This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Sorry for the leading question but am I the only one naive enough to ask "Why don't the israeli troops just walk into the al-Shifa hospital?"? Where I live, if the national army wanted to take over the closest hospital I am confident they could do it in like 5 minutes by walking in through the front door.
If the answer is as I suspect, "the Israeli troops can't walk into the hospital because the hospital is being defended with guns," then why doesn't that fact appear in your average news story like this one? I know this sounds like a post from a person who really cares about Israel and is always going on about media bias against that country, so I just want to add a disclaimer saying that my position on Israel is that I'm just a normal American non-Jew who doesn't really know or care very much about it.
But honestly, to go back to my opening question, what the heck is going on at the hospital? Why can't they just take it over?
Basically Hamas knows Israel won't bomb the hospital, which seems to be the largest hospital in that area. And thus, they base operations there with impunity.
Why wouldn't they just blow it up while they have an excuse to? Netanyahu was talking about how he's dealing with Amalek all over again, do you know what was commanded to do to them?
Is your model that Israel is trying to kill as many people as possible? The world would look different if that were the case. There would be a lot more dead people.
The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high. Not impossible and Hamas has made sure to make Israel life easier by doing their best to make any civilian infrastructure legitimate military target, but still it is a big deal.
The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high.
The bar is extremely low, as low as 'is it being used as a military position.'
War crime law is not that legitimate military targets (military positions, command posts, munition stores) are made ineligible by the presence of protected classes (i.e. hospitals), but rather than protected classes are made eligible by the presence of legitimate military targets. There are no protected classes of military sites where someone can fire at you, but you can't fire back.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties. There are no convention requirements to take military casualties in the process of storming military objectives in order to minimize civilian casualties.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties.
Do you have a source for this? Because if this is true, then I've seen such misinformation repeated all the time:
Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life... which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.
What you cited covers the point in conjunction with the same conventions covering valid military objectives and the revocation of protected sites if they are turned into valid military objectives.
Destroying something so that it no longer contributes to casualties on your forces is a concrete and direct military advantage. This goes back to what a valid military target is, and the conventions are very clear that protected targets are NOT protected if they are converted into valid military targets, even if there are still civilian casualties. As such, there is not requirement for there to be no civilian casualties, or for the belligerant to accept casualties in order to avoid civilian casualities. The onus is on the other belligerent to not place military objectives amongst civilians / to move civilians away from military objectives, not on the 'attacking' beligerant to not engage valid military objectives.
As the collateral damage of any civilians is not a binary disqualifier, proportionality doesn't work as a 'prohibit any attack on a valid military objective that may cause casualties' either-or binary. The porportionality is in the excess to the miltiary advantage... but since the military advantage is judged by the attacker, not the defender, and the anticipated value is often trivial to justify in close-range engagements on force-protection grounds and limiting enemy ability to continue offering mearningful resistance, proportionality would be a functionally dead letter if it was solely a binary (which- by its own working- it isn't).
Rather, proportionality comes into play when something would have no concrete or direct miltiary objective- which is usually when a target is so far away / inconsequential it means nothing for your military force survivial if the target is hit or not- or if you have alternatives that have different effects on the civilians in the course of the legitimate strike. In the face of valid military objective where concrete and direct military is already anticipated, and thus engaging is not prohibited, the proportionality distinction will only apply if you have alternatives with smaller loss of incidental loss- which would then render the overkill-casualties excessive in relations to the military advantage anticipated, because you could get the military advantage anticipated by using a smaller effect and thus the 'extra' deaths are unnecessary.
Thanks! I’ve seen a lot of misinformation around how proportionality actually means that if the ratio of civilians to enemy combatants is high enough, then it’s automatically a war crime. I can see where they come from, as the wording is rather vague, but upon reading the article further:
Australia, Canada and New Zealand have stated that the term “military advantage” includes the security of the attacking forces.
the expression “concrete and direct” military advantage was used in order to indicate that the advantage must be “substantial and relatively close, and that advantages which are hardly perceptible and those which would only appear in the long term should be disregarded”.
Numerous States have pointed out that those responsible for planning, deciding upon or executing attacks necessarily have to reach their decisions on the basis of their assessment of the information from all sources which is available to them at the relevant time.
It’s not clear to me how much of a consensus this is outside of Australia, Canada, and NZ, but the air strikes by Israel most certainly 1) provide immediate and perceptible advantages to 2) the security of its attacking forces, at least 3) as far as the IDF is aware of, unless there’s any evidence that they have engaged in air strikes despite knowing full well that there were no Hamas military assets at the target location.
