• SaltySalamander
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    5 months ago

    The superseding cause of virtually every civilian death in Gaza is an IDF bullet or bomb.

    • I don’t agree. If the IDF warns people before they bomb a building and people refuse to leave the building, it’s their refusal that is the superceding cause, it’s a knowing assumption of risk.

      Good actual example. First or second week of the war north of Gaza City. Everyone had already been airdropped leaflets and received masses text and emergency broadcast warnings to evacuate and head south and that anyone who stayed behind was in extreme danger. A few hundred thousand people did not evacuate.

      IDF stumbles across a tunnel section is wanted to bomb underneath several blocks of apartments. Israel, as a world leader in the development of strategies to avoid civilian casualties, uses the cell phone network to call people still in the buildings. They start running door to door, IDF stays on the phone and promises not to bomb until the people leading the evacuations say everyone is clear.

      As they evacuate, a number of people refuse. Hamas has been spreading Facebook posts saying that the calls are a hoax. They tell the caller, “prove this is real, fire a warning shot.” Bam, warning shot goes off. They say “there’s a lot of bombing, prove it’s real and do another warning,” bam another warning shell. They are convinced and so they continue evacuating. Everyone gets out, a resident tells the IDF it’s clear, several city blocks get demolished when IDF blew up the tunnels. 3,600 people used to live there and there were zero civilian casualties. The tunnels were completed destroyed.

      In my view, the superceding cause to the apartments falling down was when Hamas built a tunnel underneath them and then used them to launch a massive terrorist attack–involving thousands of rockets (fired actually indiscriminately against civilians targets and infrastructure) and mass shootings at concerts and restaurants, on families just driving down the road, and on first responders who came in response to the gunfire–and then retreated back into those same tunnels, making them legitimate military targets.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67327079

      This story is the exception only because everyone agreed to leave.

      If people had refused to leave or been tricked or forced to stay behind by Hamas, in my example above, the superceding cause of their deaths would have been Hamas spreading rumors, in addition to all the propaganda is has already spread about dying with honor as martyrs, which caused people not to evactuate in the first place.

      I guess the October 7 attackers thought they would retreat back into the tunnels and Israel was just going to say “darn, guess they got away!”