Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza for nearly three months has destroyed 70 percent of the homes in the besieged Palestinian enclave, according to the Government Media Office.
No further details were provided but an earlier report said more than 200 heritage and archaeological sites were destroyed in the Israeli bombardment considered the most destructive in modern history.
About 300,000 out of 439,000 homes have been destroyed in Israeli attacks, a Wall Street Journal report said. Analysing satellite imagery, the report added that the 29,000 bombs dropped on the strip have targeted residential areas, Byzantine churches, hospitals and shopping malls and all civilian infrastructure has been damaged to an extent that they cannot be repaired.
“The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden [Germany] and other famous cities that have been bombed,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the history of aerial bombing, told WSJ.
I assume it works kind of like what’s called “possession with intent to distribute” drugs in the US, which really means possession of a sufficiently large amount to cross some legal threshold. I don’t think most reasonable people would dispute that destroying 70% of the housing shows an intention to make Gaza unlivable.
But in that case any sufficiently destructive attack on a city in a war (e.g. Dresden) would be considered genocide, no?
The thing here is that Dresden is just one of many german cities. Gaza is one of 2 Palestinian “containment” areas. Bombing gaza this hard would equatw to bombing about half of Germany to absolute rubble.
So it wouldn’t be genocide if Palestine was bigger?
If they were bombing 1-5 percent of the Gaza strip and only contained the fighting in that area at least I myself would not consider it genocide. But the systematic bombing of the whole enclave cannot be called anything else.
Genocide? No. War crime? Yes.