Let's explore the BS of the sainted international community in how it applies international law.
[U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet] on Thursday condemned Israel for the strikes and Hamas for retaliating with rocket fire into Israel.
"Such strikes raise serious concerns of Israel's compliance with the principles of distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law," Bachelet said in a statement.
"If found to be indiscriminate and disproportionate in their impact on civilians and civilian objects, such attacks may constitute war crimes."
Bachelet added that Hamas likely broke international law by locating and firing military assets from densely populated civilian areas. She said an investigation must work to identify "systematic discrimination and repression" in Israel and Palestine.
One, Hamas "retaliated"? Seriously? Hamas started shooting at Israeli civilians.
Two, distinction in shooting at Hamas relies on Hamas and other terrorists to distinguish themselves from civilians to earn that protection under laws of war. The terrorists often dress like civilians and use civilians as human shields, making distinguishing between combatants and civilians extremely difficult. Which is itself a war crime. The fact that Palestinian civilians died--and Hamas claims should not be taken at face value--is not in itself a war crime. The laws of war do not reward human shields by making it unlawful to hit civilians while attacking military targets.
Three, proportionality doesn't require Israel to respond to Hamas attacks with the same level of firepower and effectiveness. Proportionality requires Israel to not use excessive force to achieve the objective. As I often illustrate with an extreme example, if your forces encounter a sniper in an apartment building, you aren't allowed to nuke the apartment building to take out the sniper.
But at lower levels of force it is completely legal to kill civilians while going after a military target. There may have been war crimes when you balance military gain versus civilian deaths to achieve the gain. But civilian deaths in those circumstances are not automatically a war crime.
Three, Hamas fired in order to kill civilians--a war crime; while Israel went to great efforts to avoid killing civilians. Which shows respect for the laws of war that require distinction between civilians and military targets.
Perhaps Israel committed war crimes. But any violations in proportionality or discrimination may have been errors from the fog of war. In general their actions were proper and lawful.
In bright contrast, Hamas absolutely committed war crimes, both in killing Israeli civilians and getting Palestinian civilians killed.
It would be nice if there were more than isolated cases of sanity on the liberal side on this issue.
The sainted international community can eff itself. It is tainted by evil actors who want to make it illegal for Jews--and Westerners in general--to fight back.