So there’s indeed a strong case to be made that regardless of civilian casualties, the IDF has not committed war crimes in this particular air strike campaign. Not that anyone already calling it “genocide” would care to change their minds, of course.
It’s not clear to me how much of a consensus this is outside of Australia, Canada, and NZ,
Basically every military that has fought an insurgency or an urban conflict in the last century, or otherwise had to fight a conflict where a house is a battle position, has adopted the force protection argument that some civilian casualties are acceptable. This goes from Russia to the Philippines to Sri Lanka and India to Iran and Saudi Arabia to Colombia and every NATO member.
This is usually the point where I remind an audience that war is hell, and that the laws of wars are about limiting, not preventing, civilian casualties. The conventions on how to wage war 'right' are as much about protecting every single life as a fire break is about stopping forest fires. The effects are good for the greater whole, but the part of the forest within the forest break is fully expected to burn.
So there’s indeed a strong case to be made that regardless of civilian casualties, the IDF has not committed war crimes in this particular air strike campaign. Not that anyone already calling it “genocide” would care to change their minds, of course.
This is generally correct. There will be some specific cases that people will focus on, but these can depend on having insight into the belligerent perspectives, as well as other 'the law isn't what you thought the law was' contexts. For perspectives, nothing in the conventions requires a belligerent to reveal their Intelligence- and thus sources and methods- for why they chose a target, so there are often targets that are legitimate but which may not appear to be when prioritized... and this in turn doesn't even include cases of flawed/wrong intelligence, where the a belligerent can legitimately believe there is a valid target somewhere one isn't. It doesn't become a war crime retroactively if one is duped by a denial/deception campaign. Meanwhile, some things that may seem obviously off-limits are actually covered in other areas of the convention. We had a good example in the first thread, when someone did an actuall review of the convention requirements for delivering aid to civilians- in short, while delivering aid to civilians must be allowed, it doesn't have to be allowed by any given organization to any given organization. Rather, a belligerent must allow a mutually acceptable intermediary to deliver it, so that the there can be some sort of guarantee that the aid goes to civilians and not the beseiged belligerent. As a consequence of that, for example, bombing the border crossings early on is not, from a rules-of-law perspective, 'preventing aid from getting to civilians,' which is forbidden, it is 'preventing resupply to a belligerent,' which is permitted.
Rather than quibbling on legal dynamics few know and fewer actually care about, the better argument against genocide-claimers is the point that, just by the numbers, if the Israelis are trying to genocide the Gaza Strip population... they are doing a really, really poor job at it by even the most pro-Palestinian numbers.
If the goal of the Israeli government and military was to genocide the Palestinian population, we would expect to see massively higher Palestinian casualty rates so far. Like, orders-of-magnitude higher. We'd also have seen considerably different targeting decisions of types of targets- with far more about irrevocably destroying essential infrastructure beyond repair or leveling apartment blocks without organizing evacuations- if they were in a 'just kill them all before anyone can stop us' dynamic.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties
And that is actually a high bar in my book. If there are no civilians you are free to overkill.
And no one particularly cares about overkill, because overkill is wasteful and takes away relevant resources for the next engagment. Outside of a few propaganda contexts- which are extremely rare in civilian casualty contexts- civilian-overkill is a military-waste issue as much as anything else.
Is it just that the news sources I'm reading are terrible? I feel like I've never seen it mentioned that there is another side (not just the IDF) fighting in this war. Like they mentioned that the IDF forces have surrounded the hospitals but it's not clear why, since as far as anyone has told me it is just full of doctors and their patients. I feel like I'm five years old asking these questions but it's just so weird to me, it's like the grownups understand something that I don't.
You're quite right. None of the news sources I've read has said anything about what's stopping Israel from just walking up to the reception desk with a bunch of fuel cans and spare generators, and having a look around for tunnels while they're there. The assumption has to be that either it's defended by Hamas, or that Israel is kayfabing that it's defended by Hamas, but no news outlets seem to want to say anything beyond "the doctors say there's no Hamas, but we as reporters didn't bother to ask the IDF commander why they don't just walk inside."
A lot of coverage has made it seem like the IDF is simply choosing to starve everyone in the hospital of supplies under the assumption that Hamas has a position within it, but has been extremely light on details.
