In blatant violation of international law, particularly international humanitarian law, the Israeli army has executed 13 children by direct shooting in Al-Shifa Medical Complex and its Gaza City environs. This is a war crime and a crime against humanity, and is part of the genocide that the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip having been experiencing for the past six months.
For over a week now, the Israeli army has been conducting systematic and horrifying military operations inside and around Al-Shifa Medical Complex. These crimes include extrajudicial executions and deliberate killings of Palestinian civilians. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor field team has received identical testimonies about the killings and executions of Palestinian children between the ages of four and 16.
Some of the fatal shootings occurred during an Israeli army siege while the victims’ families were inside their homes; others occurred when the victims attempted to escape via routes that the Israeli army had designated as “safe” after forcibly evacuating them from their homes and places of residence.
I have zero interest to comparing the awfulness of the IDF with the awfulness of Hamas.
But it is true that on October 7th Hamas killed kids, man, it’s unfortunately just true.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/dozens-of-children-died-in-hamas-oct-7-attack-on-israel-contrary-to-online-claim/
It’s worth pointing out because many people still hold the implicit assumption that the IDF is just an overzealous army or some other whitewashed nonsense while Hamas is an unsalvageable terrorist organization. Because of that it’s important to establish that in terms of terror IDF >= Hamas, and not at all Hamas > IDF.
Also I’m not saying no children died; that’s just impossible. I’m saying that instances of a Hamas soldier intentionally shooting a child when they could’ve just not are very few, if any. I mean hell it says right in your link: 29. That’s out of 1139 people, 2/3 of which are civilians, and after the IDF shot and bombed their own civilians to get Hamas fighters. This puts the number of children casualties among civilian casualties at about 5%. There are probably many reasons for this, but I think it’s clear evidence that Hamas was at least avoiding children casualties as a conscious decision.
29/1139 gives you 2.5%. Children are a protected group under “non-combatants” in int’l law, and Israel has killed an estimated 13,000, or 40% of total deaths if it’s 32,000, in just 6 months. Although I do agree with the other commenter that the correct number of children to kill, under any circumstance, is 0, I also think big problems need to be addressed first. Killing 13,000 children in 6 months is a big problem. The kicker here is the complete impunity, both legally and in the mainstream consciousness/ news reporting, with which Israel massacres children. That to me makes a whole lot more people than just Israel complicit in this big problem.
Look man, the IDF is an army that has the capacity to perform crimes at with much higher efficiency than Hamas. They are responsible for war crimes, massacres and are plausibly on the hook for genocide. Bad hombres. Hamas is a bunch of jihadist fascists who are responsible for horrible crimes and massacres. They are the kinds of bad hombres that if they had the IDFs capabilities they would be doing what the IDF does. I do not care about who is better or worse. I want them both on the stand, tried for war crimes in the Hague. Just like after the Yugoslav wars, Bosnian, Serb, and Croat war criminals got their due, I want the same for both Israeli and Palestinian war criminals. Trying to keep a score is NOT HELPING PALESTINIAN LIBERATION, it only perpetuates the race to the bottom.
And, buddy, fuck this whole paragraph:
This is bullshit. They killed 29 kids. They could have, you know, not done that. Like they hadn’t done shit like that up to now.
And I’m not even against armed struggle. If Hamas had targeted only the IDF outposts they did target and killed a whole bunch of IDF soldiers, but left civilians alone, I would not even have condemned it. Fair game, eh. But that’s not what they did. They attacked civilians. They killed innocent people, non-combattants. They killed a bunch of hippies, man. No, Hamas are not “better” than the IDF. They are despicable scum and I don’t mourn a single one of them. Fuck them.
You have to count, again, IDF-inflicted casualties and crossfire deaths. We have evidence of houses that were just blown up by the IDF with their residents inside.
There were other smaller armed groups aside from Hamas that infiltrated which were a lot less informed nor caring about any rules.
Hamas trained soldiers didn’t intentionally shoot any children. The very low child death rate compared to adults is direct evidence for this. And they have stated it is against their policy. (Hamas definitely shot some adults intentionally though).
Also we know that IDF friendly fire killed multiple of those kids, for example with the tank attack on Be’eri
To be clear: that’s IDF-style hasbara.
The moment Hamas decided to target civilian settlements, they accepted that kids are acceptable types of casualties.
Except the numbers completely back up their claim.
The IDF Hasbara is a known lie because the results don’t match their words.
I mean that you are arguing specifically about the shooting of children, as if that’s a reasonable thing to focus on and debate, when the problem is that civilian settlements should not be targeted to begin with.
The goal of the operation was taking hostages and dealing damage to the IDF, not attacking civilians. They then attacked civilians, but we have no reason to believe that was a goal of the operation.
Hamas sees israel taking Palestinians hostage and has figured out the only way to get their hostages back is take israeli hostages and trade them.
Hamas sees israel breaking these international laws all the time and just mirror it because people are fine with it when israel does it. At least Hamas is not targeting kids like israel.
Hamas certainly did war crimes but the worst ones are either heavily exaggerated or made up (40 beheaded babies in ovens). And that’s the stuff people keep repeating. It only serves to demonize Palestinians to keep israel’s Genocide going.