Palestinians killed and wounded

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Israel destroys a quarter of northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian death toll exceeds 4,000 [EN/AR]

Israel destroys a quarter of northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian death toll exceeds 4,000 [EN/AR] - occupied Palestinian territory | ReliefWeb.

Geneva – Israel is conducting the largest campaign of destruction of buildings and residential houses in the Gaza Strip in modern history, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated, as part of a wide-scale military attack ongoing since the seventh of this month.

Euro-Med Monitor emphasised that Israel is focusing its attacks on the Gaza and North Gaza governorates through a systematic destruction campaign, aiming to force displacement and population transfer against the residents of these governorates.

The Israeli army has warned the residents of both governorates, which are home to nearly a million people, to evacuate the areas and move to the central and southern sections of the Strip, a measure that raises serious legal and humanitarian concerns as it endangers the safety of civilians.

Israel’s army is bound not to target civilians or civilian infrastructure at all, Euro-Med Monitor confirmed, but in reality has committed multiple and complex violations that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity through the massive firepower it has used and continues to use against densely populated civilian areas.

Euro-Med Monitor pointed out that these violations include a blatant assault on a number of fundamental rights of civilians in the Gaza Strip, most notably the right to life, the right to housing, and the right to property.

Before the current Israeli attacks, the number of housing units in the Gaza and North Gaza governorates was estimated to be around 260,000. Euro-Med Monitor has documented that approximately 52,000 housing units are now destroyed or severely damaged by Israeli airstrikes.

The human rights group stated that over a quarter of the area of Gaza City and northern Gaza has been affected by the destruction and that 20% of the houses there are no longer fit for habitation. The town of Beit Hanoun, on the outskirts of the northern Gaza Strip, is the most severely affected, with approximately 60% of its buildings either destroyed or physically damaged.

Euro-Med Monitor emphasised that these numbers are preliminary and non-final, saying it is likely that these statistics could be multiplied due to the difficulty of documenting all the destroyed areas and the intensifying Israeli targeting of residential areas around the clock.

The organisation called on the Human Rights Commissioner for the Palestinian Territories and the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing to take urgent action by confronting the Israeli destructive machine razing entire residential neighbourhoods in Gaza. It warned that international law, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention, prohibits the occupying force from demolishing the properties of the local population of the occupied area, and international human rights law guarantees the right to housing and the protection of private property.

The Israeli Political-Security Cabinet approved a state of war against the Gaza Strip on 7 October in response to an armed attack by Hamas, which it called “The Al-Aqsa Flood”, resulting in the killing of around 1,300 Israelis and the capture of dozens more. Since then, the Israeli army has carried out thousands of airstrikes and artillery strikes around the clock, targeting residential neighbourhoods and multi-storey buildings inhabited by Gazan civilians.

According to documentation by Euro-Med Monitor, at least 4,079 Palestinians have been killed, including 1,413 children and 806 women, with approximately 3,420 civilians among the dead. More than 15,000 additional Palestinians have been injured in various ways, with more than half of them being children and women.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor concluded that Israel is committing complex war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

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How many Hamas fighters have been killed? Maybe 2 or 3? Israelis need to kill 30,000 x 4000 people or all Palestinians in Gaza to eliminate Hamas.

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You still are going off on things that are not facts.

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It’s important to look at how the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) actually applies to Gaza. The basic aim of LOAC is to prevent unnecessary casualties and destruction within the context of military conflict. In pursuit of that, there are three principles: necessity, distinction, and proportionality.

Necessity requires that combatants only attack targets necessary to accomplish military objectives. Distinction requires that combatants not only distinguish between civilians and combatants, but they also distinguish themselves from civilians (through the wearing of uniforms, use of clearly identified military vehicles, etc.). Proportionality requires a combatant to use only that force necessary to accomplish the military objective. It does not require you to use the same force as your enemy (you can bring a JDAM to a gun fight).

Applying these principles to the Gaza conflict:

– Every Hamas rocket attack is a war crime. These rocket attacks are indiscriminately aimed at Israeli cities There is no indication that Hamas even tries to aim its rockets at military targets.

In addition, because these rocket attacks are conducted from civilian areas by men wearing civilian clothes, Hamas violates its obligations to distinguish noncombatants from combatants.

– Hamas’s use of civilian buildings changes the status of targets from civilian to military. A civilian building becomes a legitimate military target when used for military purposes.

– Hamas thus bears legal responsibility for civilian deaths in Gaza resulting from its decision to wear civilian clothes and launch rockets from civilian buildings. Without Hamas’s decision to use these human shields those civilians would not be subject to military targeting.

DB2

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I have to completely disagree Hamas does nothing of the sort.

/sarcasm

Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. The organization just keeps the entire population in an unwanted war.

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The destruction of infrastructure is a fact.
The number killed and wounded is a fact.
The number of children and women killed are facts.

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Your numbers are not verified.

But yes a lot of damage is being done. Hamas never should have declared an unending war since 2007.

You still supporting Hamas any excuse you can get?

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As we should already have learned from the hospital incident, claimed facts need to be independently verified before they can be relied upon. In the midst of war, facts are notoriously hard to determine.

I’ve never heard of Euro Med Human Rights Monitor. One minute or so of research tells me they’re some kind of human rights organization. Such an organization has incentive to find human rights violations to justify their existence. I don’t know if they are right or not, but my inclination is to wait for some additional verification before accepting their claims as fact.

—Peter

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Israel, and it’s backers, have a universal excuse: “Hamas uses civilians as shields”. That narrative can be used to excuse any destruction of homes and infrastructure. A piece on the news tonight panned around a formerly nicer residential neighborhood in Gaza City. 32 apartment blocks, a couple city blocks, have been leveled. Was Hamas hiding in those buildings, among the civilians?