This NY Times article from within the hour describes IDF troops 'battling Hamas fighters nearby' the hospital, but otherwise simply paints a picture of the terrible situation the people in the hospital are in, and reproduces a statement from the hospital's director, Dr. Salmiya, where he says that there is no truth to the idea that Hamas is operating beneath the hospital.
"There’s no reason why we just can’t take the patients out of there, instead of letting Hamas use it as a command center for terrorism, for the rockets that they fire against Israel, for the terror tunnels that they use to kill Israeli civilians."
According to this Nov 14 article from the Jerusalem Post, make of that what you will, the IDF is going out of its way to offer assistance in evacuating patients from the hospital, which apparently a publicly released phone conversation shows the hospital leadership is eager to accept. The article also prominently mentions and provides footage of incubators being loaded into vans that the IDF is apparently rushing to get to the hospital as fast as possible. (Isn't the problem that there is no power for their incubators, not that they didn't have enough incubators? How are these new IDF incubators meant to be powered? Or delivered?)
The article reminds readers:
Previously, however, Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have said that Al–Shifa has refused Israeli assistance.
"We just offered Shifa hospital the fuel; they refused it," Netanyahu claimed on Sunday.
Earlier this month, a Gaza health official stated in a phone call intercepted by the IDF that Hamas takes fuel provided to Al-Shifa.
Another intercepted call recorded a health official saying that the director general of Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry, Yusef Abu Rish, had prevented a delivery of fuel from getting to the hospital.
The linked reporting there, from Reuters, Nov 12:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday his country offered fuel to Gaza's Al Shifa hospital, which has suspended operations amid fierce fighting with Hamas, but that the militant group refused to receive it.
"We just offered Shifa hospital the fuel, they refused it," Netanyahu said, without providing details.
The fuel was offered to the hospital, but "the militant group [Hamas]" refused to receive it. How was it "offered" and how was it "refused"? Physically, verbally? Why wouldn't Hamas have accepted the fuel in this situation, and just taken some or all of it for themselves, as the IDF has made clear many times is what it would expect them to do?
So ... yeah, it's a little hard to build in my mind's eye what the situation is on the ground. The IDF's messaging here seems to want me to believe that it is fully capable, ready and willing not only to provide supplies directly to the hospital in person, but also to begin evacuating patients, and they could and would immediately do this if only they could get close, which Hamas is preventing. If Hamas is fighting the IDF around the hospital perimeter and not letting them give the hospital anything or take anyone out of it, how are the hospital staff still able to insist that Hamas is not meaningfully present at the hospital? Are they just being held more or less at gunpoint by Hamas and forced to keep saying Hamas isn't at the hospital even when they plainly are?
But also, if Hamas is deeply entrenched in and around the hospital, to the point that it has maintained enough perimeter control around it that the IDF can't or won't enter it and evacuees can't or won't leave it, have the IDF only been surrounding it for days because they simply don't think they could take the hospital by force at this time? Or that they shouldn't for optical reasons, or something?
I'm not a combat strategist and I also can't claim to be able to model the minds of any of the actors here, but yes, I am also confused by the situation.
a statement from the hospital's director, Dr. Salmiya, where he says that there is no truth to the idea that Hamas is operating beneath the hospital.
I honestly think this is what he would say in all possible worlds, and thus not evidence for anything.
Would anyone seriously expect him to say: "The Hamas headquarter is located in building C, floor -1. Please take them out so we can run our hospital in peace."
That would be suicidal even if Hamas was just a local terrorist group. But Hamas is the government in Gaza, and has been for a decade. A director of a hospital is a political position, and I doubt Hamas is very shy about removing their opposition. Especially not if they were actually using that site as a headquarter.
In my mind, falsely claiming a lack of militants in a hospital would be alike to using ambulances as troop transports. Still, if I were a hospital director with a cellar full of militants I would not worry about the Hague to much and instead worry about Hamas.
Meanwhile the IDF is releasing plenty of photos and pretty extensive walkthrough footage showing all of Hamas's stuff that they're pulling out of hallway closets and out from behind MRI machines, as they walk down corridors that have had their security cameras disabled or obscured.
All the reporting I'm reading ... describes the hospital staff being very afraid during the raid, "because of all the fighting", but ... again, written like the hospital staff and patients are having to take cover while the IDF comes in and fights no one.
