> The problem is that Hamas fighters don't wear uniforms
Hamaa doesn't wear uniforms because Hamas is a political party. The al-Qassam Brigades do wear uniforms, as I have seen in GoPro and other footage from October 7th and after. There has been a blockade on Gaza for a decade so some don't get the full uniform, and make do with a headband and military fatigues instead.
I have not seen any videos of them wearing uniforms when engaging with Israeli troops after the 7th. I have seen plenty of videos of guys dressed as civilians firing mortars and rpgs.
Your logic would justify oct 7. Israeli operatives don’t always wear uniform either. Last January there was a high profile case of three Israeli solders dressing in Palestinian civilian clothing, infiltrating a hospital, and extrajudicially killing a patient.
The case you linked to is not in a warzone. That's a special forces raid in the west bank. That is nothing like urban warfare where your soldiers are dressed as the civilians that you purport to care about.
The point is not to find differences or similarities to when Israeli or Hamas operatives dress in civilian clothing while carrying out military action. Of course there will always be plenty of either. If that was my point, you could have simply accused me of whataboutism and left it at that.
The point is that this excuse is a Humanitarian camouflage and does not justify atrocities, war crimes, nor apartheid.
Francesca Albanese talks about this in detail in here report (Chapter VI, section A, paragraph 62; linked above):
> Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality.
As well as section B of the same chapter appropriately titled Turning Gaza as a whole into a ‘military objective (paragraphs 63-67):
> Israel has misused this rule [of legitimate military targets] to “militarize” civilian objects and whatever surrounds them, justifying their indiscriminate destruction. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “many ostensibly civilian objects may become legitimate targets”, losing their protection under IHL [International Humanitarian Law] or become “collateral” damage as a result of Hamas’s choice.
> Protected civilian objects can lose their immunity from attacks if and for as long as they are used by combatants in hostilities. However, Israel considers any object that has allegedly been or might be used militarily as a legitimate target, so that entire neighbourhoods can be razed or demolished under fictions of legality.
> Israel has thus de facto abolished the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives.
> Ten more Arabs attacked the World Trade Center - which as the 9/11 Commission and so on stated, had US military intelligence offices as well.
Which US military intelligence offices were those? I don't recall anything of that sort from the 9/11 Commission report. There are also no active US military personnel listed amongst the fatalities from the WTC towers.
And no, the same logic doesn't apply. Having a handful of military personnel inside civilian locations is not contrary to the rules of law; what would be is to locate bases, shooting positions, weapons storage, etc within primarily civilian facilities. That's something the US military, as with most militaries, doesn't do.
How is that relevant, and why would we care about how a terrorist would view it? By definition they're intentionally targeting civilians rather than military targets anyway.
Where the distinction matters is both in terms of international law and the comment I replied to calling it a 'US military intelligence office'.
The CIA has toppled foreign governments, for instance that of Iran. If you don't want to count them as part of the US military, what should the rest of the world call them instead? Terrorists?
The question wasn’t about whether the CIA were the ‘good guys’, nor did I claim anything like that. As an organisation they done horrible things and seldom been held accountable.
The question is whether the phrase ‘US military’ includes the CIA and, secondarily, whether a small CIA office in the WTC towers would’ve made them a legitimate target in international law.
For both of those the answer is ‘no’.
First, the CIA is a civilian intelligence agency and so not considered part of the military. It doesn’t fall under the military hierarchy, and it does not report to either the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defence. In the same way the Russian SVR and FSB are not military institutions either, for what it’s worth.
Second, for the WTC towers to have been a legitimate target they would’ve had to have met the standards of “nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage”, be justified by immediate military necessity, and be proportional in terms of the harm caused to civilians or civilian property. None of that was true in the case of the WTC towers, even with a small CIA office inside one of them.
I genuinely don’t understand why this is a controversial point.
I don't know a lot about this. But my first thought is better undercover, intelligence work? Follow through on citizenship deals for locals that cooperate with intelligence programs, grow & nurture those efforts.
The biometric stuff just seems too dangerous to me, and unlike e.g. Nuclear arsenals, there's no peaceful game-theoretical equilibrium at MAD, I just see an extremely effective tool for the eradication of groups of people, and I don't trust human beings not to misuse that, especially with machine intelligence getting so powerful so fast.
It all feels frighteningly unstable to me.
edit: A perhaps more lucid way to explain what I mean: I am afraid of a world where the cost of eliminating a group of people is low enough that it outweighs the incentive to adapt & negotiate peaceful coexistence, even without what I see as an innate human bias towards destroying groups we don't like. Do violent, authoritarian regimes begin to gain an edge over peaceful, democratic ones?
sure, it didnt start, but israel was "happy" defending itself from its neighbor shooting thousands of rockets each year... Yeah, it didnt start on oct 7th, but the escalation very much did. Actions have consequences, and a ceasefire was broken on Oct 7th... Let them resolve their issues now
It is not clear at this point whether or not the current military activity will be followed with settlements. There are certainly calls for that among some Israelis, even among high ranking members of the Israeli government. We should take those seriously.
Only weeks following oct 7. Netanyahu announced new settlements in the Gaza envelope, meaning the part of Israel within rocket range from Gaza. There have been documented cases of Israel expending the buffer zone on the Palestinian side of the boarder wall. I would certainly call that expansion, even though the settlements them selves are within Israel’s territory, their security infrastructure results in land being taken away from Palestine.
> They attacked their neighbor, they will suffer consequences of the choices of their elected governors.
Hamas is in no meaningful sense elected by the people of Gaza (the last election was before most people now living their were alive, much less eligible to vote); given that it is Israel that has blocked new all-Palestine elections in the last decade, Israel had had more say in choosing Hamas as the government in Gaza than the people fo Gaza have had. (And ministers in the current Israeli government have explicitly said they actively preferred to keep Hamas in power because the division between Hamas and the Fatah-led administration in the West Bank and the extremism of Hamas provides political cover against pressure to make peace and accept a Palestinian State.)
