary (I don’t knowing if you’ve seen about the ongoing Canadian mining protests).

          The documentary covers some of what happened obviously, but it also shows some of the news airing at the time from the biggest American news channels that were covering the wars and how they covered it. You’d be amazed at what was claimed at home vs what was happening overseas. The MSM may as well have been a third arm of the US government. As much as they like to pretend to be neutral on domestic affairs which the people watching would easily be able to criticize, it should really be no shock to anyone that they’d mostly be parroting US gov talking points when it comes to foreign affairs.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, I mean there are people in the Israeli Government calling all Palestinians (not just Hamas) “animals”, others who say that Palestinians won’t be allowed to get back to Northern Gaza and there’s even a member of that Government who seriously suggested Israel should nuke Gaza.

      And then, of course, there is the long track record of Israel doing things like murdering journalists and killing Palestinian kids throwing rocks at their armored diggers, especially under governments with these same people in them.

      People who have a track record of murdering journalists and children, bombing hospitals full of those they see as “animals” which they want to see dead or out of Gaza, and then providing to the World some unverifiable excuse that blames somebody else and doesn’t even pass the sniff test when it comes to proportionality in the use of force is hardly out of character, especially because History has various examples of people who think like that going full on mass-murderer in similar ways.

  • MuuuaadDib@lemm.ee
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    Crazy thought, why don’t we just not bomb hospitals? Anyone?

    Or how to make people hate you more than Hamas, a book by the IDF.

    • Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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      And if rockets and other weapons really are being fired from hospitals? What do you do then?

      • CaptFeather@lemm.ee
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        That’s up to them to figure out how to do it with the least amount of civilian casualty then. Moot point anyway considering nothing has come out with overwhelming proof of Hamas using the hospital as cover.

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          We already know Hamas is in that hospital and have fired at least one anti-tank rocket out of it.

          There’s also the time Islamic Jihadists fired missiles from right next to a different hospital.

          Hamas has always used civilian infrastructure to attack from, it’s their MO. They want Palestinian civilians to get killed by Israel.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling.

    “It was the thing we somehow told ourselves wouldn’t happen,” he said, speaking by phone from the central city of Deir al-Balah, where he arrived by foot Friday after escaping what he said were strikes on the hospital with tens of thousands of others.

    “It’s to say, ‘Not only will we kill and wound you, we will ensure you have nowhere to go to be treated,’” said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British Palestinian surgeon working for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza City.

    Nonetheless, there must be plenty of warning before attacks to allow for the safe evacuation of patients and medical workers, ICRC legal officer Cordula Droege said.

    Even if Israel succeeds in proving Shifa conceals a Hamas command center, the tenets of international law remain in place, said Jessica Wolfendale, expert in military ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

    In an editorial published Friday in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a warning to combatants that the burden of proof is on them if they claim hospitals, schools or houses of worship have lost their protected status because they are being used for military purposes.


    The original article contains 1,155 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              If they actually did that the entirety of West Asia and North Africa would attack them and all their allies would abandon them.

              So actually, no, Israel doesn’t have that capability.

              • rigatti@lemmy.world
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                You seem to have a different understanding of capability than I do. They could do it, so they have the capability, but that says nothing about the consequences.

                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                  No, they would be dogpiled as they did it. They wouldn’t be able to finish the job before the whole world ate them alive.

        • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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          Hamas killed around 1100 israelis on Oct 7.

          Israel killed at least 122 of the 1200 themselves. Most likely more

          350 of the israelis killed were IDF

          This mean the civilian casualty rate was around 70%. On Oct 7.

          Hamas has a far better civilian casualty rate than America which goes around 80-90 while committing their supposed genocide attack. This is not an accident you can realize by blind firing into civilian areas.

          Purely from these numbers we can conclude in ACTIONS not words that Hamas takes decent care to avoid civilian deaths even when attacking. Far better than israel which just bombs everything that moves.

    • Count042@lemmy.ml
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      Israel uses human shields. Operation Cast lead is what human shields looks like.

      Stop justifying war crime in defense of an apartheid ethno state trying to commit genocide.

      • Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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        That was 15 years ago, and I see absolutely no mention of Israeli human shields anywhere regarding Cast Lead.

        • Count042@lemmy.ml
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          https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150152009en.pdf

          Page 48.

          Israel does a good job of making the world forget their actions.

          According to testimonies, in several cases Israeli forces also forced unarmed Palestinian civilian males (mostly adults but in two cases also children) to serve as “human shields”, including making them walk in front of armed soldiers; go into buildings to check for booby traps or gunmen; and inspect suspicious objects for explosives. These practices are not new. Numerous such cases have been documented in recent years and the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that such practices contradict International law and prohibited them in October 2005.73

  • Quereller@lemmy.one
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    From the ISW report today: Israeli forces fought Palestinian militia fighters near the Square of the Unknown Soldier less than half a kilometer from the al Shifa Hospital complex.[1] A Palestinian journalist reported that the al Qassem Brigades—the military wing of Hamas—ambushed Israeli forces south of the Square of the Unknown Soldier on Shuhada Street.[2] Other Palestinian militia fighters fought Israeli forces on Omar Mukhtar Street, which bounds the square.[3]

    If you build your defense in urban environment you are supposed to evacuate the civilians. This is standard for any half competent army.

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social
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      If you build your defense in urban environment you are supposed to evacuate the civilians. This is standard for any half competent army.

      To where? Gaza is small enough as is, and the whole strip is being bombed by Israel.

      Also, Hamas isn’t an army; they’re a resistance force. Gaza doesn’t have a proper army, which is why they have to resort to asymmetrical warfare.

      • Quereller@lemmy.one
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        Away from Gaza City were they currently focus their defensive efforts.

        They have a structure and recognition marks, they fall under the Geneva convention as lawful combatants.

        Asymmetrical warfare does not allow you to use perfidy and abuse of a protected status.