| Collective punishment is not a war crime either. Why do you keep talking about something you have no clue about? I've given you an example of collective punishment that Israel did perform (unlike many idiotic claims made by people who just like to make stuff up). Israel canceled work permits for everyone from Gaza be those terrorists or not. How's canceling a work permit a war crime? You just keep using the words, but you don't understand what they mean... Now, were there war crimes committed by IDF during the Gaza war? -- Yes, and some were punished for that, while even more were claimed. This is a nature of any war. Were there more crimes than in any other war? How do you even measure and compare these things? As I lived through several wars, I can tell that Israeli wars, at least from my perspective as a bystander, are very mild in terms of cruelty towards both combatants and non-combatants. This is not a unique Israeli virtue. In general, wars waged by well-to-do countries are less cruel to the opposing side simply because soldiers growing in well-to-do countries are not exposed to the everyday violence as much as their counterparts in poor countries. They are brought up in an environment where human life has intrinsic value, where critical thought is encouraged and so it's harder to brainwash a soldier into a mindlessly cruel machine. Now, my childhood in Ukraine had seen this, for example, beside other multiple such incidents: on my way back home from school my mom pulled my hand hard in order to get me to walk faster. Before that, I've heard voices of some youth cursing and taunting someone. I also saw some guys kicking something in the mud, but it was too dark and too far to see what that was. Next morning there was a makeshift fence erected by the police around that place, and the school sprouted rumors that a bunch of alcoholics / homeless people were mauled to death at that place. This was during peace time. And this would've been a typical fate for the homeless / drunks, unless hypothermia got them first. Very rarely would anyone get in jail for that. Imagine now people like that being drafted into the military. First Karabakh war, for example. Or Chechen wars. These were real torture fests. Both sides deliberately looked for more painful ways to kill the opponent. And they made little distinction between combatants and non-combatants. People who signed up for the military were driven by the idea that they will be allowed to kill and torture legally even more so than by money or status. The horrors soldiers routinely commit in poor countries eclipse anything you could dream up in your wildest dreams living in the EU, US or another wealthy place. Does this mean that war crimes committed by IDF shouldn't be prosecuted? -- Of course not. But you shouldn't infer from there being war crimes any sort of intention on the state level, nor should this be any kind of supporting argument to claim genocide or any other such wide-reaching policy. Putting things in perspective and in proportion: if Gazans were instead fighting Russians, there wouldn't have been any Gazans left in about two months since the start of the war. And it's not unique to Russians. Bet you, that if they wanted the same kind of fight with Egypt, they'd be similarly dying in much larger numbers. And this isn't even because of the calculus of achieving military objectives. Poorer armies are both more cruel and more crude, while valuing the lives of their own soldiers less. Poorer army would both need to expend more ordnance per target (accidentally missing / hitting unintended targets) and having more vicious soldiers abuse the population being invaded. > Israel has been the aggressor throughout. You couldn't be more delusional / ignorant about the subject. |