I really shouldn’t be engaging with this, and I’m in fact choosing to ignore the more problematic aspects of this—and previous—posts (which I fully expect to become flagged to death anyway). However I’m gonna engage with one point though (your strongest point).
> the ICJ has already not accepted the accusations against Israel,
That is simply not true. The ICJ has done no such thing. In fact they have accepted that there is a probably case and a risk of genocide. In fact, I’m gonna quote the summary of the verdict (from Wikipedia):
> It is plausible that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The State of Israel must take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of genocide.
If anything since this verdict was published, the case for genocide has become even more glaring. Just today Ireland announced they would intervene on behalf of South Africa in that case adding the blocking of aid to the charges against Israel[1]. The day before yesterday UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories published a report[2]—which I have been quoting a lot lately—concluding: “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” Francesca Albanese further describes this genocidal rhetoric in her magnificent report:
> One of the key findings is that Israel's executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.
same alabanese who said that usa controlled by jewish lobby, called to demolish state of israel, said that israel has no right to self defense and wrote in report "More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.".
From the outside it sure looks like AIPAC has a lot of influence and US politicians by and large are absurdly committed to supporting Israel no matter how flagrantly it violates international law and human rights. You can try to dismiss this observation by joking about a secret cabal of evil Jews (maybe they can be lizards as well!) but that doesn't change the reality that the USA seems to be grovelling at the feet of Bibi as if Israel is giving it free billions each year instead of the other way round.
aipac is rather minor donor/lobbyist in usa. you should look up statistics.
those billions are peanuts in israeli budget. majority of population in israel in favor of stopping taking it. it works actually as lever that usa is using, so it actually beneficial to usa (and all the money going back to it anyway)
usa doesn't grovel at feet of bibi. it just usa has more guts than other countries to support israel.
“the Jewish lobby” is widely—and correctly so—regarded as an anti-Semitic trope. Anyone should refrain from using it. Even Albanese regrets having used these words a decade ago, and has apologized for doing so.
If you want to talk about AIPAC and similar groups you should use the more accurate term Pro Israel lobby, which Albanese has indeed used since. In fact I would argue there is nothing Pro Jewish about AIPAC. AIPAC doesn't really care about American Jews. They only care about furthering Israel’s war machine and that Israel’s human rights violations continues to go unpunished. Even when this policy harms American Jews.
Also the trope that Israel controls the USA is also both untrue and anti-Semitic. The USA is perfectly capable of aligning them selfs with a criminal foreign governments on their own if it somehow serves their interest. They did so with Apartheid South Africa, they do so with Saudi Arabian, and there was no “Jewish Lobby” making them do so. The truth is that Israel is an antagonistic country in the Middle East, and it serves the interest of the USA to keep this region unstable. You don't need an evil race of people to keep colonialism alive, you just need plain old capitalists.
I think this is mostly very well said! Thanks for adding this clarity to the thread.
I think reasonable people can go back and forth on the US's interest in destabilizing the Levant and the extent to which Israel (outside of the West Bank and Gaza) represents "colonialism". I think a reasonable person could argue that literally every US administration since Ronald Reagan's would have jumped at the opportunity to settle a 2-state solution that gave Palestine self-determination, a seaport, etc.
(My expectation is that we don't agree on this point, which is totally fine. Certainly, we agree about AIPAC.)
> the ICJ has already not accepted the accusations against Israel,
This is false.
The ICJ has accepted but not gotten to the point of trial on the accusations against Israel. They also ordered a number of preliminary measures designed to prevent irreparable harm in the interim on the initial application for such measures. The only thing they have ruled against that was brought to them was a request to order additional interim measures against Israel in response to what was characterized as noncompliance with the initial set of interim measures.
> If you have any evidence of another army that has undertaken more measures to prevent civilian deaths please let me know.
Pretty much every Western Army does more; even people with military experience who have been generally supportive of Israel on the broad policy and justification level criticized the footage of operations that Israel put out to show their supposed protection of civilians as showing RoE that are compliant neither with international law nor with the norms of other militaries, including the US, when it comes to civilian protection, including requiring soldiers to get positive permission not to fire on apparent civilians.
> HN is full of Hamas apologists
No, its not, its just that the defenders of Israel’s multigenerational campaign of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in violation of international humanitarian norms (which is not limited to the present campaign against Hamas or to Gaza) consistently call anyone who points out Israeli abuses – even if they do so while condemning Hamas’s abuses [0] – as apologists for Hamas as a deflection technique.
[0] For which Israel, who actively sought to create, during the occupation of Gaza, and since to preserve Hamas in part to create such abuses and provide cover for its campaign of ethnic cleansing bears substantial responsibility, though that does not diminish the responsibility either of those committing the acts in Hamas or of the others who actively sponsor Hamas because the conflict b/w them and Israel serves other geopolitical interests, like Iran.
“Geoffrey S. Corn is the George R. Killam, Jr. Chair of Criminal Law and Director of the Center for Military Law and Policy, Texas Tech University School of Law and a Distinguished Fellow with the Gemunder Center for Defense Strategy (part of the Jewish Institute for National Security in America). A retired U.S. Army Judge Advocate Officer, he served as the Army's senior law of war advisor.”
Sounds unbiased, and full of integrity if he was a lawyer for the US army.
> The ICJ has accepted but not gotten to the point of trial on the accusations against Israel. They also ordered a number of preliminary measures designed to prevent irreparable harm in the interim on the initial application for such measures. The only thing they have ruled against that was brought to them was a request to order additional interim measures against Israel in response to what was characterized as noncompliance with the initial set of interim measures.
