Hmm, I seem to recall US Intelligence swearing that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMDs and was definitely about to use them on his own people and we definitely needed to invade Iraq to stop him. US Intelligence is not a fact or truth seeking operation; its purpose is to further American imperial interests all else be damned.
Hasn’t the IDF been in control of the hospital for like a month, and are yet to produce any evidence (those 3 rifles and the calendar don’t count)?
They kidnapped the hospital director and tortured him until he confessed that he was Hamas. That’s way better than video and photo evidence of the huge base they claimed was underneath the hospital.
Look at this cool video of this 3d animation the IDF made before they started attacking the hospital. That looks more realistic than real life. In fact it looks so realistic that actual video footage wouldn’t do these tunnels justice. Which is why the IDF isn’t providing it.
You can trust Bidens word. Surely he would never lie about completely unverified ridiculous Zionist claims
To be fair, they also said Russia was about to invade Ukraine and no one believed them.
Hopefully they’re giving real intel to the decision makers, but anything released to the public is intended for influence purposes. Nothing in their mission requires or even encourages telling the general public true things.
They gave the wmd ‘intel’ to lawmakers who were then pressured into supporting the illegal US invasion of Iraq.
Not much has changed since then. Hell, the Afghanistan Papers detailed how everyone in the intelligence community knew the war was a lost cause, but it still came as a shock to most law makers.
One does not really need US intelligence’s confirmation to undestand that the use of human shields is standard operating procedure for islamistic terrorists. It’s not that they don’t care about their own citizens but they simply don’t see getting martyred as a bad thing. Quite the opposite.
To me it comes down to a strategic approach. In how many ways is it possible for Hamas to actually hurt Israel in a significant way? Not very many, even thousands of civilians dead doesn’t genuinely weaken the country much. But they can make Israel hurt themselves, by basically making them go evil and lose their allies.
Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals for the Sept 11th attack, by getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart imo.
Regardless, arguing this position on here is going to be like trying to swim up a waterfall. Israel has gone too far, and the hate against them is too strong because of that. The middle of a war is not the time for nuance.
edit for a qualifier
Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals for the Sept 11th attack, by getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart.
Bin Laden’s goals were to get Americans to replace their government with one that would get out of the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting Israel. He consummately failed.
To me it comes down to a strategic approach. In how many ways is it possible for Hamas to actually hurt Israel in a significant way?
Perhaps they should have focused on governance instead of martyrdom.
Even if it did, and I wouldn’t take Israels best ally as complitelly objective fact, you don’t just bomb a whole hospital full of civilians
From the Israeli point of view yes you do.
Hospitals being a forbidden target is important, civilians dying is not, because they don’t care about civilians.
It’s sad to see how something intended to become a Jewish nation after 2k years and so on became a dumbed down pidgin version of 1950s’ late European colonialism.
To defend that israel does not commit war crimes, I have seen zionists claim that if civilians are used for military purposes (involuntary human shield), they become valid military targets ._.
Could that same argument be applied to army reservists in a country with mandatory military service?
It’s because of the Geneva Convention (origin of the modern concept of war crimes.)
It’s designed to be applied mutually, if only one side does then it’s basically non-functioning.
Isn’t this the same hospital Israel allegedly leveled a few months back?
Edit: Nope, it was Al-Ahli Arab hospital.
Yup. I think there’s a difference between the factual claim of whether Hamas has operations on the hospital grounds vs the justification for the type of military action taken against the hospital. I think it is possible to accept there is truth to the Hamas operations center being located there and still condemn the military tactics used against the hospital due to civilian casualties and harm it caused. Unfortunately those 2 things seem to be conflates that acknowledgement of Hamas being there is implicitly condoning Israel’s actions.
Saddam’s WMDs were also hidden in the still to appear gigantic, impossible to avoid command centre tunnel network under the hospital.
AP have the most comprehensive coverage of the document, which is not publicly available. Two sections in jump out to me:
“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident in its judgment on this topic and has independently corroborated information on HAMAS and PIJ’s use of the hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel,” the assessment states. It continues that it believes the groups “used the al-Shifa hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”
And
The U.S. believes that Hamas members evacuated days before Israel raided the complex on Nov. 15 and that they destroyed sensitive documents and electronics before Israeli troops entered the facility.
From the AP article:
U.S. officials had previously pointed to classified intelligence, obtained independently from the Israelis, to offer support for Israel’s raid.
The US and UK (possibly more, I lost track at some point) have been running surveillance flights over Gaza for pretty much the entire duration of the war. There are plenty of eyes on Israel’s military operations and ways to gather intelligence inside Gaza.
NYT themselves came to the conclusion that al-Shifa was used for military purposes based on Hamas’ own propaganda. It’s always been a question of how central it was to Hamas’ operations.
That’s an editorial. And the bullet list of “evidence” is outdated or irrelevant. The existence of a tunnel means nothing. Every modern hospital in existence has tunnels or basement levels. What was happening a decade or more ago is irrelevant. To strike a protected target you must have timely, well backed, intelligence. Basically you don’t do it without a smoking gun like radio direction finding their command frequency to that location, tracking movements of runners, or corroborating stories from prisoners.
Just shrugging and pointing to the terrorist label doesn’t meet the requirement.
Did they use the part of the hospital Israel built to be a bunker as their command center?
Are we considering armed guards at hospitals to be war crimes now, because Israel built that bunker and definitely stations armed guards at all of its hospitals.