Al-Jazeera also helpfully relays a witness' statement that the IDF "have tried to kill anyone moving inside - no one has done anything, we don't have any kind of resistance inside the hospital", and also reports, in a bullet point immediately prior, that the IDF evacuated people from inside into the outdoor courtyard to be interrogated - even though it was raining.
(Isn't the problem that there is no power for their incubators, not that they didn't have enough incubators? How are these new IDF incubators meant to be powered? Or delivered?)
I heard these incubators had their own power (or at least didn't require being plugged in) and so could also function to move the infants if necessary, but that was a single article that I can't recall the source of.
Is it just that the news sources I'm reading are terrible?
This is almost always true in all circumstances.
It's unclear to me exactly what the state of play on the ground is, but the Institute for the Study of War claims that zones of control currently look like this, and according to the IDF Israel has broken the effectiveness of 10 of Hamas' 24 battalions. So, to the extent those claims are true (and they easily may not be), the indication is that Israel is making progress but there is a lot more fighting left to be done.
When Israel was in control of Gaza they built the hospital to be a bomb resistant fortress so that patients would be safe during fighting. They handed control of Gaza to the PLA / Fatah. Then Hamas won elections in 2007 and took over.
Hamas set up their headquarters in the hospital. For two reasons, it would look bad if Israel attacked it and it was already fortified.
Western reporters are in an odd spot. They sympathize with the Palestinians as an underdog and see it through an anti-colonial lens. Also they need access to Hamas to do reporting in Gaza. Also there's the safety of their reporters.
As a result it's uncouth to mention the Hamas fighters. They sort of beat around the bush.
The only news sources who will talk about them openly are the kind of sources that say blunt un-PC things.
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Notes -
Sorry for the leading question but am I the only one naive enough to ask "Why don't the israeli troops just walk into the al-Shifa hospital?"? Where I live, if the national army wanted to take over the closest hospital I am confident they could do it in like 5 minutes by walking in through the front door.
If the answer is as I suspect, "the Israeli troops can't walk into the hospital because the hospital is being defended with guns," then why doesn't that fact appear in your average news story like this one? I know this sounds like a post from a person who really cares about Israel and is always going on about media bias against that country, so I just want to add a disclaimer saying that my position on Israel is that I'm just a normal American non-Jew who doesn't really know or care very much about it.
But honestly, to go back to my opening question, what the heck is going on at the hospital? Why can't they just take it over?
It's highly likely Hamas has some significant operations based out of Al-Shifa Hospital.
If you read the history from 2008-9 and 2014 wars, every outlet from NYT to WaPo, organizations from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, have reported on Hamas militants being in the hospital, hamas leaders seen there, Hamas spokespeople talking to media there (using a fake backdrop of destroyed buildings), and Hamas using the hospital for torture and imprisonment (Amnesty).
Basically Hamas knows Israel won't bomb the hospital, which seems to be the largest hospital in that area. And thus, they base operations there with impunity.
In 2007, Hamas and Fatah fought in/near that hospital, though at much smaller scale (apparently only one wounded from each faction).
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Why wouldn't they just blow it up while they have an excuse to? Netanyahu was talking about how he's dealing with Amalek all over again, do you know what was commanded to do to them?
Could it be that they don’t want to slaughter that many innocents?
Seems unlikely.
You’ll have elaborate. While I’m sure the IDF has limited regard for Palestinians, “limited” is not zero.
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Is your model that Israel is trying to kill as many people as possible? The world would look different if that were the case. There would be a lot more dead people.
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Indeed, who doesn't?
https://rdrama.net/post/204796/in-which-the-god-of-israel
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The bar for blowing hospital and it not being a war crime is quite high. Not impossible and Hamas has made sure to make Israel life easier by doing their best to make any civilian infrastructure legitimate military target, but still it is a big deal.
The bar is extremely low, as low as 'is it being used as a military position.'
War crime law is not that legitimate military targets (military positions, command posts, munition stores) are made ineligible by the presence of protected classes (i.e. hospitals), but rather than protected classes are made eligible by the presence of legitimate military targets. There are no protected classes of military sites where someone can fire at you, but you can't fire back.
The proportionality principle, which is what limits collateral damage that could kill civilians, is proportionality relative to what is needed to destroy the legitimate military target compared to other means that would achieve the same military effect, not the proportion of military-to-civilian casualties. There are no convention requirements to take military casualties in the process of storming military objectives in order to minimize civilian casualties.
