The only major countries/blocs that are ICC members are the EU/EFTA/EU ascension candidates, UK, Canada, Mercusor (lowkey surprised Venezuela's still a signatory), Mexico, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and NZ.
Edit:
Yes. 124 nations did initially sign the Rome Statute.
I meant regional powers/countries that matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
> The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Act authorizes the president of the United States to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization led to the act being colloquially nicknamed "The Hague Invasion Act", as the act allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.
It was introduced in 2002 when the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and hasn't been rescinded. So if the US ever committed war crimes in those countries, or any other ones; too bad. The US so totally and completely doesn't recognise the ICC's jurisdiction that it will literally invade the Netherlands in order to not be bound by it in any way, shape or form.
The "Hague Invasion Act" is performative silliness enacted in the immediate wake of September 11. The truth is that no major European country is going to arrest an American, Indian, Philipino or Israeli politician. There's kind of a deus ex machina thing happening with the ICC; you still have to do standard-issue diplomacy.
No, it wasn't; the ICC (which the US had a lead role in negotiating and initially signed despite never ratifying it) was never going to have retroactive authority, and the US knew that was not an issue long before it “unsigned” the Rome Statute.
Both the unsigning and the “Hague invasion act” were in 2002, during the runup to the 2003 Iraq War; it was about protecting people then in office from consequences in the war of aggression they were about to launch, to the extent it was about protecting specific people and not just the broad idea of American exceptionalism and opposition of the US government of the time to the idea of international institutions not fully subordinated to the US.
The ICC was formed out of the ICJ, to tackle matters that rose beyond 'dispute' between states. The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials, which defined war crimes and crimes against humanity for the first time, so it would not have been really retroactive. These things were already crimes, there just wasn't a body capable of prosecuting them.
No, it wasn't. In any sense.
It was a permanent successor to ad hoc criminal tribunals like the International Military Tribunal, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
> The ICJ came out of the IMT, which was the Nuremburg trials
No, it didn't, it was the UN system's successor to the League of Nations system's Permanent International Court of Justice (the ICJ statute is modelled on that of the PICJ, the PICJ transferred irs assets and archives to the ICJ on its dissolution, the ICJ was headquartered in the Peace Palace that had held the HQ of the PICJ, and the ICJ even adopted the PICJ seal.)
The ICJ—like the PICJ, a court for disputes between nations—was in no respect a successor to International Military Tribunal, which dealt with crimes by individuals (and, indeed had most of its lifespan during that of the ICJ, starting work only a few months before the ICJ.)
Wikipedia says there are 124 states party to the Rome Statute and there are 193 sovereign states that are members of the united nations. Thats 64%, which is most countries.
Non-signatories are overwhelmingly represented by a handful of countries with very large populations. None of the 5 most populated countries in the world are signatories, and out of the 10 most populated, only 4 are signatories (Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Mexico). Out of the top 20 most populated countries, 10 are signatories.
Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey have all previously expressed intentions of signing the Rome Statute, if only these countries would do so, it would bring over 60% of the world’s population under it.
The standard semantics of ‘most countries’ counts countries, not the people in them. Of course the related claim that the majority of /people/ do not live in state parties to the Rome Statute has different truth conditions.
This isn’t a guerilla war either, it’s the actual official government party. One who has actively promised sequels of the attack.
What would you do in such a situation?
> What would you do in such a situation?
The situation is that Israel is an oppressor and an occupier, so what should it do? Well, first of all it should have made different choices in the past, honest and fair and peaceful choices. Which it didn't make, and it's its fault. But it's never too late. It should have made honest, fair and peaceful choices also in this occasion- mourned its deads, vowed to bring those responsible to justice, and engaged with Palestinian counterparts to withdraw within the 1967 borders and promote the birth of a Palestinian state.
Of course, it didn't do any of those things. It did exactly what Hamas expected.
Yes: Israel did exactly what Hamas expected. The problem for Hamas is twofold:
* Hamas thought the urban combat to root them out of Gaza City and Khan Younis would be a Vietnam-scale bloodbath that would tie the IDF up indefinitely until they were forced to make a truce.
* Hamas's messianic nutbag leader genuinely believed that he was ushering in the end of days, and that the IRGC's other assets would immediately commit to full scale combat operations against the IDF. Instead: Hezbollah noped the hell out, and Iran launched a large scale drone attack that ended up providing a Boeing and Lockheed-style fireworks display in which other Arab states, even as Israel was massacring Palestinian civilians, pitched in to help. Then Iran "declared the matter resolved". Gulp.
Sometimes, if only strategically, it makes sense to do what your enemy wants you to, because your enemy is stupid.
This is more or less why Israel has so much support between Evangelical Christians. A relatively large number of these people actually want the world to end because they really believe in the Rapture and that they’ll be saved.
That said, a lot of evangelicals do believe the world is about to end and are willing to pay to hasten the process.
