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Notes -
Why Not Simply: Gaza, some more.
As I understand it,
It seems that one way to defuse Hamas' tactic of using a civilian populace as an all-purpose shield and moral justification is to separate Hamas-ans from Gazans, prevent the Gazan class from providing aid to Hamas, prevent the Gazan class from attacking Israel, and then avoid mistreating the Gazan class. In other words, stop-the-world filtration:
(Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now)
I don't understand why Israel isn't doing this, and prefers to do horrific things to civilians and take the international consequences on the chin. Is it just because it's reinventing concentration/filtration camps, and not even Israel can handle the international blowback of that tactic at that scale? Is the scale impractical? Is the expense impractical? Is the needed bandwidth of processing humans not doable within Israeli manpower constraints? Do they simply not care that much? Do Gazans prefer to live freely in the current war zone that much more than food, board, and light prison regimentation? Is "after combat operations end" too fuzzy of a line to trust? Is there no trust in being released after internment, or good conditions during?
That's a war crime, you don't get to kill non-combatants who refuse to surrender to you. Their non-combatant status is not suppressed unless the military advantage of killing them is high enough.
Thanks for weighing in. I think I acknowledged this, that's the bit about "Yes I know it's evil, but it's less evil and seems back-of-envelope more practical than what they're doing now". The current Israeli actions also implement war crime criteria pretty well, so clearly they're up for that class of action either covertly or accepting it via negligence. The point of the question is that my proposal seems to be strictly superior in both humanitarian and logistical terms but isn't being taken, so I'm looking for reasons the that seeming isn't correct.
If Israel's outright policy is to commit a war crime, then they're playing a much more dangerous game which could result in the US applying much heavier pressure. It's unlikely they're going to go that route, doubly so when it would give their enemies a PR bonanza.
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