Last week, the UN issued a report about Israeli attacks on UN facilities during last summer’s Gaza war. Acknowledging that Hamas used these facilities to store weapons and launch offensives, the authors are hard pressed to find fault with Israeli conduct. However, writes Jonathan Tobin, a larger issue is at stake: current codes of military conduct are inadequate to the situations in which Israel finds itself fighting:
Were the world prepared to let Israel go into Gaza and capture the terrorists and the government in whose name they operate, it might be possible to say that there is no need to think about rules. But we know this isn’t so. The leaders of Gaza were able to sit out the war inside hospitals, secure in the knowledge that the Israelis wouldn’t shoot at their hideouts or attempt to root out this criminal conspiracy. Indeed, the Hamas-run independent (in all but name) Palestinian state knows that it operates with impunity and need never fear that the Israelis will seek to destroy it.
How then is a legitimate democratic government supposed to protect its people? Four-year-old Daniel Tragerman was killed because his family in Nahal Oz near the Gaza border had only a few seconds to seek shelter when a Palestinian shot a mortar shell at them from the safety of a UN building compound. But there is no outcry at the world body to bring to justice his murderer. Nor is there any effort to bring UNRWA—which exists to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee problem so as to use [the refugees] as props in the war against Israel—to account for its involvement in the war against the Jews. . . .
So long as both sides aren’t playing by the same rules, no one is safe. Those Palestinians who were made homeless or were wounded and killed because of the war their Islamist overlords launched ought to hold Hamas accountable. But they won’t because Palestinian political culture still treats the war on Zionism as the national priority even if it means sacrificing the lives of their own people.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/05/04/hamas-atrocities-and-the-rules-of-war-israel-gaza/