No, the real news here is of course the news: the ICC seeks to arrest Israeli top leaders as much as the Hamas leaders. The subject that is going from being everyone's darling to international pariah is Israel, absolutely no doubt about this. This is a massive win for Palestine and those who claim to fight for it, including Hamas- with the potential for historical consequences.
My take is that this was the intention behind the October 7th attack- to drive Israel to such a violent retaliation as to force the world to take notice and to condemn Israel. I might be wrong and the victory might be entirely an unintended consequence. However your interpretation essentially requires Hamas to have zero knowledge of the real ratio of military force between Hamas/ Iran and Israel, and zero knowledge of the fact that the US have always been ready to commit their entire military for Israel. And even your imagined "win" scenario for Hamas is Israel committing to "a truce"- which is what they already had before Oct 7.
* Iran's fireworks display is the result of Israel, not Hamas, trying to drag Iran into the war.
I see very strong parallels between this and the Dublin 1916 rising. I don't believe the leaders of the Irish rebels could beat the British - it was seen as a "blood sacrifice" and a way to show the world the brutality of British colonial power. The Brits duly obliged and brutally put down the rising and set the wheels of an independent Ireland in motion.
I have to say though, that the 1916 rebels didn't go out of their way to kill civilians like Hamas clearly did on the 7th ...
You're missing an important part about tens of thousands of rockets and mortars being fired from Gaza at Israel and terrorism originating from Gaza at Israel. Israel didn't just randomly attack Gaza.
Here's what really happened in Gaza: Israel completely withdrew in 2005 and was not occupying Gaza any more. It handed the entire Gaza strip to the Palestinian Authority. There was even an agreement for safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_freedom_of_movemen...
Not to mention that even before 2005 Israel handed control of most of the Gaza strip to the PA as part of the Oslo accords (and agreement to hand Gaza and Jericho over to the Palestinians predates the Oslo accords).
In 2007 following Palestinian elections Hamas took control of the Gaza strip by force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gaza_(2007) Israel only imposed a full blockade of Gaza as a result of this change because Hamas' stated goal is/was the destruction of Israel. Despite Israel's blockade Gaza has a border with Egypt and had no shortage of goods (and weaponry) through smuggling and other means. There was also plenty of travel in and out of the Gaza strip (both towards Israel and the West Bank and towards Egypt) and there were plenty of good going into Gaza through Israel. Gazans also worked in Israel. Gaza also had a power station and a water desalination plant. It has billions of dollars of aid and investment flowing into it (Ismail Hanyah needs to be a billionaire after all).
So Israel was neither an oppressor nor an occupier in Gaza. It took actions to try and prevent Hamas from arming itself.
The other part wrong with your premise is that Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel within the 1967 borders. They do not. Maybe some of them do. But many do not. When the Oslo peace process was accelerating towards that goal Palestinians started a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians which results in the killing of Rabin, the rise of the right, and the termination of the peace process.
EDIT:
Bombings by Hamas starting 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
Rabin's assassination 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
1993: Oslo accords https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
2007: Blockade of Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip
2005: Disengagement from Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...
Rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_...
Gaza-Israel barrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_barrier
Netanyahu has supported Hamas long before 2005 as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The elections were pushed by Bush at a time when PA were seen as corrupt. When they lost Bush tried to get them to coup and Hamas took over and kicked them out as a reaction to that.
>In July 1995, Netanyahu led a mock funeral procession featuring a coffin and hangman's noose at an anti-Rabin rally where protesters chanted, "Death to Rabin"
Should tell is everything we need to know about the people in power now.
Maybe the Palestinians were not happy with the deal, them losing their land. Not to forget previous atrocities perpetrated by Jewish terrorists and the nakba.
> Under a 2007 agreement between Egypt and Israel, Egypt controls the crossing but imports through the Rafah crossing require Israeli approval.
Doubly untrue today; Israel took complete control of it on May 6.
Factually this was never Palestinian land. This was Ottoman land, then British land, then Israel. Many Palestinians are not native (e.g. El-Masri, "The Egyptian", is a common family name in Gaza, because they are Egyptians) and the Jewish people have as much of a claim on the land as they do. Parts of the land were also under Egyptian and Jordanian control for some time (ask them why they didn't establish a Palestinian State over these lands while they had them by the way). Jewish refugees immigrated to the region before 1948 because they had nowhere else to go. Many Israeli Jews have been expelled from Arab countries under violence and their assets stolen. The Arab behavior toward Jews in the region is purely racist, there's no other way to look at it.
Also factually what pushed the Israeli right wing to demonstrate was Hamas' suicide bombing attacks. I was there and I know this first hand. You're not going to rewrite history by referring to some random fact.
