[ignoramous]

> All the hospitals are now rubble

Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).

[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

[cholantesh]

A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.

[glenstein]

Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.

[dathinab]

many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil).

Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.

This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.

But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.

---

(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.

(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).

[mikkupikku]

People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.

[ceejayoz]

It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.

IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.

[themafia]

> according to accepted conventions

Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?

The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.