Sinwar's killing is a win for Israel — but many Palestinians are proud of his defiant last stand
Sinwar's killing is a win for Israel — but many Palestinians are proud of his defiant last stand
Video released by Israel purporting to show Sinwar’s final moments was met by his supporters as a rousing example of their leader’s battlefield bravery.
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This isn't a win for the Israelis who wanted a ceasefire or the hostages released. There will need to be a new leader to take over before negotiations can resume and chances are good they'll be even more radicalized against Israel.
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And as their assassinations keep pushing the leadership lower and lower down the organizational structure there's less likelihood whoever is around by the time they negotiate will have the influence to actually command people to cease fighting.
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At this rate perhaps Hamas will soon no longer be viable and Gazans will have the option to choose non-genocidal leadership instead.
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How would they be able to influence Israeli leadership? Those are the people committing genocide currently.
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The Atlantic: Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology
While one can debate whether Israel is genocidal, (and I don't believe they are,) Hamas has been unequivocally calling for genocide since their creation and has taken actions to that end.
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Removed for genocide denial.
To be 100% clear here, the precise definition of a genocide has five criteria, it only takes ONE to be declared a genocide.
Israel's actions in Gaza meet ALL FIVE requirements.
https://iccforum.com/genocide-convention
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
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Why didn't you include all of article II in your criteria?
Here's the beginning:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religions group, as such:
The intent and type of group being targeted are also part of the criteria.
In this case it would be Israel intending to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians. Which South Africa is trying to prove in court using statements that Israeli politicians have made and the actions of the IDF.
The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Archive of UN.org
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When Israeli snipers are shooting little kids in the head, that is not hard to prove.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestinian-children-killed-idf-israel-war
"“One child, I could see there was a shot to the head. They were doing CPR on this five- or six-year-old girl who obviously died,” said Gupta.
“There was another little girl about the same age. I saw a bullet entry wound on her head. Her father was there, crying and asking me, ‘Can you save her? She’s my only child.’”
Gupta said that a third young child also had a shot to the head and was sent for a CT scan.
“The neurosurgeon looked and said, ‘There’s no hope.’ You could see the bullet had gone through the head. I don’t know how old he was, but young,” she said.
. . .
"The doctor said he treated five children he believes were shot by snipers because the placing of the bullets suggested they were not hit randomly but targeted.
“They were mostly shot in the thorax, the chest area, some in the abdomen. There was one boy shot in the face. As a result he had a shattered jaw. There were two children who had been shot in the chest, young, under the age of 10, who did not survive. Two others, one shot in the abdomen, did survive. They were still recovering in the hospital when I left,” he said.
Ahmad noted the children were often shot by “one large-calibre bullet” which could produce devastating wounds."
. . .
"“This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.”"
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That's deeply upsetting, but still not the same as proving systematic intent to commit genocide
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Israel has certainly shown enough intent to prove it themselves
Genocide
- De-Gaza: A Year of Israel’s Genocide and the Collapse of World Order - Euro-Med Monitor Report see Chapter 2 and 3
On 26 January 2024, the ICJ said that it was plausible that Israel had breached the Genocide Convention. As an emergency measure, it ordered Israel ensure that its army refrained from genocidal acts against Palestinians.
The ICJ reported, as part of its decisions in March and May, that the situation in Gaza had deteriorated and that Israel had failed to abide by its order in January.
So, when we look at the actions taken, the dropping of thousands and thousands of bombs in a couple of days, including phosphorus bombs, as we heard, on one of the most densely populated areas around the world, together with these proclamations of intent, this indeed constitutes genocidal killing, which is the first act, according to the convention, of genocide. And Israel, I must say, is also perpetrating act number two and three — that is, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and creating condition designed to bring about the destruction of the group by cutting off water, food, supply of energy, bombing hospitals, ordering the fast evictions of hospitals, which the World Health Organization has declared to be, quote, “a death sentence.” So, we’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent. This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.
More than 800 scholars of international law and genocide have signed a public statement arguing that the Israeli military may be committing genocidal acts against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as the total siege and relentless airstrikes continue to inflict devastation on the occupied territory.
An independent United Nations expert warned Monday that "Israel's genocidal violence risks leaking out of Gaza and into the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole" as Western governments, corporations, and other institutions keep up their support for the Israeli military, which stands accused of grave war crimes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Our documentation encompasses over 500 incitements of violence and genocidal incitement, appearing in the forms of social media posts, television interviews, and official statements from Israeli politicians, army personnel, journalists, and other influential personalities.
Deliberate Attacks on Civilians
Israel deliberately targets civilian areas. From in general with the Dahiya Doctrine to multiple systems deployed in Gaza to do so:
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The Dahiya Doctrine & Israel’s Use of Disproportionate Force
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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Israel also targets Israeli Soldiers and Civilians to prevent them being leveraged as hostages, known as the Hannibal Directive. Which was also used on Oct 7th.
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Yes, to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that they aren't committing genocide, just that the initial copy-paste comment leaves out the most important part of doing so, because that's the bit that's actually challenging to prove
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Israel is committing genocide and an ethnic cleansing. Claiming otherwise is incredibly callous and cruel.
Genocide
Holocaust scholar to discuss his conclusion that Gaza campaign constitutes genocide
UN Expert Says Impunity for Israel Must End as 'Genocidal Violence' Spreads to West Bank
“A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza
800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating 'Crime of Genocide' in Gaza
Human Shields
Hamas:
Intentionally utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain areas immune from military attack is prohibited under international law. Amnesty International was not able to establish whether or not the fighters’ presence in the camps was intended to shield themselves from military attacks. However, under international humanitarian law, even if one party uses “human shields”, or is otherwise unlawfully endangering civilians, this does not absolve the opposing party from complying with its obligations to distinguish between military objectives and civilians or civilian objects, to refrain from carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, and to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects.
