They can pull back, but they'll be fighting again when Hamas starts another war in a few months or years. There is no losing interest and giving up against an enemy that threatens your homeland.
If the Viet Cong had done 9/11 we would have turned their jungle into a parking lot.
Sunshine
1d ago
The Viet Cong didn't win, the Americans got tired of fighting and gave up. The Viet Cong never landed a single boot on American soil. There was never any question of the Viet Cong conquering America. In the sense that the Palestinians are too weak to conquer Israel, the Viet Cong were too weak to conquer America.
The difference between Hamas and the Viet Cong is that Hamas has invaded Israeli soil and killed Israeli civilians. The Israelis can't get tired of fighting and give up like the Americans did in Vietnam. If they could, they would have done it already. Hamas and its various sister organizations like Hezbollah will continue to attack Israel until one or the other is annihilated. Ergo, the Israelis have no choice but to continue fighting.
I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.
As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.
"Eh, they are not 'free Palestine' raped yet"
If Hamas had the military power to actually accomplish this, that would make their actions less pointlessly evil. The fact that Hamas' power is limited to terrorizing a few unarmed civilians and then scampering away in impotent terror when the real soldiers show up is, itself, the problem. The fact that they're too weak to have any chance of victory is the reason why their futile war crimes are so heinous. It's one thing to commit a necessary evil in order to liberate your people from oppression. It's another, much worse thing to commit a pointless evil just for the sake of doing it.
As Talleyrand once said of another act of self-destructive violence against civilians: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake."
Sunshine
1d ago
It isn't necessary to starve Hamas, merely to deprive them of money. Hamas's allies in the various NGOs and aid organizations help them steal most of the food that comes into Gaza, far more than they can eat themselves. They then sell that food to the starving civilians at high prices, which nets them millions of dollars to fund their war effort.
Israel is under no obligation to help the UN finance a terrorist organization.
A left-wing commune dweller saying that after the revolution they'll lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. A right-wing authoritarian saying they'd be a warlord an authoritarian society. I think you're making a conversion error when you say these are equivalent.
The would-be commune dweller is funny because leading discussion groups and making clothes out of scraps is no more plausible as a career after the revolution than it is before. If it's not profitable to do under a capitalist system them it's not practical to do under a communist system. If we had the money and desire for that kind of frivolous luxury then someone would already be paying you to do it.
Being a warlord is a real job, it's just that you chose for some reason to compare a regular person making clothes out of scraps with a highly-exclusive job reserved for social elites. A more reasonable comparison would be to a warlord's street-level enforcers, who actually tend to do quite well for themselves under an authoritarian system. "Under an authoritarian system I would be one of the dictator's goons enforcing his will on the people and exploiting his power to enrich myself," may not be a very moral stance, but no one can say that it's not a tried-and-true strategy for getting ahead.
If you work hard and kiss all the right asses you can climb the ladder of authoritarian goons until you become the warlord, like how Putin climbed through the KGB. That doesn't mean that everyone who doesn't make it all the way to the top is just wasting their time. Being a regular goon can still be a good job.
Maybe they found it easier to kill him when he was trapped in a prison cell unable to escape, than when he was free to move around at will? Contra to the memes, I don't think Hillary Clinton actually has an organization of John Wick style super-assassins at her beck and call ready to hunt down inconvenient witnesses wherever they may hide. Killing someone and making it look like an accident or suicide isn't exactly easy.
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