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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

> Finally, it's very clear that Hamas actively wants to kill Israeli civilians. Israel's behavior is not beyond reproach but they aren't going through Palestinian towns and shooting old people and children.

While I agree that Hamas has made it very clear that they are explicitly targeting Israeli civilians, which is an obvious war crime and abhorrent, I see no proof whatsoever that the Israeli military isn't doing the same. The scale of destruction and murder in the current incursion speaks for itself. Sure, they don't intend to literally murder all of Gaza's population. But it's very hard to believe that they don't intend to kill some specific number.

They have already killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia killed in the first months in Ukraine.

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If Israel wanted to kill civilians, why order evacuations? Why let aid trucks in?

Israel is willing to kill a lot of civilians in order to destroy Hamas. But I've seen no evidence that Israel wants to kill civilians. Individual Israelis, sure, but as a policy? No, it would be counterproductive.

The question can be asked the other way - if they didn't want to kill civilians, why attack refugee camps? Why invade the Al Sheefa hospital? Why level entire neighborhoods?

Sure, we can't know for sure what the intentions were, what legitimate targets may have been there or not etc.

All we can say for sure is that they have killed a huge number of civilians, so it's illogical to assume that this could not have been at least part of their intention.

There has been plenty of historical and present proof including video and photo evidence, that Hamas operates from within or near civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and residential buildings.

Given that, do you deny possibility that some residential infrastructure targeted by Israel including that hospital could have been used militarily by Hamas as they have done in the past?

> Given that, do you deny possibility that some residential infrastructure targeted by Israel

In principle, no. However, the IDF has failed to provide convincing evidence in many cases, especially in the case of the Al Shifa hospital. Doubly so when their most spectacular piece of evidence - the tunnel found underneath the hospital - was casually revealed by Ehud Barak in a CNN interview to have been an old Israeli construction from the time of the military occupation (taking Christiane Amanpour aback live on air) [0].

Do I think that some of the apparently civilian infrastructure they destroyed was legitimate targets? Yes, absolutely. But given the scale of the destruction and the scantness of evidence, I do not at all believe that all of it was.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/11/20/exp-amanpour...

Israel built bunkers, not tunnels, and evidence of tunnels was presented.

Consider that releasing information jeopardizes its source, both in the physical sense (a person giving information will be executed), and in the intelligence sense - the source will go dead and Israel will have worse intelligence.

That's why Israel can't release information for each and every single target. For Al-Shifa, ample evidence was produced. Whether or not it is convincing is subjective, and your opinion is not more valuable than mine or the IDF's.

The only way to get an objective judgement of the legitimacy of a given attack is to have a neutral third party actively collect intelligence and present their findings, but that's not going to happen.

There are neutral third parties available but Israel requires they go thru their own censors before gaining any access.

You realize that half of Gaza is a permanent refugee camp. Where else in the world has there been 75 years of refugee camps? These were pretty much cities before the war.

Why ask civilians to leave before bombing if they wanted to kill them all? Why ask them to move to a different location?

Do you have any clue how difficult it is when the enemy is not wearing a military uniform? Either they have to use intel (which could be wrong) or wait until they are fired upon before engaging.

Stop acting like they are purposely killing civilians when the enemy is blending right in.

> Why ask civilians to leave before bombing if they wanted to kill them all? Why ask them to move to a different location?

Obviously, to maintain plausible deniability. Note that there was nothing organized in the South where they were asking those civilians to evacuate to. And they have also bombed the southern side occasionally after evacuating all those people there.

Not to mention, they have killed plenty of obvious non-combatants, such as journalists, children, doctors and others. They have bombed hospitals under flimsy pretenses, and have leveled entire neighborhoods. By their own (certainly highly biased count) they have killed two civilians for every one enemy combatant - a huge margin.

We can also compare these nukbers to other similar wars in the region. In the Iraq War, it seems the direct civilian casualties were in the order of 200,000 people in three years - most of these killed by coalition forces, with significant chunks killed by increased criminality and by Iraqi forces. In Afghanistan, where there was an even less well defined combatant, the total civilian death count is around 200,000 people in 20 years of conflict. Israel has killed on the order of 20,000 people in less than two months - going by IDF estimates, this would be ~13, 000 civilians. Extrapolate this to 36 months or to twenty years to compare.

> Extrapolate this to 36 months or to twenty years to compare.

Extrapolating like that is a great way to achieve amazing numbers with little relation to reality: wars don't keep up the pressure throughout their duration.

For example: The latest number I've seen was 857 civilians murdered by Hamas on Oct 7. That would be 26500 dead civilians per month, but of course that number exaggerates an already horrible situation into ridiculous heights.

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