See that link to mondoweiss I posted? According to that interview the guy's name is Musa Abuhassanin. Google him.
You're not supposed to shoot medics who don't present a threat, regardless of their affiliation. Unless you can show that the one who was killed and the one who was injured did pose a credible threat, I don't see why such statements should be placating.
Also, I don't see the relevance of the Canadian doctor being shot in the legs. As many people here often point out, legs contain several important arteries that may cause bleeding out fast. That he was shot there doesn't lessen the gravity of the situation.
Hamas doesn't respect those sorts of things. They have no qualms about putting military members in medic clothing for deceptive purposes.
No it works regardless. You cannot immediately assume all medics are combative just because a handful could be. If that was the case, you could argue shooting civilians is justified because some might be terrorists.
I'm not justifying it. I was replying specifically to Jouska's statement about Hamas.
Oh, so that makes everybody who wears paramedic attire on the other side of the fence fair game, including those affiliated to neutral NGOs?
You don't get to shoot people who don't present a threat anyway, medic or not.
Seriously, what the hell is this pathetic excuse?
I think you may have answered your own question, it's a pathetic excuse
It means that wearing medical clothing doesn't matter near as much when they often disguise their soldiers in medical uniforms? I'm not sure why that's so hard to understand.
When you're actively fighting against a force that doesn't follow any of the "rules," then the rules don't apply in nearly the same way. Sure, you're still going to try and not shoot a medic, but it's a hell of a lot harder to tell who's a medic when you know that ever medic might be a soldier in disguise.
I'm not saying that everything is justified because Hamas doesn't follow any rules. I'm saying that we can't apply every rule in the same way in this kind of conflict. When one side totally disregards all rules, then the nature of the conflict has changed. Wearing medical clothing doesn't mean nearly as much as it ought to, non-uniformed personnel can't automatically be treated as non-combatants, etc.
We know nothing about the context of this Hamas medic being shot. Was he near the fence? Was he around combatants actively fighting? Was he fighting himself? Etc. These are all relevant questions that need to be answered before just saying, "Israel shot this guy who was clearly just acting as a medic because he was wearing medical clothing."
So stoop to their levels? Okay.
That works really well I hear.
All the more reason to have an unbiased investigation, to be honest.
A guy in medical clothing is walking up to you. You don't shoot him because you're not supposed to kill medics. He stabs you.
Congratulations! You didn't "stoop to their levels," but you're also dead.
You really think you're explaining a new concept to me here?
You're not.
Please, I encourage you to use this mindset to it's extremes in this situation. The result is you're going to have to wipe the Palestinians out using your logic. That's the course we've been going down for years now, it's good to see you're very comfortable with where it ends.
What? lol? No, of course not.
It just means you can't give Hamas as much leeway as you would a normal military force. If a medic does something aggressive, then he can't be given the same automatic protections that a normal medic would be given.
A medic walks up to you, you shoot him, congrats you just murdered a person in paranoia. Considering said medic wasn't walking up to the guards when shot, its even more stupid. We have the Geneva convention for a reason, we can't just shoot anyone whom we suspect could be a terrorist.
I mean you could, just like we did in nam if you really want to see that road traveled again.
Aggressive? On a battlefield? Oh no.
better just start killing those medics indiscriminately.
Where is the middle ground in the policies being used? Where is the middle ground in the reality on the ground?
It isn't "Trying to make it a black and white issue". It's a grey as fuck issue, but it's a fact that taking your mindset of "You can't trust em, so shoot em" is going to lead to a very bad outcome, with NO possible diplomatic outcome on the radar, ever. This will end violently. If the only option forward is to shoot the medics, break our own rules, how can we ever, EVER, expect anything but a violent end to this conflict? Diplomacy is pointless when your enemy is going to refuse to follow their own rules.
Not all the protestors weren't hamas ffs, basically you're justifying killing rioters and medics because there might be terrorists.
What is questionable? Who decides what definition of this category of "questionable" is justified?
You're already being dishonest. Please point where I said to kill medics indiscriminately.
Point out where I said you're not supposed to kill medics who present a credible threat. That's not what my point is. The point is that you can't kill medics who don't pose a threat, like you would enemy combatants. This is in response to those who point out that the medic that was killed was part of Hamas. That fact alone doesn't justify the killing.
