> Among the most egregious cases are those of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s jailed for six weeks and of a single mother separated from her young children. When the mother was released after 53 days she found the children begging on the streets.
> At that point in May Israel had detained 6,000 people under its “unlawful combatants” legislation, which allows indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, official data released after legal appeals showed.
> “I remember [the 82-yo woman with Alzheimer's] limping badly toward the clinic. And she’s classified as an unlawful combatant. The way that label is used is insane,” the medic said. Photographs confirm his presence at Anatot at the time.
The indefinite detention under dubious justifications without charge or trial. Such a profound violation of human rights and dignity, but it's OK, because they're "animals".
The other issue is that someone working for the local government (Hamas) in 2023 or after, is often treated by the IDF as being a combatant. So even the claimed combatant numbers will include those from the cleansing department or local civilian police and many others in civilian and necessary jobs.
> someone working for the local government (Hamas) in 2023 or after, is often treated by the IDF as being a combatant
To be fair, guilty-until-proven-innocent for card-carrying affiliates is deeply precedented during wartime. (Though I'm not sure how we'd classify e.g. a janitor on a military base, casualty-wise.)
Jailing elderly single mothers who haven't been charged with a crime is not. It's important to distinguish between these because while both are horrible, one departs from the way the great powers have fought modern wars.
This is not a modern war though. It's asymmetric warfare, in that there is one overwhelming military power and they are choosing to enact widespread military action, including dropping megatons of explosives on a civilian population.
So I'm can't see how your point about how great powers and modern warfare applies.
The IDF and contractors are just enacting methodical slaughter and starvation techniques in an indiscriminate manner surely? There isn't really an actual war scale action other than on the Israeli side.
> not a modern war though. It's asymmetric warfare
Modern (i.e. post nuclear) war is always fought asymmetrically. And great powers constantly fight asymmetric wars. (Israel isn't a great power, but it is an emerging regional hegemon.)
In this case, we have a proxy war between America and Israel, on one hand, and Iran and its proxies, on the other hand, with Gaza and to a lesser degree Yemen being the board's pawns.
> IDF and contractors are just enacting methodical slaughter and starvation techniques in an indiscriminate manner surely?
I genuinely can't figure out why anyone in this war is doing what they are doing.
Hamas' winning move is to return the hostages--they're greater leverage for Netanyahu at this point than the villa-dwellers in Doha. Tel Aviv's winning move is to end hostilities with a tight security cordon around Gaza to prevent Iran from resupplying Hamas. Tehran's winning move is to offer dropping support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis if the Security Council agrees to (a) an independent Palestinian state and (b) dropping sanctions. (And, like, not bomb Australian Jews. Though Tehran's position makes the most sense, not because it's rational, but because Iranian hardliners gain domestic power when Iran is isolated. Sort of like Netanyahu.) The only folks without a winning line are America, the EU and the people of Palestine and Israel.
That said, detaining a Hamas member is not indiscriminate. Even if the paperwork says they're a librarian, it's reasonable to act on hunches in wartime provided they're treated like POWs.
Hamas has offered to return the hostages many times and Israel refuses to stop the killing. Missing in your analysis is Israel’s primary goal: ethnically cleanse all of Palestine and enforce Jewish supremacy.
> Hamas has offered to return the hostages many times and Israel refuses to stop the killing
Offering and doing are different. Unilaterally returning the hostages is the winning move for Palestinians. It is not for Hamas’ leadership, however, so it won’t happen.
> Missing in your analysis is Israel’s primary goal: ethnically cleanse all of Palestine and enforce Jewish supremacy
This is like equating hard liners with Iran or Hamas with Palestine.
There are elements in Israel who want this. There are elements without who are okay with it. Nobody is particularly motivated to intervene because the burden is purely moral—there isn’t a unique industry or diaspora for Palestinians to call on.
Hamas and Likud benefit from the war continuing. (Their right wing elements are both exterminationist. They have been for years. Nothing new there.)
Let's say Hamas returned the hostages. What would happen next? What makes that the "winning move?"
My guess is that Netanyahu would say that the war can't end until "all the terrorists are dead" (impossible), and the Palestinians have given up the one bit of leverage that they have.
