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Beware False Moral Equivalence between Israel and Hamas
(Newsweek) Lt.-Col. (ret.) Geoffrey Corn and Lt.-Gen. (ret.) George Smith - Hamas's murder of six Israeli hostages, including a U.S. citizen, is another reminder that it is among the most immoral, illegal, and barbaric armed groups in the world. International law categorically prohibits deliberately attacking civilians to kill them, injure them, or terrorize them. Launching such attacks is absolutely prohibited. The four 1949 Geneva Conventions include the obligation to treat humanely any captive or detainee. Article 3 binds all organized armed groups, not just states, and specifically prohibits murder and summary execution. Murdering people at your complete mercy because they have been captured and detained is rightly condemned as among the most egregious violations of international humanitarian law. Hamas's terrorist operations demonstrate a complete and pervasive disregard for even the most basic rules of war, showing the world the bottomless depths of its barbarism. This tragic incident also reminds us that there is simply no moral equivalency between Israel and its illicit enemies. Critics of Israel will no doubt cite the (often inflated and unverified) numbers of civilians killed in Gaza as the result of combat operations to justify their efforts at "equality of condemnation." But as any prosecutor can readily explain, there is no equivalency between those who deliberately kill and those who cause unavoidable killing even when following the law. Geoffrey Corn is Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law and a Distinguished Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. George Smith is the former Commanding General of the I Marine Expeditionary Force.