And, as an update, they have, just now, on a new application from South Africa, ordered additional provisional measures in the genocide case against Israel.
Is this the Irish internvention? I know they had stated that they were going to intervene on behalf of South Africa, specifically in regards to the preventing the delivery of aid, which this document is ordering Israel to stop in order 2(a).
The allies did something similar in Iraq and Afghanistan[1]. Biometrics make the most sense if you need to track people and there is no stable/reliable government.
More nuance would be helpful. The third paragraph from the article you linked says:
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces from Gaza, dismantled its settlements, and implemented a temporary blockade of Gaza. The blockade became indefinite after the 2007 Hamas takeover, supported by Egypt through restrictions on its land border with Gaza.[14] Despite the Israeli disengagement, the United Nations (UN), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many human-rights organizations continue to consider Gaza to be held under Israeli military occupation, due to what they consider Israel's effective military control over the territory; Israel disputes that it occupies the territory.[15][16][17] The current blockade by Israel and Egypt prevents people and goods from freely entering or leaving the territory, leading to Gaza often being called an "open-air prison."[18][19] The UN, as well as at least 19 human-rights organizations, have urged Israel to lift the blockade.[20] Israel has justified its blockade on the strip with wanting to stop flow of arms, but Palestinians and rights groups say it amounts to collective punishment and exacerbates dire living conditions.
> In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces from Gaza, dismantled its settlements, and implemented a temporary blockade of Gaza. The blockade became indefinite after the 2007 Hamas takeover, supported by Egypt through restrictions on its land border with Gaza.
Also, I guess Egypt is also occupying Gaza according to you?
In 2006, the Palestinian political entity operating in the West Bank and Gaza staged elections. Little did observers know that it would be the last vote allowed by the Palestinian Authority, led then, as it is now, by President Mahmoud Abbas. The vote took place in the aftermath of a turbulent series of events: the fiery years of the second intifada, the death of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and the 2005 Israeli withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.
The election yielded a shock victory for Hamas, which won the most seats with some 44 percent of the vote.
Further in the artcle: "Seventy-two percent of respondents said they believed the Hamas decision to launch the cross-border rampage in southern Israel was "correct" given its outcome so far, while 22% said it was "incorrect". The remainder were undecided or gave no answer."
If the Jewish prisoners of a Nazi concentration camp revolted and killed their guards, would they not be justified? When the cargo of the La Amistad revolted and killed their captors, were they not justified? The actions of Hamas were vile, but I can't blame the oppressed from lashing out against the oppressor.
> If the Jewish prisoners of a Nazi concentration camp revolted and killed their guards, would they not be justified? When the cargo of the La Amistad revolted and killed their captors, were they not justified? The actions of Hamas were vile, but I can't blame the oppressed from lashing out against the oppressor.
The problem with your comparison is that Hamas attacks, as a matter of policy, civilians. A reasonable person would not claim that those civilians are holding Hamas captive.
A Gallup poll made on behalf of CNN and USA Today concluded that 79% of Americans thought the Iraq War was justified, with or without conclusive evidence of illegal weapons.
> A Gallup poll made on behalf of CNN and USA Today concluded that 79% of Americans thought the Iraq War was justified, with or without conclusive evidence of illegal weapons.
If you honestly believe this comparison makes sense, then you are saying that Hamas is misleading Palestinians as to their motivation for attacking Israeli civilians.
The comparison is the context of the war in Iraq being more popular amongst Americans than the actions of Hamas amongst Palestinians (if we all use shitty polls as the basis of our facts for killing people). Many here know how popular that particular military action is.
Nevertheless; Hamas said that its fight was against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project, Israel.
Thus it is either true that Israel is “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist”. Or when Hamas says that is why they are attacking Israel it is misleading the Palestinian people. You are welcome to select either assertion.
So people of a land fighting for their freedom is categorized as terrorists?
I believe in colonialism age, organization like HAMAS is categorized as guerrilla fighters.
Why is it different now?
Given how accurate these systems usually are… they are looking for some rando with a beard, and a way to spend some money on defense contracts sold by a friend.
I responded below about how they're probably training on photos of locals, but it's also worth noting that Palestinians, Israelis, and Lebanese people are all quite similar looking on average and have quite a bit of phenotype diversity. A well known Palestinian activist (Ahed Tamimi) in the West Bank famously has red hair, light skin, and freckles. Former congressman Justin Amash is half Palestinian and just looks like a Midwestern guy with a tan.
The ashkenazi population is about 30% of Israeli Jews, and Arab Israelis are about 21% of the population.
Palestinians have a fair amount of Anatolian, Lebanese, Armenian, and Iranian ancestry. So again there’s quite a bit of phenotypic variation. There’s also a high degree of genetic relatedness to even the Ashkenazi Jews.
In practice if you lined up 100 random Israelis and Palestinians you aren’t going to reliably determine who is who based on appearances.
This has definitely been the case with commercial offerings do to limitations in the training data, but the application here is obviously using photos of people in the population they're trying to do recognition in for training. It's probably better than off the shelf tools for this application.
Stating the impossibility of successfully using facial recognition on Mediterranean people is a weird claim to make in a technical form. Do you have any citations showing that Mediterranean and Near Eastern people present particular problems for facial recognition?
It seems a lot more certain than using cell signals, and can present some opportunities to make arrests without endangering a lot of civilians. I'd normally be against facial recognition for general purpose law enforcement, but but trying to be precise in an urban war is always a worthwhile goal.
> There is an incident where some medical staff were detained in Khan Younis on Feb 15th and later released. There's evidence they were handled pretty roughly, but they weren't Red Cross employees.
You're aware that red crescent and red cross are the same thing?
> The IDF also reported finding weapons, medications with the names of hostages on them, and cars taken from a kibbutz at the hospital.
Believing the IDF is no better than taking for true every word hamas might say.
I'm not trolling. I'm factually stating that the thing you are claiming is nowhere to be found on the BBC's site or anywhere else online that I can find. I looked for like 20 minutes and couldn't find any source claiming that the IDF kidnapped red crescent staff. So it seems to not be true. I'd happily admit I was wrong if you could find a well sourced news report from a real news outlet.
I'd also point out that the guidelines here discourage "shallow dismissals".
That's just an editorial from a blog, that has a very well known point of view on the subject.
The article glosses over the fact that Faiq Mabhouh was Hamas's head of internal security (secret police) and has a long record of executing Palestinians on flimsy accusations without trial. Presenting him as a humanitarian aid worker is disingenuous enough to be called a lie.
After IDF hunted down the Hamas police officers who were taking over the aid deliveries, the food prices on the markets crashed down to pre-war prices. Mission accomplished?
You would certainly want to track people if you were fighting a war where military leaders of the opposition tried to blend into a densely populated civilian neighborhood
Gaza was under complete blockade from Israel (after it was occupied by it). That's not an environment you can create reliable governance since it wasn't allowed to be a sovereign state.
Palestinians were free to travel through the Egypt-Gaza border. Plenty of TikTok videos of Gazans having trips abroad.
Even now, during the war, they can still leave but have to pay $7k in bribes, that's how Hamas leaders smuggled their families out or some actual terrorists left.
Apparently Hamas is the only thing that matters to some. That there are many people in the area affected by the conflict is not material. This one is the blueprint for something truly dystopian.
Is the implication that when you label something a "war" it becomes justified? That this happens a lot and is therefore ok? I'm trying to find a charitable way to interpret your reply.
With Fallujah the Red Cross estimated directly following the battle that some 800 civilians had been killed during the offensive. The Iraq Body Count project reported between 581 and 670 civilian deaths resulting from the battle.
Whereas as of 29 February, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least 30,000 Palestinians (including over 10,000 minors) have been killed, over 70,000 injured, and 10,000 are missing under rubble, totaling over 110,000 casualties since the war began, which is about 5% of Gaza's 2.3 million population.
Hamas has been attempting to bomb Israel for 15 years... Israel built the Iron Dome for self defense, you seem to "forget" this. Any other neighboring country would have flattened Gaza from the air already...
This is part of Israel’s playbook to justify genocide. UN special rapporteur’s report on the ongoing genocide described this practice as: “Humanitarian camouflage: distorting the laws of war to conceal genocidal intent”[1] (chapter VI).
Of course you cannot use alleged warcrimes of the enemy—be they real or fabricated—to consistently strip rights of live from a civilian population.
please stop using the term holocaust. as horrific as destruction in gaza is, it is not a systemic annihilation of millions. it is unfair to the victims of holocaust and is unacceptable use of the term
The moment Israel started dropping white phosphorus bombs on the Gaza strip turned it into a literal "holocaust" (destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war). And, they've been dropping white phosphorus since 2009.
Prior to that, it was "just" a garden variety genocide, enforced by apartheid and with enforced starvation of at least 1.1 million people.
It is NOT "The Holocaust" (event in World War 2), but it ABSOLUTELY is *a* holocaust.
I would have thought the descendants of The Holocaust who ended up in Israel would have remembered the horrors, and actually believed in "Never Again" for all peoples. But it really meant "Never again to us".
EDIT:
To gryzzly : I would appreciate where I'm being "hateful". And you claim lies. What exactly am I lying about? Your pattern of "discourse" here is just fly-by namecalling slurs. Hopefully you'll change that.
to hotdogscout: I'm using the strict definitions of genocide, holocaust, and apartheid.
And "October 7 was worse than anything Israel did. If you have a better way to get the hostages back and guarantee this doesn't happen again I'm all ears. "
The answer has ALWAYS been "2 state solution", to of which Israel's response is bulldoze, subjugate, bomb, murder. Its completely unsurprising that the ones subject to such extreme violence on a mass scale (genocide enters chat) invokes people who are willing to stand up to such extreme violence.
If this was compared to that other war going on, Israel is the Russia as the murdering and invading force, and Palestine is Ukraine and those defending their homes and themselves from mass destruction and death.
If you believe one side is entirely at fault, especially given the history of this conflict, you are clearly subjective in your judgement. And there is no any acknowledgement of at least the "difficulty" of the situation, rather a one sided blame of Israel as well as demonising its people and a presentation of the situation as black and white. That is hate.
I agree that it would be better to leave the memory of that horrific event which killed millions alone, but it's being invoked by both sides, and if both sides can't come to an agreement about a matter where people are being killed and hostages are being taken, I don't think there is anything to achieve by policing people's language.
I chose my words carefully after verifying their definitions.
And I believe in "Never Again", in any holocaust, genocide, apartheid, and similar - they should never be done.
Israel's government is hellbent on all of those things pertaining to the Gaza strip and the Palestinians.
Again, I would have figured the descendants of "The Holocaust" would have recognized that even war has limitations, and would have actually held to the ideal of "Never Again". But it really was turned into "Never again to us".
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And to your "You're in a war. Famine and bombs are a war.".... There are indeed limitations, which Israel is grossly violating.
international humanitarian law prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare (API Art. 54, APII Art. 14
The use of white phosphorus may violate Protocol III (on the use of incendiary weapons) of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCCW) in one specific instance: if it is used, on purpose, as an incendiary weapon directly against humans in a civilian setting.
"Confirmed True" based on 2 tweets (one of them from the iranians) and a few articles that all cite the same sources... lol, textbook fake... Israel could have leveled Gaza in an afternoon... most countries would have done that... I kind of wish they did and this would be over.
I don't think anyone mentioned Jews before who are just normal humans like everyone else here.
It's just simple to see that there are pretty heavy-handed actions taken by Western leaders in support of the Zionist (not Jewish) state, like the president of the most powerful country in the world bypassing congress to send military help (like weapons) to the state. Not all Americans agree with his decision though some do.
(I see after I posted this comment that the person you are replying to did state that most bad things happen because of the Jews which is not something I would say, and many critics of the Zionist state would not.)
If so, then this is a case of an occupier deciding which civil rights their occupied peoples have. Which makes this an apartheid practice. Which does not make this look better.
It does not. Iraqi citizens were not stripped of their civil rights during eight years of American occupation*. An occupying power has responsibility to the civilian population which they occupy, and does not grant rights on dictating which civil rights they have. That is for their own government to decide.
I know this is not a case of apartheid, btw. I was only rebutting your claim that if this were a civil right issue, then it would somehow be OK. But if you were right that it was just a civil right issue, then it wouldn’t. You can’t occupy a state, and strip them of rights which your own citizens have. That is apartheid.
But what is going on here is not apartheid, it is a war crime. Israel isn’t merely stripping occupied citizens of their rights. Israel is a annulling any distinction between a civilian and combatants, and treating the entire civilian population as combatants, including by employing dubious mass surveillance tactics.
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* Edit, to clarify. Many Iraqi citizens were indeed stripped of their civil rights (as we know from documents leaked by Chelsea Manning). However those cases constituted war crimes and in some cases the criminals were even prosecuted and found guilty.
> Israel is a annulling any distinction between a civilian and combatants, and treating the entire civilian population as combatants, including by employing dubious mass surveillance tactics.
By dressing soldiers in civilian clothes, Hamas forces Israel to guess who is or isn't a combatant. Given that Israel has to make such calls, shouldn't they collect all available information to make them as accurately as they can? Shouldn't we be more concerned about mistakes (leading to civilians deaths) than about privacy?
Like I said elsewhere, this logic justifies Oct. 7.
But also, no. The purpose obviously isn’t to find combatants. If it is it is very poor one obviously. No they are doing this to justify mass targeting of civilians.
In reality this does not only strip Palestinians of their privacy, it also creates potential targets out of any Palestinian.
By targeting civilians, do you mean killing them? If that was Israel's goal, why would they need facial recognition? Facial recognition suggests selective targeting; if the goal was to kill civilians wouldn't they just carpet bomb without worrying about any particular targets?
Your guess is as good as mine, but I guess they use it to justify their targeting. What the AI tells them to target, they target. If the AI is inaccurate—which it probably is—even better, the results are the same. Whole neighborhoods are carpet bombed, massive civilian casualty rate, but the optics are better. And hopefully they don’t get charged at the Hague.
This reminded me of the forced photographs that Marc Garanger took of Berber (Kabyle) woman for identification cards for France during the Algerian Revolution [1]. My ancestral village in Kabylie was similarly emptied out with forced relocation and napalmed when my dad was a kid, so it's always wild to see these photographs.
That is terrible to hear. I haven't connected that war to the Vietnam war really. But essentially it is the same thing but without the US coming in afterwards?
Did he say the village was burned down (by hand), or that the French air force fire bombed it?
Oh yeah, there are actually a lot of connections between Vietnam and the Algerian Revolution. Many Algerians (and other groups colonized by France in Africa) were brought to fight the Viet Minh, and when captured, were spared and asked why they weren't also fighting their colonizers. There was often anti-colonial re-education that happened. [1][2]
In terms of our exact village, I don't recall if it happened by air or hand (or both), but he definitely has talked about the French air force dropping napalm and helicopters landing on the football field they played on as kids when accessing the mountains. I'll ask him. He was already living in Bejaia at the time (he was 5), and one day 10 or so family members showed up to live with them (in their ~1000 sqft house, much of which is a courtyard), saying the village was emptied out and destroyed. I go to the land where the village was whenever I'm visiting and really there's just an old two room stone mosque still standing, a tapped well for water, and a couple off grid homes that some hermits live in.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadhttps://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2021/03/23/ansi-...
Hamaa doesn't wear uniforms because Hamas is a political party. The al-Qassam Brigades do wear uniforms, as I have seen in GoPro and other footage from October 7th and after. There has been a blockade on Gaza for a decade so some don't get the full uniform, and make do with a headband and military fatigues instead.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/middleeast/israel-undercover-...
Refer to Chapter VI of the following report: Distorting humanitarian laws does not justify further crimes.
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
The point is that this excuse is a Humanitarian camouflage and does not justify atrocities, war crimes, nor apartheid.
Francesca Albanese talks about this in detail in here report (Chapter VI, section A, paragraph 62; linked above):
> Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality.
As well as section B of the same chapter appropriately titled Turning Gaza as a whole into a ‘military objective (paragraphs 63-67):
> Israel has misused this rule [of legitimate military targets] to “militarize” civilian objects and whatever surrounds them, justifying their indiscriminate destruction. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “many ostensibly civilian objects may become legitimate targets”, losing their protection under IHL [International Humanitarian Law] or become “collateral” damage as a result of Hamas’s choice.
> Protected civilian objects can lose their immunity from attacks if and for as long as they are used by combatants in hostilities. However, Israel considers any object that has allegedly been or might be used militarily as a legitimate target, so that entire neighbourhoods can be razed or demolished under fictions of legality.
> Israel has thus de facto abolished the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives.
Which US military intelligence offices were those? I don't recall anything of that sort from the 9/11 Commission report. There are also no active US military personnel listed amongst the fatalities from the WTC towers.
And no, the same logic doesn't apply. Having a handful of military personnel inside civilian locations is not contrary to the rules of law; what would be is to locate bases, shooting positions, weapons storage, etc within primarily civilian facilities. That's something the US military, as with most militaries, doesn't do.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-cia-lost-office-in-wtc/
Further, a tiny office with a handful of intelligence personnel would not make the entire facility a legitimate target.
