Abdollah Vakily: Civilians are the tragic targets and victims of war
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Over seven months have passed since Hamas fighters launched an unprecedentedly large-scale attack on Israel, killing 1,200, injuring many more, and taking 250 people back to Gaza as hostages.
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Abdollah Vakily: Civilians are the tragic targets and victims of war Back to video
Hamas’ attack was met by a global condemnation obliging most Western leaders to fly to Israel and express their sympathy as well as their support.
An alternative view, nevertheless, gradually got traction on social media that regards Hamas’ attack as an inevitable reaction stemming from frustrations piled up by decades of living under unbearable conditions created by Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. This is a logical argument from a purely sociopolitical perspective.
Looking at it from an Islamic perspective, however, I disagree.
According to Islamic rules of war, targeting civilians, whether killing them, taking them prisoners, or capturing them as hostages, is unconditionally forbidden. In other words, Muslims are required to focus their fighting only on military components of the enemy and leave the rest of its parts alone. This law is inviolable even when the enemy forces act contrary to it.
If Hamas fighters had concentrated their attacks on Israeli military targets, that would have been a military operation since Israeli forces systematically target Hamas and other Palestinian militants in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria.
This brings me to the first point I would like to discuss; the assertion Hamas started the war by attacking Israel on Oct. 7 is inaccurate and misleading. Israel has been in war with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah for many decades. The relationship between Israel and Hamas is not one of peace. Rather, it is a lull in fighting that is often broken by one side or another.
Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 merely started the latest round of fighting, albeit on a larger scale. Whatever we may call the attack launched by Hamas, it presented a golden opportunity to the hawkish segments of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to attack Gaza in what it excitedly announced as “a lesson that would be remembered for generations” by Palestinians.
What followed has often been referred to as the Israel-Hamas War, but this description does not properly reflect reality. In a war, there are two armies who fight each other at the battlefields targeting clearly identifiable military targets and military forces who in turn fight back and defend themselves. Civilians are usually, although not always, spared and are not the ones who pay the toll for the war.
In Gaza there is a different scenario being played out.
On the one hand, there is the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the strongest army of the region, using the most sophisticated weaponry provided by the Western world. On the other hand, there are Palestinians whose only military force is Hamas’ fighters who have no airplanes, no tanks, and no heavy weaponry to defend civilians. Hamas’ assets consist of a vast network of tunnels to house their fighters, machine guns, rocket launchers, and a fairly large stockpile of missiles.
All of Hamas’ efforts are focused on defending their tunnels and their fighters. In reality, the civilians in Gaza are left helpless and incapable of defending themselves. IDF leaders, frustrated by their inability to engage Hamas in a direct way, have turned their military might against the Palestinian civilians and infrastructure.
Israel’s aerial bombardments have targeted residential areas, schools, mosques, hospitals, and so on. The justification provided for this unprecedented atrocity is that Hamas fighters are hiding among civilians, making these attacks unavoidable. This explanation is superfluous and could not be an excuse.
If Hamas fighters are largely hiding in their tunnels, the fact some of them might be hiding among civilians does not justify the destruction of whole neighborhoods housing frightened civilians, a great number of them elderly, women, and children.
Another myth Israeli forces are using is people running hospitals, mosques, schools, and humanitarian agencies are Hamas members, making these institutions military targets. Some of the people working in these places could be sympathetic to Hamas, that does not justify indiscriminate arrest, torture, and murder of people who work in these institutions.
Hamas is the governing body in Gaza, so all those who work in civil organizations are Hamas employees— but that doesn’t make them Hamas members. By denying the distinction between a Hamas employee and a Hamas member, Israel unjustly portrays all Palestinian public employees as the enemy’s forces whose arrest, torture, and murder are justifiable.
The IDF spokesman and Netanyahu himself repeatedly emphasized they are in war with Hamas and not with the Palestinian people in general. The reality, however, shows quite the opposite.
Thousands of women and children who have been killed had nothing to do with Hamas, and their murder provides the best proof Israel’s forces do not care about civilian lives and are not making any effort to avoid targeting them.
Despite the international outcry against Israel’s one-sided war in Gaza, there seems to be no near future end to this dilemma and we should brace to see more destruction more atrocities and more heart-wrenching images of children being pulled from under the rubble of bombed-out buildings.
May the all-merciful God awaken the minds of the enablers of this tragedy and bring it to a speedy end.
Amen.
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