Israel’s “permissive fire policy”: total disregard for human life
JVL Introduction
Israel’s massive bombardment of Gaza and its sending gas into tunnels was seemingly done with no concerns for Palestinian civilian and little enough for Israeli hostages. One Israeli security source said: “It was insane…You’re bombing the house of someone suspected of being a kidnapper. By sheer luck, we didn’t kill dozens of hostages. There weren’t ‘no-strike zones,’ and you didn’t know where the hostages were. I voiced [my frustrations] … They didn’t take it into consideration…The focus was revenge against the kidnappers.”
Of course, it was Palestinians who suffered the most as Israeli bombs and carbon monoxide releases killed hundreds of civilians because, perhaps, a Hamas operative was there as well. “Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and expert in international law, (said)…“Even if the bombs releasing the gas are conventional and the gas is only a byproduct, the deliberate use of this ‘side effect’ as a method of warfare violates prohibitions outlined in the laws of armed conflict. The use of toxic or asphyxiating gas in combat contravenes the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention and longstanding international declarations predating it, and is classified under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as a war crime.”
This chilling report shows that war crimes were carried out by Israel, whether or not it is agreed that it is a genocide or genocidal. The possibility that there might be an Hamas operative or even leader, does not legitimise killing large numbers of civilians.
LL
This article was originally published by +972 on Thu 6 Feb 2025. Read the original here.
Bomb the area, gas the tunnels: Israel’s unbridled war on Gaza’s underground
Unable to pinpoint Hamas commanders in Gaza’s tunnels, the Israeli army decimated entire residential blocks with bunker-buster bombs to crush the passages below and flood them with lethal fumes, an investigation reveals.
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A focus on what the army and air force of Israel are actually doing on a daily basis has always seemed to me a more constructive way of highlighting the nature of of the deliberate and systematic cruelty which has been inflicted indiscriminately upon the people of Gaza for the past fifteen months, rather than highlighting arguments about whether what we are witnessing is genocide.
Acts of genocide necessarily involve questions of intent, which we can only infer either from what individuals say or our interpretation of the consequences of what they say, and have to be proved to be directed at a specific racial, ethnic, cultural or religious group. Even if genocide is proved only the good name of the state and a very small number of political leaders, who might find themselves in the dock, would be affected.
Focusing on the actions of individuals who knowingly commit war crimes, e.g. use of poison gas even against combatants, is easier to prove and puts a much larger number of individuals in jeopardy. What the IDF is doing seems to have a high approval rating in Israel. The Israeli public need to realise that some behaviours are unacceptable even in war.
Thank you +972 and local call for refuting the last argument from Israel that ‘it can’t be genocide, we’re not gassing anybody’.