Israel blockaded Gaza. Blockades are legal. Gaza still had a border with Egypt which Egypt chose to blockade as well. Gaza was effectively a polity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polity) and was at war with Israel. What should amaze you is that Israel supplied Gaza with electricity (Gaza also had their own power station) and with water (Gaza has wells and a desalination plant) and allowed good in all while being enemy territory under the control of Hamas. Hamas stole the aid flowing into Gaza to buy weapons and build tunnels.
> The Nakba was an outcome of Arabs deciding to attack Israel in 1948, they wanted to wipe it off the map, and they lost. They rejected the partition plan.
The "partition plan" was a plan to give part of Palestine to Israel. It's pretty natural that one side refused and the other accepted- the action is the same but the outcome is the opposite for the two parties. Trying to spin it like "they both got the same generous offer" is propaganda.
But even more important is that the partition plan assigned to a "Jewish state" a territory whose population was 45% Palestinian. This means that either
a) they thought it was possible to create a Jewish democratic state with a 45% of the population non-Jewish, or
b) the plan was to enforce apartheid from the beginning, or
c) the plan was ethnic cleansing from the beginning.
And- lo and behold- ethnic cleansing is exactly what happened one minute after the creation of Israel. How convenient that it was the Palestinian's fault.
But this "Nakba" stuff appears invariably to be coded appeals to a "one-state solution". Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the world's best trained military and a strong economy that, contrary to activist opinion, stands on its own two feet. There is only one outcome in a "one-state solution" and it's not the one you (or I) want.
It's worth pushing back on existential arguments against Israel as it's currently construed. "Mass murder of Israeli civilians is unprovoked because Nakba" is one of those. The correct response is "no, things are much more complicated than that."
Gaza is considered an occupied territory by all international bodies with the power and authority to make such a determination, for excellent reasons that you can look up. End of the story. What you do (and Israel does, for propaganda purposes) is to confuse the civilian settlement with the military occupation, or to pretend that since soldiers are not inside Gaza but just all around its borders, Gaza is free. Which is like saying that a prison camp is free if the guards are all outside the fence.
I've been saying, only kind of jokingly, that a more likely outcome than arrest or Israel-directed assassination of Sinwar is Haniya (or his successor) taking him out to a field to talk about the alfalfa they're going to plant, and how Sinwar will get to feed the rabbits. Sinwar really fucked Hamas over here. Easy to lose sight of how good a thing they had going! It had tacit Israeli government support and was making a bunch of Hamas people fairly rich.
Anyways, from that point of view: yes, killing tens of thousands of civilians is certainly going to radicalize people and drive them into militant groups. But those groups might look more like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades than the Al-Qassam Brigades.
(I'll say again though that Hamas in 2018 is a different entity than Hamas in 2016. They're both very bad organizations, but only one of them was literally working to bring about the end of days.)
It's hard to look at October 7th and its aftermath as anything but a setback for literally every party in the region. Even Iran seems to have been caught flat footed.
It would have probably ended in a civil war type situation but at least you wouldn't have widespread famine or the bombing of hospitals or further civilian atrocities. Also forcing regional states to allocate their own resources to the conflict means there's a direct incentive to wind it down since their resources are a lot smaller than the resources of the US. Israel would eventually face domestic pushback over wartime spending and the autocratic states in the region would have to balance their funding of the proxy conflict against their own ambitions and budgets. Iran is somewhat democratic and they too could only fund Hamas so far before looking after their own affairs. A civil war would also create a generation fatigued by conflict and more open to compromise. The unilateral nature of this conflict will guarantee that Palestinians and dissidents in the region will hold this as a grudge over Israel and the US for decades and might even open the possibility of further terrorism against the US.
The US's own nation building efforts in the Middle East after 9/11 flagged due to outrageous spending that materialized in minimal results. The same effect with poorer governments would naturally circumscribe the conflict in the area.
Some millions from Qatar with no political engagement towards 2SS isn't good by any measure. It was most certainly good for the Israelis: the Abraham Accords and recognition of the Western Golan Heights + Jerusalem by the US, with practically no opposition.
Sinwar may be a lunatic, but we'd be lunatics just the same to assume Hamas were happy with the status quo. They are not PA for a reason.
Can you tell me more about the difference here?
Funded and trained by Mossad and others too, at times. In fact, Netanyahu was approving tens of millions a month to Hamas to stay militant and provide a more extremist opposition to Arafat and the PLO who were calming down and more peaceable in their old age.
This is the thing that really gets frustrating.
Israel's hard right is as opposed to a two state system as Hamas is. People point to "from the river to the sea" as "proof" of Hamas' genocidal intent (and I won't pretend they haven't said other things to that end, either), ignoring that it was literally Likud's platform slogan since the 1970s.
