I mean considering Israel has had the upper hand and controls access to basic services, I can't imagine there aren't other options.
When you kill that many innocent people who live next door to you, you can never just "destroy hamas" unless you basically destroy all those people.
It's not a good situation.
At any rate, the target wasn’t the civilian settlement. It was a Hamas headquarters and weapons production facility. Hamas tends to build these things underneath and around civilian population centers.
If Hamas attacks innocents for leaving and the IDF attacks them for staying, it's kind of a shitty thing to do then to just blow them up right?
Considering Israel has for sure the upper hand, I don't see why they need to be so hasty to just blow the shit out of everything really?
I'm not sure if you have Children but good luck just "fleeing south" with a family. Heavily pregnant wife and 2 kids for example.
Experts on international humanitarian law said asking civilians to leave did not absolve Israel of the responsibility to protect those who chose to stay, when it was launching attacks.
“Civilians that that cannot leave or do not leave are still civilians. And so the same rules apply,” said Helen Duffy, professor of international humanitarian law and human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
“You cannot target civilians. You cannot carry out indiscriminate attacks and you cannot carry out attacks that have disproportionate impact on civilians and civilian objects.”
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/01/jabalia-camp-a...
It is a very shitty situation, which is why Israel spent the last 17 years following the exact policy you’re advocating, including refraining from airstrikes when Hamas had enough human shields in place. After October 7, that’s no longer a viable policy. Hamas needs to be removed from power, not just for the security of Israel but also for the good of the Palestinians in Gaza whom Hamas has been murdering and robbing for the past 17 years. Allowing Hamas to protect themselves by using the civilian population of Gaza as human shields only incentivizes that behavior and protects Hamas.
Israel has “the upper hand” only because of the weapons that you’re demanding they don’t use. No urban battle in recent history—not Fallujah, not Mosul where ISIS was defeated—has ever taken place without airstrikes and civilian casualties. There is no way to win the battle for Gaza without any civilian casualties, and that’s a deplorable state of affairs, made worse by the actions of Hamas. Unfortunately, allowing Hamas to stay in power would be even worse.
All told, the process of eliminating ISIS’ control over vast swaths of Iraq and Syria led to many thousands of civilian casualties. And yet, everyone seems to agree that between that outcome and the possibility of allowing ISIS to persist, this was the preferable choice between two very bad outcomes. It was a goal that, although briefly and inconsistently, was shared by the US and Russia, all sides of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey, and even Iran.
Just like ISIS, allowing Hamas to persist is no longer a viable possibility. People call for a cease fire, but the last cease fire was broken by Hamas when they committed the bloodiest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust—itself an atrocity that was only ended through a war that entailed the deaths of probably millions of German civilians at the hands of the Allies.
Innocent people in Gaza do exist. They exist as hostages of Hamas. I don’t mean just the hundreds of hostages they captured on October 7th; I mean that Hamas is holding the entire population of the Gaza Strip hostage. They build underground tunnels to protect their fighters and their weapons, but nothing to protect civilians. Instead they place refugees on top of their underground command centers and weapons caches. Even when they fire their terror rockets into Israel, many of them never make it past the borders of Gaza. And when this happens, they lie, they accuse Israel of committing attacks on the innocent people of Gaza that actually happened at the hands of Hamas and their allies, and they completely fabricate numbers. Any of the numbers you see reported and attributed to a “health ministry” in Gaza are Hamas fabrications; Western media is strangely gullible about this sort of thing for reasons I can’t explain. And so claims about “the destruction of thousands of children” are little more than Hamas propaganda.
Israel has held back their offensives for weeks, provided directed warnings to Gaza residents (at the expense of tipping off Hamas when and where they would strike), and given several days’ warning for Gaza residents to evacuate south of the Wadi Gaza. In response, Hamas blocked the roads and bombed Palestinian refugees traveling towards this safe zone.
The only path to a peaceful future for the people of Gaza and Israel is the elimination of Hamas, just as ISIS had to be eliminated. It is a horrible situation, but it is Hamas who has made it this way and that is why Hamas needs to be destroyed. Just because they have better PR than ISIS did doesn’t change the situation on the ground.