I don’t think I remember hearing about Russians bombing Ukrainian refugee camps (though I could have missed it).
Seems like Putin sees civilians as an inconvenience that get in the way of his goals. For Netanyahu, it seems as though killing the civilians is the goal. I would say that the latter is objectively worse (though they are both pieces of shit).
Not to mention eradicating close to the entirety of the military-aged male population in Donetsk and Luhansk by forced conscription.
I might grant Putin though that he’s only doing a cultural genocide, that is, the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance – which is known to generally not work, hence why it’s a war crime. He’s perfectly fine with people staying alive as long as they bend the knee and become Russian.
the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance – which is known to generally not work, hence why it’s a war crime.
I think it’d be a war crime even if it generally worked.
That’s the pacifist answer but no that’s not how war crimes work: The rules of war aren’t about avoiding bloodshed, they’re about avoiding pointless bloodshed, pointless from the point of winning an armed conflict, that is. If you can shorten a conflict and spare millions of lives by killing a couple thousands of civilians, well, a couple thousand is less than millions. War is erm dispassionate like that, a hard-nosed calculus.
Hence why you also get rules like the ban on hollow-point bullets: They’re more likely to kill than to disable. Killing combatants, however, is less effective at binding up enemy resources and thus not a sound military strategy, using them means that you care more about killing people than winning the engagement. If, OTOH, the enemy started killing all their wounded soldiers instead of expending medical resources that reasoning would cease to apply and you’d be justified using hollow points. (Which are btw in ample use by police forces because they ricochet much less, leading to less injured bystanders, but you generally don’t have bystanders on the battlefield. Similarly tear gas is allowed for police use but outlawed for war because it could get confused with a nasty chemical attack very easily, possibly leading to a very nasty escalation when the attacked force responds in kind. Also for the record there’s plenty of legitimate uses of white phosphorous, tracer rounds and smoke screens all use it, the banned use is as an incendiary weapon anywhere close to civilians but that’s not special to white phosphorous, that’s a general thing about incendiary weapons).
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There’s no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with “Palestine” in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
Your downvotes remind me of the Reddit hive mind. But you are obviously 100% correct and anyone over the age of about 25 knows it.
It has been almost 3 months since the Hamas terrorist attack. If Israel was trying to kill as many civilians as possible, as you said, the death toll would be orders of magnitude higher.
So many people commenting here have no sense of historical perspective at all. I see people using words like “astounding” and “world record” and “genocide” to describe the death toll in this conflict. It’s hard to know where to start with that level of historical ignorance.
I should know better than to get sucked into this. But you’re right. I’ve been repeatedly told the most complex and longest lasting conflict in history is “simple”. Should stick to Israel bad / Palestine good, communists good / capitalists bad, no one likes nuance or shades of gray here.
I don’t think I remember hearing about Russians bombing Ukrainian refugee camps (though I could have missed it).
Seems like Putin sees civilians as an inconvenience that get in the way of his goals. For Netanyahu, it seems as though killing the civilians is the goal. I would say that the latter is objectively worse (though they are both pieces of shit).
Russia intentionally bombed a ton of civilian targets with zero military value. It’s weird that you don’t remember this. There’s even a lengthy Wikipedia article specifically about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_civilians_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Not to mention eradicating close to the entirety of the military-aged male population in Donetsk and Luhansk by forced conscription.
I might grant Putin though that he’s only doing a cultural genocide, that is, the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance – which is known to generally not work, hence why it’s a war crime. He’s perfectly fine with people staying alive as long as they bend the knee and become Russian.
I think it’d be a war crime even if it generally worked.
That’s the pacifist answer but no that’s not how war crimes work: The rules of war aren’t about avoiding bloodshed, they’re about avoiding pointless bloodshed, pointless from the point of winning an armed conflict, that is. If you can shorten a conflict and spare millions of lives by killing a couple thousands of civilians, well, a couple thousand is less than millions. War is erm dispassionate like that, a hard-nosed calculus.
Hence why you also get rules like the ban on hollow-point bullets: They’re more likely to kill than to disable. Killing combatants, however, is less effective at binding up enemy resources and thus not a sound military strategy, using them means that you care more about killing people than winning the engagement. If, OTOH, the enemy started killing all their wounded soldiers instead of expending medical resources that reasoning would cease to apply and you’d be justified using hollow points. (Which are btw in ample use by police forces because they ricochet much less, leading to less injured bystanders, but you generally don’t have bystanders on the battlefield. Similarly tear gas is allowed for police use but outlawed for war because it could get confused with a nasty chemical attack very easily, possibly leading to a very nasty escalation when the attacked force responds in kind. Also for the record there’s plenty of legitimate uses of white phosphorous, tracer rounds and smoke screens all use it, the banned use is as an incendiary weapon anywhere close to civilians but that’s not special to white phosphorous, that’s a general thing about incendiary weapons).
Yes exactly, that was basically my point, that Israel is actively attacking civilians almost exclusively (it feels like to me anyway).
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There’s no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with “Palestine” in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You can say that - but seemingly also can’t explain why the death count isn’t stratospherically higher if that was their goal.
Asymmetric warfare always sucks for civilians. The whole point is knowing who a civilian and who’s a combatant is intentionally difficult.
Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms, because they’re terrorists and not a government or regular army.
Your downvotes remind me of the Reddit hive mind. But you are obviously 100% correct and anyone over the age of about 25 knows it.
It has been almost 3 months since the Hamas terrorist attack. If Israel was trying to kill as many civilians as possible, as you said, the death toll would be orders of magnitude higher.
So many people commenting here have no sense of historical perspective at all. I see people using words like “astounding” and “world record” and “genocide” to describe the death toll in this conflict. It’s hard to know where to start with that level of historical ignorance.
I should know better than to get sucked into this. But you’re right. I’ve been repeatedly told the most complex and longest lasting conflict in history is “simple”. Should stick to Israel bad / Palestine good, communists good / capitalists bad, no one likes nuance or shades of gray here.
They’re wildly different wars from a population density per square mile perspective.
fr Israel is worse than Russia