4 ms·

As far as has been credibly reported, it wasn't a "sizeable fraction", it was a very small number. There's only one incident I know of that is verified. I'm su

• SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
  It is absolutely not "true both legally and morally." It all depends on scale and purpose of the operation. If israeli military acted with disregard to the lives of non combatants, that would account to war crimes, against their own population. They have history of war crimes against their own forces, called Hannibal doctrine, so I won't surprised if they have same directives against civilians.
  • edanm 3y ago
    > It is absolutely not "true both legally and morally." It all depends on scale and purpose of the operation. Well I wasn't making a general statement - I was talking in this specific case. Let's give an analogy - if a bunch of bank robbers have taken hostages and are threatening to kill them, and if the police is reasonably certain there is no way of actually getting them out - the police is morally justified in sending in SWAT to try and rescue as many hostages as possible. Even if they know that many hostages will die. The moral fault is with the bank robbers, not the police. > If [I]sraeli military acted with disregard to the lives of non combatants, that would account to war crimes, against their own population. I think that's a totally valid internal matter for debate within Israel. Should this kind of doctrine be the rule? Is it appropriate to attempt to stop militants by any means necessary, including possibly at the cost of your own population? This is in the same vein as "we don't negotiate with terrorists", a principled position that theoretically cuts down on terror, but that has brutal immediate ramaficiations in specific cases. That all said, I don't think this doctrine amounts to war crimes (I'm not sure how it possibly could amount to war crimes). And I think it's an internal matter for debate inside the country, but don't really see how it matters to anyone else. In fact, it kind of proves the opposite of what many people think - that the IDF is specifically trying to kill Gazan civilians. I'm often asked "what would the IDF do if the innocent civilians around a Hamas militant were Jews, not Palestinians, would you still bomb them even though it might cause collateral damage?". And while I think that question has a lot of answers, I think the "Hannibal directive", if implemented on October 7th (as appears likely), is actually proof that the IDF acts consistently, if terribly brutally - civilians are sometimes collateral damage, even if they're Israelis.
    • runarberg 3y ago
      I have a question about your analogy: How is the police so certain that the bank robbers won’t release the hostages with negotiations? Should we trust the judgement of the police? I think the answer to these questions are: “We don’t known” and “No”. We should indeed scrutinize the police judgement, and if the SWAT team goes in guns blazing killing some of the hostages in the cross fire, we should question that decision. As is often done in countries with free press. I don’t think that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is an actual policy by any country. Even the USA frequently negotiates the release of hostages of terrorists. In fact not negotiating seems like a horrible policy which only serves to maximize unnecessary suffering. It may be a good policy if you believe that the lives of the hostages is worth less then the blood of terrorists, or if you are actively trying to spew hatred towards terrorists among your electorate. I think the latter reason is true of Israel’s government. They are actively trying to maximize the perceived threat of Hamas, and don’t mind Palestinians as a group being dehumanized in the process. In the eyes of the Israeli government, the lives of the hostages are worth the cost as long as the perceived threat level increases. Their end goal is to justify annexation in the best case scenario or ethnic cleansing or genocide in the worst.
      • edanm 3y ago
        > We should indeed scrutinize the police judgement, and if the SWAT team goes in guns blazing killing some of the hostages in the cross fire, we should question that decision. As is often done in countries with free press. Absolutely. I'm not against scrutinizing anything. Like I said about this specific case - the people most aggrieved and most understanding of the situation is Israelis themselves, since we're talking about cases where Israeli citizens were killed while trying to kill militants. It's absolutely something the Israeli press should explore and something that the Israeli public should and will hold the military accountable for. It is not, however, something that should be used to "score points against the IDF" or whatever- if the affected citizens themselves are not against the way this was handled, a third party using it as some kind of way to show that "the IDF is evil" or whatever is a bit silly (and, btw, insulting). Nor is this something that should be used to conclude that "actually, Hamas didn't really kill so many people" - which is clearly false based on vast troves of reports of people killed by Hamas, much of them filmed. --- In this case, bitter experience shows that Hamas doesn't release captured citizens without horrible costs - last time, for one soldier, Israel released 1,027 prisoners, including the person who just masterminded the October 7th attack. This time, 100 hostages were eventually released for a much more favorable-to-Israel exchange, and in exchange for a pause in the fighting - which some people take as a sign that the fighting pressured Hamas into accepting this deal. > I don’t think that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is an actual policy by any country. It is - though it's complicated, many European countries do in fact negotiate, the US less often. I've heard reports that it isn't clear which policy is actually better in terms of number of captured civilians. Quoting Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_terrorists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_negotiation_with_te... > On June 18, 2013, G8 leaders signed an agreement against paying ransoms to terrorists.