The biggest problem with this isn’t the horror of the actual war crime. The far more serious concern are the lengths the government will go to avoid holding anyone accountable. That is so much worse because it unintentionally endorses future crimes and challenges the offenders to take ever more offensive actions without fear of consequences.
They can take out nuclear scientists thousands of kilometers away by either planting bombs in their cars in traffic or firing accurate munitions through their windows when they sleep.
Thousands of kilometers away.
The IDF can be highly sophisticated in their plans and methods when they want to.
I think the point is that if Israel can do pinpoint decapitation strikes anywhere in Iran they sure as hell can do so in Gaza, but they choose to bomb hospitals and flatten every single building in the Gaza Strip instead.
This. Israel demonstrably has the capability for precision warfare.
That they chose to level infrastructure across Gaza instead is indicative.
And it'd be real stretch to assume they did so even for military-economic reasons.
They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
To wit, the elimination of anything resembling a Palestinian state: politically, economically, and demographically.
Which is cynical and evil as fuck, given they're smart enough to realize they eventually either have to (a) kill every Palestinian or (b) make a deal.
Instead, they decided killing 50,000+ Palestinians was worth improving their negotiation position and kicking the can down the road.
> They knew the world community would give them some leeway after Oct 7th, so exploited it as far as possible to militarily achieve their geo-political goals.
That’s my read as well. I was strongly pro-Israel for decades and while I was never comfortable with the plight of Palestinians Hamas had a lot of the blame, too, but the last year really moved me over to thinking that the people who said most of the “accidents” over the years were intentional were correct. They can pull off these amazingly accurate strikes when they want to, it’s implausible that they suddenly have the precision of a drunken 18th century musketeer around aid workers and civilians. Their leadership clearly do not care and collective punishment is a war crime no matter who does it.
The term ”mowing the lawn”[1] has been used to describe their long term strategy, so I can ”excuse” someone for thinking that they can’t control the situation, but it’s been a tactic for a long time.
HN readers can recognize the tactic in other parts of our world too. It’s the strategy of people in power who believe they can control the chaos. When chaos in one group is a benefit to the other, chaos becomes a worthy status quo. When your military is infinitely more powerful, any uprising can eventually be exhausted, and you get automatic casus belli. The Cold War was full of this destabilizing politics, where superpowers tried their best to turn functioning socities into hellholes, in the hopes that it would spread in the enemy’s region. The same works for Israel. The less legitimacy Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians have, the longer they can keep building settlements. If they ever gain independence, it will cause another war, which has been planned for, because settlements have been overwhelmingly built on higher ground. Illegal settlers will not give up easily, and will likely gain military assistance.
To be fair, the Iranian state is a proper military. I’m not sure if there is a way to fight a guerilla force without massive civilian casualties. (Which is why one generally shouldn’t.)
A better analog might be Hezbollah. Surgically dispatched. Resolved with minimal follow-on nonsense from both sides.
No, it’s war. Targeted killing of a military scientist is war. Gunning down civilians trying to get food is a war crime. If we start labelling all war as criminal, the term loses all meaning.
How about killing a scientist that they claim is trying to make a bomb with 15 members of his family and several neighbors including children under age 10.
This claim is not proved. In Europe there is no capital punishment for mass murders but Israel can kill anyone they want with their family without trial or even conclusive evidence and no one can condemn it.
If you do it with a crude hand made bomb it is called terrorism but if you do it with F35 it is called self-defense.
> war crimes are just a label for anyone in opposition to Western domination
Eh, there is a broad consensus on what constitutes a war crime. But there is also broad precedent for these rules not applying to major powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951.)
I’d also argue that recent history has almost rendered the term worthless, as activists label practically every civilian death as a war crime.
On the flip side, this is not as controversial (or even at all in western media) when done by the Ukraine military (not specifically nuclear scientists). This is not a justification, but I think some characteristics of conflict are less interesting/important to focus on when trying to formalise critique against an assailant. This would be more important if contrasted with for example a conflicting ideological narrative.
I‘m sorry, but you’re comparing apples to bedrooms. Israel vs. Iran is a war/conflict between two proper countries‘ militaries - which means that both belligerents stick to certain agreed upon rules and military traditions, such as trying to separate the civilian from the military world/infrastructure. In lack of another word (haven’t slept, please forgive me for the choice of word), there’s “honor“ and a notion of equality and respect (somewhat) between the foes, even if Iran has declared it wants to wipe Israel off the map.
All of this does not apply to the conflict with Hamas. With them muddling the lines, it’s extremely hard to fight a “clean“ war. You’re between a rock and a hard place - either you lose but with your head held high and your moral compass intact, or you stoop to their level thereby slowly losing your values but win in the end. If that win is worth it or not, is heavily debated in the rest of the world, but only debated in the fringes of Israeli society. But no military expert is able to suggest a real alternative of fighting Hamas without inflicting heavy losses on one’s own army.
