Nothing to do with this, since Hamas are the authority in charge over Gaza. The analogy I would use, as a youth perhaps, is if you hit me and I wanted to return the favour but you were hiding behind your little brother and sister, and where I hit one of them instead, would you say you played no role in this? This is very much what Hamas are doing. How can they not in some way be responsible?
I have never, even once, said that Hamas bears no responsibility. That's not my argument.
And I think your analogy, which compares modern, militarised nations with squabbling children, is perhaps a little inadequate.
Israel has been open, as to telling people to get away from areas that might be targeted. The fact that many are still being killed perhaps is more down to Hamas. I don't know and neither do most of us who aren't there. There is plenty of scope for civilians to be killed when Israel apparently is going after anything that looks remotely like being military. And of course it is horrible.
Once again, you seem to want to alleviate all responsibility from Israel, despite the fact that Israel started their reaction to Hamas' incursion by committing an explicit war crime against the entire civilian population of Gaza. As we have seen, Israel is not above deliberately harming civilians in this conflict, and so I'm less than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that when they target clearly non-military targets and justify it as "you'll just have to trust us, Hamas was there".
Hamas started off with a war crime, so don't preach about such.
So you're just going to ignore the decades leading up the Hamas incursion?
Do you honestly believe war crimes justify more war crimes?
Also, don't you find it absolutely atrocious that my argument, which was "You can't use war crimes to justify more war crimes" that your response was "Well, they did the war crimes first!". You're explicitly saying that previous war crimes justify more war crimes. That is, apparently, your position.
Unfortunately it was Hamas who put the civilians in the path of danger, unless you think that Hamas should get off scot free so as to avoid civilian casualties.
No and no.
Once again, my argument has never been that Hamas are fine and should be let off. It's that
what Hamas did does not justify what Israel is doing. This has been my argument from the start. Please respond to why you think it's okay for a state to commit war crimes and kill over 10,000 civilians in response to terrorists killing over 1,000 civilians. In what way does that not explicitly justify Hamas?
The fact that there are so many civilian casualties perhaps says more about Hamas than much else, as to not being that bothered or not planning sufficiently before carrying out such a stupid act in the first place. It is just so cynical - and cowardly.
Once again, you absolve Israel of all wrongdoing. You're pretending that they have no choice whatsoever in how they respond, this alleviating them of any moral culpability for the civilian deaths.
Please tell me how this is any different whatsoever to blaming the civilians killed by Hamas on Israel, because it's a direct consequence of Israeli foreign policy? Why do you selectively apply this logic of "killing civilians is bad but justified because the other side did a bad thing" to Israel, but not Hamas? Your logic, that justifies atrocities, justifies ALL ATROCITIES.
Actually, we don't know anything for a fact, and plenty of mistakes occur in all wars.
I think calling war crimes "a mistake" is overly generous, to say the least. Israel have engaged in very active and deliberate war crimes against civilian populations for decades. I am much less willing to believe that any acts of mass murder they inflict on the Palestinian people are just a big "whoopsie doodle".