Steve

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Yes, often Hamas and others are there.

The Palestinians need a different tactic. This is not working since 2007.

Maybe peace and prosperity? I donno. That might be too hard to understand.

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The only time anyone pays any attention to the Pals is when they are blowing stuff up. If the Pals lay down for everything that is dished out to them, they are ignored.

Steve

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The only problem: if the Israelis start to pay attention after having stuff blown up it just reinforces that attitude and more stuff gets blown up! Something or someone needs to break the cycle.

JimA

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Then the corollary to that is the Israelis need to blow up enough Pal stuff so that, like Germans in 1945, the Pals have experienced the full horror of war and don’t want to do any more blowing up. The memories of October 7th will also then provoke a shudder with the Pals, and they will never again propose wiping out the Jews.

Just a though.

DB2

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How would you know that?

The West Bank Palestinians do actually have a government. Hamas is not even a government. The West Bank settlements are not in the Palestinian-governed areas. The illegal settlements are in the mixed-controlled areas.

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The Pals have already suffered 10 times more than the Israelis have since October 7th.

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But the violence only seems to be escalating over the last 40 years. The state actors have been progressively neutralized, Egypt, and Jordan both with treaties. Syria a bit occupied with it’s internal civil war. No-one really left to take the fight to the Israelis except the “terrorists” in Gaza and Lebanon. Isn’t that the part of the world where “an eye for an eye” was the law?

Steve

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Hamas was actually elected at one time. They were providing very low priced care at neighborhood medical clinics, and schools. Sort of a rough analog to the IRA, which had a terrorist wing, and a political wing.

Steve

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More BS. When Israel steals land from Palestinians in the West Bank, then these land convert to Israeli governed land. Then settlements built on those lands are called legal settlements by Israelis. The rest of the world (including USA) calls them illegal settlements.

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Lots of people in Gaza can see how many people are killed and wounded. The UN is there and they would know the facts. Here are some facts about UN efforts in Gaza:

The United Nations (UN) has provided aid to Gaza since 2014. UN agencies have spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza, including $600 million in 2020 alone. The UN has also:

  • Prepositioned life-saving stocks, including food and medical supplies, at the border in Egypt
  • Provided direct food assistance to some 350,000 Palestinians monthly
  • Offered aid to nearly 1 million Palestinians in cooperation with other humanitarian partners via cash transfers
  • Allocated a record $1.2 billion through CBPF in 2022
  • Released $5 million to help people sheltering in Gaza and the West Bank

The UN has also called for:

  • A humanitarian ceasefire
  • Safe access to civilians
  • The immediate release of all hostages
  • Protection of civilians in Gaza from forced relocation
  • The provision of food, fuel, water, and medicine to civilians in Gaza
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I have no idea where you gobbled together these fake LOAC principles. They are not correct. Here is a detailed article on the correct LOAC:

The enemy’s use of civilians as involuntary human shields does not relieve attacking forces from their own responsibilities. In conducting an attack, commanders must take into account those civilians used as involuntary human shields both in the proportionality analysis and in the obligation to minimize harm to civilians.

For more information, readers may be interested in Beth Van Schaack, Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework, December 7, 2016.

10. Targeting civilian infrastructure and disproportionality targeting civilian infrastructure = war crime

The same two rules just discussed with respect to civilian persons (8 and 9) also apply to civilian objects. The protection of civilian infrastructure is often a vitally important issue in urban warfare.

Directly targeting civilian objects is strictly forbidden and constitutes a war crime in both international and non-international armed conflict. Likewise, combatants must refrain from a military attack if the expected damage to civilian objects incidental to the attack would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained. Violations of that rule of proportionality may amount to a war crime if done purposefully or recklessly.

Important note on residential apartment buildings with military units inside.

Israel apparently adopts a highly unusual view of LOAC that would allow greater license to destroy an entire residential apartment building in which an enemy military facility is found — and to do so without the standard proportionality analysis. The generally accepted view is that an attack on a civilian apartment building in such cases must consider whether the civilian infrastructure that is expected to be destroyed is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage (ICRC, United States, International Law Association; ICRC report surveying States’ views and leading scholarship). The outlier position adopted by Israel is that “as a matter of law, the building is a single military objective, and therefore damage to other parts of the building need not be considered as collateral damage” (Merriam & Schmitt 2015; Eli Bar-On 2021). This conception of the rule does not appear to include a limiting principle that would apply to other civilian objects, including medical facilities, houses of worship, schools, and the like.

To avoid confusion, it is important to make clear that Israel’s legal position would still consider any loss of civilian life or injury to civilians in the proportionality analysis. It is the civilian infrastructure – the building itself – which drops out of their equation.

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Israelis tell civilians to go to southern Gaza, then the Israelis bomb southern Gaza killing and wounding more civilians.

Conflict death toll update:

Israel pounded southern Gaza with airstrikes early on Sunday and said it would intensify attacks in the enclave’s north, as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his cabinet late on Saturday, reportedly to discuss an expected ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian media reported at least 11 people were killed in an Israeli strike in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, and that Israel was striking the southern city of Rafah.

The strikes came hours after Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari called on Gaza’s residents to move south “for your own safety”. He said the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) would step up airstrikes from Saturday in preparation for the next stage of the war. “We will deepen our attacks to minimise the dangers to our forces in the next stages of the war. We are going to increase the attacks, from today,” Hagari said.

Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday that Israel’s retaliatory attacks had killed at least 4,385 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, with more than a million of the territory’s 2.3 million people displaced. It comes after an attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants that killed 1,400 people, mainly civilians, in a shock rampage that has traumatised Israel.