> Let's say Hamas returned the hostages. What would happen next?
The international terms of the debate would change. The domestic political situation in Israel would change.
Netanyahu’s hand would be significantly weakened by losing hostages as a justification to his electorate and even the IDF. Hamas, however, would face pointed questions over why it didn’t recognise that the hostages were a liability sooner (I frankly question if they were ever an asset at all—Sinwar’s purpose, to draw in Iran, was a dud).
If you want to get conspiratorial, consider that the one red line Netanyahu has respected is Hamas’ leadership’s security in Doha.
The mistreatment includes obvious civilians and children and their mistreatment includes heinous, evil acts.
Theoretical arguments that don't reflect the actual facts really shouldn't be a point of discussion.
I don't agree with the entire premise that military power can enact a war and that allows it to detain, torture and kill anyone associated with the other side. That doesn't meet any moral or ethical threshold that should be acceptable.
The might is right argument is just self-serving to those that don't want to be accountable no matter how horrifying what they have done.
> Does that not invalidate a reasonable amount of your points above?
Which ones? The original point is that detaining a Hamas member is not unusual even if they were just a librarian.
I find it "reasonable to act on hunches in wartime provided" such prisoners are "treated like POWs." But reasonableness is not the same as precedent. While Israeli torture is certainly far along the spectrum of what America and China have done, and Russia and India are suspected to have done when dealing with hybrid elements, it's not particularly outlying.
What is outlying is detaining an elderly mother and leaving her children on the streets. That was my top-level argument. Focussing on the common horribleness is good for, I guess, educating everyone on why we shouldn't do war. But if the horribleness isn't particular to this war, that message is not only lost, it serves to cover up the specific horribleness that increasingly sets this one apart.
If they aren't being treated like POW's then your argument doesn't hold in this case.
So hunches for instance aren't reasonable because they will lead to non-POW treatment of whoever is detained. How they are classified is also no longer relevant as we are talking about a proposition to detain and mistreat regardless of classification. And I'd go further and say it's deliberate.
Similarly, I don't really hold with arguments that are based on others doing the same or worse. It doesn't change for me that the objective here being pursued is collective punishment. What's been enacted is clearly not warfare but deliberate targeting of the whole population in addition to ethnic cleansing/genocide, so in an entirely different category to assess.
The question asked, goes directly to your arguments rationale, but you've avoided it. Would it not be better to be consistent in your position, or reconsider it?
> Would it not be better to be consistent in your position, or reconsider it?
Didn’t mean to deflect. Current and former IDF members as well as reservists are absolutely valid military targets.
As for detention, absolutely, an Israeli citizen in Iranian or proxy territory should expect to be detained. (They would not be valid military targets.)
> Iran made targeted strikes against military installations
And civilian targets [1].
You didn’t hear about this because this category of war crime is happening in every currently-active war zone. If a population chooses war, this is essentially part of what they’re consenting to doing and potentially have happen to themselves.
I'm actually kind of surprised it's that high. That's what asymmetric warfare means: you can't tell the fighters from the civilians.
If Hamas put on uniforms, the number would be much higher. The war would also have ended a long time ago -- and not in their favor.
That does not excuse Israel's own war crimes, which are indeed egregious. Israel has obligations, both moral and under treaty, that it is violating.
But I think it's important to consider the framing of this article. The implication is that Israel detaining exclusively "fighters" is easy, but in fact it's not possible.
I'd love to see a convention on asymmetric warfare, parallel to the Geneva Conventions. What are the obligations of a first-world country fighting a much smaller force who is not bound by the existing conventions? Obviously more than Israel is engaging, but I don't think most people would agree to fight solely along Geneva Convention lines, either, when faced with such an opponent.
Israel would still be committing genocide regardless of how the resistance dresses. They’re literally ethnically cleansing the West Bank and that has nothing to do with Hamas. They ethically cleansed all of Palestine during the Nakba and Hamas didn’t exist for another 50 years.
Hamas is carrying on the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO renounced those tactics and is now (more or less) successfully running the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority.
