By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
It doesn’t take much sanity to see that attacking your much larger and stronger neighbor and indiscriminately murdering their elderly and children and parading raped corpses through your streets would be a terrible idea. But we have idiots on both sides.
They are religious nutters, they don’t care about their own death, or the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. If anything, they want Israel to attack Palestine and kill thousands, and create rage that creates more Hamas. Hamas isn’t only fed by Palestinians. It can’t be defeated by military might. That’s like “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.
I mean if Hamas was replaced by a Hezbollah equivalent that would be in improvement.
More likely the anger being created will feed ever more extremism. Beating a people into peaceful submission doesn’t work. Let alone is barbaric.
It’s not about beating Gaza into submission. It’s about destroying the logistical facilities necessary to executing slave raids. There’s not need for Gazan to “submit” to Israel. They just need to stop attacking Israel.
Those same facilities are used by civilians. It really seams about giving Palestinians the choices of submit, leave or die. This is not the road to peace.
Ya unfortunately Hamas commits warcrimes by co-locating military infrastructure with civilian infrastructure.
Yes I’m sure they do. However the answer isn’t to respond with more war crimes. It just keeps escalating and innocent people keep dying. It also feeds the nutters on both sides, swelling their numbers and influence.
Hitting a colocated facility isn’t a war crime.