Hospitals have special protection under the rules of war. Why are they in the crosshairs in Gaza?

Kinda similar to the "human shields" argument. When I read comics growing up, when a villain takes a hostage the answer was never "kill the hostage" except for the edgiest of antiheroes, yet here we are with "human shields" being used as a justification to kill civilians. It's fucking wild.

This exactly is my main gripe with how Israel is conducting this war. They're completely unwilling to take any additional risk to preserve civilian life.
- Even the US sent troops in to kill a scumbag like Uday Hussein instead of bombing with an airstrike.
  This is just the Zionist creed of "unlimited Palestinian deaths don't make up for 1 Israeli."
- It's not just in "this war", they weren't giving a shit about Palestinian civilians for decades.
- Well, the US has shown that they couldn't fight an insurgency with their level of protections for civilians.
  Makes sense that Israel assesses that they have less resources than the US, and thus can't fight the same way and have a hope of success.
  Of course they could have used that as a pretty good reason not to start this war in the first placez but alas, they didn't.
- this war
  You mean "this genocide". They don't see civilians, they see targets for extermination.
If you kill hospitals, you kill a generation.
except for the edgiest of antiheroes
lol'd

Because that's where the Palestinians are, and this is a genocide.

Because Israel is committing war crimes. Because Israel has stated, unequivocally, that Palestinians are animals and must be scourged off the face of the earth.

Placing the Blame soley on Israel is misinformed at best
- Oh, Hamas is airstriking hospitals and refugee camps too? No? They're not? Only Israel is doing that?
  Why wouldn't this genocide be blamed on the ones committing it? Use your head.

Because both sides are fighting are major assholes. Hamas does hide arms and fighters in and around hospitals. Israel doesn't hold back attacking the hospitals to get at that gear, because they care more about killing Hamas than saving Palestinians. The civilians in Gaza are surrounded by assholes.

This is true in general, but this time they're literally in Israel's crosshairs. These people are dying to sniper fire.
- Here you go
  https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8phw94
  Rockets literally stored 1m from the doorstep of a class room

Why are hospitals in Gaza under Israel’s crosshairs? Why? Is it truly that difficult to step back and think for a moment about why Israel would want to erase the current populace entirely?

Amazing, what a mystery

Not sure why you’re being downvoted… Israel an ethnostate, and what we’re seeing here are the early stages of a genocide. Look at any other ethnic cleansing in history, and you’ll easily see the parallels.
- Well, I'm not sure early stages fits, that's calling for a group to removed and Israel has been bombing water wells, while monopolizing all water supplies and providing only dangerously! small amounts of unclean water. Without question, this has caused unneeded deaths. Simmiliarly for electricity and food supplies.
  It's tragically been a genocide for a long time.
- War does not automatically equate to being a genocide just because people due. Otherwise, every war in history would.be genocide.
  There are Arabs & Palestinians that serve in the IDF too and have killed Palestinians. There are other Arabs in Jordan and Syria who have also gone to war against Palestine.
  You are using incindiary rhetoric to win an online argument, but your description doesn't fit the facts.
I don't know why people insist on this narrative. Isn't the truth horrible enough? Hamas is allegedly using hospitals as shields, which is horrible. Israel is willing to kill countless civilians to get at Hamas, which is also horrible.
- Because it’s what Israeli politicians and government officials actually believe. They aren’t even quiet about it. It’s genuinely not hard to prove the genocidal intent of the Israeli government.
  Unfortunately western media just tends to gloss over it all. I’m not sure if reporters can’t fathom the US supporting ethnic cleansing or if they just want to avoid the flack they’d receive by being honest. Either way, it’s unfortunate because well meaning liberals are left to assume Israel genuinely cares about stopping Hamas and aren’t using them as a pretext to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip.
- Operation cast lead.
  Humans shields was something the IOF engaged in.
Yeah, I mean there are people in the Israeli Government calling all Palestinians (not just Hamas) "animals", others who say that Palestinians won't be allowed to get back to Northern Gaza and there's even a member of that Government who seriously suggested Israel should nuke Gaza.
And then, of course, there is the long track record of Israel doing things like murdering journalists and killing Palestinian kids throwing rocks at their armored diggers, especially under governments with these same people in them.
People who have a track record of murdering journalists and children, bombing hospitals full of those they see as "animals" which they want to see dead or out of Gaza, and then providing to the World some unverifiable excuse that blames somebody else and doesn't even pass the sniff test when it comes to proportionality in the use of force is hardly out of character, especially because History has various examples of people who think like that going full on mass-murderer in similar ways.

Because Israel is trying to genocide.

They don't care about Hamas, they just want Palestine gone.

That doesn't explain why the rest of the world is ok with it.
- We aren't. But anyone that voices an opinion against Israel in my country is labeled an anti-Semite, so people stay quiet.
  Also Putin is doing the same, global out rage, no one really stepped in due to politics
- Most civilians aren't but they've found out in 3 weeks time that they live all live in pretend democracies and not real ones. Mask off we're the Russia now.
- Because if you don't support genocide you are an antisemite, and only one of those can destroy your political aspirations (hint, it isn't supporting genocide).
- Ever seen an oil tanker turn? That is the the way the world works with Israel slowly and not quick to judge. The rest of us though have had enough, fuck Israel and no funding of them whatsoever.

