RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-gaza-civilians-united-nations-1222797b?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As Israel prepares for its likely ground invasion to pursue Hamas in Gaza, the world is warning about civilian casualties. The moral point to keep in mind as the fighting gets intense is that the responsibility for those casualties will lie with Hamas.

Israel has an obligation to do what it can to protect civilians, and it is doing so. It has warned Gazans to move to the south of the territory as it prepares its campaign. It is using precision-guided bombs when it can to target Hamas combatants rather than civilians. No one has a bigger strategic stake in reducing civilian Palestinian casualties than Israel given the propaganda fodder they provide its enemies.

Contrast that with Hamas, which gave no warning to the Israeli and foreign civilians it slaughtered on Oct. 7. Killing civilians was the explicit goal. Hamas has ordered Gazans not to flee, and its leaders hide weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques.

Israel built bomb shelters for its citizens. Hamas built a network of tunnels for its combatants but keeps its civilians above ground, where they can be used as human shields or casualties showcased on TV. It’s not too much to say that Hamas wants Palestinian casualties to stir an uprising on the West Bank and turn world opinion against the Jewish state.

Yet the United Nations and others criticize Israel more than they do Hamas. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has denounced Israel’s evacuation order but he says little about Hamas’s human blockade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-siege-of-hamas-is-no-war-crime-da6f5659?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Most victims of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel weren’t yet buried when some prominent international voices—including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, and Josep Borell, the European Union’s top diplomat—suggested that Israel’s first efforts to defend itself are war crimes. This raises an important question: Does international law require a nation to choose between committing war crimes and having war crimes committed against it?

The answer is no. One of the great tragedies of war is that civilians often become victims. That is why countries like Israel resort to war only as self-defense, which, according to the United Nations Charter, is every nation’s inherent right. But if even unintentional harm to civilians constitutes illegal “collective punishment,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel’s operations in Gaza, even defensive war is effectively precluded.

The law of war prohibits directly targeting civilians. Israel has made clear that its objectives are only military. “The IDF will destroy Hamas,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday, “and we will hunt down every last man with the blood of our children on his hands.”

But military targets can be attacked even when doing so may result in the loss of civilian life. International humanitarian law requires that civilian casualties from a particular action be balanced against “anticipated military advantage,” a rule known as proportionality. In practice, as this rule is understood by Western countries, even significant civilian casualties don’t necessarily make strikes on legitimate targets illegal.

Hamas has violated international law by hiding among civilians. But international law doesn’t reward the use of human shields. Instead, it makes clear that “the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack.” Israel’s critics want it to fight in a way that would have made it impossible for democracies to wage war in every conflict from World War II to the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, which killed about 10,000 civilians by some estimates.

A legal analysis of Israel’s response must take into account the barbarity and scale of Hamas’s attack. Israel now knows that Hamas’s goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Defeating Hamas isn’t simply a tactical military goal but an existential national one—a military objective of the highest order. There is no basis on which to bar Israel ex ante from a generally lawful means of warfare such as siege, or maneuver in urban areas.

https://www.jns.org/hamas-weaponizes-sympathy-for-civilians-they-help-kill/?_se=YW5uZS1tYXJpZS5m

Suffering in Gaza is real, though the false victimhood narrative gives Hamas benefits and deflects attention from saving the hostages and defeating the terrorists.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but most of the talking heads and pundits are managing to pull it off. Unlike the hard left, most liberals and Democrats have not abandoned sanity and embraced the open antisemitism that has been expressed at rallies for “Palestine,” in which Hamas is not just supported but justified. To the contrary, at least for the moment, the old bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel seems to have re-emerged since the unspeakable terrorist atrocities on Oct. 7. The vast majority of Democrats and almost all Republicans are solidly backing Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas, even as many of them also speak of their concerns about Palestinian suffering.

But only a week after the slaughter of men, women and children in the Jewish communities along the Gaza border and at a music concert attended by young adults—and with Israel still sifting through the wreckage, finding bodies of the slain and tortured victims of these atrocities, and preparing to bury some 1,400 people—the conversation about the conflict is shifting. To no one’s surprise, the headlines are now all about a “humanitarian crisis” and not a hostage crisis, even though the fate of the estimated 150 people, including 14 Americans, kidnapped by Hamas is still unknown. The suffering of Palestinians—President Joe Biden has been at pains to try and differentiate from the terror group, stating that “the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Hamas”—has become the world’s top concern.

Callousness about deaths in Gaza is wrong. So, too, are overwrought expressions of rage about terrorist crimes that lead to talk about wiping out the Palestinians or turning a place where so many people live into a parking lot.

However, Biden is wildly overstating his case about the level of support Hamas can count on. More important than that, the seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of Western politicians to deny that Hamas represents Palestinian aspirations is linked to a wave of sympathy for the Palestinians that is bound to influence administration policy as the war continues.