Do you have a source for this? Because if this is true, then I've seen such misinformation repeated all the time:
What you cited covers the point in conjunction with the same conventions covering valid military objectives and the revocation of protected sites if they are turned into valid military objectives.
Destroying something so that it no longer contributes to casualties on your forces is a concrete and direct military advantage. This goes back to what a valid military target is, and the conventions are very clear that protected targets are NOT protected if they are converted into valid military targets, even if there are still civilian casualties. As such, there is not requirement for there to be no civilian casualties, or for the belligerant to accept casualties in order to avoid civilian casualities. The onus is on the other belligerent to not place military objectives amongst civilians / to move civilians away from military objectives, not on the 'attacking' beligerant to not engage valid military objectives.
As the collateral damage of any civilians is not a binary disqualifier, proportionality doesn't work as a 'prohibit any attack on a valid military objective that may cause casualties' either-or binary. The porportionality is in the excess to the miltiary advantage... but since the military advantage is judged by the attacker, not the defender, and the anticipated value is often trivial to justify in close-range engagements on force-protection grounds and limiting enemy ability to continue offering mearningful resistance, proportionality would be a functionally dead letter if it was solely a binary (which- by its own working- it isn't).
Rather, proportionality comes into play when something would have no concrete or direct miltiary objective- which is usually when a target is so far away / inconsequential it means nothing for your military force survivial if the target is hit or not- or if you have alternatives that have different effects on the civilians in the course of the legitimate strike. In the face of valid military objective where concrete and direct military is already anticipated, and thus engaging is not prohibited, the proportionality distinction will only apply if you have alternatives with smaller loss of incidental loss- which would then render the overkill-casualties excessive in relations to the military advantage anticipated, because you could get the military advantage anticipated by using a smaller effect and thus the 'extra' deaths are unnecessary.
Thanks! I’ve seen a lot of misinformation around how proportionality actually means that if the ratio of civilians to enemy combatants is high enough, then it’s automatically a war crime. I can see where they come from, as the wording is rather vague, but upon reading the article further:
It’s not clear to me how much of a consensus this is outside of Australia, Canada, and NZ, but the air strikes by Israel most certainly 1) provide immediate and perceptible advantages to 2) the security of its attacking forces, at least 3) as far as the IDF is aware of, unless there’s any evidence that they have engaged in air strikes despite knowing full well that there were no Hamas military assets at the target location.
So there’s indeed a strong case to be made that regardless of civilian casualties, the IDF has not committed war crimes in this particular air strike campaign. Not that anyone already calling it “genocide” would care to change their minds, of course.
Basically every military that has fought an insurgency or an urban conflict in the last century, or otherwise had to fight a conflict where a house is a battle position, has adopted the force protection argument that some civilian casualties are acceptable. This goes from Russia to the Philippines to Sri Lanka and India to Iran and Saudi Arabia to Colombia and every NATO member.
This is usually the point where I remind an audience that war is hell, and that the laws of wars are about limiting, not preventing, civilian casualties. The conventions on how to wage war 'right' are as much about protecting every single life as a fire break is about stopping forest fires. The effects are good for the greater whole, but the part of the forest within the forest break is fully expected to burn.
This is generally correct. There will be some specific cases that people will focus on, but these can depend on having insight into the belligerent perspectives, as well as other 'the law isn't what you thought the law was' contexts. For perspectives, nothing in the conventions requires a belligerent to reveal their Intelligence- and thus sources and methods- for why they chose a target, so there are often targets that are legitimate but which may not appear to be when prioritized... and this in turn doesn't even include cases of flawed/wrong intelligence, where the a belligerent can legitimately believe there is a valid target somewhere one isn't. It doesn't become a war crime retroactively if one is duped by a denial/deception campaign. Meanwhile, some things that may seem obviously off-limits are actually covered in other areas of the convention. We had a good example in the first thread, when someone did an actuall review of the convention requirements for delivering aid to civilians- in short, while delivering aid to civilians must be allowed, it doesn't have to be allowed by any given organization to any given organization. Rather, a belligerent must allow a mutually acceptable intermediary to deliver it, so that the there can be some sort of guarantee that the aid goes to civilians and not the beseiged belligerent. As a consequence of that, for example, bombing the border crossings early on is not, from a rules-of-law perspective, 'preventing aid from getting to civilians,' which is forbidden, it is 'preventing resupply to a belligerent,' which is permitted.