Does that headline not read war crime to you somehow?
- Well it's kind of open to interpretation, which may be why they didn't want to directly say that, just imply it.
  Article 19 of the Geneva convention:
  The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy. Protection may, however, cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded.
  Now are firing qassam rockets "harmful to the enemy"? Probably.
  Has due warning been given? Maybe? It's not well defined what that means. Does roof knocking count? Do you need to submit a form to their embassy?
  I think the big problem is that the kind of warfare we are seeing here is unlike what they saw when they wrote those laws.

Because someone decided it was such a funny idea to use these places to launch missiles at their enemies.

Fucking godawful people Hamas are, ruining the lives of 2 million people and assuring untold suffering for probably generations. The sooner those fucks are gone, the better.

Oh, well if bad people did bad thing, that definitely justifies bombing civilians, which totally isn't a war crime.

Given most people aren't reading the article, the particularly relevant points:

International humanitarian law lends hospitals special protections during war. But hospitals can lose their protections if combatants use them to hide fighters or store weapons, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. [...]

In an editorial published Friday in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a warning to combatants that the burden of proof is on them if they claim hospitals, schools or houses of worship have lost their protected status because they are being used for military purposes. And the bar for evidence is very high.

“If there is a doubt that a civilian object has lost its protective status, the attacker must assume that it is protected,” Khan wrote. “The burden of demonstrating that this protective status is lost rests with those who fire the gun, the missile, or the rocket in question.”

TL;DR: If Hamas is conducting military operations from hospitals, they can be legitimate targets in the eyes of international law, but precautions still need to be taken to avoid civilian casualties and the case for their military use should be overwhelming, not amorphous or tenuous.

So just shouting, "They're coming right for us!" Isn't enough?
I'm shocked.

Netanyahu doesn't give a duck.

Crazy thought, why don't we just not bomb hospitals? Anyone?

Or how to make people hate you more than Hamas, a book by the IDF.

And if rockets and other weapons really are being fired from hospitals? What do you do then?
- That's up to them to figure out how to do it with the least amount of civilian casualty then. Moot point anyway considering nothing has come out with overwhelming proof of Hamas using the hospital as cover.

The way I see it, Israel is doing its best to free the hospital from Hamas with as minimum innocents getting hurt as it can.

If that were true, then they would be sending in troops on the ground instead of indiscriminate bombings.
- That not how that works the us tried that a few times in Afghanistan and the risk to their own people was too large compared to the lives saved which were next to none because of the hostage taking I know Israel is a shithole and Palestine is too but war isn't as simple as just send people
- There are troops on the ground and the bombings are not indiscriminate, but on legitimate military targets.

There's two kinds of people; ones that use human shields and ones that are deterred by them. Atleast to a point.

Israel uses human shields. Operation Cast lead is what human shields looks like.
Stop justifying war crime in defense of an apartheid ethno state trying to commit genocide.
- That was 15 years ago, and I see absolutely no mention of Israeli human shields anywhere regarding Cast Lead.
explain
- It's no accident Hamas keeps their HQ's and ammunition depots near civilian population aswell as regularly shoots rockets from near mosks and hospitals. They know Israel is atleast trying to minimize civilian casualties so they're probably not going to just level that building without a warning as they would if it was located in the desert.
  If Hamas had the military capabilities that Israel does and Israel would put their military HQ in the basement of Israeli hospital hoping to use their own population as human shields Hamas could not care less. They would level that building in a heartbeat and collateral damage would just be a bonus.

If you build your defense in urban environment you are supposed to evacuate the civilians. This is standard for any half competent army.
To where? Gaza is small enough as is, and the whole strip is being bombed by Israel.
Also, Hamas isn't an army; they're a resistance force. Gaza doesn't have a proper army, which is why they have to resort to asymmetrical warfare.

The truth. Israelis are racist as fuck!
https://youtu.be/5JzGzyaUnz0
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No one cares about brown indigenous peoples bombed by white colonialists.

Even less care given when brown indigenous peoples bombed by other brown indigenous people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil_war
Estimates of the total number of deaths in the Syrian Civil War, by opposition activist groups, vary between 503,064 and about 613,407 as of March 2023
- A lot of Arabs and Muslims have volunteered to fight Assad, and many foreign countries got involved in Syria
  As bad is it was, it is nowhere near as bad as war on Gaza

Rules apply only to peasants

This is the best summary I could come up with:

JERUSALEM (AP) — The head of surgery at Gaza’s largest and most advanced hospital held up his phone Saturday to the hammering of gunfire and artillery shelling.

“It was the thing we somehow told ourselves wouldn’t happen,” he said, speaking by phone from the central city of Deir al-Balah, where he arrived by foot Friday after escaping what he said were strikes on the hospital with tens of thousands of others.

“It’s to say, ‘Not only will we kill and wound you, we will ensure you have nowhere to go to be treated,’” said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British Palestinian surgeon working for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza City.

Nonetheless, there must be plenty of warning before attacks to allow for the safe evacuation of patients and medical workers, ICRC legal officer Cordula Droege said.

Even if Israel succeeds in proving Shifa conceals a Hamas command center, the tenets of international law remain in place, said Jessica Wolfendale, expert in military ethics at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

In an editorial published Friday in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a warning to combatants that the burden of proof is on them if they claim hospitals, schools or houses of worship have lost their protected status because they are being used for military purposes.

The original article contains 1,155 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Didn't you all see the things these Hamas fucks did? C'mon now

Hamas hasn't been bombing hospitals. I'm not sure why you think it's okay for Israel to do that.