This distinction would be laughed at by a terrorist as pure sophistry.
Where the distinction matters is both in terms of international law and the comment I replied to calling it a 'US military intelligence office'.
There’s nothing illegal in terms of international law for the CIA to have had a small office in the WTC towers.
The question is whether the phrase ‘US military’ includes the CIA and, secondarily, whether a small CIA office in the WTC towers would’ve made them a legitimate target in international law.
For both of those the answer is ‘no’.
First, the CIA is a civilian intelligence agency and so not considered part of the military. It doesn’t fall under the military hierarchy, and it does not report to either the Joint Chiefs or the Secretary of Defence. In the same way the Russian SVR and FSB are not military institutions either, for what it’s worth.
Second, for the WTC towers to have been a legitimate target they would’ve had to have met the standards of “nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage”, be justified by immediate military necessity, and be proportional in terms of the harm caused to civilians or civilian property. None of that was true in the case of the WTC towers, even with a small CIA office inside one of them.
I genuinely don’t understand why this is a controversial point.
The biometric stuff just seems too dangerous to me, and unlike e.g. Nuclear arsenals, there's no peaceful game-theoretical equilibrium at MAD, I just see an extremely effective tool for the eradication of groups of people, and I don't trust human beings not to misuse that, especially with machine intelligence getting so powerful so fast.
It all feels frighteningly unstable to me.
edit: A perhaps more lucid way to explain what I mean: I am afraid of a world where the cost of eliminating a group of people is low enough that it outweighs the incentive to adapt & negotiate peaceful coexistence, even without what I see as an innate human bias towards destroying groups we don't like. Do violent, authoritarian regimes begin to gain an edge over peaceful, democratic ones?
He said that the USA method is to go to some village, kill the head and say "now you have democracy, elect a new leader", and chaos ensues.
While our way is "we build you a well and a road, let us know if someone comes to recruit young people".
Of course since the USA soldiers are the most, their way is the one that happens more often.
At this point you can just shoot at anyone and say "terrorist".
Only weeks following oct 7. Netanyahu announced new settlements in the Gaza envelope, meaning the part of Israel within rocket range from Gaza. There have been documented cases of Israel expending the buffer zone on the Palestinian side of the boarder wall. I would certainly call that expansion, even though the settlements them selves are within Israel’s territory, their security infrastructure results in land being taken away from Palestine.
Hamas is in no meaningful sense elected by the people of Gaza (the last election was before most people now living their were alive, much less eligible to vote); given that it is Israel that has blocked new all-Palestine elections in the last decade, Israel had had more say in choosing Hamas as the government in Gaza than the people fo Gaza have had. (And ministers in the current Israeli government have explicitly said they actively preferred to keep Hamas in power because the division between Hamas and the Fatah-led administration in the West Bank and the extremism of Hamas provides political cover against pressure to make peace and accept a Palestinian State.)
> the ICJ has already not accepted the accusations against Israel,
That is simply not true. The ICJ has done no such thing. In fact they have accepted that there is a probably case and a risk of genocide. In fact, I’m gonna quote the summary of the verdict (from Wikipedia):
> It is plausible that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The State of Israel must take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of genocide.
If anything since this verdict was published, the case for genocide has become even more glaring. Just today Ireland announced they would intervene on behalf of South Africa in that case adding the blocking of aid to the charges against Israel[1]. The day before yesterday UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories published a report[2]—which I have been quoting a lot lately—concluding: “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” Francesca Albanese further describes this genocidal rhetoric in her magnificent report:
> One of the key findings is that Israel's executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/27/gaza-ireland-j...
2: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
one hell of an expert
those billions are peanuts in israeli budget. majority of population in israel in favor of stopping taking it. it works actually as lever that usa is using, so it actually beneficial to usa (and all the money going back to it anyway)
usa doesn't grovel at feet of bibi. it just usa has more guts than other countries to support israel.
If you want to talk about AIPAC and similar groups you should use the more accurate term Pro Israel lobby, which Albanese has indeed used since. In fact I would argue there is nothing Pro Jewish about AIPAC. AIPAC doesn't really care about American Jews. They only care about furthering Israel’s war machine and that Israel’s human rights violations continues to go unpunished. Even when this policy harms American Jews.
Also the trope that Israel controls the USA is also both untrue and anti-Semitic. The USA is perfectly capable of aligning them selfs with a criminal foreign governments on their own if it somehow serves their interest. They did so with Apartheid South Africa, they do so with Saudi Arabian, and there was no “Jewish Lobby” making them do so. The truth is that Israel is an antagonistic country in the Middle East, and it serves the interest of the USA to keep this region unstable. You don't need an evil race of people to keep colonialism alive, you just need plain old capitalists.
I think reasonable people can go back and forth on the US's interest in destabilizing the Levant and the extent to which Israel (outside of the West Bank and Gaza) represents "colonialism". I think a reasonable person could argue that literally every US administration since Ronald Reagan's would have jumped at the opportunity to settle a 2-state solution that gave Palestine self-determination, a seaport, etc.
(My expectation is that we don't agree on this point, which is totally fine. Certainly, we agree about AIPAC.)
This is false.
The ICJ has accepted but not gotten to the point of trial on the accusations against Israel. They also ordered a number of preliminary measures designed to prevent irreparable harm in the interim on the initial application for such measures. The only thing they have ruled against that was brought to them was a request to order additional interim measures against Israel in response to what was characterized as noncompliance with the initial set of interim measures.
> If you have any evidence of another army that has undertaken more measures to prevent civilian deaths please let me know.