Israel:
Additionally, there is extensive independent verification of Israel using Palestinians as Human Shields:
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Including Children (2013 Report)
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Israel “Systematically” Uses Gaza Children as Human Shields, Rights Group Finds 2024
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Breaking The Silence - Testimonies from IDF Veterans
Deliberate Attacks on Civilians
Israel deliberately targets civilian areas. From in general with the Dahiya Doctrine to multiple systems deployed in Gaza to do so:
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The Dahiya Doctrine & Israel’s Use of Disproportionate Force
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‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Israel also targets Israeli Soldiers and Civilians to prevent them being leveraged as hostages, known as the Hannibal Directive. Which was also used on Oct 7th.
Starvation
Prior to the current hostilities, 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million people were estimated to be facing acute food insecurity, and over 80 percent were reliant on humanitarian aid. Israel maintains overarching control over Gaza, including over the movement of people and goods, territorial waters, airspace, the infrastructure upon which Gaza relies, as well as the registry of the population. This leaves Gaza’s population, which Israel has subjected to an unlawful closure for 16 years, almost entirely dependent on Israel for access to fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and other essential commodities.
After the imposition of a “total blockade” on Gaza on October 9, Israeli authorities resumed piping water to some parts of southern Gaza on October 15 and, as of October 21, allowed limited humanitarian aid to arrive through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on October 18 that Israel would not allow humanitarian assistance “in the form of food and medicines” into Gaza through its crossings “as long as our hostages are not returned.”
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That's quite a citation spam. You had that all prepared? Hm, curious.
I don't really want to debate every aspect of this conflict with you, so I'll stick to the matter I was discussing, whether Israel is committing genocide or not:
- Israel could destroy Gaza in a day if they didn't care about civilians. They haven't. In fact they often do things to reduce civilian casualties that no other nation does, even at the expense of their operational effectiveness. (Roof knocking, warning people to evacuate in advance.) I find that inexplicable if they intended to commit genocide and maximize civilian deaths.
- Self-defense is not genocide. Collateral damage is not genocide. Genocide, the crime, is a very specific claim of intent to destroy in whole or in part a protected group. Hamas, what Israel has been clear they intend to destroy, is not a protected group under this law. I do not believe evidence has been sufficiently established to make a credible accusation that Israel is attempting to destroy Arabs, Palestinians, or Muslims in whole or in part, (which are the relevant protected groups in this accusation,) especially considering 21% of Israeli citizens are Arab/Muslim, (i.e., the same heritage as Palestinians,) with full rights.
- There have been some terrible and indefensible statements made by judeofascist members of the Israeli government that might qualify as genocidal, (Ben-Gvir, Eliyahu,) but not by people actually waging this war, and not sufficient to establish genocidal intent by the IDF at large. A while back I actually dug into the quotes SA provided in their IJC case from the ones waging this war, many of which are included in your "law4palestine" citation, (mostly by Gallant and Netanyahu.) When I read them in their original context it was clear they were stripped of important context and/or interpreted in the least charitable way possible to make their case. For example, acknowledging that war takes a toll on civilians and suggesting they should want to avoid conflict is not the same as stating intent to commit genocide via targeting civilians, nor is spouting rhetoric about how their side are the good guys, even though many such statements appear on that list.
- Your links about statements from XX scholars remind me of the tactics climate change deniers use; cite a handful of experts to appeal to authority even when they may hold a minority opinion. The fact of the matter is the IJC did not find that SA's claims of genocide were plausible, and did not order Israel to stop the war, which is what they would have done if this were a clear case of genocide. Actual judges in positions of authority applying the law is far more compelling to me than a petition by, "legal scholars," or one individual's opinion.
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Removed and temp banned for repeated genocide denial and misinformation.
To be 100% clear here, the precise definition of a genocide has five criteria, it only takes ONE to be declared a genocide.
Israel's actions in Gaza meet ALL FIVE requirements.
https://iccforum.com/genocide-convention
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
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I took it from a different user who created it to combat misinformation and have been re-using it because of comments such as yours.
You're entire argument is why you don't believe it's genocide when I've given you sources by credible institutions and hundreds of scholars explaining why this viewpoint is wrong. To take your climate change denial example, in this case you're the climate change denier who's intentionally ignoring the voice of so many experts and very blatant evidence.
You're link to the ICJ ruling doesn't prove your point. They didn't say there was no genocide. This is what they said:
Rather, she said, the purpose of the ruling was to declare that South Africa had a right to bring its case against Israel and that Palestinians had “plausible rights to protection from genocide” - rights which were at a real risk of irreparable damage.
The judges had stressed they did not need to say for now whether a genocide had occurred but concluded that some of the acts South Africa complained about, if they were proven, could fall under the United Nations’ Convention on Genocide.
So they didn't say it wasn't genocide. They just said the case of genocide brought forth by South Africa can proceed.
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If you genocide them enough, then they don't need leaders at all. Then there will be more lebensraum for the people of proper genetic stock that you think deserve to exist.
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like there's gonna be elections in the rubble?
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This isn’t a win for the Israelis who wanted a ceasefire or the hostages released.
So it's a win for Netanyahu who wants neither of those things.
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