Quote:No, you're conflating the mass murder of innocent people versus attacks against wartime adversaries.
No I'm not. Since the Geneva Convention targeting civilians even during a so-called "war" is now considered a war crime and nothing short of mass murder. The GC rules state clearly that during a war civilians are to be protected and provided medical care not killed. IDF soldiers may get to kill other Hamas soldiers, but they do not get to shoot Gazan citizens. There's no excuse for it. And trying to justify it is trying to justify genocide.
"The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel's security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages.
Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead.
Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached.
The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups.
According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.
Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry's figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country's own intelligence services.
When the work of the ministry's statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates.
A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care.
Gaza's civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive "total victory" over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023.
Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved.
A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger "as a weapon of war". The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a "main pressure lever" against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat.
Weaponising food is a war crime."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko