Tag: hiroshima
Israel Bombs Gaza: What Is A War Crime?

Israel Bombs Gaza: What Is A War Crime?

This is a picture of hundreds of potential war crimes, according to some who are accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It is a satellite photo of the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Gaza. Imagine for a moment that you are a senior member of Israel’s Defense Forces, the IDF. This, or a satellite photo like it, is what Israel’s military officials and generals are looking at every day as Israel strikes back at Hamas for its attack on Israel on October 7.

This photo is from Google Earth, and it depicts the houses and apartment buildings and grid of streets before Israel’s aerial strike on Jabalia on Tuesday. Somewhere in that photo is the location of the Ibrahim Biari, the Hamas commander who planned the October 7 assault on Israel that killed 1,400 Israeli citizens, the great majority of whom were civilians.

Israel had intelligence that Biari, along with a number of his Hamas lieutenants, was hiding in a Hamas headquarters bunker. But where is it? Beneath which one of those houses, apartment buildings, streets and parking lots is the bunker that held him and his fellow Hamas fighters?

What do you do if you are an Israeli military official and you determine that Biari’s location is in Jabalia? As you can see by the satellite photo, practically every square inch of Jabalia is occupied by a civilian home or business or street. How do you kill your enemy in such a situation?

Right now, Israel’s army is inside the borders of Gaza, but they have not yet entered Gaza City or Jabalia or any other city or town, so Israel does not have any soldiers on the ground in Gaza they can send into the Jabalia refugee camp to kill Biari, even though on Tuesday, they knew where he was. They know that Hamas commanders, and other Hamas fighters, change their locations frequently in order to confound Israel’s intelligence services which are trying to locate them.

So, if Israel determines Biari’s location on Tuesday, but does not have the kind of special operation forces like the ones we used to kill Osama bin Laden in Jabalia or even close to it, what do they do with that information? If they don’t act on it, they know Biari will move, and they’ll have to get the intelligence to nail down his location all over again. Israel is not just seeking vengeance on this Hamas commander for the October 7 attack. They are trying to prevent him from doing it again.

Somewhere in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or on an air force base in the Sinai desert, a bunch of Israeli intelligence officers and air force targeting specialists sat down with a map like the one above, and knowing Biari’s location, they prepared an airstrike to take him out. Looking at that satellite photo, you can see with your own eyes the dilemma Israel has faced every day since Hamas launched its attack. They can see as well as you or I that no matter where their bombs hit within that grid of streets and houses, some civilians will be killed.

But was ordering and carrying out the airstrike that killed Biari a war crime because it also killed an unknown number of civilians?

The answer to that question is no. Certain facts are involved in determining whether something that happens in a war is a crime. First among them is, who is the aggressor? In this case, it was Hamas with its attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, which was a war crime under international law. When Hamas rocket launchers fired more than 5,000 missiles into Israel, each and every one of them was a war crime. When Hamas terrorists broke through the fence defending Israel from Hamas militants inside Gaza, they invaded a sovereign nation militarily, which is a war crime. When they killed civilians with AK-47’s and RPG-7 rocket propelled grenades or any other weapon, it was a war crime.

So when Israel hits back with rockets and ground troops, is that a war crime? The answer is no, because under international law, any nation attacked militarily has the right to defend itself. How Israel defends itself determines whether its forces are committing war crimes.

If you are a nation like Israel that has sophisticated weapons capable of precision targeting like smart bombs and missiles and 155 mm artillery that can fire smart rounds that are guided to hit a precision target, then you are obligated to use all that technology to the best of your ability to prevent as many civilian deaths as you can. If your troops engage in ground combat with the enemy, in this case Hamas militants, ground forces have the same obligation.

For example, if Israeli forces are being fired at from within a building they can see with their eyes, or with drones, or on satellite imagery, they can fire back with small arms or artillery or even an airstrike to defend themselves. If civilians are killed along with the Hamas fighters who were shooting at them, it is not a war crime.