Pretty much every Western Army does more; even people with military experience who have been generally supportive of Israel on the broad policy and justification level criticized the footage of operations that Israel put out to show their supposed protection of civilians as showing RoE that are compliant neither with international law nor with the norms of other militaries, including the US, when it comes to civilian protection, including requiring soldiers to get positive permission not to fire on apparent civilians.
> HN is full of Hamas apologists
No, its not, its just that the defenders of Israel’s multigenerational campaign of ethnic cleansing in Palestine in violation of international humanitarian norms (which is not limited to the present campaign against Hamas or to Gaza) consistently call anyone who points out Israeli abuses – even if they do so while condemning Hamas’s abuses [0] – as apologists for Hamas as a deflection technique.
[0] For which Israel, who actively sought to create, during the occupation of Gaza, and since to preserve Hamas in part to create such abuses and provide cover for its campaign of ethnic cleansing bears substantial responsibility, though that does not diminish the responsibility either of those committing the acts in Hamas or of the others who actively sponsor Hamas because the conflict b/w them and Israel serves other geopolitical interests, like Iran.
Sounds unbiased, and full of integrity if he was a lawyer for the US army.
You don't even understand you are a terrible person.
And, as an update, they have, just now, on a new application from South Africa, ordered additional provisional measures in the genocide case against Israel.
https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...
[1]https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/2021-06...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/30/new-evidence-biometric-d...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip
More nuance would be helpful. The third paragraph from the article you linked says:
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces from Gaza, dismantled its settlements, and implemented a temporary blockade of Gaza. The blockade became indefinite after the 2007 Hamas takeover, supported by Egypt through restrictions on its land border with Gaza.[14] Despite the Israeli disengagement, the United Nations (UN), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many human-rights organizations continue to consider Gaza to be held under Israeli military occupation, due to what they consider Israel's effective military control over the territory; Israel disputes that it occupies the territory.[15][16][17] The current blockade by Israel and Egypt prevents people and goods from freely entering or leaving the territory, leading to Gaza often being called an "open-air prison."[18][19] The UN, as well as at least 19 human-rights organizations, have urged Israel to lift the blockade.[20] Israel has justified its blockade on the strip with wanting to stop flow of arms, but Palestinians and rights groups say it amounts to collective punishment and exacerbates dire living conditions.
> In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces from Gaza, dismantled its settlements, and implemented a temporary blockade of Gaza. The blockade became indefinite after the 2007 Hamas takeover, supported by Egypt through restrictions on its land border with Gaza.
Also, I guess Egypt is also occupying Gaza according to you?
It doesn't matter if the prison guards are inside or just surrounding the prison, you're still in prison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing
And the only reason the “occupation” transferred to Israel is because Egypt lost a war it started.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/24/gaza-electio...
In 2006, the Palestinian political entity operating in the West Bank and Gaza staged elections. Little did observers know that it would be the last vote allowed by the Palestinian Authority, led then, as it is now, by President Mahmoud Abbas. The vote took place in the aftermath of a turbulent series of events: the fiery years of the second intifada, the death of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and the 2005 Israeli withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.
The election yielded a shock victory for Hamas, which won the most seats with some 44 percent of the vote.
"Almost three in four Palestinians believe the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was correct" - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palesti...
Further in the artcle: "Seventy-two percent of respondents said they believed the Hamas decision to launch the cross-border rampage in southern Israel was "correct" given its outcome so far, while 22% said it was "incorrect". The remainder were undecided or gave no answer."
How does this change the fact that there hasn't been any election in almost 20 years?
Exactly
Gaza had:
- Luxury villas with private pools [1][2]
- Beautiful modern apartment buildings [3]
- Modern restaurants [4][5]
- etc....
[1] https://twitter.com/imshin/status/1676187850470232064 [2] https://twitter.com/imshin/status/1656952101027848192, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1500443195213287431.html [3] https://twitter.com/imshin/status/1526545488073441285 [4] https://twitter.com/imshin/status/1591474946773221377 [5] https://twitter.com/abrahambenisaac/status/13406054739014737...
The problem with your comparison is that Hamas attacks, as a matter of policy, civilians. A reasonable person would not claim that those civilians are holding Hamas captive.
If you honestly believe this comparison makes sense, then you are saying that Hamas is misleading Palestinians as to their motivation for attacking Israeli civilians.
Is that what you’re asserting?
Nevertheless; Hamas said that its fight was against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project, Israel.
Thus it is either true that Israel is “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist”. Or when Hamas says that is why they are attacking Israel it is misleading the Palestinian people. You are welcome to select either assertion.
Edit: is not => is
Please stop pretending that this conflict started last October. Also the last elections happened a long long time ago.
They're looking for specific hamas commanders who are believed to be hiding in the civilian population.
They are very inaccurate, especially face recognition on dark people, which palestinians are, is going to be a crapshot.
Palestinians have a fair amount of Anatolian, Lebanese, Armenian, and Iranian ancestry. So again there’s quite a bit of phenotypic variation. There’s also a high degree of genetic relatedness to even the Ashkenazi Jews.
In practice if you lined up 100 random Israelis and Palestinians you aren’t going to reliably determine who is who based on appearances.
Their problem is that they don't.
Plus, training takes so much time. I doubt they will actually do what you are suggesting.
You're aware that red crescent and red cross are the same thing?
> The IDF also reported finding weapons, medications with the names of hostages on them, and cars taken from a kibbutz at the hospital.
Believing the IDF is no better than taking for true every word hamas might say.
I clearly do know that, and it should be apparent from context. My point stands no Red Cresent employees where “kidnapped”
So again, do you have a link to the BBC article you claimed exists?
I'd also point out that the guidelines here discourage "shallow dismissals".
The article glosses over the fact that Faiq Mabhouh was Hamas's head of internal security (secret police) and has a long record of executing Palestinians on flimsy accusations without trial. Presenting him as a humanitarian aid worker is disingenuous enough to be called a lie.
