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by bigyabai
323 days ago
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To echo the parent; it doesn't matter. It didn't matter 2 weeks ago when Israel killed 3 Catholics bombing a church. The IDF's doctrinal destruction of civilian infrastructure and attacks on hostages are illegal under international law. If the target was entrenched personnel, then leveling a hospital reflects absolutely miserable trigger discipline on the IDF and their officer's behalf. It's not WWI anymore, if we can't agree on international accountability then we learn nothing from the horrors of our mistakes. |
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>Under the laws of war, a medical facility is considered a protected site that can be attacked only in very rare cases. If one side uses the site for military purposes, that may make it a legitimate target, but only if the risk to civilians is proportional to the military advantage created by the attack.
If you want to argue it's illegal, you have to make an argument that it's not proportional vis-a-vis the colocated military infrastructure, because otherwise international law says it's fair play in both letter and spirit. If they were completely off-limits then everybody would co-locate their military and humanitarian infrastructure without much thought - and the end result of that game would be worse for everyone. That's why international law is the way it is. Civilian infrastructure cannot be allowed to be used as a shield for military infrastructure.
On that point - you would have a difficult time making a legal argument that hitting the edge of the parking lot (deliberately avoiding a strike to the hospital itself, and without doing significant structural damage to the hospital) to kill the Hamas #1 (at that time) was not proportional. If you want to make that argument with some other strike (like the church one) then go ahead - I'm extremely open to the idea that the IDF is crossing the line with many of their strikes - but that's a different argument than falsely saying that any strike next to civilian infrastructure is a war crime by default.