re: #648 GunstarGreen

The Hamas-Israel war hasn’t stopped since Hamas took over in Gaza in 2006. Thousands of rockets fired into Israel, each with the intent to cause damage and/or start fires in Israeli properties/land, and kill and main Israelis.

In a “quiet” year, hundreds of these rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel.

Israel does more than any other country to minimize civilian casualties, but it’s exceedingly tough to do when Hamas embeds in civilian areas, purposefully wears civilian clothes to blend in when the need arises (during Cast Lead for instance, there were reports of Hamas thugs switching out of uniforms into civilian clothes to avoid detection).

In after action reports from Cast Lead, it turned out that the number of civilians were overcounted, and Hamas took it on the chin. We’ll see something similar with the current military operation against Hamas.

Is one civilian casualty too high? That’s not the standard under international law, even as Israel looks to minimize those casualties. Israel isn’t going out of its way to target civilians; that would be in violation of international law and human rights laws (Geneva Conventions). At the same time, Hamas continually violates those same international laws by hiding behind civilians and purposefully putting them in harm’s way.

In other words, the people who wrote the human rights laws and laws of war recognized that the object need be minimize civilian casualties, avoiding total war and purposeful targeting of civilians. It was hoped to minimize civilian casualties.

It would seem that you’re trying to hold Israel to a standard of conduct that simply doesn’t exist.