Similarly, if Israel discovers that a Hamas commander like Biari is in a bunker under a parking lot or a building within Jabalia, Israel’s military is entitled to bring a precision airstrike on that area in order to kill Biari and defend themselves from Biari commanding another assault on Israel. Israel is not allowed, under international law, to “carpet-bomb” the neighborhood or city where Biari is hiding. Israel is obligated by law to use the best intelligence it has and its precision munitions to accomplish its goal.

Israel cannot do what Nazi Germany did to London and Allied forces did to Dresden and Tokyo and then to Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they leveled whole cities with bombers carrying conventional and nuclear weapons.

Here is a photo of what Dresden looked like after Allied bombing in World War II:


Here is a photo of Hiroshima after the U.S. nuclear strike:


Here is a satellite photo of the area in Jabalia before Israel’s airstrike that targeted Ibrahim Biari on Tuesday night. Take special notice of the white L-shaped building with a gray rectangle on top of it at the right of the photo:



It’s difficult to determine how many civilian buildings were hit and destroyed in the airstrike, and it is certain that several hundred civilians lost their lives along with Biari and his Hamas fighters who were in the tunnel complex beneath them.

The contrast between the World War II photos and the two satellite photos above are evidence of the difference between barbarity and what international law now defines as a nation acting in its own defense. Since before the time of Alexander the Great, armies have ravaged and destroyed cities and killed civilians in pursuit of conquering and seizing territory. For thousands of years, that is the way civilization made its way into the future, with mass death and destruction and enslavement of those conquered.

Today, we have the International Criminal Court and a set of international laws agreed to in the U.N. that attempts to police how nations fight wars. But as we can see by what Russia did in attacking Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and what Hamas did in attacking Israel on October 7, 2023, and what both Ukraine and Israel have been caused to do to defend themselves since then, we’ve got a long way to go.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Should America Apologize For Hiroshima?

Should America Apologize For Hiroshima?

The first flash came at 8:15 on a Monday morning. Eyewitnesses remember it as a bolt of soundless light as if the sun had somehow touched down to the Earth.

And suddenly, Hiroshima was gone.

The second flash came that Thursday morning at 11:02. Eyewitnesses recall two thumps — possibly the sound bouncing off the mountains that cradled the city — and a flash of bluish light.

And Nagasaki was decimated.

Japan surrendered the following Wednesday, ending the Second World War.

Last week, when it was announced Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, everyone from Salon to the National Review raised two important questions:

Will the president apologize for what America did 71 years ago this August? Should he?

The White House says the answer to the first question is No. For whatever it’s worth, the answer to the second is, too.

It is a measure of the deep emotion this subject still stirs that that will be a controversial and divisive opinion. Many good and moral people will find it abhorrent. Of course, the opposite opinion would also have been controversial and divisive and would have appalled other people, equally good, equally moral.

In the end, then, one can only answer to conscience, and this particular conscience is disinclined to second guess the long-ago president and military commanders who felt the bombs might obviate the need to invade the Japanese home islands at a ruinous cost in American lives. Remember that the Japanese, inebriated by the “bushido” warrior code under which surrender equals shame and dishonor, had refused to capitulate, though defeat had long been a foregone conclusion.

Indeed, even after Hiroshima was leveled, it still took that nation nine days to give up.

That said, there is a more visceral reason the answer to the second question must be No: Any other answer would defame Americans who endured unimaginable cruelty at Japanese hands.

Should America apologize?

Ask Ray “Hap” Halloran, a B-29 navigator from Cincinnati who was beaten, stoned, starved, stripped naked and displayed in a cage at the Tokyo Zoo.

Ask Lester Tenney, a tanker from Chicago whose sleep was forever raddled with nightmares of a twitching, headless corpse — a man he saw decapitated in the death march on Bataan.

And by all means, ask Forrest Knox, a sergeant from Janesville, Wisconsin. He was trapped with 500 other prisoners in the hold of a Japanese freighter where the heat topped 120 degrees and there was barely any water. Some of the men broke out in gibbering, howling fits of madness, prompting a Japanese threat to close off the hatch through which their meager air came if there was not silence.

The maddened men could not be reasoned with. So American men killed American men. Knox saw this. And participated. And for years afterward, he was haunted by dead men walking the streets of Janesville.

Should America apologize? No.