I find the committed war crimes abhorrent and wish they’d be heavily prosecuted at least.
For as long as countries like Israel stand against giving Palestinians a legitimate state, militias and terror groups will continue to rise. The US showed that it was possible to fight an insurgency as an occupying force without resorting to literally levelling cities. It was not easy, it took more lives than they hoped, but they did it anyway, because they at least acted like war crimes out in the open was off limits.
Until corrective actions with criminal penalties occur incidents like these almost certainly continue with possible increases of frequency and severity. More importantly though when this becomes a matter of conduct and military discipline is that it will spread to other areas even outside Gaza.
This isn’t just a matter of vague speculation as there are historical cases outside of Israel on which to see how things like this develop and what the consequences are both for the victims and the soldiers. These historical accounts also indicate soldiers committing these sorts of actions become victims themselves with catastrophic mental health disorders.
The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
Israel got in trouble with ICJ court, because of quotes from top government officials. Government of Israel was very specific what they will do to Gaza! This was even full scale bombing started!
Trying to reinterpret this as a problem of "military discipline", and "soldiers are victim as well" is just another level of cynicism!
> The idea Israeli government would hold anyone accountable is a laughable.
It's happened, many times. Usually this doesn't make front-page news, but soldiers that break the law are sometimes held accountable. Not nearly enough, and I think it should be far more publicized as a deterrent effect (the fact that it isn't is a pretty big indictment of the current government). But it's certainly not laughable.
Well, he is on trial. So he could be arrested. Prime Ministers have been arrested (and jailed!) before.
A part of what the Isareli opposition has been pushing for in the last few years has been removing Netanyahu from power and presumably jailing him because of the corruption charges.
For each of their "operations" on Gaza they usually had one or two soldiers in trouble for something like stealing and using a civilians credit card. When there were many more serious crimes like deliberately targeting the disabled.
Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions? Let’s not pretend that this is just some random soldiers doing this, this is exactly what the Israeli government wants.
Soldiers shooting at civilians is a war crime. It does not matter what the intentions of the soldiers are. It doesn’t even matter if the civilians are also armed up until the point they display violent intent according to a common person standard. Shooting at a crowd is a crime.
That said the soldiers pulling the trigger are committing crimes. These are patently illegal actions to a common person standard which eliminates any defense of following military orders. That being said the soldiers, at least, are committing crimes. Accountability starts at the source of the crime.
If the government is ordering these actions then those are illegal orders, according to international standards of military conduct. The soldiers on the ground must ignore those orders on the basis of patently illegal conduct according to a common person standard and the officials facilitating those orders can be investigated for issuing war crimes.
NATO was conducting defensive operations against Yugoslavia around that time. It isn't clear that war crimes can be committed so easily by US allies. It'd be nice if they can be recognised though.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding here. War crimes are not judged by what a diligent investigation after the fact might find. It hinges on the information and judgement by those acting in the moment. You are a soldier told these armed people a click out are the insurgent group you are fighting? Of course you can engage them. And there is a similar lenient standard applied to whoever got that information in the first place. War by any other standard of course would be entirely unworkable.
That is not correct. If you are a uninformed soldier operating in a designated combat area here are the scenarios:
* Patently illegal conduct, according to common person principle, is always illegal. There are no legal exceptions.
* If you are fired upon you must return fire. Uniformed militaries are obligated to defend themselves. There are no exceptions to this, except the prior point. When these two points are in conflict the prior point always wins.
* Uniformed service members are required, by law, to follow orders given to them except for the prior two points.
That is the law. It does not matter what specific scenario finds tenable or practical, because combat is inherently challenging. In most cases this is highly impractical, which is why urban warfare is so challenging.
Well, there is actually a reasonable reason. Typically you'd want the government to hold people accountable so you could have the thin veneer of operating by the rules of warfare and not committing war crimes. That's usually been a popular strategy of the US for when someone goes a little too far (or gets caught).
As far as I can tell Israel doesn't particularly care for even looking like it's trying to behave responsibly. I don't think they've held anyone responsible for even some of the most obvious war crimes we have evidence of being committed.
Because "the govahment" is not a singular entity. In functioning democracies, by popular definition in large parts of the field, legislative and executive powers are kept separated from the judicial powers. So the executive power can not interfere with being held accountable. That's not fullt implemented everywhere, but that is the general idea how it is supposed to work.
Well, the civilian leadership is obviously in favour of massacring civilians, the military leadership orders civilians to be massacred, and the soldiers on the ground revel in the opportunity to massacre civilians. And the courts are happy to allow the massacre of civilians.
In functioning democracies in general, sure, you have to be careful not to tar everyone with the same brush. But in the specific case of Israel in 2015, it's not realistic to argue that the government isn't a single entity, so some parts of it may not be responsible (or even in favour of) crimes against humanity.
> Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions?
Because that is what keeps the ICC off of their backs. The ICC only has authority to step in in cases where national jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to prevent and prosecute war crimes.
Even ignoring primary crimes, under Israeli law, even incitement to genocide is punishable by death. But so many members of the political and media elite have made inciting statements, that the rubicon is crossed; the political class cannot allow any serious, independent consideration of war crimes to ever occur, because that would risk them all facing the firing squad. This in turn signals to individual soldiers that there will be no accountability, even in the absence of directives.
Regarding the risk to Israelis facing the firing squad, you do know that Israel only executed Eichmann (and one other person in a field court) since the founding of the country?
When it comes to the list of things that Israelis fear, being sentenced to a firing squad is very low down.
Fair enough, but I don't think that makes the incentive much different. If you are convicted of a crime punishable by death, your actual punishment is not likely to be trivial.
Government and regime can always change. Post socialist countries convinced border guards, for shooting unarmed civilians, who were trying to escape across country borders. That was a crime even under socialist laws.
If Israel had regime change, new regime and majority of voters would be pro Arab... New government could actually enforce existing laws!
> even incitement to genocide is punishable by death
For that to happen, the government, and the overall population, would need to consider what's being done in Gaza and on the West Bank to actually be a genocide. I don't think popular support for that actually exists in Israel. Last time I checked, most of the population supported the annexation of Gaza and the forced eviction of the local population to neighboring countries.
I don't think I'll live to see a two-state solution.
There isn't popular support for it when you factor in the Israeli-Palestian but in opinion polling it has now gone beyond 50% among the rest of the Israeli population.
You may be missing a legal wrinkle: the crime of incitement usually does not require the underlying primary crime to actually occur. (Admittedly I'm not sure if that is the definition in Israel, but they inherited a lot of British law so it is likely). So this does not require the Israeli population to accept that this was a genocide, only that some war crimes occurred and that they should be prosecuted. Right now they are not there, but the point is that the government has an incentive to keep the population in that state.
Where I hope this comes back, after the conflict and a new Israel government, is human culpability for automated systems.
AI being whitewashing for IP is disruptive and troubling.
It being whitewashing for war crimes is a much more serious problem.
If Israel/IDF put in place a automated system that gave effectively caused war crimes to be committed, some humans in positions of power need to be held responsible and face consequences.
The world should not allow cases where (a) it's undisputed that war crimes occurred but (b) authority was interwoven in an automated system in such a way that humans escape consequences.
Sadly, it'll probably take the fall of right-wing Israeli and current Russian governments to have a hope of passing through.
As with most international law, the two most likely originations are either (a) mutual self-interest (e.g. chemical weapons) or (b) horrendous and inhumane abuse.
I expect with the first first-world drone war on a third-world country, there might be pressure at the UN to put something in place. At least for the automating genocide case.
Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without snark or flamebait? It's not hard if you choose to, and the site guidelines ask people to do so, regardless of how charged or divisive the topic is.
Ok. The parent is the same kind of rhetorical question, whose counter-argument is so evident that it shouldn’t have existed, and it’s disappointing that one side gets the right of way on HN and the other is downvoted, one camp is making use of flaws in your rules to win without merit, aka bullying.
Yes, the parent was the same kind of question; in fact I almost included that observation in my reply to you. However, it's all a matter of degree, and your comment was significantly worse in the degree of snark and flamebait that you were posting. That's why I replied to you and not the other comment. It had nothing to do with which side either of you are on, although I understand how it ends up feeling that way. (I've posted quite a bit about that elsewhere in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44403947.)
For anyone else, who for some reason, feels compelled to comment without reading the article:
> Haaretz has learned that the Military Advocate General has instructed the IDF General Staff's Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism – a body tasked with reviewing incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war – to investigate suspected war crimes at these sites.
Now what will come from this (a proper investigation, etc.), who knows.
Or maybe because this isn't happening at all could be the reason why because there is actually no one to hold accountable because this is just some hysterical anti semitic conspiracy theory.
What is the conspiracy here? Who is the perpetrator? Haaretz is Israeli owned and operated. The sources are Israeli soldiers and officers. The war is definitely real and gazans definitely died while receiving food aid.
It's even worse: Awful lot of people die for the careers of politicians and it's not limited to Israel. If someone needs political tension for weathering a scandal or economic turmoil, it can be created artificially by killing certain people and they do it all the time.
I have distaste for Trump but something I appreciate about him is his abilities to stage a theatre with his "fake" bombings. The more mainstream politicians have much more sociopathic tendencies.
If you think about it, %100 of modern wars are about who is going to be the administrator and doesn't feel like can win an election. We live in a world of abundance, there's no reason for a group of people to kill other group for their resources. If it wasn't for the careers of some people with huge egos all this can be sorted out through civil matters. After the wars it gets sorted out anyway, we don't see mass exterminations anymore.