Which Israel is screwing up by building more and more settlements, making a two-state solution impossible. It isn't ethnic cleansing, but it is certainly a bad idea and probably a crime.
Israel is annexing the West Bank so it's safe to say the PLO made the wrong call. It's 100% ethnic cleansing. That's all Israel is, ethnically cleansed Palestine, since Nakba.
You could potentially meet me where I am, trying to cover the entire range of events, considering both sets of people who have done good and bad things.
Or you could continue to spout nationalist propaganda. Your call.
Being against ethnic cleansing and land theft isn't "nationalist propaganda". Let's stick to historical facts, starting with Nakba and the Balfour Declaration, both of which were egregious human rights violations.
> Let's stick to historical facts, starting with Nakba
What's the logic for starting with the Nakba versus something earlier or later?
Part of what I think makes this conflict intractable is everyone has a litany of historical grievances they can readily pull up to justify just about any claim.
Everyone wants the cutoff to be when their grievances begin - where they were wronged unprovoked and unwaranted - as we must start from that point and ignore all priors.
> Everyone wants the cutoff to be when their grievances begin
Not everyone. Plenty of nations across history forgave, or at least tolerated and moved on. (America, Germany and Japan. Hell, America and Britain. India and Britain. Pretty much every member of the EU.)
The ones that don't, the ones that hold onto multigenerational gripes, tend to be consumed by them. (I'm not arguing that the Israelis or Palestinians or Armenians should give up because it's more peaceful. These are complicated fractures. But I'll stand by this feature, alone, making their conflicts intractable. Particularly by outsiders. The best you can do is permanent stalemate.)
> Among the most egregious cases are those of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s jailed for six weeks and of a single mother separated from her young children. When the mother was released after 53 days she found the children begging on the streets.
> At that point in May Israel had detained 6,000 people under its “unlawful combatants” legislation, which allows indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, official data released after legal appeals showed.
> “I remember [the 82-yo woman with Alzheimer's] limping badly toward the clinic. And she’s classified as an unlawful combatant. The way that label is used is insane,” the medic said. Photographs confirm his presence at Anatot at the time.
The indefinite detention under dubious justifications without charge or trial. Such a profound violation of human rights and dignity, but it's OK, because they're "animals".
The other issue is that someone working for the local government (Hamas) in 2023 or after, is often treated by the IDF as being a combatant. So even the claimed combatant numbers will include those from the cleansing department or local civilian police and many others in civilian and necessary jobs.
> someone working for the local government (Hamas) in 2023 or after, is often treated by the IDF as being a combatant
To be fair, guilty-until-proven-innocent for card-carrying affiliates is deeply precedented during wartime. (Though I'm not sure how we'd classify e.g. a janitor on a military base, casualty-wise.)
Jailing elderly single mothers who haven't been charged with a crime is not. It's important to distinguish between these because while both are horrible, one departs from the way the great powers have fought modern wars.
This is not a modern war though. It's asymmetric warfare, in that there is one overwhelming military power and they are choosing to enact widespread military action, including dropping megatons of explosives on a civilian population.
So I'm can't see how your point about how great powers and modern warfare applies.
The IDF and contractors are just enacting methodical slaughter and starvation techniques in an indiscriminate manner surely? There isn't really an actual war scale action other than on the Israeli side.
> not a modern war though. It's asymmetric warfare
Modern (i.e. post nuclear) war is always fought asymmetrically. And great powers constantly fight asymmetric wars. (Israel isn't a great power, but it is an emerging regional hegemon.)
In this case, we have a proxy war between America and Israel, on one hand, and Iran and its proxies, on the other hand, with Gaza and to a lesser degree Yemen being the board's pawns.
> IDF and contractors are just enacting methodical slaughter and starvation techniques in an indiscriminate manner surely?
I genuinely can't figure out why anyone in this war is doing what they are doing.
Hamas' winning move is to return the hostages--they're greater leverage for Netanyahu at this point than the villa-dwellers in Doha. Tel Aviv's winning move is to end hostilities with a tight security cordon around Gaza to prevent Iran from resupplying Hamas. Tehran's winning move is to offer dropping support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis if the Security Council agrees to (a) an independent Palestinian state and (b) dropping sanctions. (And, like, not bomb Australian Jews. Though Tehran's position makes the most sense, not because it's rational, but because Iranian hardliners gain domestic power when Iran is isolated. Sort of like Netanyahu.) The only folks without a winning line are America, the EU and the people of Palestine and Israel.
