In theory, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.
In practice, the effect is to advance Hamas by treating the Jewish state as though it operates on the same moral plane as Gaza’s terrorist leaders.
This moral equivalence is possible only by ignoring the fundamental distinction between civilians killed because they are being deliberately targeted and civilians killed because they are caught in the crossfire.
It should go without saying that it’s a crime to put them in the crossfire.
If Hamas can kill Israeli soldiers, it is delighted. But its leaders know they cannot defeat Israel on the battlefield. So their strategies depend mostly on dead civilians.
That can take the form of terrorizing Israeli civilians by firing rockets into their neighborhoods.
Or it can mean using Palestinian women and children as human shields with the aim of attracting Israeli fire — and then using the deaths in a grisly p.r. effort to paint Israel as a pariah.
The Hamas handbook on “Urban Warfare” recently captured in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces basically confirms this.
First, it notes the IDF “limits their use of weapons and tactics” when fighting in areas filled with civilians. Second, it hails the “destruction of civilian homes,” because it increases hatred for Israel.
Hamas fighters do not wear uniforms as they battle Israeli troops, they do not carry their arms openly, they use innocents as human shields and they target civilians.
When will the human-rights community recognize what a mockery it is to speak of the conventions of war without acknowledging that one side in this bloody conflict defines itself by its rejection of all of them?