With respect to your proposal. Can you be more specific about how Israel is supposed to target Hamas leadership when they are in tunnels underground below civilian populations and holding hostages? That Hamas leadership is not dead is not due to lack of Israel trying to target them specifically. I don't think it's possible to get at Hamas without taking over the entire Gaza strip which leads me to repeat the OP's question of what would you do. Another question is whether you're suggesting to give free pass to the Oct 7'th attackers and kidnappers (which seems to be implied by saying "focus on Hamas leadership").
Heh this is funny because this was an explicit concern for the US after WWII. This is the reason behind the creation of the Marshal Plan and directly the reason why the US occupied both Germany and Japan and assisted in nation building there. The idea that losing a war leads to radicalism is as old as WWII, but probably even older, as the UK came to a similar conclusion when divesting its colonies in South Asia.
For more recent cases on how political instability and sectarian conflict leads to a rise in terrorism, look at what happened in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the dissolution of the Baathist party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821R0lGUL6A
If you've never seen "Your Job In Germany", bookmark and it and make sure you do at some point. It is pretty unreal.
Of course, the counterpoint here is: the reason we worried about German terrorism but didn't see it is because we trained our forces with videos like this, and we were the nice guys about it compared to the Soviets.
Note: there hasn't been a "generation of motivated terrorists" coming out of Japan and Germany after WWII, those populations were entirely subdued.
But again, Japanese and Germans aren’t blowing up Americans and Indians aren’t blowing up London. Claiming this will create more terrorists is saying the Palestinians are irredeemably violent. I don’t think that’s right.
Unfortunately I don't see it as very likely that Israel will give back all the territory in Gaza and provide aid to the Palestinians to rebuild.
Gaza was quite beautiful! And given its prime location on the mediterranean sea, I don't see why it couldn't be built up again.
https://twitter.com/InsiderWorld_1/status/178854608101537840...
But of course the massive mistake was not eradicating the evil terrorist genocidal mentality of its nominal leadership, Hamas. Israel (and the world) shouldn't make that mistake again.
Gazan Palestinians don't even have limited local rule the way Chinese autonomous regions or Puerto Rico do.
Note that despite aid and the occupation, Japan had significant unrest following the war. The Communist Party of Japan's candidate Inejirou Asanuma was assassinated by an imperial revanchist on Oct 12, 1960 [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_...
The Palestinians are taught from primary school to hate Jews[1] (books paid with western money). They couldn't possibly hate Jews more.
[1]: https://www.cfr.org/blog/teaching-palestinian-children-value...
Unprovoked is a stretch.
Settlers have been given free rein to commit terror acts all throughout the Palestinian Territories.
And Hamas has been propped up by the Netanyahu government for years.
What was the total number of Palestinians killed by Settler terrorist attacks in 2022? Do you have that handy? What was the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorist attacks during that time?
167 Palestinians and 12 Israelis in the west bank. All deaths, not just by settlers etc.
If a Palestinian attempts to stab someone and is shot that's not the same situation as "settler" terrorist attacks.
I think you should answer my question.
Also please count Israelis in Israel killed by Palestinians from the west bank.
Maybe by "is" you mean since Oct 7th. But again that's not provocation, that's after the fact. If you think Gaza was occupied how come the IDF needs to re-occupy it?
Killing people and children along the border is NOT a characteristic of occupation. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230513-gaza-israel-confe...
Counting calories of food consumed by Gazans is not occupation : https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89G0NM/
Restricting water supply is most definitely not an act of occupying power : https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occu...
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/2021-0...
All these are before the Oct 7.
Not quite:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_G...
This is not to say that Israel permitted Gaza to have any reasonable sort of economic development (as a simple example, it’s effectively a country with two not-very-open land borders and no port, which surely made trade rather challenging).
If you want an analogy, imagine roughly the population of San Francisco plus San Mateo County, but with under half the land area, hostile relations and extremely limited travel across the land border with Santa Clara County and points South, with no bridges and no port. Throw in a near-complete dependency on Santa Clara for water and electricity, and nowhere near enough agriculture. (At least San Mateo County has a decent amount of farming to the West.) Take out the hot tech scene as well, and the economic situation would not be awesome.
That's a ridiculously high number. It's comparable to the number of civilians killed through the entirety of the Bosnian War which lasted over 4 years. Not just the widely-recognized genocidal part of it (Srebrenica), but all of it.
Secondarily, what do you when the enemy is using that expectation as piece of leverage to make it practically impossible to strike more surgically.
I’m not the smartest, but I seems like you’re saying that if one side uses their population as attack deterrents and shields that it’s incumbent on the other side to comply?
It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member.
That is a ridiculously high figure in my opinion. I'd be lying if I said I didn't expect to witness something on such scale somewhere in the world during my lifetime, but I certainly didn't expect a modern-day "western" "democracy" to get away with it.
