Comment by frabbit
Comment by frabbit 3 days ago
[flagged]
Comment by frabbit 3 days ago
[flagged]
That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.
Again you are responding to an argument which was explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.
Everything only works by agreement and adherence to rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly obvious to a human that there should be no need to state them.
Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.
Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of the site.
This conflict has had a historically very notable property where civilian casualties are so much higher than military casualties as to be clearly anomalous.
According to Israel, it is the same conflict, but if you tally up civilian casualties from previous Israeli-Lebanon conflicts, you'll find a similar rate.
The ratio is at least as high in WW2, but only if you include war crimes and genocides. I think we can agree that WW2 featured notable and anomalous civilian casualties from the first industrial genocides, can't we?
If you look more closely at the data, you'll see that Germany, for example, suffered 3.8 million civilian deaths and 5.5 million military deaths. This was after Germany was completely invaded, thus the fighting reached every city.
The civilian-military death ratio in Gaza is, according to peer-reviewed independent estimates, at least 2:1, and that's if you assume that every male 18-60 is an enemy combatant. If you don't, you find a ratio of at least 4:1, with estimates mostly around 6-9:1. And this data is from before the collapse in infrastructure had time to really drive up the excess death count : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
With thousands of them going bang, that's unsurprising.
As the page says, "after her father’s pager exploded while he was next to her".