This was not slavery. This was not the Trail of Tears. This was not the incarceration of Japanese Americans. This was not, in other words, a case of the nation committing human-rights crimes against innocent peoples.

No, this was war, a fight for survival against a ruthless aggressor nation. Japan committed unspeakable atrocities. America did the same. Such is the nature of war. Seven decades later, the idea of an apology feels like moral impotence, a happy face Band-Aid that denies the awful immensity of it all.

There are two words that should be spoken, in fact, reverently whispered, with regard to Hiroshima and they are not “I’m sorry.” No, the only words that matter are this promise and prayer:

Never again.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

The H-Bomb: The Most Destructive Weapon On Earth

The H-Bomb: The Most Destructive Weapon On Earth

dpa (TNS)

BANGKOK — The thermonuclear, or hydrogen bomb — of the kind that North Korea said it had tested Wednesday — was developed after the nuclear weapons used on Japan in World War II and is far more destructive.

The first hydrogen bomb, tested in November 1952 by the United States, yielded energy equivalent to 10 megatons of TNT — roughly 1,000 times larger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima seven years earlier.

In this new type of bomb, two types of hydrogen — deuterium and tritium — are fused into helium, thereby releasing energy.

A conventional nuclear weapon uses fission — splitting rather than fusing the nuclei of atoms — to create a less powerful explosion.

A hydrogen bomb uses an initial fission reaction to produce the high temperatures required for the more powerful fusion reaction.

Less than a year after the U.S. thermonuclear bomb test, the Soviet Union exploded their own H-bomb, starting a race to produce more “superbombs.”

The most powerful H-bomb ever detonated — and therefore the biggest ever man-made explosion — was used by the Soviets in 1961. Known as the Tsar Bomba, it produced a yield equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT.

©2016 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Pyongyang citizens gather in front of a big screen at Pyongyang Railway Station in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to watch a news report on the hydrogen bomb test on Jan. 6, 2016. North Korea announced Wednesday that it has successfully carried out its first hydrogen bomb test. (Lu Rui/Xinhau/Zuma Press/TNS)

 

Hiroshima Marks Atomic Bombing, Worries About Steps Toward War

Hiroshima Marks Atomic Bombing, Worries About Steps Toward War

By Hyun Oh and Toru Hanai

HIROSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) — Bells tolled and thousands bowed their heads in prayer in Hiroshima on Thursday at ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing while survivors warned about Japan’s moves away from its pacifist constitution.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his government are pushing security bills through parliament that could send Japanese troops into conflict for the first time since World War II, sparking massive protests around the country.

Many with memories of the war and its aftermath are scathing about Abe’s steps away from Japan’s pacifist constitution in pursuit of a more robust security stance, and survivors of the bombing lambasted Abe at a meeting after the commemoration ceremony.

“These bills will bring the tragedy of war to our nation once again,” said Yukio Yoshioka, 86. “They must be withdrawn.”

Abe, who in a speech at the ceremony called for abolishing nuclear weapons, replied by repeating his view that the legislation was essential to ensure Japan’s safety.

At 8:15 a.m., the exact time the bomb exploded on Aug. 6, 1945, the crowd stood for a moment of silence in the heavy summer heat while cicadas shrilled, the Peace Bell rang, and hundreds of doves were released into the sky.

Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui urged that nuclear weapons be abolished and demanded the creation of security systems that do not rely on military might.

“Working with patience and perseverance to achieve these systems will be vital, and will require that we promote throughout the world the path to true peace revealed by the pacifism of the Japanese constitution,” he said in a speech.

Many of those gathered for the ceremony renewed their calls for peace.

“My grandfather died here at that time and I keep wondering what he felt then,” said Tomiyo Sota. “He was still 21 years old and it pains me to think he died so young.”

The Hiroshima bombing, which killed 140,000 by the end of the year, was followed by the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, which killed about 40,000 instantly. The war ended on Aug. 15.

(Writing by Elaine Lies; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

Photo: People pray for the atomic bomb victims in front of the cenotaph for the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing, at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, western Japan, August 6, 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing of the city. REUTERS/Toru Hanai