against UNIFIL because the force keeps reporting the violations of Resolution 1701 by Israel as well as Hezbollah or the Lebanese government. These periodic reports make it harder for the Israeli government to claim, and sell the lie to Israeli citizens, that the Israeli government is just sitting on the Israeli side of the Blue Line innocently minding things on their side etc. They have a pattern of this same obstruction and deception with other UN organizations tasked with doing human rights investigations, illegal settlement status etc. and they do things like refuse to give documents, provide their own people for interviews, make impossible requested interviews with Palestinians who appear to be the targets/witnesses to abuse/attacks and outright denial of visas and access to the Occupied Territories.
We now are seeing the result of allowing a country to use the "we have a right to defend ourselves" mantra and stretch it cover the commission of war crimes, other violations of international law, abuse and torture of adults and adolescents it "detains" for questioning etc. At the earliest stages of this behavior the US and the rest of the major countries in the West should have been forceful and put a halt to those kinds of things by making it clear that if they were not ended then all military aid would be suspended and a reexamination of our diplomatic recognition would take place as well as our usual posture of defense at the UN Security Council.
But we didn't, and likely won't, take harsh measures and we will see that like other instances time will be allowed to roll by while arguments are had about doing an investigation and then eventually years down the road a report will be issued showing only a cursory investigation and little to no cooperation from the Israeli government. Any recommendations from the report won't be followed in any event and it will just become another footnote.
The enormity of the disproportionate attack/damage in Gaza by the Israeli government needs some context. We know the death toll is higher than reported because we know there are bodies buried deep in the rubble. But even given the figure of 42,000 plus dead the IDF has killed in one year nearly 2/3 as many as the total number of US dead during the the main 10 years of our activity in Vietnam. The square mile area of Gaza is 141 and is barely the size of Philadelphia. Over 60% of Gaza has been destroyed in less than one year. In the first 3 months of the bombing the IDF dropped an estimated 45,000 metric tonnes of bombs and the current total is estimated to be over 75,000. That equates to about 49,000+ and 82,000+ in US tons. That includes about 10% plus in unexploded bombs that will be in the rubble. So in a years time the tons of bombs dropped on just a square mile basis, keeping mind some areas received more than others, has been 581 US tons of bombs. Thought of another way a square mile contains about 400 city blocks if we don't count the streets. So that is nearly 1.5 tons of bombs dropped on every area the size of a city block. Given that the bombing obviously wasn't concentrated on the seashore that means the concentrated bombing on occupied areas was far higher.
The description of the wounded and their ordeal is too sickening for me to even describe but suffice it to say that physicians and nurse having to amputate the limbs of children without anesthetic day after day is a scene straight from Hell. Once the child stops screaming there will not even be clean water to drink or food to eat. There will be no medicine to stave off infection. Many times the same blast that tore at the child's limbs also took the lives of one or both parents. So there may not even be anyone to care for the child going forward. Tens of thousands of people who were receiving cancer treatments and other medical treatments for chronic conditions have been obviously unable to continue those treatments and they have also in most all cases been denied exit from Gaza to other countries where they could receive care.
The laws and treaties about warfare and disproportionate response are there because once military armaments/technology developed to the point where massive devastation to life could happen in a short time the leaders of the world realized that we were way beyond the days and impacts of cavalry charges and cannon lines. It was possible that a near total devastation of a small country by a larger one could take place in a brief time over an incident far smaller in scale than the potential response. The Israeli government, as I've noted before, in the early 2000's embraced something called the Dahiya Doctrine which specifically calls for massive devastation to a civilian population specifically in a massively disproportionate manner. They embraced it, and have obviously implemented it, despite being warned by legal scholars around the world and in Israel that the Doctrine was in violation of international law.
The bottom line is that words have never been effective before and there is no reason to think they will be now. But also as I've noted before the US is on shaky ground to moralize about invasions of countries or disproportionate response when people can point to Iraq etc. Furthermore the Israeli embrace of their Dahiya Doctrine creates their definition of a yardstick for military conduct in conflict. Would they claim the yardstick is inappropriate if a country used it against Israel for an Israeli transgression? But it is a normal fact of human history that people cry out when their own tactics and justifications are turned around and applied to them.
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