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Another day, another Guardian article.
I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.
Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.
Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.
Also:
So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.
Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.
More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.
This wouldn't stop Israel. The optics were terrible when they shoot children in the back but they do it anyway and clear it in court. There's no shortage of bad optics on either side.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/11/27/fact-check-did-israeli-children-really-sing-about-annihilating-everyone-in-gaza
Well they sure did shoot at them before the war: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session40/Documents/A_HRC_40_74_CRP2.pdf
Imagine you're Israeli. All your life you hear about suicide bombings, attacks, rockets, problems all coming from these dirty uncivilized Arabs who belong to a death cult that hates your religion and routinely sneak-attack on your religious holidays. You hate these people.
Imagine you're Palestinian. Israeli troops will knock down your door at night-time and search your apartment. You're not allowed to move freely, they cut power off, they steal your land like they've been stealing it for decades now. You spent your whole childhood punctuated by bombs, assassinations of peaceful protestors, dead family members, dead neighbours, arrests, torture... You hate these people.
This is a war of hatred. They hate eachother (as a collective). Not all of them hate eachother but enough do. We cannot model this war without understanding that there's intense hatred. Trying to model leadership or boots-on-the-ground as calculating, rational plotters is not going to yield good predictions.
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There's no substitute for an impartial investigation with international observers, a complete exhumation of the alleged mass graves, and autopsies to prove time and cause of death, and the quantity of human remains. Until that happens, if it ever does, one should be skeptical of these reports and eyewitness accounts. And if Hamas says that the mass graves are not allowed to be exhumed because that would be disrespectful to the dead massacred by the IDF, then their claims can be dismissed outright.
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I have to confess that I simply do not care about the day-to-day litigation of whether such-and-such attack or finding constitutes a "war crime" or not. The present conflict is the direct result of choices made by Gazans. The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership, they're simply unwilling to accept the terms of surrender. Arguing about whether a given incident is an example of Israelis behaving badly seems about on par with someone in 1944 arguing that the American response to Pearl Harbor has been wildly disproportionate, and they've sank way more warships than Japan ever sank of the Americans, and it would be terrible to hurt any innocent Japanese civilians. Anyone arguing this would rightly be seen as an anti-American agitator. By all means, sort out whatever you can when it comes to conduct of your soldiers after the war, but I just do not care about the claims of the side that picked a fight that they can't win, particularly when that side's chief tactic is trying to get civilians killed to create international pressure. I am completely fine with Israel inflicting misery until their enemy surrenders.
Even this is charitable, because this assumes that the Gazans will actually listen and not just keep on jihadin' on their own. Maybe most will, of course, but "most" is probably not enough for Israel at the moment.
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"Proportionality" is in fact an important concept in international law contexts, but it's nearly always misrepresented by the legacy media, either due to ignorance or malice or both. Properly used, it refers to the scope of collateral damage that is permissible when seeking to eliminate a legitimate military target--the excess damage must be proportional to the military value of the intended target. It has literally nothing whatsoever to do with being "proportional" to the damage caused by the other side.
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Israel is under no extremely urgent (ie advancing enemy army) pressure to retreat, so mass graves of executed dead Gazans with their hands tied behind their backs left where the UN can find them seems very unlikely. That said, and as you suggest, it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.
Even though Israel is a rich country, it’s small by first-world standards with only 9.5 million inhabitants. The US or China could intern a few million people, Israel can’t. The population of Gaza is a quarter of Israel’s, it would be like the US permanently occupying a country of 80 million people extremely hostile to America in every way (far more than the Germans or Japanese were to Americans, or arguably even the Afghans and Iraqis were) for deeply ingrained ethnic and religious reasons.
I would hesitate to say that Arabs will never accept being ruled by Jews, since 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, but occupying Gaza permanently would put a severe and probably unsustainable strain on Israel’s finances.
The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.
That hasn’t been true for decades. The Geneva Conventions don’t permit summary executions of anybody. Unlawful combatants are considered to be civilians and so fall under GC I-IV article 4. This means that any combat they engage in can be considered a domestic crime, no different than if you decided to run around shooting at the military right now.
