Israel’s decision to deprive Palestinian civilians living in Gaza of access to basic needs violates international law, former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth said.
“In the realm of humanitarian necessities, the Israeli government has imposed a siege on all of Gaza,” Roth said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Roth, who now teaches at Princeton University, added that the atrocities committed by the Hamas armed group against Israeli civilians do not justify the “revenge” and “collective punishment” against Palestinian civilians.
“A basic premise of international humanitarian law is that war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by the other. There’s an independent obligation by both sides to respect the laws of war.
“It increasingly does look like the Israel military is proceeding without adequate care to spare civilians. And that kind of indiscriminate and disproportionate attack … is in itself a war crime.”
The whole point of human rights, is that they can’t be taken away from people. Both populations have the right to exist. To say otherwise simply invites unending religious war.
That’s funny, because Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist and have said that publicly. Which was the twist in my original comment.
There’s bad actors on both sides. The trouble is there’s a huge power asymmetry politically right now.
We’re in a position where a fascist ideologue religious military group has entrenched itself in politics, that’s a terrible position to be in. But we’re not going to get out of this position by saying one population doesn’t deserve to live
Ah, it’s a both sides guy.
I know right! Can you imagine populations of millions of people have different subgroups which behave differently? And you can’t condemn an entire ethnic group by the actions of some of them? World is so unfair, be easy if it was simple, we could just kill all the bad guys.
But if one of the populations doesn’t deserve to live, who gets to decide which one dies?