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To: woodpusher

In believe Gaza is a territory Regardless you can have a war on a territory or terrorist organization. We have seen several of those. I agree with a lot of what you say. But as has been said israel has the most moral army in the world.


47 posted on 04/18/2024 10:08:19 AM PDT by coalminersson (since )
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To: coalminersson
In believe Gaza is a territory Regardless you can have a war on a territory or terrorist organization.

What is important and determinative is that Gaza is not a nation state. It is impossible for a non-state actor to be a party to an international war.

Gaza cannot be more than a non-state actor, incapable of being part of an international war. The Laws of War have been done away with, replaced by the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Also appliicable is International Humanitarian Law (IHL).

Gary D. Solis, United States Military Academy, The Law of Armed Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2010, page 157.

Gary D. Solis is a retired Professor of Law of the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he headed the law of war program.

Nonstate Actors and Armed Opposition Groups Are Bound by LOAC/IHL.

What LOAC applies when nonstate actors like al Qaeda, not controlled by any state, are the opposing "armed force" in an armed conflict? "[T]he application of the laws of war in counter terrorist operations has always been particularly problematical."

Terrorist groups are most often criminal organizations, a variety of armed opposition group. (Until they defeat the government forces and become the gvernment.) They are not states and therefore may not be parties to the Geneva Convention, the Additional Protocols, or any multinational treaty. Terrorist attacks, if the terrorists have a sufficient organization and if the attacks are sufficiently violent and protracted, may be instances of non-international common Article 3 conflicts. If not sufficiently organized, and if the attacks are not lengthy in nature, they are simply criminal events.

Terrorist attacks, no matter how organized the group, violent or protracted the fighting, cannot be considered an international armed conflict for the same reason that terrorist groups cannot be considered parties to the Conventions. Terrorist attacks are conducted by non-states. More than a half century ago, Professor Oppenheim expressed the traditional law of war view: "To be war, the contention must be between states. When engaged in armed combat, terrorists and other armed opposition group members in a common Article 3 conflict enjoy no combatant's privilege, and upon capture they may be prosecuted for their illegal combatant-like acts prior to capture.

Everyone involved in a conflict is either a combatant or a civilian, the only two classifications. Combatants are members of the uniformed armed services of a nation state, wear a distinguishing insignia, carry their arms openly, etc. By comparison, a civilian is negatively defined as one who does not meet all the defining criteria of a combatant. The definition of civilian makes everyone one or the other. The make-believe classification unlawful combatant is an oxymoron. Anyone who is not a lawful combatant is a civilian. They are no type of cmbattant at all.

Terrorists who are not members of the uniformed armed services of a nation state cannot be any form of combatant, they are civilians. When the Taliban became the official government of Afghanistan, its members became combatants and, upon capture, they were prisoners of war. When the Taliban was not the official government, its members doing combat-like actions were civilians and their acts were criminal.

But as has been said israel has the most moral army in the world.

Categorizing armies as most moral is like categorizing ladies in a house of ill repute as most virginous.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n09/neve-gordon/the-day-after

Vol. 37 No. 9 · 7 May 2015
EXTRA
The London Review of Books

The Day After

Neve Gordon on the IDF’s new tactics

Several months ago, a young woman working in Kibbutz Dorot’s carrot fields noticed a piece of paper lying on the ground with a short inscription in Arabic. It looked like a treasure map. She put it in her pocket. Some time later, she gave it to her friend Avihai, who works for Breaking the Silence, an organisation of military veterans who collect testimony from Israeli soldiers to provide a record of everyday life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Avihai was in the middle of interviewing soldiers about their experiences during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip last summer. He recognised the piece of paper as a leaflet that had been dropped by an Israeli plane above Palestinian neighbourhoods in the northern part of the Strip; the wind had blown it six miles from its intended landing point.

The leaflet helps explain why 70 per cent of the 2220 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians. The red line on the map traces a route from a bright blue area labelled Beit Lahia, a Palestinian town of 60,000 inhabitants at the north edge of the Strip, and moves south through Muaskar Jabalia to Jabalia city. The text reads:

Military Notification to the Residents of Beit Lahia

The IDF will be undertaking forceful and assertive air operations against terrorist elements and infrastructure in the locations from which they launch their missiles at the State of Israel. These locations include:

From east Atatra to Salatin Street. From west [unclear] to Jabalia Camp.

You must evacuate your homes immediately and head toward southern Jabalia town along the following road:

Falluja Road, until 12 noon, Sunday 13 July 2014.

The IDF does not intend to harm you or your families. These operations are temporary and will be of short duration. Any person, however, who violates these instructions and does not evacuate his home immediately puts his own life as well as the lives of his household in danger. Those who take heed will be spared.

‘The significance of this leaflet,’ Yehuda Shaul, the founder of Breaking the Silence, told me, ‘cannot be appreciated fully without reading our new report.’ The report is made up of 111 testimonies, provided by around seventy soldiers who participated in the fighting.

One thing is immediately clear from the interviews: the IDF’s working assumption was that once the leaflets were dropped, anyone who refused to move was a legitimate target:

Q: You said earlier that you knew the neighbourhood was supposed to be empty of civilians?

A: Yes. That’s what they told us ... they told us that the civilians had been informed via leaflets scattered in the area, and that it was supposed to be devoid of civilians, and civilians who remained there were civilians who apparently chose to be there.

Q: Who told you that?

A: The commanders, in off-the-record type conversations, or during all kinds of briefings.

The IDF has the technology to tell whether people had actually left, but the claim that ‘no civilians should be in the area’ is a recurring refrain.

The land invasion began on 17 July and was generally limited to within a mile of the border. An infantry soldier deployed either in or near Beit Lahia described a typical incident:

There was one time when I looked at some place and was sure I saw someone moving. Maybe I imagined it, some curtain blowing, I don’t know. So I said: ‘I see something moving.’ I asked [permission] to open fire toward that spot, and I opened fire and [the other soldiers] hit it with a barrage ...

Q: What were the rules of engagement?

A: There weren’t really any rules of engagement ... They told us: ‘There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.’ Whether the person posed a threat or not wasn’t a question; and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. First of all because it’s Gaza, and second because that’s warfare. That, too, was made clear to us – they told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to shoot,’ and they made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.

[...]

Considering what the Hamas terrorists did, they cannot be considered as an example of morality. Morality in combat may be rather flexible. I don't know of any military renowned for its morality.

48 posted on 04/18/2024 11:55:09 PM PDT by woodpusher
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