The international community fuels Hamas’ war crimes against Gazan civilians

by Robert Harris

The argument below, as quoted from this article: (‘The curious case of the Biden administration and Hamas‘, Bassam Tawil, Dec 19^th 2023), raises the point that the international community is quite overtly encouraging Hamas, and its associated terror groups, to actually use Gazan civilians as human shields with predictably tragic results: 

[…] Hamas, however, in keeping with one of its favorite war crimes, has continued to use its own citizens as human shields precisely because it hopes that whenever Israel targets a military site, Gazan civilians will be killed. The international community can then fall for the trick and do exactly what Biden did: tell Israel to stop because of civilian casualties. 

The grotesque irony, of course, is that—no matter how careful Israel is to avoid civilian casualties—the more the West blames Israel for civilian deaths, the more Hamas will place civilians in the line of fire in order to keep the international community blaming Israel. 

The Biden administration should be telling Hamas, not Israel, to minimize the number of civilian casualties. The real cause of these casualties, besides Hamas, is therefore actually the Biden administration, the UN and the international community. They incentivize Hamas to place its own people in harm’s way. 

The act of blaming Israel for casualties orchestrated by Hamas is, in fact, what is causing them. Hamas can only be looking around and saying to themselves, “Hey, it’s working! Let’s keep on doing it!” 

Hamas commits further war crimes for which Israel also gets unfairly blamed. There is clear, abundant evidence that Hamas terrorists deliberately place their weapons and ammunition in schools, kindergartens, hospitals and mosques, which, under international law, are “protected zones,” and use these sites to fire rockets at Israel and ambush Israeli soldiers. 

Under international law, however, once combatants use “protected zones” for military purposes, including for storing weapons, these zones lose their protected status. 

As US Senator Tom Cotton said: “If Hamas uses schools, and kindergartens, and mosques for military purposes, Israel has every right under the laws of war to strike back… It is Hamas that is committing war crimes by using those civilians….” […]

It can be argued that this war-crime enabling stance is of an increasingly knowing nature now that the evidence coming out of Gaza is becoming increasingly hard to ignore given the prolific amounts of material that shows the extent to which Hamas has militarily embedded itself into the region’s civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. 

Furthermore, since this is Hamas’ modus operandi, then how exactly will the terror group not continue to behave in this manner if the international community rewards them for such behaviour, especially when it now appears to be going as far as to save them from annihilation with incessant talk of ‘ceasefire’?