I don’t know what the outcome will be. Of course I read the complaint and some of the initial legal opinions, as to jurisdiction, application of the conventions, and the preliminary injunction, and at this stage of the case, the decisions are based on the complainance statements and are presumed to be true. Like, if everything South Africa says happened really did happen exactly as they say, does the court have jurisdiction, do the convention supply, and did they state a plausible case for genocide?

My takeaways from the complaint are posted in detail elsewhere, but in summary it provided a lot of hyperlinks to news articles that were based on second and third hand reports, mostly from anonymous sources, with pretty half assed reporting.

For example, reading the articles, it’s impossible to determine if you just read 10 articles about 10 different events, or 10 articles about the same event, because the articles don’t include enough detail. Yet, if people read the same headline then times, they’re going to think it must be true. I’ve gotten into it with people here on Lemmy where they tell me how wrong I am and just look at all these examples of Israel doing a thing, and then they post three examples all talking about the same one event and they don’t even realize.

To prove up the claims in court, South Africa is not going to be able to rely on hearsay and anonymous sources; Twitter posts aren’t evidence. They’re going to need names, dates, exact locations, credible witnesses, and Israel is going to have a chance to respond and cross-examine every claim.

A lot of the most sensational claims are going to fall apart when Israel’s position is included. Like the headline might have said that no weapons were present, no terrorists were killed, just all kids and women. And when the IDF investigators present their evidence, it will show that there were weapons, or there were terrorists present.

A lot of claims fall apart now just with critical analysis. I recall a series of articles about a local doctor quoted as saying that he treated a boy who had been shot by an Israeli sniper, and others with similar wounds, but if you actually look at what the guy said, he based his opinion on the idea that because a kid had a hole through his center, it must have been fired by a sniper; he said something like ‘only a sniper could be so accurate.’ Maybe that sounds plausible, especially if you want to believe Israel is monstrous, but it’s absurd on its face; emergency room doctors cannot identify the shooter or the motive or intended target from a bullet wound. It could have been fired from two miles away at some other target entirely. That’s how bullets work.

On the other hand, there have definitely been what seems like some pretty egregious war crimes; IDF blames a lot of horrible things on freak accidents and mistakes. Some I’m sure are freak accidents snd honest mistakes, sometimes I find that unbelievable. So when the media reports a bunch of wild nonsense, sprinkled with a little truth, people find the nonsense believable. I tend to think that when any news articles makes me think “God damn, that’s unbelievable,” such as Israel sniping kids, it shouldn’t be believed without extraordinary evidence.

I’ve found that a lot of the reporting has been like this, rhetorical or wildly exaggerated, claims that the declarant could not possibly know. In law that’s called incompetence. Like the driver of a car could testify as to what they experienced, but would be incompetent to testify that a manufacturing defect caused a crash; you need a mechanic to say that, and at that, one who examined the car at issue.

A lot of the claims are circumstantial, which is fine, but if the reporting only includes one view of the circumstances, it’s insufficient to draw a conclusion. Much of that sort of coverage begs a conclusion anyway. Al Jazeera constantly does this. They’ll talk about one recent report, which is often just some random Twitter post with nothing else, just to have an article, and then they’ll say “well Israel has been accused of this kind of thing several times before, so it must be true.” Again, if people want to believe Israel is a monster, they’re likely to accept the article at face value without thinking through the clearly false logic.

Further, part of the Hamas strategy is to lie and encourage people to lie. By their account, everyone killed is a woman or child, no terrorists are ever among the dead, and none of the dead ever had any weapons. Hospitals are always hospitals and schools are always schools. Israeli troops are getting in small arms fire fights everyday. Someone must be a terrorist, someone must have some weapons.

All this said, I’m not there, I don’t know what’s true or not, and like mostly everyone with an opinion on this stuff, I only have my experience and instincts to guide me, and this has been how I see it.

I’m not in a position to say what I would do, like, if I was asked to press the button to drop the bomb. I don’t feel like I’d be okay with it either. By the time the person who does press it gets there, they probably have their mind made up as to what they’re going to do, through their training and customs.

There’s a story that I remember from, I want to say at least 10 years ago, about an Israeli pilot who was ordered to bomb a building from which rockets were being launched at Israel, and the standard warnings were given (“roof knocking,” where they essentially fire percussive blanks at the building first, if memory serves), and as the plane flew by the pilot could see dozens of people on the roof of the building, waving at him, and I believe he did not drop the bomb. JFK famously said, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” My neighbor is Canada. They want their people to pay taxes, vote, serve on juries, occasionally to join the military, and be decent to each other. The government in Gaza wants it’s people to go stand on the roof, and would give your family a pension not for a career of service, but for being a suicide attacker. What if Gaza was your neighbor?

It’s been decades of Hamas leadership and even before Hamas, decades more of extremist violence was also accepted and encouraged by its predecessors, the PA and the PLO, the latter being more of a criminal gang than anything resembling a government. Today, Hamas rules by assassinating any local opposition, such as a prominent fellow in North Gaza who, for the crime of calling for elections, got beaten to death in front of his family and neighbors.

