Pants-of-dog wrote:The claim that a general warning suffices is not written in the ICRC summary,
Instead, it states that the USA usually gives general warnings, “in order not to endanger the attacking forces or the success of their mission …[and can] consist of a blanket alert delivered by broadcast advising the civilian population to stay away from certain military objectives”.
There is no evidence that the residents of the towers were told to stay way from the tunnels, and there is no evidence that a specific warning would endanger the mission.
So even if we accept US practice as law, the IDF still failed to provide sufficient warning.
What was the mission Israel was trying to fulfill when it attacked those towers? This is not something you can learn solely from the bombing. The fact that Rimal is in northern Gaza City and that Israel entered Gaza by ground just 2 days after the bombing may have something to do with it.
Furthermore, how exactly can the civilians be away from the tunnels and remain in the buildings at the same time? The tunnels presumably were located under the towers. It's why they needed to evacuate the area.
Pants-of-dog wrote:And once again, we cannot take the IDF’s claims at face value since they are currently being investigated by the ICJ for genocide and war crimes against the population of Gaza and therefore would be admitting guilt if they said anything except “tunnels”.
The ICJ is only investigating genocide.
I also wonder, why would Israel just attack civilians for the sake of it? In reality, civilian deaths are not in Israel's interest (they definitely hamper the war effort). And indeed, we can see this has been the case as the Biden administration decided to restrict arms sales to Israel, and of course also from this bogus genocide charge itself which has also hampered Israel's war effort to some extent. There're also no prospects of annexing Gaza in the long term, given that it's clear Gazans are not leaving the strip en masse and no attempt was made to get them to do that.
Although we can also see people like you, who justify attacking civilians by claiming it's just "resistance" and unavoidable.
Pants-of-dog wrote:And please note that the mere presence of tunnels has been refuted as a justification for attacks by @wat0n and others.
To now claim that this is sufficient cause for an attack would ge to refute other previous arguments. Is this what you are arguing now?
Certainly hitting tunnels isn't enough of a justification by itself, hitting tunnels are are known to be out of commission and therefore unused for example would not justify this type of bombing. Whether the attack was justified on military grounds also depends on what or who was believed was inside those tunnels, what they were assessed to be used for, if such assessments were justified by the available intelligence and if there were alternative means to destroy them. And if you want to know if it was proportionate then you'll have to compare those assessments with the assessment of the expected damage to civilians (that is, how many civilians were assessed would be killed or otherwise harmed by the bombing of those tunnels).
Unfortunately, since the war is still ongoing, Israel has no reason to share any of that information and indeed doing so could also hamper its war effort and its intelligence sources. Hence, any spokesperson will just say that the decision was made according to protocol or something vague along those lines.
What I'd love to know though is how you concluded then that this attack did not target a military asset or that it was disproportionate. It seems you are just assuming Israelis are cartoonishly evil and just can't help themselves to do these things. And yet when one says that Hamas' massacre of October 7 was an evil act, you say that one is just assuming Hamas is cartoonishly evil even when its men literally filmed themselves massacring civilians and proudly shared it on social media.