Nobody serious disputes that Gaza's suffering is real or that Israel's conduct warrants scrutiny. But "genocide since Israel was created" is doing a lot of work for you; the ICJ found Palestinian rights were "plausibly" at risk, not that 1948 was a genocide.
Words mean things. Overreaching doesn't help the people you're claiming to defend, it just makes it easier for the other side to dismiss everything else you say.
If we apply the civilized world's standards of war then yes, Israelis who are also off-duty soldiers or reservists don't count as military targets.
If we apply Israel's standards, however, they are.
Are Gazans not allowed to apply the same standards to their adversaries that their adversaries openly apply to them? Would you be this courteous, in their position?
So even by the standard you're proposing, Hamas massacred around 358 people who wouldn't qualify as military targets under anyone's rules of engagement. Including theirs, apparently, since Hamas's own explanation was that they "may have thought" the ravers were soldiers "resting"; i.e. they didn't know and killed them anyway.
The argument you've constructed requires Hamas to have been applying a targeting framework. The evidence is that they found a large crowd of Israelis and opened fire.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-okayed-nova-music-festival...
Do you suppose Israel doesn't consider previous members of Hamas legitimate targets?
>The argument you've constructed requires Hamas to have been applying a targeting framework. The evidence is that they found a large crowd of Israelis and opened fire.
But that's effectively indistinguishable from the Israeli targeting framework where everyone connected to Hamas is a legitimate target.
The argument that prior military service permanently strips civilian status has no basis in IHL. If it did, every Israeli who'd ever served (which is nearly all of them, given conscription) would be a legitimate target forever.
So: not a targeting framework, more like a justification for killing the entire population.
On your second point: Israel's targeting decisions are also subject to IHL, and where they kill civilians unlawfully that's also a war crime. That's not a defence of Hamas... it's the same standard applied consistently.
"They do it too" doesn't make either lawful.
For what it's worth, joining Hamas is a choice; IDF service is compulsory. The cases aren't analogous.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/09/questions-and-answers-oc...
Neither participant in the Israel-Hamas conflict subscribes to that.
And I'm not really sure how you could expect the small resistance group to follow international humanitarian law when the big state they're fighting doesn't either? That seems absurd.
Many things are settled in international humanitarian law, thus far it hasn't stopped either side from ignoring it wholesale.
“Nimrod Cohen was abducted from Tank 3”
And if you want to play the number of victims game, even pre Oct 7 one side has always had it significantly worse than the other. After all, one side is a sovereign state that has a technologically advanced military, an air force, a navy, and air defense systems.
This isn't a conversation, it's not even engagement: that's just not reading.
On asymmetry: you've accidentally made the case for holding Israel to a higher standard. A nuclear-capable state with F-35s, Iron Dome and a $3.8bn annual US military subsidy [1] bears more responsibility for its choices than a militia in a blockaded strip of land; not less. That's what asymmetry actually means.
What it doesn't mean is that a music festival full of civilians somehow doesn't count. But nice try.
Was this not your choice of words?
> On asymmetry: you've accidentally made the case for holding Israel to a higher standard.
Huh? Are you replying to someone else?
Israel has killed 10s of thousands of civilians, a large portion of which are children. This along with many other factors - in addition to the higher standard expected from a sovereign state fighting an occupied people - is the reason we call it a genocide.
It's almost as if we genuinely believe that because there are more deaths on one side, that the other is deserving and should not be condemned despite innocence.
Isn't that interesting.
On substance: 72% of October 7th victims were civilians by Israel's own social security data [1]. tovej's argument that this was primarily a military operation depends on not counting them.
The Hannibal directive is a separate and legitimate concern. It has nothing to do with whether Hamas targeted civilians — it addresses what Israel did in response.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social...
You're playing devils advocate any time a white supremacist, Israel, or racist bigot is under scrutiny.
And every time you deploy bad faith debate tactics. E.g. here you're strawmanning my argument to say I ignore the percentage of civilians dead. That's not true at all. My argument does not depend on not counting civilian victims. October 7th was a military operation, a guerilla warfare operation.
Most of the Supernova ravers Hamas killed on October 7th who died that day did not die at the rave, but at ad hoc checkpoints far away from the rave. Military checkpoints set up to intercept military re-inforcements.
The rave was not announced until the 6th of October, and Hamas was not aware of it. When people fled the rave, this triggered a massive flow of car traffic. And based on Hamas' limited intelligence, it is not unreasonable to assume that a sudden rush of car traffic could be related to the conflict.
The IDF also set up a road block near the rave, which led to a huge throng (3000 ravers) being caught near the site of the firefight.
In other words, the biggest tragedy of October 7th, the Supernova rave, was not a target, and the deaths in this tragedy seem to have been due to an unfortunate coincidence.
And the Hannibal directive absolutely plays a role. We don't actually know how many civilians died due to it. It could easily be hundreds. The only actor who could verify this is Israel, and they are not keen to do so.
You're defending a position that doesn't actually care about Palestinian lives. Iran has funded Hamas for decades not because it wants a Palestinian state: it wants the end of Israel. Those aren't the same goal. You've let a theocracy that hangs gay people and flogs women position itself as the voice of Palestinian liberation and you haven't noticed.
I've seen the footage of Shani Louk. German tattoo artist, half-naked, paraded on a truck while people celebrated. Then months of stories she was alive in a Gazan hospital, used to extort money from her family. I saw a Thai farmer gruesomely beheaded by a shovel while the perpetrator screamed with joy on camera. You want to call that resistance? Go ahead. I'll call it what it is.
Criticising Hamas doesn't mean supporting the IDF. Find one line in this thread where I defended an Israeli war crime. One.
You called me far-right. The far-right wants ethnic cleansing. I want a two-state settlement and both sides held to the same legal standard... which is apparently a controversial position in this thread.
Palestinians are people. Israelis are people. The children dying in Gaza are a catastrophe. So is raising children to believe their highest calling is killing their neighbour. You can hold both of those thoughts unless you've decided one side's dead children count and the other's don't.