No. of Recommendations: 6
Not since WWII has there been such carpet bombing of civilians, and at that time there was truly an existential threat. The IDF is the 4th largest military in the world and Israel is NOT fighting for it's life. Where are the Seal Team equivalents performing surgical strikes?Israel hasn't been "carpet bombing." If you're alluding to Dresden, allied bombers killed 25,000 people in barely two days - with fewer sorties over an area with a
fraction of the population density of Gaza. If Israel were bombing
indiscriminately and actually trying to blanket all of Gaza, the casualties would be
vastly higher.
As I've mentioned in our past conversations, the reason you don't have "Seal Team" equivalents is because those tactical operations are useful if you're trying to take out a
very small number of people - not when you're in combat against tens of thousands of belligerents. In those types of conflict situations, you're in a
military combat, not a small-unit special operations team. That means infantry with air support, not special ops.
Nor do I believe you're correct that Israel isn't fighting for its life. If Hamas can launch this kind of attack,
and not face any response because they are in a densely populated area, then Hamas (and others) will know that they will always and forever be able to launch such attacks without effective reprisals. This is asymmetric warfare. The way Israel is destroyed isn't by a superior Palestinian military force overcoming the IDF - any more than other large powerful militaries were "defeated" in Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietman and a host of other places. Asymmetric warfare is won by the weaker force inflicting enough cost that the stronger force
isn't willing to keep up the fight. In Israel's case, that would be Hamas and Hezbollah being successful enough in terrorizing the population to the point of not feeling safe enough, over a long enough time, to the point where they
aren't able to maintain a large and powerful military.
Witness the cruelty of cutting off water and power to starve the Gazan people of sustenance and medical care. How is this justifiable?Because it's a justifiable tactic to cut of resources to opposing belligerents - not simply justifiable, but common to the point of being nearly universal. When facing an enemy force, a
top military priority is to try to cut off their supplies. Food, water, fuel, munitions, heavy equipment - all things that are important to stop in order to degrade the fighting capabilities of an enemy force.
If an enemy force embeds itself
within a civilian population, it becomes impossible to cut off their access to resources without severely hurting - or eliminating - the ability of the civilian population to get access to such resources. The way the laws of war deal with this is by
forbidding combatants from deliberately embedding themselves within civilian populations -
not by prohibiting the other forces from trying to cut them off from supplies. For example:
One view, based on the wording of the prohibition in Article 54 AP I and, in particular, on its framing of the practice ‘as a method of warfare’, is that only the deliberate starvation of civilians is prohibited.39 A number of military manuals appear to support this interpretation.40 Additional support for this narrow interpretation comes from the wording of Article 54(2) AP I, which sets out an example of a violation of the prohibition of starvation, and refers to the destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population ‘for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population’ (emphasis added).https://www.chathamhouse.org/2019/06/sieges-law-an...You get into assessments of proportionality if you have a complete encirclement of a civilian population - but the military objective of depriving Hamas of food, water, fuel, power and equipment, given the likely effect on their capacity as a fighting force, is pretty significant. Hamas has no other supply lines - they can't continue fighting and defending their military infrastructure if they remain isolated.
The consequences of the current actions, despite the rhetoric of the press releases, is needless cruelty and death with yet again displacement of Palestinians from, and destructions of their homes. It is inexcusable and it is a war crime, if this slaughter can be called a war.It is not a war crime. The rules of war do not allow a belligerent party
to gain immunity from attack simply by being successful enough at interposing a civilian population between themselves and the other belligerent. Such interposition itself is a war crime - it does not render the other belligerent engaging in
normal acts of war into a war crime, despite the suffering of the civilian population. It imposes
some obligations on the other belligerent...but those obligations do not translate into having to cease military operations in order to avoid hurting the civilian population. Remember - the purpose of these rules is to
disincentivize belligerents from putting civilians in harm's way. If embedding yourself in a civilian population gives you
an enormous advantage by forcing your enemy to
completely disengage, then you will be much more likely to do it. Which is why military forces never consider the laws of war to require them to disengage.