But, just like any other civilian, unlawful combatants are still afforded the right to a fair trial. If they’re found guilty, then sure, you can execute them if that’s the prescribed punishment for what they’re convicted of. What you don’t get to do is line people up against a wall like you’re the German army in 1914 executing “Francs-tireurs”.
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The US position from the the GWB era is of course that these would be unlawful enemy combatants who could be subject to torture without any violations of international law. I do not share this position (because I detest torture), but emotionally I would have no problem with any Gazans found carrying a firearm or explosive device being presumed partisans and getting a short court-martial followed by a long drop.
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome. Then again, being a partisan has always had its perils, not matter if you were fighting Nazi occupation in France or for a communist revolution in Latin America.
Still, as far as armed opponents are concerned, my preferred frame of reference is to see the Gaza war as a police action against especially murderous bandits in a border region which is not a matter for international law. If any country wants to make it a matter of international law, I would encourage them to ship grant their passports and uniforms to Hamas.
My frustration is that that I do not see any winnable end game in that strategy. A majority of Gazans seem to be happy with Hamas. Kill 90% of their fighters and they will just come back in a decade.
One thing would be to invite an international peace keeping force. But even if you find any countries outside Iran who would be willing to participate, this would mostly bring in a lot of weapons while at the same time limiting the tactical options of IDF to respond to future attacks on Israel.
Or they could try a carrot and stick approach. Split Gaza into ten zones separated by borders. Able-bodied men are restricted from passing between zones, while everyone else can move freely around unless they are carrying goods. Each zone gets assigned a cooperation level. At cooperation level zero you only let the goods in which humanitarian law absolutely requires. Water pipes can be turned into rockets, Rebar makes for makeshift weapons, so you get to live in tents and carry your water. That is the stick. Any zones which manage not to shoot rockets at Israel, rats out Hamas fighters to the IDF and elect a leadership which does not want to drown the Jews in the sea moves up on the cooperation level. They get more privileges. Houses out of concrete, zone transition privileges for able-bodied men, shorter waiting times at checkpoints, vehicles, work permits for Israel, ultimately perhaps an Israeli passport (with limited franchise if you want to preserve the Jewish ethno-state, whatever), or broader rights of self-determination. That is the carrot.
Perhaps seed one zone by requiring any able-bodied man wanting to enter to publicly renounce Hamas in a way which will get him on their kill-list. Or with known IDF collaborators.
My theory is that given the choice of maintaining eternal animosity towards Israel and living in a country which is not a total third world shithole, most people might eventually relent on their Antisemitism. As you pointed out, the 20% Arab Israeli mostly manage to suppress any urges they might have to slaughter their Jewish neighbors and instead enjoy a life as second-class citizens in a country which offers an amazing quality of life compared to its neighbors.
Less gruesome for whom?
These people are already happy to kill and rape civilians and turn their own people into unwilling martyrs while benefiting from the restraints on their opponents.
I was speaking generally. I feel that (would-be) genociders such as Hamas come as close as you can get to being hostis humani generis without leaving dry land.
But not all non-state actors who ever take up arms against a country are that evil. For example, I do not think that the US civil war would have been improved if the North had decided that since the South represented no state they recognized, they were free to kill Confederate soldiers like dogs in the street. Or if the Brits had adopted that stance with regard to the US during the war of independence.
So a stance of "well, these gunmen are not representing a nation state, no reason to give quarter to them" would have predictably bad outcomes whenever you are not fighting Hamas or the like.
Isn't it less about representing a recognized state, and more about wearing uniforms and obeying an authority that can order a surrender? There were Confederate partisans, but the Confederate armies wore uniforms and surrendered when ordered. Pirates do neither. Hamas doesn't wear uniforms, and I doubt that most of them would surrender if their leadership in Qatar suddenly said "it's over now, we've lost the war: Israel is too powerful, and we don't want innocent Gazans to suffer any more".
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I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.
"Ethnic cleansing" is so broad that I think Israel is doing it.
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There’s also quite a lot of the public which simply does not care about savages in the desert somewhere and thinks that Israel is within their rights to wipe them all out since they can’t learn to behave.
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I am as anti-Hamas as they come, but the moment the IDF goes full Einsatzgruppen on Gaze (like Hamas did on Israel), my sympathy level for the Israeli state will drop to similar levels as I have for Hamas.
