Israel and Hamas in Gaza: Attacks on a Gaza City Command Center, Food Security, and Human Rights: War Crimes and Humanitarian Laws
Although schools have become regular targets of Israeli strikes, they continue to draw Palestinians seeking shelter because they offer some limited access to plumbing and are seen as somewhat safer than other places in the enclave, which has suffered increasing lawlessness.
The media office for the Gazan government, which is controlled by Hamas, said that many widows and orphaned children had been at the school to receive a small payment to help cover food costs. The experts warned this summer that almost half a million people in the Gaza territory faced food shortages.
Israel said it struck a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City on Saturday because it believed Hamas militants were using the building as a command center. Palestinian health authorities said the attack killed 22 people, mostly women and children, who had sought shelter at the school, and did not confirm any combatant deaths.
The Saturday strike on the school killed women and children, including an infant, according to Gaza rescue services. The health ministry in Gaza said that the majority of the dead were women and children.
The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting members of Hezbollah in Lebanon were certainly an espionage and technological coup. Few people on the ground or reading about them from out of the way could fail to be amazed. But the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.
Israel is widely believed to have been behind the attacks. Friends of Israel have to say that this was not right if those allegations are true.
The theory of just war is dependent on who is a combatant and who isn’t. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together, because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.