UK surgeon Nick Maynard, a volunteer at Nasser Hospital, tells Good Morning Britain that he and other doctors tried to bring baby formula into Gaza and the Israelis confiscated it from them with no justification. [0]
If a justification was given we'd be able to evaluate the worthiness of that decision - if there were technical notes about, for instance, food safety concerns, we could evaluate the justification against other standards in different areas of the world around proper formula storage.
Without a justification the decision is arbitrary and silences any ability to push back against it within the normal bounds of dialog. A justification would potentially allow aid groups to remedy whatever the specific deficiency is if it is a reasonable deficiency to remedy.
If there was a justification it might be acceptable - depending on the justification - without a justification it is unacceptable when there is such a clear need. The aid is blocked and there is no recourse to unblock it outside the current attempts to just smuggle it in.
No, but the callousness of an arbitrary decision without even spending 10 seconds to make up a pretend reason is a pure display of power. They do what they want and they don’t care one bit about even looking like the good guys.
That would be an acceptable justification for confiscating sugar. If Hamas were making rocket fuel somehow out of baby formula, then yes, that would be an acceptable justification.
That said baby formula cannot in fact be meaningfully used to make explosives, so this is not acceptable.
Only in the same way that pointing at a starving infant as a prop is a moral justification for using food meant for the infant instead to manufacture weapons.
That rather depends on the justification. "We think you might be planning to use that to feed babies," no. "There's a small canister of nerve gas concealed in the middle," yes.
The reason for that is apparently that you can use baby formula to make rocket candy. Because apparently extracting the lactose from 40kg baby formula is all it takes to make a quassam rocket.
If you can get your hand om 20kg of oxidiser that is. It is all more than ridiculous.
Same for water. I've heard they could electrolyze drinking water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then they could explode the hydrogen using the oxygen as an oxidizer.
Only solution is to cut off all wells and water supplies.
> Hamas did not start it though, according to history
Hamas absolutely started this war. It did not start the conflict, and is not the sole party that has antagonised the situation. (Iran, America, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf countries each played a role in that.)
The Eastern Mediterranean is probably the most fought-over tract of land in human history, principally because it's on the shore of the largest easily-navigable body of water near where human history began. Before the British and French there were the Ottomans and Mongols; before them, the Greeks, Romans and Parthians; before them, the Macedonians; before them, the Achaemenids and Babylonians; before them the Egyptians. The last time the region of Palestine contained any independent power was under the Crusader Kingdom. (Before that, around the Jewish-Roman wars.)
I think one could credibly claim that pretty much every nation on Earth has some credible historical claim to some land in the Levant.
Okay, let us look at it this way: you are constantly starved, blocked from trading food and water, and all sorts of things Israel did to Palestine. Would you just sit back and watch?
What do you think that Israel is doing to civilians going to do to long-term? There will be another Hamas, I guarantee it. Israel's actions only breeds violence, i.e. Hamas.
What I am saying is that you cannot expect people to be okay with it. And they will not be okay with it. These kids who survived will turn adults and will retaliate for these actions of Israel. They may have fled, but they will come back full force one day.
In any case, no, Hamas did not start the war, they only started this battle. There will be more because of Israel's ways of doing things.
That depends, did you want enough water to flush your shit into some kind of septic system so all the people around you don't get some awful disease, and maybe enough left over to grow something to eat since your territory is effectively blockaded and situated in an area that requires irrigation?
Though different from the rocket fuel, I've read Israel has dumped so much ordinance on Gaza that the Hamas weapons primarily use material from unexploded ordinance as their warheads.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ipJEROtHOs