Around 9:30 p.m. in late February, a white Mazda pulled up near a game cafe in the Jenin refugee camp on the northern edge of the West Bank, where a crowd of boys and young men often gathered to socialize.
As the car stopped, a few people walked by on the narrow street. Two motorbikes weaved past in different directions. “Everything was fine at the time,” according to an eyewitness sitting nearby in the camp’s main square.
Then the car erupted in a ball of flame. Two missiles fired from an Israeli drone had hit the Mazda in quick succession, as shown in a video the Israeli Air Force posted that night.
According to the IAF, the strike killed Yasser Hanoun, described as “a wanted terrorist.”
But Hanoun was not the only fatality: 16-year old Said Raed Said Jaradat, who was near the vehicle when it was hit, sustained shrapnel wounds all over his body, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. He died from his injuries at 1 a.m. the next morning.
Jaradat is one of 24 children killed in Israel’s airstrikes on the West Bank since last summer, when the Israeli forces began deploying drones, planes, and helicopters to carry out attacks in the occupied territory for the first time in decades.
Do the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? Or are we just going to call any retaliation “terrorism”?
Yeah, it worked great for US forces when they captured uniformed, trained, ranked military in countries we decided were state sponsored terrorists, so they weren’t military, just ‘enemy combatants’ being ‘extraordinarily renditioned’ to an ‘advanced interrogation’ in a ‘happy play time building’ or what ever insane bullshit we were saying when we were ‘liberating’ oil fields, poppy fields, and other private resources to be carefully maintained by a trusted and legitimate corporation rather than being LOOTED, by a dictator to do evil shit like… build schools and hospitals… but also chemical weapons he bought. And WE KNOW!!! because we sold them to him.
But yes…
They are clearly all terrorists. Particularly when they attack Israeli police or military.
Until you have your own air force, any violence is terrorism. Once you have an air force, nothing you do is terrorism.
He was suspected of involvement in a shooting at a kibbutz near the West Bank. There is no right to attack settlements with no military value.
You mean like a game cafe
The military value depends on who is inside.
90% of Israelis are military or reservists, making them non-civilians under International Law. So yeah, a kibbutz can be seen as a valid military target.
Not true. Until they are activated for service, they are noncombatants under international law.
Was what I said not true?
They are noncombatants under international law. Noncombatants are not valid military targets.
So Israel is killing a bunch of non-valid military targets and justifying it by saying they were Hamas. Got it.
You don’t actually have any standards or morals, and just want to justify everything as “With us or against us”
Using that same logic, most of the Hamas members targeted by the Israelis are also civilians.
Remember, Hamas is a singular governmental organization that kept the militant wing separate from the civilian wing. i.e. Gazan Hospital Administator? Hamas.
That is a literal justification Israel has used to justify killing Gazan civilians, including police officers.
So, which is it? Are IDF reservists military, or are Gazan police and hospital administrators civilians?
You don’t get to have both.
Fascinating that “a bunch of civilians” doesn’t factor into that valuation
If there are only civilians inside, then it’s not a military target.
If there are any combatants inside, then it’s a military target.
Not according to Articles 51 and 54 of Protocol I of the Geneva Convention, but then again who cares about war crimes, right?
Article 51 and Article 54 do not have anything to do with this.
Article 51 bans pardons and article 54 discusses the use of the red cross emblem.
Those are articles of the Geneva Convention. Protocol I of the Geneva Convention is different. It was added later. The protocols are like amendments.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/article-51
It clearly lays out what constitutes targeting of civilians. But the fact that you need to be told that killing civilians is wrong says everything that should be said.
So they assassinated him instead of arresting him?
Sooo much legal.
They can’t arrest him, he doesn’t live in Israel. And killing enemy combatants is legal, for example Osama bin Laden.
I’m sorry I just spent that entire time laughing. The IDF and Israeli Police absolutely have the run of West Bank. It’s not called an occupation for nothing.
And when you kill someone without even trying to arrest them inside your civil jurisdiction, it’s called murder. At least it is in civilized countries.
Israel is not the civil authority of Gaza. Hamas is.
More important, the attack on the kibbutz occurred during a war between Israel and Hamas. That makes the attacker a combatant, not a criminal. In fact, you cannot legally prosecute combatants unless they commit war crimes.
That’s all great. But this is in the West Bank. Not Gaza.
And you can absolutely be prosecuted for a war crime. Your own link says that.
Yes the link said that, and so did I.
Are you suggesting Yasser Hanoun committed a war crime?
If he specifically attacked civilians as part of a war then yes.
Aren’t settlements military outposts?
No. And this wasn’t a settlement, it was a kibbutz within Israel.
Which kibbutz did he shoot at and was he convicted of anything or is a suspicion enough to kill Palestinians?
Settlers have no right to be in the settlements, either.
Also, suspected isn’t enough.
The kibbutz was in Israel, and Israelis have the right to be in Israel.
And as an armed member of Hamas, he was a military target even if he wasn’t involved in the kibbutz shooting.
It’s a war, they’re both allowed to attack each other. Palestinians are going to lose though, the two sides are not equal.
All this peacefire talk is just a nice way of framing the Palestinian surrender. The only question is how long Hamas will keep fighting before they are forced to give in.
Ehhh not exactly. We describe it as a war when Israel is doing the killing (37k civilians dead) but we describe it as a terrorist attack when Hamas does the killing (<1000 civilians dead).
You’re not wrong
Why do you count all those dead as ‘civilians’?
Because they are. Unless you have proof they were not.
If you’re suggesting that no Hamas fighters were killed in this conflict… Yeah not gonna waste my time on that
Were they in the refugee camps?
Was who in which refugee camp?
Enemy combatants in the kibbutz
Wow, You actually don’t realize that Hamas is not a political organization in the West Bank. So, it isn’t even a war.
You’re literally justifying the murder of children here because they are Palestinian. You don’t even have the fig leaf of saying that it is a population that voted for Hamas.
You’re literally justifying the unjustifiable murder of children.
Almost all of the deaths are happening in Gaza, there’s very little fighting going on in the west bank right now.
Can you read for me the title of this post, please?
I’m not certain, but I may be hallucinating words and need to verify that you’re not just changing a goal post to justify the slaughter of innocent children that literally have nothing to do with Israels war against Gaza.
RTFA
Hamas isn’t in the west bank. This is straight up butchery and terror by the Israeli government.