It's nuts that this is barely even news. Like... another day another atrocity.
I'm trying not to be numb to it, but it's hard to remain shocked. I'm still disgusted, though.
I'll say this, too: I think we too often judge wars by the conduct of the participants as though there are good wars and bad ones. And my hunch is that it's more like there are bad ones and terrible ones, and as awful as this sounds, this one is more notable because it's being well documented and it involves a uniquely fucked up context (decades of occupation with the support of the US). I think the way the Israeli right wing discusses it is uniquely brazen, and the degree to which the IDF targets journalists and medics seems high, but I think that this kind of stuff happens so often and is undercovered. I wish Yemen got the kind of coverage this is getting.
In terms of the atrocities, I think most wars are basically just a bunch of atrocities in a trenchcoat. It doesn't make these any better: I just want this to end, and then all the other wars. Fuck this shit.
AND I want the people who do this shit dragged in front of the Hague. I'm very glad that Netanyahu and Gallant have had arrest warrants requested, but you know what I call that? A good start.
I really try not to get into litigating each and every instance, but I feel compelled sometimes to point out a few things:
The claim that Abdallah Aljamal was holding hostages is not credible. This claim was made by the IDF without evidence, and they have a very long history of fabricating post-hoc justifications for killing people they weren't targeting or supposed to target. Examples include the assassination of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 and the killing of medic Rouzan al-Najjar in 2018. In both cases, the IDF was caught lying to justify their murders, and I don't think the claims about Abdallah Aljamal hold up at all. From what I read, he lived in the building one of the hostages was recovered from, but he wasn't known as a target before he was killed. He was characterized as one after he was dead.
Overall, the concept of "valid targets" is bullshit. It is used to assuage our innate understanding that killing people -- particularly the young, the innocent, the defenseless, the elderly -- is WRONG. Israel has, in this particular war, extended the concept in a way that is clearly genocidal. Their target selection, as covered by 972, was wildly more vicious than their own historical limits on collateral damage. An anonymous Israeli intelligence officer called it "a mass assassination factory".
I'm glad we agree that all the responsible parties for atrocities deserve to be held accountable. I don't intend the above as a provocation to fight, but I want to make sure anyone reading this comment section is aware of this context.
Actually it's extremely uncommon. In fact I haven't seen Hamas do this a single time yet. 8 months of terror attacks on civilians in Gaza and it's israel every single time
Aside from blatantly stupid claims with zero evidence, why would Hamas have any reason to waste any sort of resources and energy on their own people?
You could at least vaguely make a statement about human shields, but no let's go with "obviously it was Hamas because it's always Hamas, even when Israel itself says it wasn't Hamas"