Quote:
Originally Posted by foreverwar
And are Hamas and their followers breaching international law with the rockets, mortars, and suicide bombers?
This does not make what Israel is doing right, but surely what Hamas and others are doing is wrong as well?
btw, from the BBC article quoted earlier -
"The Egyptian foreign minister has accused Hamas of not allowing injured Palestinians to leave Gaza to seek treatment, even though much-needed medical supplies are waiting at the nearby El-Arish airport"; because there is, of course, an Egyptian-Gaza border crossing in the south of the Gaza Strip (as the Egyptians ruled the Gaza Strip until the '67 war). |
Wrong and international law are not necessarily the same thing. What Hamas are doing is clearly wrong, other than in some warped, conditioned mind, one that would probably be found somewhere in well, unfortunately the middle east.
Hamas have been the government, or as documentation would describe it the de facto authority since 2006. So there may be a case to answer, they could certainly be investigated with their followers but that would be harder to gather evidence against. Pinning something on the authority when Arafat was incharge though, certainly not. So the question is whether Hamas sponsored stuff since they have been in government amounts to a widespread enough practice to be called a Crime Against Humanity. The answer is probably, no.
The other point of interest here is that the Israeli Military and some other countries round the world don't see Hamas as a legitimate government and they have no right to go round trying to change it to something else, as their intention seems to be. The civilian deaths and trying to (again) dismantle the proto-government will probably either reinforce Hamas (in which case the only winners are Hamas and the Israeli military) or some other realignment where some other political organisation that the Israeli military will also take a disliking to will take power(ish) and we can go through yet another cycle of this.