The Daily Populous Saturday July 19th, 2025 night edition
Authored by bbc.co.uk and submitted by PM_THE_REAPER

Several human rights lawyers who spoke to BBC Verify suggested the campaign could amount to war crimes.

Eitan Diamond - a senior legal expert at the Diakonia International Humanitarian Law Centre in Jerusalem - said there was little justification under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the document which generally covers the protection of civilians in wartime.

"International humanitarian law prohibits such controlled destruction of civilian property during armed conflict, except under narrow conditions of absolute military operational necessity," Mr Diamond said.

"Destruction of property because of concerns or speculations about its possible future use (for example, that it will be used to launch attacks in the future) falls well outside this exception."

Professor Janina Dill, co-director of Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict, said an occupying power must administer a region for the benefit of the population - which she said was "incompatible with a military approach that simply makes the territory uninhabitable and leaves nothing standing".

But some analysts have sought to defend the IDF’s campaign.

Many of the buildings the IDF has demolished had already been left in ruins by shelling and air strikes, said Prof Eitan Shamir, director of the BESA Center For Strategic Studies in Israel and an ex-official with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. He told BBC Verify they posed a safety risk for returning civilians, especially "during winter rains when they are more likely to collapse".

Prof Shamir also alluded to tactical concerns.

"The area is a combat zone," he said. "Even when a building has been entered and cleared by the IDF, once the Israelis exit it, the terrorists often return to plant bombs or hide inside to shoot at them."

Jaskojaskojasko on July 18th, 2025 at 19:05 UTC »

Let's stop pretending this to be anything else than what it is. They will level the Gaza and remove the Palestinians and then the settlers will come and start building their settlements, Trump, Natenyahu and Kutschner will get the prime plots to build their casinos and hotels.

Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed from that area and will never return, as was the Israeli plan from the beginning.

After_Lie_807 on July 18th, 2025 at 13:50 UTC »

I expect that damaged buildings need to be taken down in order to remove obstacles to line of sight and reduce the number of IED incidents. It’s about time that Israel started to clean up the area so it can assess where tunnels and underground compounds are located. Once Hamas loses the ability to hide the wars end is inevitable.

corbynista2029 on July 18th, 2025 at 13:39 UTC »

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.