I don’t think I remember hearing about Russians bombing Ukrainian refugee camps (though I could have missed it).
Seems like Putin sees civilians as an inconvenience that get in the way of his goals. For Netanyahu, it seems as though killing the civilians is the goal. I would say that the latter is objectively worse (though they are both pieces of shit).
Not to mention eradicating close to the entirety of the military-aged male population in Donetsk and Luhansk by forced conscription.
I might grant Putin though that he’s only doing a cultural genocide, that is, the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance – which is known to generally not work, hence why it’s a war crime. He’s perfectly fine with people staying alive as long as they bend the knee and become Russian.
the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance – which is known to generally not work, hence why it’s a war crime.
I think it’d be a war crime even if it generally worked.
That’s the pacifist answer but no that’s not how war crimes work: The rules of war aren’t about avoiding bloodshed, they’re about avoiding pointless bloodshed, pointless from the point of winning an armed conflict, that is. If you can shorten a conflict and spare millions of lives by killing a couple thousands of civilians, well, a couple thousand is less than millions. War is erm dispassionate like that, a hard-nosed calculus.
Hence why you also get rules like the ban on hollow-point bullets: They’re more likely to kill than to disable. Killing combatants, however, is less effective at binding up enemy resources and thus not a sound military strategy, using them means that you care more about killing people than winning the engagement. If, OTOH, the enemy started killing all their wounded soldiers instead of expending medical resources that reasoning would cease to apply and you’d be justified using hollow points. (Which are btw in ample use by police forces because they ricochet much less, leading to less injured bystanders, but you generally don’t have bystanders on the battlefield. Similarly tear gas is allowed for police use but outlawed for war because it could get confused with a nasty chemical attack very easily, possibly leading to a very nasty escalation when the attacked force responds in kind. Also for the record there’s plenty of legitimate uses of white phosphorous, tracer rounds and smoke screens all use it, the banned use is as an incendiary weapon anywhere close to civilians but that’s not special to white phosphorous, that’s a general thing about incendiary weapons).
Russia is bombing no less indiscriminately than Israel, it’s just a much larger theater of war, their aiming capabilities suck and their shit gets shot down a lot before ever reaching anything.
They do the exact same thing day in day out. Taking out a cluster of civilians is probably worth an extra ration of vodka or even worse, a promotion, at this point.
Two wars of terror, if you want. Irony is stone cold dead at this point.
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There’s no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with “Palestine” in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You also can’t prove how much higher the death toll would actually be, because we’re all just speculating fools. You are using an argumentative fallacy, which is “you can’t explain why this hypothetical thing isn’t occurring” when it doesn’t really have to be occurring. Can’t remember which that is. Red herring? Straw man? Ah, I can’t remember.
Anyway, we’re going by what we’re seeing, which is the bombing of innocent civilians. Terrible, terrible state of the world right now.
I can’t say exactly how many people they could kill if they were targeting civilians, but I can with certainty say it would be significantly more than have currently died.
They could drop many more bombs and shell the entire strip for weeks. These aren’t hypotheticals - we know they have the armament to do that.
There are around 20,000 people dead - out of almost 800,000 in Gaza. If their goal was a maximizing death, they could have killed significantly more. They certainly have the ammunition and means to do it - and that’s not a hypothetical.
I don’t think I remember hearing about Russians bombing Ukrainian refugee camps (though I could have missed it).
Seems like Putin sees civilians as an inconvenience that get in the way of his goals. For Netanyahu, it seems as though killing the civilians is the goal. I would say that the latter is objectively worse (though they are both pieces of shit).
Russia intentionally bombed a ton of civilian targets with zero military value. It’s weird that you don’t remember this. There’s even a lengthy Wikipedia article specifically about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_civilians_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Yeah, I seem to remember a lot of cruise missiles hitting apartments and schools.
That’s exactly what came immediately to mind for me as well.
Not to mention eradicating close to the entirety of the military-aged male population in Donetsk and Luhansk by forced conscription.
I might grant Putin though that he’s only doing a cultural genocide, that is, the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance – which is known to generally not work, hence why it’s a war crime. He’s perfectly fine with people staying alive as long as they bend the knee and become Russian.
I think it’d be a war crime even if it generally worked.
That’s the pacifist answer but no that’s not how war crimes work: The rules of war aren’t about avoiding bloodshed, they’re about avoiding pointless bloodshed, pointless from the point of winning an armed conflict, that is. If you can shorten a conflict and spare millions of lives by killing a couple thousands of civilians, well, a couple thousand is less than millions. War is erm dispassionate like that, a hard-nosed calculus.
Hence why you also get rules like the ban on hollow-point bullets: They’re more likely to kill than to disable. Killing combatants, however, is less effective at binding up enemy resources and thus not a sound military strategy, using them means that you care more about killing people than winning the engagement. If, OTOH, the enemy started killing all their wounded soldiers instead of expending medical resources that reasoning would cease to apply and you’d be justified using hollow points. (Which are btw in ample use by police forces because they ricochet much less, leading to less injured bystanders, but you generally don’t have bystanders on the battlefield. Similarly tear gas is allowed for police use but outlawed for war because it could get confused with a nasty chemical attack very easily, possibly leading to a very nasty escalation when the attacked force responds in kind. Also for the record there’s plenty of legitimate uses of white phosphorous, tracer rounds and smoke screens all use it, the banned use is as an incendiary weapon anywhere close to civilians but that’s not special to white phosphorous, that’s a general thing about incendiary weapons).
Russia is bombing no less indiscriminately than Israel, it’s just a much larger theater of war, their aiming capabilities suck and their shit gets shot down a lot before ever reaching anything.
They do the exact same thing day in day out. Taking out a cluster of civilians is probably worth an extra ration of vodka or even worse, a promotion, at this point.
Two wars of terror, if you want. Irony is stone cold dead at this point.
Yes exactly, that was basically my point, that Israel is actively attacking civilians almost exclusively (it feels like to me anyway).
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There’s no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with “Palestine” in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You can say that - but seemingly also can’t explain why the death count isn’t stratospherically higher if that was their goal.
Asymmetric warfare always sucks for civilians. The whole point is knowing who a civilian and who’s a combatant is intentionally difficult.
Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms, because they’re terrorists and not a government or regular army.
You also can’t prove how much higher the death toll would actually be, because we’re all just speculating fools. You are using an argumentative fallacy, which is “you can’t explain why this hypothetical thing isn’t occurring” when it doesn’t really have to be occurring. Can’t remember which that is. Red herring? Straw man? Ah, I can’t remember.
Anyway, we’re going by what we’re seeing, which is the bombing of innocent civilians. Terrible, terrible state of the world right now.
I can’t say exactly how many people they could kill if they were targeting civilians, but I can with certainty say it would be significantly more than have currently died.
They could drop many more bombs and shell the entire strip for weeks. These aren’t hypotheticals - we know they have the armament to do that.
There are around 20,000 people dead - out of almost 800,000 in Gaza. If their goal was a maximizing death, they could have killed significantly more. They certainly have the ammunition and means to do it - and that’s not a hypothetical.
fr Israel is worse than Russia
They’re wildly different wars from a population density per square mile perspective.
So maybe 2,000 pound bombs weren’t the right weapon?
There are no good weapons for densely populated areas. Civilian casualties will always be high in populated urban areas unfortunately.