That said, detaining a Hamas member is not indiscriminate. Even if the paperwork says they're a librarian, it's reasonable to act on hunches in wartime provided they're treated like POWs.
Hamas has offered to return the hostages many times and Israel refuses to stop the killing. Missing in your analysis is Israel’s primary goal: ethnically cleanse all of Palestine and enforce Jewish supremacy.
> Hamas has offered to return the hostages many times and Israel refuses to stop the killing
Offering and doing are different. Unilaterally returning the hostages is the winning move for Palestinians. It is not for Hamas’ leadership, however, so it won’t happen.
> Missing in your analysis is Israel’s primary goal: ethnically cleanse all of Palestine and enforce Jewish supremacy
This is like equating hard liners with Iran or Hamas with Palestine.
There are elements in Israel who want this. There are elements without who are okay with it. Nobody is particularly motivated to intervene because the burden is purely moral—there isn’t a unique industry or diaspora for Palestinians to call on.
Hamas and Likud benefit from the war continuing. (Their right wing elements are both exterminationist. They have been for years. Nothing new there.)
Let's say Hamas returned the hostages. What would happen next? What makes that the "winning move?"
My guess is that Netanyahu would say that the war can't end until "all the terrorists are dead" (impossible), and the Palestinians have given up the one bit of leverage that they have.
> Let's say Hamas returned the hostages. What would happen next?
The international terms of the debate would change. The domestic political situation in Israel would change.
Netanyahu’s hand would be significantly weakened by losing hostages as a justification to his electorate and even the IDF. Hamas, however, would face pointed questions over why it didn’t recognise that the hostages were a liability sooner (I frankly question if they were ever an asset at all—Sinwar’s purpose, to draw in Iran, was a dud).
If you want to get conspiratorial, consider that the one red line Netanyahu has respected is Hamas’ leadership’s security in Doha.
But we know they are not treated as POWs. That is well documented: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinians_in_Israeli_cust... - see Human Rights abuses.
The mistreatment includes obvious civilians and children and their mistreatment includes heinous, evil acts.
Theoretical arguments that don't reflect the actual facts really shouldn't be a point of discussion.
I don't agree with the entire premise that military power can enact a war and that allows it to detain, torture and kill anyone associated with the other side. That doesn't meet any moral or ethical threshold that should be acceptable.
The might is right argument is just self-serving to those that don't want to be accountable no matter how horrifying what they have done.
> we know they are not treated as POWs
Sure. Nothing I suggested is being done.
> military power can enact a war and that allows it to detain, torture and kill anyone associated with the other side
Nobody argued this.
> Sure. Nothing I suggested is being done.
Does that not invalidate a reasonable amount of your points above?
> Nobody argued this.
I view what Israel is doing now as exactly that.
There is an argument it has been doing it for decades.
> Does that not invalidate a reasonable amount of your points above?
Which ones? The original point is that detaining a Hamas member is not unusual even if they were just a librarian.
I find it "reasonable to act on hunches in wartime provided" such prisoners are "treated like POWs." But reasonableness is not the same as precedent. While Israeli torture is certainly far along the spectrum of what America and China have done, and Russia and India are suspected to have done when dealing with hybrid elements, it's not particularly outlying.
What is outlying is detaining an elderly mother and leaving her children on the streets. That was my top-level argument. Focussing on the common horribleness is good for, I guess, educating everyone on why we shouldn't do war. But if the horribleness isn't particular to this war, that message is not only lost, it serves to cover up the specific horribleness that increasingly sets this one apart.
If they aren't being treated like POW's then your argument doesn't hold in this case.
So hunches for instance aren't reasonable because they will lead to non-POW treatment of whoever is detained. How they are classified is also no longer relevant as we are talking about a proposition to detain and mistreat regardless of classification. And I'd go further and say it's deliberate.
