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Right; the Geneva Conventions aren't meant to turn men into angels. They're supposed to be clear rules of the road so that everyone knows what to expect if they behave in a particular way. If people elect not to behave in the specified ways, they don't get the benefit of those clear rules. It's really simple at root.
Remember also that the Geneva Conventions are from a time when war was still something peer nations did.
The world has changed, as has the ways wars are fought- Hamas operates the way it does to exploit the fact that everyone else in the West adheres to obsolete and incorrect ideas of what modern warfare is and are very uncomfortable with reality (example: are women who make weapons for men legitimate military targets?).
Ironically Hamas has done what liberal Westerners only ever dreamed of- they made the average Palestinian women just as capable a fighter as the average Palestinian man (with respect to how their enemy limits itself).
I dunno. Some of the international customs, though, for instance around executing people out of uniform, not conducting false surrenders (and respecting noncombatant status of POWs) predates the Geneva Conventions considerably. The Civil War, for instance, is full of screeching about international law – the North threatened to hang Southern privateers as pirates, for instance, under the logic that the Confederacy wasn't a real state. And guerrilla combat was part of the Civil War (and many wars before that).
Even during the Second World War – which was the birth of the modern Conventions – partisans and guerrilla fighters were very commonplace. So while I agree that the world has changed – it might not be the world the Conventions anticipated – a lot of these problems are very old and in fact predate modern international laws.
And the way they were dealt with was reprisal killings until the population actively rejects the insurgents (and in so doing integrates with the occupying force). Which is what Israel is doing- you can't challenge a militia like this to a set-piece battle because they'll just instantly lose; they've tried that a few times already (and lost every single time).
You have to beat it out of the population, like the US did to the Germans post '45. You do that by running decapitation strikes (that's what Nuremberg was for, and that's why the Israelis settled on exploding pagers) on the previous elite and only focus on destroying the elements of the enemy population that are legitimately intolerable or otherwise not useful to you; it wasn't necessary to destroy all of the underlying Nazi tendencies of the German population (and would have been harmful considering the country was to be the first line of defense against the Soviets), just the ones that brought them into conflict with American interests.
So it is with the Palestinians. They lost the war, now they're trying to avoid being subsumed and, in absence of any competent people, are unable to do this through soft power. (What Blue states try to do to Red states in the US when/as they have the opportunity is exactly the same; part of the Blue civil religion is to deny they do this, which is naturally why they seek to deny any of their provinces the right to do it- something the Palestinians, as their fargroup, are able to exploit.)
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