For how many years of suicide bombings and daily rocket attacks would you turn the other cheek, before saying okay ladies and gentleman, gtfo the way, because we’re going to now bomb all the tunnels and every Hamas member we can find. I’d imagine not very many, unlikely 70+ years. Palestine, and especially the nationalists in Gaza, who again, are in charge, have rejected every opportunity for peace. They’ve turned every institution and public utility into instruments of international crime and terror.

The rest of the world would not care one iota how Gazans want to worship and pray, even live like it’s the 14th century, if they stayed inside their borders and exported something other than illegal terrorism, but they won’t. Every public dollar in Gaza gets squandered, stolen from the general population, and turned over to what is at this time and unwinnable war against Israel.

Israel has to intercept thousands of rockets per month launched at its civilians at a cost of $40,000 to $50,000 per rocket. And that’s been going on since 2007, prior to witch the rockets often hit rheir targets. For how many years would your country spend billions of dollars strictly on defending itself from rocket attacks before blowing up the tunnels from which the rocket attacks are carried out?

And, by the way, this is all in the context of Iranian aggression. The rockets and rocket launchers are mostly made in Iran, featuring some supplies from North Korea, each of whom are the first and second largest funders of the tunnels in Gaza. And this is in the context of the fact that Israel is a burgeoning democracy, the only such government in the region, and I believe democracy is the only form of government even capable of granting lasting human rights; certainly not a monarchy or religious dictatorship, where any such rights are basically imaginary, capable of being taken away on the whim of someone claiming to hear the voice of Dog.

I think that at this point there is a general consensus in Israel and in the halls of concerned intelligence and diplomatic circles around the world that Hamas will not be a part of the remainder of this century, and it’s in this context that the incidental casualties are weighed against achieving that objective.

October 7 scared the Israeli people. It wasn’t in any way a military operation. It was purely a terrorist attack. Hamas members were driving in on motorbikes, just firing AK-47s at cars full of families on their way out to dinner, or whatever. I think the Israeli people overwhelmingly feel that enough is enough, and if the people of Gaza aren’t going to get rid of Hamas, then that must mean a good chunk of the people support Hamas. I mean, where are the cooperators? Where are the Gazans openly calling for Hamas to surrender? I see the Gazan efforts in social and regular media to blame every civilian death on Israel, and to say that no terrorists are ever killed in the bombings, only women and kids. Where are the Gazan efforts on social and regular media to identify, locate, and arrest Hamas members?

I think the Isrealis and others I mentioned feel that 1 in 100 is prettu acceptable, in context, although there are certainly many people in Israel who still want to seek other solutions and who find the number of civilian casualties unacceptable. And because Israel is a democracy, those people may freely speak out, we can see their social and regular media campaigns, and there’s a very good chance that the current government in Israel gets voted out at the next election.

Personally, I find the civilian casualties horrific, but feel that the mission of destroying Hamas and their ability to carry out further attacks on Israel and on their own people, including by mental and social subjugation, to be far more important than 1 in 100 lives.

I just don’t see any merit to the argument that this is an intentional genocide, though with twisted facts and unattributed reports pedaled by Hamas themselves, it certainly has an appearance of one. In a genocide though, the Killing apparatus gets more efficient with time. In a genocide, there are no warnings before a bomb drops. The aggressornin a genocide doesn’t let flow food, water and medicine into the hands of the people they’re trying to kill. It seems to me that Israel is taking every reasonable precaution to limit civilian casualties, and sending in food, water, and medicine, and that it is the cultural exemplar set by Hamas that readily explains the excess deaths; Hamas could surrender tomorrow, turn the place over to an interim government, and join a meaningful ceasefire, and not one more bomb would fall.

When I consider the strength and tactics of Hamas, they have absolutely zero chance of accomplishing any mission of theirs through military means. They are simply outnumbered and outgunned. Their only possible effective strategy is through international law, and for that to succeed the number of civilians killed must be unacceptable to the west. It is only that context that October 7 makes any strategic sense; what was the purpose of the attack if not to provoke Israel to start bombing tunnels and bombing Hamas? Similarly, only in this context do Hamas’s movements and tactics make any sense; why surround themselves with family and friends, hide under schools and hospitals, and block evacuations if not to ensure excess civilians are killed?

The article I linked above contained a paragraph describing some hoax calls by Hamas and posted on Facebook after an IDF bombing warning was issued. Here’s some other links with video and audio recordings:

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/378465

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-gaza-resident-says-hamas-preventing-evacuations-thousands-return-north/

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bjqk4hpft

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip/card/hamas-tells-civilians-not-to-evacuate-to-the-south-T9TX4p5KHl930OHJDyfp

https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/10/14/hamas-blocks-gazans-from-evacuating-to-safe-zones/

My grandchildren? Lol. This is a short footnote in history.