Similarly, I don't really hold with arguments that are based on others doing the same or worse. It doesn't change for me that the objective here being pursued is collective punishment. What's been enacted is clearly not warfare but deliberate targeting of the whole population in addition to ethnic cleansing/genocide, so in an entirely different category to assess.
Since every adult in Israel joins the IDF, that would make them valid targets then right?
> Since every adult in Israel joins the IDF, that would make them valid targets then right?
Iran launched into Israel, broadly, including targeting cities. Same as Russia in Ukraine. America in Iraq. Indian peacekeepers in Sri Lanka.
The question asked, goes directly to your arguments rationale, but you've avoided it. Would it not be better to be consistent in your position, or reconsider it?
> Would it not be better to be consistent in your position, or reconsider it?
Didn’t mean to deflect. Current and former IDF members as well as reservists are absolutely valid military targets.
As for detention, absolutely, an Israeli citizen in Iranian or proxy territory should expect to be detained. (They would not be valid military targets.)
Whilst I don't wholly agree with your position, you are definitely consistent on it. Thanks for responding.
Iran made targeted strikes against military installations.
> Iran made targeted strikes against military installations
And civilian targets [1].
You didn’t hear about this because this category of war crime is happening in every currently-active war zone. If a population chooses war, this is essentially part of what they’re consenting to doing and potentially have happen to themselves.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/04/iran-missile-strikes-on-...
I'm actually kind of surprised it's that high. That's what asymmetric warfare means: you can't tell the fighters from the civilians.
If Hamas put on uniforms, the number would be much higher. The war would also have ended a long time ago -- and not in their favor.
That does not excuse Israel's own war crimes, which are indeed egregious. Israel has obligations, both moral and under treaty, that it is violating.
But I think it's important to consider the framing of this article. The implication is that Israel detaining exclusively "fighters" is easy, but in fact it's not possible.
I'd love to see a convention on asymmetric warfare, parallel to the Geneva Conventions. What are the obligations of a first-world country fighting a much smaller force who is not bound by the existing conventions? Obviously more than Israel is engaging, but I don't think most people would agree to fight solely along Geneva Convention lines, either, when faced with such an opponent.
Israel would still be committing genocide regardless of how the resistance dresses. They’re literally ethnically cleansing the West Bank and that has nothing to do with Hamas. They ethically cleansed all of Palestine during the Nakba and Hamas didn’t exist for another 50 years.
Hamas is carrying on the activities of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO renounced those tactics and is now (more or less) successfully running the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority.
Which Israel is screwing up by building more and more settlements, making a two-state solution impossible. It isn't ethnic cleansing, but it is certainly a bad idea and probably a crime.
Israel is annexing the West Bank so it's safe to say the PLO made the wrong call. It's 100% ethnic cleansing. That's all Israel is, ethnically cleansed Palestine, since Nakba.
You could potentially meet me where I am, trying to cover the entire range of events, considering both sets of people who have done good and bad things.
Or you could continue to spout nationalist propaganda. Your call.
Being against ethnic cleansing and land theft isn't "nationalist propaganda". Let's stick to historical facts, starting with Nakba and the Balfour Declaration, both of which were egregious human rights violations.
> Let's stick to historical facts, starting with Nakba
What's the logic for starting with the Nakba versus something earlier or later?
Part of what I think makes this conflict intractable is everyone has a litany of historical grievances they can readily pull up to justify just about any claim.
Everyone wants the cutoff to be when their grievances begin - where they were wronged unprovoked and unwaranted - as we must start from that point and ignore all priors.
> Everyone wants the cutoff to be when their grievances begin
Not everyone. Plenty of nations across history forgave, or at least tolerated and moved on. (America, Germany and Japan. Hell, America and Britain. India and Britain. Pretty much every member of the EU.)
The ones that don't, the ones that hold onto multigenerational gripes, tend to be consumed by them. (I'm not arguing that the Israelis or Palestinians or Armenians should give up because it's more peaceful. These are complicated fractures. But I'll stand by this feature, alone, making their conflicts intractable. Particularly by outsiders. The best you can do is permanent stalemate.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_trading_partne...
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