"Hamas confirmed that Jalamneh was one of its members. The Jenin Brigade, which includes a number of Palestinian armed resistance groups, said in a statement that two of the three men were members of Islamic Jihad" (it says right here).
This week's killing of a Hamas leader inside a West Bank hospital generated a lot of amateur commentary of the Geneva Convention-sort. Do the laws of war really prohibit troops from posing as doctors to attack an enemy in a hospital?
Put precisely, the question is: was the Israeli action a "ruse of war" - and perfectly legitimate - or a "perfidy" of the sort the Convention prohibits?
Frankly, who cares? Modern conflict against sub-state adversaries inside dense urban terrain renders quaint any of the notions that govern war between nation states.
Israeli troops (or maybe they were civilian agents) entered a hospital posing as medical staff or patients to carry out the highly targeted assassination of a Hamas leader and two associates who were themselves posing as patients. Was that ruse or perfidy?
It doesn't matter. Whichever, it was occurring on both sides. Hospitals lose their protected status under the laws of war when they are used for military purposes. Any surviving Hamas leaders ought to be on notice that they need to avoid hiding in hospitals - or using hospitals as arms depots, or hostage prisons, etc., etc. - if they want to stay on the good side of the Geneva Convention.
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