Before the war in Yemen? (>300k deaths and I think >20k civilians just from Saudi coalition air strikes)
Before the Russia-Ukraine war? (>25k civilians killed just in the siege of Mariupol according to Ukraine)
Before the US war with Afghanistan? (>46k civilians killed)
There are supposedly 30,000-40,000 Hamas combatants. The IDF said in December that it has killed 8000 Hamas combatants. In February it said 12,000 were killed. I don't know where you're getting your 1:20 ratio. Hamas certainly does not differentiate combatants from other casualties and at any rate you should have zero trust in their numbers. There were probably certain situations where a specific target was attacked with that or even higher ratios but the overall civilian to combatant casualty ratio, while unknown, is almost certainly nothing close to that.
What is your reference to "Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member"? I've never heard of that.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
It's been pretty widely reported; I've seen it repeated in every publication I follow.
(Don't forget that Israel triple-tapped an aid convoy because someone thought that a Hamas militant might have contacted them.)
What you said: "It is public info that Israel is fine with killing up to 15-20 civilians for every lowest-ranked Hamas member."
Let's look at the quote from your article: "In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants."
There are a few problems here:
- This is not sourced and we shouldn't treat it as fact. If other publications you read repeated that it doesn't change this. It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
- This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
- It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio. It just says that in certain circumstances a combatant was targeted even if there are civilians present. That's something that happens in all wars. We don't have any information on the totality of strikes and which strikes met this exact threshold. I'm not sure what numbers other western armies use. The quote refers compares with previous situations which were not an outright war (and show that at least in the past Israel was a lot more careful about collateral damage).
Anyways, if you were more precise in your wording I wouldn't take issue, but I think the casual reader can read something different into what you've said. We can debate the morality of any particular collateral damage under conditions of dense urban environment, human shields, major war etc. but this is something that happens in all wars likely with somewhat different numbers.
> It's also not clear for how long this policy was in place if it was.
It's consistent with what has been observed all throughout this war--Israel has had rather looser rules of engagement than many people would expect, and that has had the rather predictable effect of rather high incidents of accidents, such as Israeli soldiers killing 3 of the hostages or the attack on the aid convoy.
> This is a question of proportionality in the laws of war sense of the word. I.e. what collateral damage is acceptable when attacking an enemy combatant. If that statement you refer to is factual, which we don't know, it means that strikes against combatants are approved up this threshold.
20 civilian combatants for 1 enemy combatant is a pretty high threshold, especially for low-level members. According to an Economist article I read, that's the level the US is comfortable with only for essentially enemy heads of state (think Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden). (Reportedly, Israel feels 1:100 is acceptable in this kind of scenario.)
> It's almost certainly not reflecting the total civilian to combatant ratio.
No, it's not. But it's evidence that Israel isn't doing a good job of minimizing civilian casualties. And the actual numbers we have here aren't good. In the best case scenario (taking Israel's probably somewhat-inflated figures for combatants killed and the lowest numbers of civilians killed), it's about 1 combatant to 2 civilians, roughly comparable to the war in Donbass before Russia invaded Ukraine for reals (we don't have good estimates post 2022 because Russia hasn't released anything in the areas it occupies). I suspect the real numbers are probably closer to 1-to-4. By contrast, the US-led battles of Fallujah and Mosul--both urban fights against terrorist-held cities--had casualty rates around (and perhaps better than) 1-to-1.
I wouldn't be so incensed about this if Israeli generals weren't prancing around boasting that no one has done as good a job as Israel has in minimizing civilian casualties when it is so transparently false.
When you look at civilian to combatant ratios you have to take into account the battlefield. You can't compare the war in Donbass to the war in Gaza. What's the population density in Donbass? Were combatants fighting in civilian clothes? Was there a human shield strategy at play? Tunnels? Booby traps?
I've heard experts give much higher civilian to casualty ratios than 1:2 for dense urban combat under these conditions. I've heard numbers like 1:8 (which I think is more or less the ratio for the war in Chechnya). I think the battle for Mariupol has fairly high rates if we want to use another comparison. There's this US Urban warfare expert (John Spencer) from West Point that goes around saying how Israel is doing a great job. So I'm not sure I agree with your transparently false observation. We need something more directly comparable. IIRC in the Battle of Mosul most civilians evacuated, also the number for dead civilians in that battle vary widely. Where I would tend to agree is that in the beginning of the war Israel pounded Gaza very heavily and likely at that phase with less care about collateral damage vs. damage to Hamas.
Incidents like friendly fire are fairly common in wars. I don't have any way of gauging how this one compares. Wikipedia says: "accounting for an estimated 2% to 20% of all casualties in battle".
Do you have comparable examples of armies warning civilians to evacuate, by dropping leaflets, sending text messages, and giving them time to do so like the IDF does (maybe not 100% of the time but certainly has done a lot during this war)? I think that's fairly unusual in comparable situations. I don't recall the US ever doing that in its wars.
