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Notes -
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.
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.
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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