However appalling the events, officials must be held to account ! They should not reap the wailing they failed to prevent…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPnC8ie4_yE

Yes, Mr. Erdan, Yannick Baele from the eponymous blog…

At 9:22, you stated that – and I quote – : “Every inch of Gaza has become part of Hamas’s war machine. […] The era of reasoning with these savages is over. Now is the time to obliterate Hamas’s terror infrastructure”.

It ensues that the government you represent considers every inch of Gaza to be a legitimate target for ‘obliteration‘. And if that is the case, then every single Gazan becomes a target.

From 2015 to 2019, you (as the then minister of Public Security) and your colleague Ms. Shaked (as the then minister of Justice) where both part of a governement, led by Israel’s current prime minister, which initiated the so-called ‘Facebook Bill‘, meant to remove online content deemed threatening to Israel’s national security.

A year before entering that government, in an infamous Facebook post whose apotheosis, to this day, remains deplorably racist in its generalization, Ms. Shaked, as a member of the Knesset, had, among other things, likened Palestinian children to “little snakes”, claimed “all” Palestinians were to be viewed as “enemy combatants”, and subsequently called for the kind of “collective penalties, […], intimidation [and] terrorism” the fourth Geneva Convention – which both Israel and Palestine have ratified – explictly prohibits.

Of course, one might argue that, with the gruesome wave of indiscriminate killings perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Saturday, Palestine has manifestly violated its obligations under said Convention, were it not, on the one hand, for the fact that the current de facto rulers of the Gaza strip have no democratic legitimacy whatsoever and, on the other hand, for the statistical fact that an overwhelming majority of Gazans did not partake in Saturday’s slaughter.

Regardless of that, are you officially announcing today, by more or less echoing some of the claims Ms. Shaked made in her Facebook post, that the government of Israel, in the current – utterly tragic – circumstances, does not feel bound by the fourth Geneva Convention ?

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And – very briefly, if you allow me –, knowing at least three high-rises have been levelled to the ground in Gaza already, what kind of precautionary measures is the governement of Israel taking to prevent Israeli or foreign-national hostages from ending up as collateral damage of its “Iron Sword” ‘obliteration‘ ?