this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
56 points (75.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43908 readers
838 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

We know what happens with peaceful protests, elections, and foreign interference (and more foreign interference), so how can Palestine gain it's freedom? Any positive ideas are welcome, because this situation is already a humanitarian crisis and is looking bleaker by the day.

Historical references are also valuable in this discussion, like slave revolts or the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, although hopefully in the case of Palestine a peaceful and successful outcome can be achieved, as opposed to some of the historical events above.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] danhakimi@kbin.social 0 points 10 months ago

Targeting civilians is bad.

Terrorists, including those who target civilians, are combatants, and are valid targets. They remain valid targets when they use schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and residential areas as bases for combat operations. This is pretty clear in international law.

Israel still must not target civilians, and must take reasonable measures to minimize civilian casualties of war. We've seen Israel, in at least some contexts, take quite extreme measures to warn civilians, help evacuate civilians, and carefully target munitions to minimize civilian death despite Hamas and PIJ using those civilians as human shields.

The raw numbers are still gruesome... unless you compare them to other instances of urban warfare, in which case the numbers are actually lower than many would expect. The civilian death ratio, as far as we've been able to estimate (since Hamas does not estimate), appears to be lower than usual.

Civilian deaths are tragic. It would obviously be much better if Hamas had not started this war, or if they would agree to the ceasefire Israel offered, or if they weren't so committed to war in general. But they are. They frequently condemn even the concept of peace, and insist that they will repeat the October 7th attack as often as they can. There is no avenue to peace while they remain in power.

So the war will continue. And we will continue to hope that Israel does its best to minimize harm to civilians.