• Nice, thank you for the reference - the BBC article is really helpful.

    But the IDF is accountable for its own actions, and some of these seem to break both international and Israeli law
    Yes, that is true.

    And unfortunate. Thanks for acknowledging this simple reality, that the IDF broke the law.

    no military can perpetrate a war without killing civilians

    Yeah, so no country should ask its military to perpetrate a war. And by that I mean no country should be starting a war. (As per https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perpetrate - perpetrate means to produce or bring about.) In fact I feel a major reason why Israel got away with so much nearer in time to Oct 2023 was because it was correctly and widely seen as the victim, rather than the perpetrator.

    The fact that civilians have been killed in Gaza is not evidence of genocide,

    Agree that the bar is higher. Will watch the SA case at the ICJ with interest.

    nor does it establish that Israel is morally wrong in their actions.

    I mean, strictly speaking, breaking the law doesn’t establish that either. Otherwise, Martin Luther King would have been morally wrong for his civil disobedience in participating in sit-in protests against racism? So just because - as we both agree - the IDF broke the law, it does not follow that they’re morally in the wrong?

    Logically that’s correct. But that just means we need to turn to another basis for arguing that some of the actions taken are morally wrong. Perhaps along the lines of failing to “take reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties.”

    Israelis don’t want war.

    When I see the headlines from articles like https://time.com/7016741/israel-protests-netanyahu-six-hostages-deaths/ - yes, I can easily believe that.