Human Rights Watch @HRW is immoral ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, May 16, 2025

Human Rights Watch @HRW is immoral

Human Rights Watch issued a press release saying Israel is doing the war crime of "extermination" and "acts of genocide."

As we've seen countless times, HRW and Amnesty base their accusations on their belief that they can read Israeli Jews' minds and invariably they decide that the Jews intend to attack civilians for no military reason - they just like to use up their military resources against the innocent. All the crimes they accuse Israel of require intent, and they base their assumption of intent on cherry-picked facts, not allowing counter-evidence (like Israel building a massive infrastructure to feed Gazans) to enter their minds.

But I want to concentrate on a throwaway paragraph that HRW inserts to pretend to be even-handed.

According to the Israeli government, 58 Israeli hostages are still believed to be held in Gaza, of whom 23 are believed alive. Palestinian armed groups should immediately and safely release all civilians they detain, just as Israeli authorities should immediately and safely release all unlawfully held Palestinians.

International law prohibits taking people as hostages. The International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages says, "Any person who seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure or to continue to detain another person (hereinafter referred to as the "hostage") in order to compel a third party, namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or juridical person, or a group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage commits the offence of taking of hostages ("hostagetaking) within the meaning of this Convention."

It makes no distinction between civilians or military hostages. They are both illegal and war crimes.

But HRW only calls for Hamas to release civilian hostages, not all hostages.

HRW is quite deliberately excluding soldiers who were taken hostage from their demand that Hamas release them. Does it want Hamas to use them as bargaining chips, in violation of international law? Does it consider them POWs, which they aren't under any definition?

That is not just immoral, it is monstrous. This "human rights" group does not consider soldiers to be human.

To add insult to injury, HRW then compares the hostages taken purely for the purpose of bargaining with the terrorists in Israeli prisons. And, no, none of them are held unlawfully - even if you disagree with administrative detention, it is legal and used in other countries like Australia, Ireland and the UK.

When Human Rights Watch gets its facts and international law wrong, it is a remarkable coincidence that it is always in Hamas' favor.