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Any unlawful use of violence to terrify a civilian population is terrorism. Israel's denial of basic humanitarian needs and attacks on densely populated neighborhoods are acts intended to terrorize civilians, not just Hamas. But, in the eyes of some defenders of Israel, anything Israel targets is ipso facto a military target and therefore not limited by the Geneva Conventions. So human shields become nothing more than big targets painted on military assets that need to be destroyed. Your cliché "War is hell" expression is often used to excuse barbaric acts against an enemy, but it doesn't actually excuse barbaric behavior.
Get a dictionary. You need to learn what "unlawful" means (hint: what Israel is doing is not unlawful) and what "terrorism" means (hint: it's about intent.)
My understanding of "unlawful" is the same as yours, and we are talking about international law here. You are no more an expert on that subject than I am, and we have very different interpretations of what the Geneva Conventions say. AFAICT, they are rendered meaningless under your interpretation, because human shields can always be killed in order to destroy what they are shielding. So the claim that there are any restraints on targeting them are inconsequential. They are targets to the extent that they exist as "human shields" standing in front of what are bona fide military targets. Your legalistic nitpicking is absurd.
And the continual assertions that Israel doesn't know what it's hitting have zero evidence. Look at that post of mine earlier where UNWRA accidentally said the quiet part by showing the school damaged by an underground collapse. You don't hit tunnels by chance, Israel knew exactly where to aim.
Did I say that they didn't know what they were hitting? I think they know fully well that they are hitting innocent men, women, and children that they feel should have heeded leaflets telling them not to be where they are sending their bombs, even though there are no safe areas to go to. I think that the IDF believes that Gaza city is pretty much honeycombed by tunnels, and it may well be. So they can bomb pretty much anywhere and be hitting tunnels underneath all of those civilians. Too bad about the children, but "war is hell", isn't it? That didn't apply to the October 7 victims, because that was terrorism, not war, right?
And consider this recent bit:
Despite general media malevolence, the truth sometimes emerges
melaniephillips.substack.com
They're still calling people to warn them to get off the X. And even waiting until the people they called have confirmed the area is evacuated.
OK, it's good to know that those three apartment blocks were actually evacuated in advance of the destruction of the residents' homes, but it's still just one anecdote published by a substack blogger. It doesn't negate incidents like the Jabalya bombing that targeted a single individual, and maybe didn't even get him before killing scores of innocent men, women, and children. It doesn't justify Israel cutting off the entire population of the Gaza Strip from food, water, medical, and power supplies on the grounds that Hamas might also commandeer some of it for their own purposes. Again, I don't think that international law allows that, but you do. We've established that difference in our opinions about the interpretation of the Geneva Conventions regarding protected people.
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You continue to not understand international law.
Military use trumps civilian--if it's being used for military purposes it is a valid target, period.
You don't need to keep repeating this. We disagree. I believe that international law says that civilian lives are to be prioritized except under very extreme circumstances--for example during actual combat. You believe that any conceivable "military purpose", including the mere presence of an officer or enemy official, justifies overwhelming force to destroy it, no matter how many innocent lives may be sacrificed to that end. Tunnels can be blown up no matter what the lethal consequences are for innocent civilians simply because they might be used by enemy forces. The only requirement is maybe that the area by leafletted with warnings to flee the area, even though there are no safe havens to evacuate to.
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Israel doesn't have a choice here. A government that fails to defend it's people will fall. If Israel acts as you want in the next election you'll see a far more hardline government.
I'm not really concerned about how Israelis will vote in the next election, if killing a lot of people is somehow in the calculus to elect politicians that are less malevolent than the current crop of rightwing racist fanatics. I realize that there are worse people than even Bibi Netanyahu, who has been running governments that actually did fail to defend its people. What I disagree with is your assumption that Israel is compelled to bomb the hell out of Gaza for a full month, killing roughly 10,000 Palestinians, added to the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7, as a means of resolving the security crisis that Israel faces. At the end of this process, we are going to find that Palestinians are even more motivated to engage in asymmetric warfare against Israel in the future. Because that is their only option for settling new scores that they feel now fell need to be settled.