I'm saying when there is military action in an urban area, there will be civilian casualties.
In this case it is Israel against Hamas in Gaza. Probably the same thing happened with the US against Iraqi terrorists in Fallujah.
I'm not Jewish or Muslim so don't really have a dog in this fight.
With Fallujah the Red Cross estimated directly following the battle that some 800 civilians had been killed during the offensive. The Iraq Body Count project reported between 581 and 670 civilian deaths resulting from the battle.
Whereas as of 29 February, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least 30,000 Palestinians (including over 10,000 minors) have been killed, over 70,000 injured, and 10,000 are missing under rubble, totaling over 110,000 casualties since the war began, which is about 5% of Gaza's 2.3 million population.
https://themedialine.org/top-stories/poll-reveals-persistent...
Of course you cannot use alleged warcrimes of the enemy—be they real or fabricated—to consistently strip rights of live from a civilian population.
1: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
They are literally the internationally recognized government of the Gaza Strip.
just the same way as
A government != the religion
https://www.denverpost.com/2009/01/11/israel-accused-of-usin...
Prior to that, it was "just" a garden variety genocide, enforced by apartheid and with enforced starvation of at least 1.1 million people.
It is NOT "The Holocaust" (event in World War 2), but it ABSOLUTELY is *a* holocaust.
I would have thought the descendants of The Holocaust who ended up in Israel would have remembered the horrors, and actually believed in "Never Again" for all peoples. But it really meant "Never again to us".
EDIT:
To gryzzly : I would appreciate where I'm being "hateful". And you claim lies. What exactly am I lying about? Your pattern of "discourse" here is just fly-by namecalling slurs. Hopefully you'll change that.
to hotdogscout: I'm using the strict definitions of genocide, holocaust, and apartheid.
And "October 7 was worse than anything Israel did. If you have a better way to get the hostages back and guarantee this doesn't happen again I'm all ears. "
The answer has ALWAYS been "2 state solution", to of which Israel's response is bulldoze, subjugate, bomb, murder. Its completely unsurprising that the ones subject to such extreme violence on a mass scale (genocide enters chat) invokes people who are willing to stand up to such extreme violence.
If this was compared to that other war going on, Israel is the Russia as the murdering and invading force, and Palestine is Ukraine and those defending their homes and themselves from mass destruction and death.
Since the side that invoked the event in this thread was pro-Palestine, here is an example of the other side invoking it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/21/netanyahu-unde...
And I believe in "Never Again", in any holocaust, genocide, apartheid, and similar - they should never be done.
Israel's government is hellbent on all of those things pertaining to the Gaza strip and the Palestinians.
Again, I would have figured the descendants of "The Holocaust" would have recognized that even war has limitations, and would have actually held to the ideal of "Never Again". But it really was turned into "Never again to us".
-------
And to your "You're in a war. Famine and bombs are a war.".... There are indeed limitations, which Israel is grossly violating.
international humanitarian law prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare (API Art. 54, APII Art. 14
The use of white phosphorus may violate Protocol III (on the use of incendiary weapons) of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCCW) in one specific instance: if it is used, on purpose, as an incendiary weapon directly against humans in a civilian setting.
It's just simple to see that there are pretty heavy-handed actions taken by Western leaders in support of the Zionist (not Jewish) state, like the president of the most powerful country in the world bypassing congress to send military help (like weapons) to the state. Not all Americans agree with his decision though some do.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-democrats-push-...
(I see after I posted this comment that the person you are replying to did state that most bad things happen because of the Jews which is not something I would say, and many critics of the Zionist state would not.)
I know this is not a case of apartheid, btw. I was only rebutting your claim that if this were a civil right issue, then it would somehow be OK. But if you were right that it was just a civil right issue, then it wouldn’t. You can’t occupy a state, and strip them of rights which your own citizens have. That is apartheid.
But what is going on here is not apartheid, it is a war crime. Israel isn’t merely stripping occupied citizens of their rights. Israel is a annulling any distinction between a civilian and combatants, and treating the entire civilian population as combatants, including by employing dubious mass surveillance tactics.
---
* Edit, to clarify. Many Iraqi citizens were indeed stripped of their civil rights (as we know from documents leaked by Chelsea Manning). However those cases constituted war crimes and in some cases the criminals were even prosecuted and found guilty.
By dressing soldiers in civilian clothes, Hamas forces Israel to guess who is or isn't a combatant. Given that Israel has to make such calls, shouldn't they collect all available information to make them as accurately as they can? Shouldn't we be more concerned about mistakes (leading to civilians deaths) than about privacy?
But also, no. The purpose obviously isn’t to find combatants. If it is it is very poor one obviously. No they are doing this to justify mass targeting of civilians.
In reality this does not only strip Palestinians of their privacy, it also creates potential targets out of any Palestinian.
It is a great sadness that plays in the "theater of the absurd."
[1] https://time.com/69351/women-unveiled-marc-garangers-contest...
Did he say the village was burned down (by hand), or that the French air force fire bombed it?
In terms of our exact village, I don't recall if it happened by air or hand (or both), but he definitely has talked about the French air force dropping napalm and helicopters landing on the football field they played on as kids when accessing the mountains. I'll ask him. He was already living in Bejaia at the time (he was 5), and one day 10 or so family members showed up to live with them (in their ~1000 sqft house, much of which is a courtyard), saying the village was emptied out and destroyed. I go to the land where the village was whenever I'm visiting and really there's just an old two room stone mosque still standing, a tapped well for water, and a couple off grid homes that some hermits live in.
[1] https://caukieucollective.com/remembering-the-algerian-war-f...
[2] https://vvaveteran.org/37-6/37-6_algeria.html