If the government of Israel had wanted to genocide Gaza, the 'best' option would have been to turn it into a radioactive parking lot on Oct 7. It is not a 'great' option, there is a reasonable chance that the US would stay out of it if Iran attacked in retaliation (which it might), and wiping out a population with nukes might be harder than it sounds.
Of course, me-the-non-genocidal-voter would also be furious about that. I would probably support withdrawing all Western military aid until such a time as Israel has sent every singe person involved with the nuking decision to stand trial in the Hague and their military forces being put under the command of a less genocidal country which allows a Palestinian state in the West Banks, but I generally do not support genociding populations as reprisals for government action, which would be the long term outcome if Western support was just withdrawn.
From a would-be genociders frame of mind, it is always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. If Hamas had killed their victims at a rate of 100 per week instead of most in a single day (which is not a realistic hypothetical for military reasons), I would basically have supported whatever it takes to stop the killing. In our world where their victims were already dead, fighting Hamas is still paramount, but not especially urgent. A slow genocide by IDF through mass executions would not be strategically sound for similar reasons: the backslash will stop the act long before you manage to murder a non-trivial amount of the population.
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The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment. If anything blind support for Israel is their prime directive and they ignore things Israel does in a way they wouldn't do for anyone else. The October 7th attack was lied about to an absurd extent, with stories of mass baby burnings and rapes that turned out to be as true as Saddam's nukes. Those stories were pushed hard by pro zionist media which is essentially all media. This report has more credible sources than those stories.
The media is also still regularly uncritically reporting numbers from de-facto Hamas controlled bodies such as the Health Ministry. The UN is likewise blindly trusted, despite the fact that they have been caught red-handed over and over at this point. There is a very strong zionist lobby with a lot of influence, but the media landscape as a whole is a mix of very different biases.
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Do you count the Guardian as part of the media? That was the second most prominently placed story at the time I read it, if I recall correctly.
What about the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which reports roughly the same (even if I get a bit more of a balanced vibe from them as opposed to the Guardian)? I did not cherry-pick here, this was really the first source I checked (after stumbling over it on the Guardian, which I read for the math puzzles or something).
If I go to the NYT, paywall aside, or CNN, or BBC or god-help-me Fox-News, is your prediction that I will only will not have reported it because of their 'blind support for Israel'?
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I mean, I did forget about the ADL, and that's my bad, but as you say they aren't in play either and so I think the overall issue of "remarkably little of the USA is actually movable by any potential Israeli warcrimes, because most of the populace either is already dead-set against Israel, is shielded from the information, or is so pro-Israel it'd still support it" still exists.
I am not so sure information doesn't matter:
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/emotions-news-and-knowledge-about-the-israel-hamas-war/
Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian. There is a major divide between young and old americans and that is probably due to getting info from pro zionist mainstream media vs those who get information online.
In large part the only Americans who care about Palestinian casualties at all are already pro-Palestine.
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My point is: suppose Israel commits an atrocity. People who consume pro-Palestinian media will hear about it and be outraged, but they mostly already hate Israel so nothing's changed. People who consume pro-Israel media will just hear Israel's side of the story, as implausible as it may be, and therefore won't be outraged because they don't know it happened, so nothing's changed.
Sure, there are people who care about the truth, have a variety of sources, but are not either already pro-Palestinian or rabidly pro-Israel and thus can be flipped - those people are in play. But there aren't actually all that many of them.
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You're thinking that it might be a case of, "if we're going to he accused of genocide for asking civilians to leave a combat area, we might as well commit some anyway to make it worthwhile?" Or more of a "just be less careful" sort of thing?
I think the “asking civilians to leave a combat area” is doing a lot of work when the whole territory (minus Rafa for now) is being reported as being a combat zone.
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I honestly don't know what's going on or will be going on. I pay very little attention to the Israel/Palestine situation because I already know what I want to do with it (nothing) and because there's not much chance of it blowing up into Global Thermonuclear War (if Iran gets nukes and nukes Israel, I imagine that would suck for anyone in the region, but it's not clear how that turns into great-power arsenals flying).
Just saying, if I were Bibi I'd assume that mostly either the funding will be pulled or it won't and my war conduct wasn't super-relevant. It's not impossible that war crimes could affect the money tap, but it's hardly a clear deciding factor.
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