Rather than quibbling on legal dynamics few know and fewer actually care about, the better argument against genocide-claimers is the point that, just by the numbers, if the Israelis are trying to genocide the Gaza Strip population... they are doing a really, really poor job at it by even the most pro-Palestinian numbers.
To take just two stores from Al Jazeera, which has a definite anti-Israeli slant in the conflict to date- on 13 November, Al Jazeera reported on the (Hamas-controlled) Gaza Public Health Ministry's claim that 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict so far. This is, of course, what the Americans know as a McBigNumber. 11,000 in a month an a half- that's a lot, right?
But nearly a week early, Al Jazeera reported on an Israeli government claim to have conducted more than 12,000 strikes... as of 1 November, nearly 2 weeks before the Hamas death claim. If we accept both claims as true- and both Hamas and Al Jazeera have an even greater incentives to greatly inflate the death claims than the Israeli government does- this is less than a 1-death-per-bomb ratio... in one of the most densly populated urbanized war zones in modern history, when Israeli ability to level entire apartment blocks is incredibly well established.
If the goal of the Israeli government and military was to genocide the Palestinian population, we would expect to see massively higher Palestinian casualty rates so far. Like, orders-of-magnitude higher. We'd also have seen considerably different targeting decisions of types of targets- with far more about irrevocably destroying essential infrastructure beyond repair or leveling apartment blocks without organizing evacuations- if they were in a 'just kill them all before anyone can stop us' dynamic.
Instead, this is where we also remind you that Hamas's militant wing has had an estimated strength in the 30,000 to 40,000 range even before the conflict. Total Palestinian death could triple or even quadruple from the first month, and it would be mathematically possible- though incredibly implausible- for nearly every single one of those casualties to not only be a Hamas member, but a part of Hamas's military component. (And it's not like the military component members are the only legitimate target under the conventions either.)
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And that is actually a high bar in my book. If there are no civilians you are free to overkill.
And no one particularly cares about overkill, because overkill is wasteful and takes away relevant resources for the next engagment. Outside of a few propaganda contexts- which are extremely rare in civilian casualty contexts- civilian-overkill is a military-waste issue as much as anything else.
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...it's being defended with guns. And to get to it they have to go through Gaza city which is also being defended with guns.
It's a war. You have to take territory with force.
Is it just that the news sources I'm reading are terrible? I feel like I've never seen it mentioned that there is another side (not just the IDF) fighting in this war. Like they mentioned that the IDF forces have surrounded the hospitals but it's not clear why, since as far as anyone has told me it is just full of doctors and their patients. I feel like I'm five years old asking these questions but it's just so weird to me, it's like the grownups understand something that I don't.
You're quite right. None of the news sources I've read has said anything about what's stopping Israel from just walking up to the reception desk with a bunch of fuel cans and spare generators, and having a look around for tunnels while they're there. The assumption has to be that either it's defended by Hamas, or that Israel is kayfabing that it's defended by Hamas, but no news outlets seem to want to say anything beyond "the doctors say there's no Hamas, but we as reporters didn't bother to ask the IDF commander why they don't just walk inside."
It's really, really weird to read.
A lot of coverage has made it seem like the IDF is simply choosing to starve everyone in the hospital of supplies under the assumption that Hamas has a position within it, but has been extremely light on details.
This NY Times article from within the hour describes IDF troops 'battling Hamas fighters nearby' the hospital, but otherwise simply paints a picture of the terrible situation the people in the hospital are in, and reproduces a statement from the hospital's director, Dr. Salmiya, where he says that there is no truth to the idea that Hamas is operating beneath the hospital.
Apparently Netanyahu personally told CNN directly yesterday that:
According to this Nov 14 article from the Jerusalem Post, make of that what you will, the IDF is going out of its way to offer assistance in evacuating patients from the hospital, which apparently a publicly released phone conversation shows the hospital leadership is eager to accept. The article also prominently mentions and provides footage of incubators being loaded into vans that the IDF is apparently rushing to get to the hospital as fast as possible. (Isn't the problem that there is no power for their incubators, not that they didn't have enough incubators? How are these new IDF incubators meant to be powered? Or delivered?)
The article reminds readers:
The linked reporting there, from Reuters, Nov 12:
The fuel was offered to the hospital, but "the militant group [Hamas]" refused to receive it. How was it "offered" and how was it "refused"? Physically, verbally? Why wouldn't Hamas have accepted the fuel in this situation, and just taken some or all of it for themselves, as the IDF has made clear many times is what it would expect them to do?
liveuamap.com reporting from 4 hours ago has the IDF still surrounding the hospital complex, with heavy gunfire and artillery shelling taking place there.