[1] However, most Western states have violated this policy on certain occasions [...] These payments were made almost exclusively by European governments, which funneled the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking it as development aid > Some Western countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Britain, tend to not negotiate or pay ransoms to terrorists. Others, such as France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland are more open to negotiation. This is a source of tension between governments with opposing policies. > In fact not negotiating seems like a horrible policy which only serves to maximize unnecessary suffering. It may be a good policy if you believe that the lives of the hostages is worth less then the blood of terrorists, or if you are actively trying to spew hatred towards terrorists among your electorate. That's not the point at all! The point is to make it so that capturing hostages is meaningless - disincentivizing doing it in the future. Many people in Israel warned, when deciding about that 1k-priosners-for-1-Israeli-soldier deal, that it would cause Hamas to really put effort into kidnapping more Israelis. Well - it happened - and a lot of people consider this proof that that previous deal was a "mistake". > [Israel's government is] actively trying to maximize the perceived threat of Hamas, and don’t mind Palestinians as a group being dehumanized in the process. In the eyes of the Israeli government, the lives of the hostages are worth the cost as long as the perceived threat level increases. Their end goal is to justify annexation in the best case scenario or ethnic cleansing or genocide in the worst. You're talking about this as if it were a coherent response calculated to benefit the government. The decision to shoot at fleeing terrorists was probably made under incredible duress, possibly by field commanders and not the government (I'm not sure), while Israel was experiencing the worst attack in 50 years, possibly since its founding. There was no way of knowing if this was the opening salvo of a much broader attack that would've strained Israel much farther than ended up happening. Whatever you think of this government aside, these specific decisions were almost certainly not made in a calculated way to "justify annexation". (And I very much dislike this government, to put it mildly.) It is a complete misunderstanding of the situation to think that the government needed to make the threat of Hamas seem larger at the expense of Israeli citizens.
• wahnfrieden 3y ago
  IDF's own reporting calls the amount of friendly fire casualties on Oct 7 "immense". Your interpretation is more conservative than IDF's own analysis and reporting on their own evidence - that's suspicious. Furthermore there is Israeli reporting on the practical use of Hannibal Directive during Oct 7, which is deliberate killing of military and civilian hostages. Israeli reporting claims that the use of this directive may have been responsible for a "large" amount of hostage casualties. Despite official recognition of the "immense friendly fire", IDF also reports that they refuse further investigation because they believe it would be "immoral", so there is deliberate obfuscation at play. >Israel’s army on Tuesday admitted that an “immense and complex quantity” of what it calls “friendly fire” incidents took place on 7 October. >The key declaration was buried in the penultimate paragraph of an article by Yoav Zitun, the military correspondent of Israeli outlet Ynet. >It is the first known official army admission that a significant number of the hundreds of Israelis who died on 7 October were killed by Israel itself, and not by Hamas or other Palestinian resistance factions. >Citing new data released by the Israeli military, Zitun wrote that: “Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF [Israeli military] believes that … it would not be morally sound to investigate” them.
  • edanm 3y ago
    EDIT: Mis-wrote something, see further comments for details. I went down the rabbit-hole trying to find out exactly what was said and meant. I don't consider Electronic Intifada a credible source (I mean, the bias is in the name!), but they are citing specific statements made by an Israeli army reporter. That said, I think they (and you) are making things seem very different by the way in which you're quoting the statements. I wrote there are only a few known cases of friendly fire on civilians, and you wrote that the army thinks the number is "immense", which contradicts what I said. Except, if you look at the context of that statement from the article, I think it doesn't actually contradict it. Here's the whole paragraph: > Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time. The "immense and complex quantity" statement here refers to why the army says it's not morally sound to investigate the incidents. There could've been 100 incidents - e.g. 100 cases of cars bombed trying to cross back into Gaza, which may or may not have had hostages in them (which is I believe where the IDF supposedly invoked the "Hannibal doctrine"). A hundred potential incidents to investigate could absolutely qualify as someone saying there are an "immense number", while still only representing a tiny fraction of victims compared to the numbers we know for certain were killed by Hamas. I honestly think that if your case hinges on the specific phrasing used to describe what someone from the IDF said, and which doesn't even necessarily prove anything - then your case is incredibly weak. This could've been a translation error (I couldn't find the original Hebrew version of this article), this could've been the reporter slightly exaggerating what they heard (even unknowingly), etc. Do you have any other sources except for this? I'd love to see them. Though again, let's be clear - there are already hundreds (possibly over a thousand?) known victims of Hamas that are verified. There might be some friendly-fire incidents too, but there are an incredibly large number that are absolutely known to have been killed by Hamas, many of which were captured on video by Hamas itself! Trying to claim otherwise is just completely ignoring all real evidence in favor of conspiracy.