Unless proven otherwise, neither the Canadian nor the Gazan posed a credible threat.
I can't people people are still trying to justify shooting a bunch of innocent people. Pathetic.
Why would you take the side of Hamas as default?
I think it's important to make a distinction between people who were shot in the leg and people who were killed.
By the IDF's own warnings they had a policy from that get go that people who get too close to the fence will be shot in the leg.
Morality aside, it appears to have been an effective last resort for when other means like tear gas failed to work, and seemed to have prevented a crowd of tens of thousands from breaking down the fence and walking into Israel, which was their declared purpose.
The IDF also made it clear that they will shoot to kill in cases where people posed a serious threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers or civilians, like armed militants trying to cross the border or people trying to plant bombs along the fence.
Now, if I'm reading the data that's been published so far out of tens of thousands of demonstrators hundreds have been shot, mostly in the legs, but only about 60 were killed in the last and most violent days of the demonstrations. Out of those that have been killed Hamas has claimed about 50 were members of its own military wing, and the Islamic Jihad claimed at least 3 more.
Which means either by pure chance almost every single demonstrator that was killed ended up being a militant on his day off, or there was something specific most of those men were doing that got them killed and almost nobody else. Like they were doing something that snipers would shoot you in the chest rather than in the leg for.
And I want to make this perfectly clear I don't think it's cool to shoot hundreds of people in the leg and possibly cripple a lot of them for life. I also don't know for a fact that everyone or even anyone that was killed "deserved" it, especially the medics.
I'm more ambiguous about the whole thing because I do believe that if the border went down and a significant number of Palestinians made it through some of them would have done their best to harm Israelis. To kill people. To kidnap people and take them back to Gaza. Even if most of the demonstrators wouldn't, Hamas definitely would have tried. That's pretty much what they do. And I don't know if there was a better way to stop all of them that didn't involve all this maiming and killing. I don't know if that justifies anything.
But that's just it. I don't know. You don't know. Sgman doesn't know. We're all just speculating based on partial information provided by the most biased parties involved. The truth is going to be somewhere in the middle, probably.
This just sound like you're justifying collateral damage in war.
Why are you taking the side of Israel as default?
We have no clue about the context.
Because one side has fucking snipers and guns shooting at them, the other has rocks and people pushing. Of course people are going to be wary when IDF posts shit like this:
https://twitter.com/IDFSpokesperson/status/996427205944184832
To fan the flames as much as possible to justify their horrible accountability. Fucking disabled civilians might be carrying bombs, same with children? Just gun them down, cant be too sure now can we. They should add medics on that list too to update it. If the US army posted this kind of propaganda bullshit, heads would roll in the media.
Hi, I'm taking neither side in this thread, but I have deep concerns over the fact that a fellow countryman was shot through the legs by an Israeli sniper while providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and according to his personal version of the story, he was off to one side and was not doing anything that would warrant being shot at.
And if anyone would like to call a Canadian medic a liar and accuse him of assisting Hamas in combat-related activities while representing himself as medical personnel in violation of the Geneva Convention (to which Canada is a full signatory), I'd like you to justify it.
1) I'm not. My position is that we don't know the context and shouldn't assume Israel is just shooting medics for fun.
2) Generally, I sure as hell am going to take Israel's word over Hamas's word if that's all I have to go by.
It came out a while ago that israel basically committed terrorism against Lebanon in order to kill Yasir Arafat, then blamed it on a made up lebanese freedom fighter organization. There was also that time that israel went and injected birth control into Ethiopian women without their consent
Personally I wouldn't trust either but Israel has far more at stake in this game than Palestine does. But can we please not pretend that this is a story of good vs evil?
What is innocent until proven guilty? Do you also automatically take the police's side in court when someone is arrested?
Hamas is actually evil. They might be the single most evil government currently in existence on the planet. Ideologically, they are beyond that of even Nazi Germany. They have similar genocidal intent, but also have no problem with things like using human shields, putting munitions in schools and hospitals, etc.
Israel is a free democracy that gives equal rights to people of every race and religion that also does some bad stuff. Hamas is a horrific government that does just about every bad thing imaginable.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.