So ... yeah, it's a little hard to build in my mind's eye what the situation is on the ground. The IDF's messaging here seems to want me to believe that it is fully capable, ready and willing not only to provide supplies directly to the hospital in person, but also to begin evacuating patients, and they could and would immediately do this if only they could get close, which Hamas is preventing. If Hamas is fighting the IDF around the hospital perimeter and not letting them give the hospital anything or take anyone out of it, how are the hospital staff still able to insist that Hamas is not meaningfully present at the hospital? Are they just being held more or less at gunpoint by Hamas and forced to keep saying Hamas isn't at the hospital even when they plainly are?
But also, if Hamas is deeply entrenched in and around the hospital, to the point that it has maintained enough perimeter control around it that the IDF can't or won't enter it and evacuees can't or won't leave it, have the IDF only been surrounding it for days because they simply don't think they could take the hospital by force at this time? Or that they shouldn't for optical reasons, or something?
I'm not a combat strategist and I also can't claim to be able to model the minds of any of the actors here, but yes, I am also confused by the situation.
I honestly think this is what he would say in all possible worlds, and thus not evidence for anything.
Would anyone seriously expect him to say: "The Hamas headquarter is located in building C, floor -1. Please take them out so we can run our hospital in peace."
That would be suicidal even if Hamas was just a local terrorist group. But Hamas is the government in Gaza, and has been for a decade. A director of a hospital is a political position, and I doubt Hamas is very shy about removing their opposition. Especially not if they were actually using that site as a headquarter.
In my mind, falsely claiming a lack of militants in a hospital would be alike to using ambulances as troop transports. Still, if I were a hospital director with a cellar full of militants I would not worry about the Hague to much and instead worry about Hamas.
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Update: they raided the hospital earlier today.
UN agencies, the WHO, and the Red Cross have all strongly condemned the raid.
Meanwhile the IDF is releasing plenty of photos and pretty extensive walkthrough footage showing all of Hamas's stuff that they're pulling out of hallway closets and out from behind MRI machines, as they walk down corridors that have had their security cameras disabled or obscured.
All the reporting I'm reading ... describes the hospital staff being very afraid during the raid, "because of all the fighting", but ... again, written like the hospital staff and patients are having to take cover while the IDF comes in and fights no one.
Al-Jazeera also helpfully relays a witness' statement that the IDF "have tried to kill anyone moving inside - no one has done anything, we don't have any kind of resistance inside the hospital", and also reports, in a bullet point immediately prior, that the IDF evacuated people from inside into the outdoor courtyard to be interrogated - even though it was raining.
So... why does this weird media phenomenon exist? If it's because of anti-Israel bias, then why is the media biased against Israel?
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I heard these incubators had their own power (or at least didn't require being plugged in) and so could also function to move the infants if necessary, but that was a single article that I can't recall the source of.
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This is almost always true in all circumstances.
It's unclear to me exactly what the state of play on the ground is, but the Institute for the Study of War claims that zones of control currently look like this, and according to the IDF Israel has broken the effectiveness of 10 of Hamas' 24 battalions. So, to the extent those claims are true (and they easily may not be), the indication is that Israel is making progress but there is a lot more fighting left to be done.
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When Israel was in control of Gaza they built the hospital to be a bomb resistant fortress so that patients would be safe during fighting. They handed control of Gaza to the PLA / Fatah. Then Hamas won elections in 2007 and took over.
Hamas set up their headquarters in the hospital. For two reasons, it would look bad if Israel attacked it and it was already fortified.
Western reporters are in an odd spot. They sympathize with the Palestinians as an underdog and see it through an anti-colonial lens. Also they need access to Hamas to do reporting in Gaza. Also there's the safety of their reporters.
As a result it's uncouth to mention the Hamas fighters. They sort of beat around the bush.
The only news sources who will talk about them openly are the kind of sources that say blunt un-PC things.
also it seems like before, say in 2014, western journalists would post on twitter about Hamas operating in/around the hospital, but then immediately delete those posts. Unclear if deleting because of the abuse they received on twitter, or because of Hamas intimidation. Probably more likely from the latter.
It seems like western journalists are both less present in Gaza, and less likely to post about Hamas misdeeds online at all.
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