Could Israel do a better job avoiding civilians. Likely yes. Is it possible to completely eliminate this under the circumstances (30,000 combatants, in civilian clothes, fighting from population centers) - I don't think so. I also agree the "boasting" about avoiding civilians is at the very least in poor taste. We should feel sorry for civilians killed regardless of the "ratio".
https://airwars.org/news/raqqa-a-city-destroyed-then-forgott...
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/92961/pdf/
No ICC arrest warrants. No encampments. Crickets. How many westerners did ISIS kill? 100? The US, UK, Australia and Russia (+ others?) blitzed the heck out of anything that moved in a place far away that presented no direct existential threat to any of them. Under significantly more favorable conditions on the battlefield than the IDF is facing in Gaza (how many casualties did western powers take in this blitz? zero?)
"In total, these claims allege more than 26,000 non combatant fatalities. Airwars presently assesses that at a minimum, between 6,300 and 9,700 civilians are likely to have died in Coalition actions overall – approximately 40 percent during the recent battles for Mosul and Raqqa"
"Much of the Old City of Mosul and almost 70% of Raqqa’s entirety have been rendered uninhabitable, according to the United Nations."
The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
Yes, if their explanations were accepted as conclusive by the prosecutor there wouldn't be a court case, but the prosecutor isn't the final decisionmaker for the court.
> The UN just made a huge change to their accounting blaming "the fog of war" which puts their numbers much more in line with what Israel was saying.
While the details of the charges asked for, beyond their titles, have not been laid out, I don't think the numerical counts that have been adjusted have much bearing on any of them.
They totally do. They halved the number of children and women killed which completely changes the combatant/civilian ratio.
> The explanations to be accepted by the court would have to be presented as evidence at trial, which would require their to be a court case.
It's hard to see what sort of evidence will be accepted by the court. Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants. What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted? Is there some sort of uninvolved party that can give us the truth here?
There's quite a history of ICC cases (and they build on a history of ad hoc tribunals like those for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.)
The kinds of evidence that are acceptable are... not particularly mysterious.
> Hamas claims every single person killed is a civilian (and their combatants fight in civilian clothes) while Israel claims it's targeting combatants.
Yeah, if the ICC operated on the level of these kinds of claims it wouldn't take months of evidence gathering before referrals to get to warrants.
> What sort of Israel do you think Israel can present that will clearly support its case and will be accepted?
Once there are actual charges with specifics (right now, we just have the names of crimes for which warrants are being sought, not the specific charges) the kinds of evidence that would tend to disprove the specific charges against specific individuals will be more clear.
Bosnia's pre-war population (4.2 million) is far more comparable to Gaza's (2.4 million), that's why I picked it.
Can you find me a better comparison?
They involved large numbers of deaths on both sides of the equation which isn't the case here.
The current best estimates are for 15 to 20 thousand civilians. When you write 35 thousand you are showing you believe Hamas propaganda.
To me, the more powerful argument is just that any meaningful military purpose to massed attacks in Gaza have now been used up; much of Hamas' infrastructure, along with the majority of their leadership cadre, have been destroyed. Hamas still "exists", and it could re-form, but so could any other militant organization at this point. The losses Hamas have taken probably exceed those of other state military actors who have decisively lost wars in the past.
Further large-scale strikes look increasingly performative. It was hard to justify a lot of what Israel did even when Hamas had 15 combat-ready brigades and was vowing to repeat October 7th. It seems impossible to justify it now.
(People definitely disagree with me on this point! It's what I believe but fuck if I know with any certainty how true it is.)
Israel is not doing large scale strikes in most of Gaza, except Raffa. It was in the news a few weeks ago that Israel withdrew most of their troops from Gaza.
They have in fact switched to limited strikes. But they're going to finish the job in Raffa first, in particular they want to destroy tunnels - especially tunnels going into Egypt.
After that the PA is going to try to take over. And Israel will "protest" the whole time like the Br'er Rabbit. The PA can't look like Israel helped them take the area. Both the PA and Israel want the PA in Gaza, but neither can say it out loud.
The whole "Israel has no day after plan" thing is just a show. There's a reason Biden stopped complaining about it.
> The following are among the deadliest incidents reported between 16 and 19 May:
> - On 16 May, at about 14:50, four Palestinians, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, were reportedly killed when a house was hit in Jabalya Refugee Camp.
> - On 17 May, at about 0:55, six Palestinians were reportedly killed when a house was hit on Al Falouja Street in Jabalya.
> - On 18 May, at about 10:00, 15 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured while trying to return to their homes in areas of Jabaliya Refugee Camp from which Israeli forces withdrew.
> - On 18 May, at about 12:30, 28 Palestinians, including ten women and ten children, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential square was hit in Mashrou’ Beit Lahiya near Kamal Adwan Hospital, in North Gaza.
> - On 18 May, at about 11:00, 12 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when Iqra’ Library was hit in central Jabalya Refugee Camp.
> - On 18 May, at about 14:00, four Palestinian men were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in Khuza'a area, in Khan Younis.
> - On 19 May, at about 1:00, 31 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in the New Camp of An Nuseirat, in Deir al Balah.
The bombardment is in fact escalating all over the Gaza strip. There may have been more limited strikes in March and April, but the Rafah offensive started, we can no longer claim so. Israel is doing large scale strikes in most of Gaza, including Rafah.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...
On May 20th Israeli jets struck around 70 targets, according to the Israeli military on Twitter. Their post admitted hitting targets across Gaza, including Jabalia, Central Gaza, and Rafah. At least 85 people were killed and 200 injured in total on May 20th.
If May 20th was a uniquely bad day with noticeably more strikes than before, and wouldn’t be repeated for months, if ever, than you could argue the strikes are limited. However, May 20th was not unique, it followed the same patterns as May 16th, May 17th, May 18th, and May 19th. May 21st looks like it is also gonna have as many strikes, and destruction:
Between midnight on May 21st and 7 AM, reported a residential building in Rafa being destroyed, killing at least 8, and 3 Palestinians being killed in an explosion Jabalia. Jabalia is still under intense shelling, in particular al-Awda Hospital where these 3 were stuck and unable to evacuate. Bait Lahia in Northern Gaza is also under heavy artillery shelling, including the gates of Kamil Adwan Hospital, which was also raided last December. Around 2 PM footage was released of the aftermath of another airstrike in Gaza City, where a residential home belonging to the Shobaki family was targeted and completely destroyed. A child no older than 2 year old was martyred in that airstrike.
No, the strikes are not “limited” by any definition of limited. Yesterday I went on a Wikipedia stroll to see examples of other urban warfare, and nowhere do we see this pattern of dozens of strikes, day after day, with 2-3 mass casualty events every day. Where several houses are leveled every single day. This very much describes e.g. the siege of Aleppo during the worst days of the fighting, in the neighborhoods which were worst affected.
If that’s the plan, I can tell you with certainty it won’t work.
There isn't any other way to exterminate Hamas which is a goal that helps everyone, including Palestinians.
Israel does not have the right to exterminate Hamas by any means necessary. If Israel is unable to do so without mass atrocities, they simply shouldn’t. There are alternatives to war. The IRA was not eliminated by mass starvation in Northern Ireland. Rather they were given a Political avenue for their fight, and so their tactics changed from terrorism to political advocacy.
They don't say that. Your entire premise is based on some random quotes from an individual?
> Israel does not have the right to exterminate Hamas by any means necessary.
Actually, yes they do. And you forget that Palestinians have no interest in any other avenue, so your suggestion isn't possible anyway.
Among genocide and ethnic cleansing peddling, over 500: https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-databas...
And it not just some individual, but a member of the Israeli government. Mind you, this government is under orders from the ICJ to do everything in its power to prevent genocide. A government which allows one of its members to speak like this, and doesn’t kick them out of the government (let alone after repeated offense) is at least sympathetic to this speech. But given that he is by no means the only member of the government which repeatedly incites genocide or ethnic cleansing, I think it is more likely that the whole government supports this speech, and is aiming for these prospects.
The mask slips
Seriously, STFU.
35,000 civilians is not an unreasonable estimate. I would personally put a lower bound at 60% of 35,000 = 21,000 civilians, which is the assuming every adult man is a combatant (which we know is not true; there are plenty of civilian adult men among the victims) and extrapolating the percentage of fully identified victims to the confirmed death count.
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...
You seem to be doing a good job of trying to understand both sides, so I think it would behoove you compare these casualty rates with other urban wars.
> extraordinarily bad position (one in part of their own making
What other options did they have?
This attitude reminds me of the Start Trek: Voyager episode Equinox where Captain Janeway insists that Captain Ransom “leaves her no choice” than to go after the Equinox no matter the cost.
Janeway was wrong, there were other options, and the cost she was willing to pay was too high.
And I assume you know that TV shows are fictional? First they write the dilemma for Janeway, then they figure out how to get there. In the real world it's the other way around.
Data for Mariupol is the fuzziest with a lower (reliable) estimate of 8000 civilian deaths, but a more realistic estimate of at least 25,000 civilian deaths. The highest estimate for soldiers dead is around 12,000 but 4,000 is more realistic. I’m not gonna compute the proportion here because the estimates are too fuzzy. Mariupol had a pre-war population of about 425,000. The siege of Mariupol is certainly one of the worst human rights disaster of our century, which justifiably put some of the Russian perpetrators on an ICC list of war criminals under investigation. It lasted for almost 3 months and left 90% of Mariupol’s high rise residential housing were damaged or destroyed. I’m sure Russian generals and political leaders have their excuses and reasons for causing this horror. They still belong in the Hague for causing this tragedy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol#Civilian_cas...
The Siege of Sarajevo (pre-war population of 525,980 [incl. surrounding area]) has been thoroughly investigated and has much more reliable numbers:
- 5,434 civilians killed
- 5,829 soldiers killed
The horrors of this siege are not to be understated. 40% of the children living in the city were directly shot at by snipers, 51% had seen someone killed, 39% had had at least one family member killed, 73% had their home attacked or shelled. Over 100,000 residential buildings were damaged or destroyed and almost every non-residential building was damaged or destroyed. The horrors lasted 4 years, with the wor The ICC was not shy about prosecuting Serbian (both from Serbia and Srpska) generals and politicians for their crimes against humanity. These generals and politicians all claimed they had their reasons. However, they did not, and were correctly found guilty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sarajevo#Casualties
The Battle of Aleppo (pre-war population of about 2.5 million) is probably the closest condition you’ll get to Gaza in terms of urban warfare in a dense civilian area. Like Gaza, Aleppo was the largest city in Syria. The Siege lasted for four years and left at least 31,273 people dead, of which 73% were adult men. 23,604 or 76% of all fatalities were civilians. Almost every neighborhood in Aleppo was targeted with indiscriminate shelling. More than 33,500 damaged residential buildings in the city. Everybody agrees (except maybe Syrian generals and leaders) that the human cost of this 4 year long siege was too great. The UN security council voted for the ICC to investigate the many war crimes committed in the siege but Russia and China vetoed it. History has already condemned them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aleppo_(2012%E2%80%9...
The Gaza strip is an urbanized area that fits between Seattle and Tacoma with a pre-war population of 2.4 million. The Gaza Genocide has so far lasted 7 months and no end in sight. 35,000 people are confirmed dead, most of them civilians. Over 90% of all residential housing has been damaged or destroyed in Gaza city. Almost everybody in Gaza knows someone that has died. Nearly everyone in the Gaza strip has been displaced, most people multiple times.
The horrors of Gaza seem no less then those in other examples of dense urban warfare. I know Israeli officials claim they have a reason to cause this horror, however, they do not. And they deserve the Hague as much as the war criminals mentioned above.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17p7mfx/bett...
60% of homes destroyed, 80% of schools, all universities, 31/35 hospitals.
What Israel [0] could have done was to not create this situation in the first place, but their goal was never solve it anyway.
[0] I mean the current government in power and right wing extremist settlers
Israel withdrew from Gaza. Is your proposal that Israel should not have withdrawn to "not create the situation in the first place"? Or re-taken Gaza when Hamas took it over from Fatah by force in 2007 after winning the elections?
Not to mention the continuation of apartheid in Israel itself and expansion of settlements in the west bank.
This situation was created because Netanyahu has supported Hamas for a long time, even before 2005, as a classic divide and conquer strategy, to not allow PA to control both territories. But the US also helped as Bush forced elections early when PA had a reputation of being corrupt, and when they lost the election they tried to get PA to do a coup and Hamas kicked them out from Gaza.
There's no apartheid in Israel itself but let's not get into that.
Expansion of settlements in the west bank. True. I don't understand how that's a provocation to Gazans to rape and murder random Israeli civilians. It's also true that Netanyahu pursued a divide and conquer approach. Again you're trying to claim that Israel's support of Hamas' rule in Gaza is provocation for Hamas to launch attacks on Israel civilians which makes no sense.
EDIT: To be fair the legal question of "when does an occupation end" is complicated. Gaza was occupied from Egypt and Egypt does not want it back. The uni-lateral withdrawal of Israel without a peace agreement left Gaza in a weird legal situation. This is why despite Gaza being under Palestinian control and not occupied the legal state of occupation is perhaps not fully resolved. There's reality on the ground though (not occupied) and international law status (debated).
No apartheid? I guess Palestinians enjoy the right to return then? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-...
The west bank is part of the whole situation, of course it matters to Gaza what happens there. It also shows exactly what would happen if Hamas did not exist, Israel would continue to allow settlers to take land and homes. I'm not saying that Hamas should exist, but its very much a situation created by Israel themselves and Hamas has support from Palestinians because of Israels actions.
May the hasbara be strong in you.
Does this make the Czech Republic an Apartheid state?
Is Russia an Apartheid state? Can Ukranian refugees return to their homes? What about the millions of other refugees from random places?
There is zero connection between the right of return (which does not exist, refugees have no right to return after they lost a war) and Apartheid.
It's not "Hasbara" (which means explaining in Hebrew, so yes, I'm explaining). It's just common sense.
With both the Cezchs and the Germans being in the EU, they very much do, yes.
> Is Russia an Apartheid state?
Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechnya, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagestan, etc. are explicitly set up as ethnostates within Russia.
Really? The entire point of the Aliyah for return to Israel is that they lost against Romans, and they expelled them. Or is it selective injustice to the Palestinians?
Are you denying Nakba with 'unprovoked'? I recommend you read through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba_denial