cities do not get systematically flattened with bulldozers in urban warfare, you only completely wipe out cities when you don't want any the civilians to come back.
This is so dumb. If the people who lived here come back then the first thing they will have to do is bulldoze all the buildings before they can rebuild. Bulldozing the buildings cannot be a genocide if it is also a necessary step to rebuilding.
It's sad that most world leaders do nothing to combat such genocide. There are so few sanctions against the state, or specific people, of Israel. Foreign forums are very much still open for business to them.
1) Ultimately, money means more to foreign nations than what happens with internal affairs of their trading partners
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).
Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell in particular) are widely believed to have operated as a massive Mossad blackmail operation, collecting (and creating) blackmail material against western politicians and influential individuals to ensure their support for Israel.
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
and it seems pretty likely that's exactly what was happening.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
Didn't he have ties to basically all powerful people? Is there something special about his Israel ties that are different to his Bill Gates ties?
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
Of course. A very valid way to view it, and the same way I would've viewed it in 2016 if you told me there was a global elite pedophile ring that helped get Trump elected.
Epstein is thought to have been working for Mossad. If that's true, they probably have copies of all the video tapes (which we know were made) of all the stuff rich people did on Epstein island. This theory would single-handedly explain why almost everyone in the Epstein files supports Israel so strongly.
> Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
The actual on the ground resistance was of central importance in the end of South African apartheid, but the international pressure and sanctions greatly increased the need for negotiations to begin. The point is to increase the pressure to change leadership through democratic means.
This could hopefully happen somewhat faster with Israel, given that the government isn't a literal Nazi remnant, as the South African government was. (Though, ironically, the main arms supplier to South Africa during the arms embargo was Israel, often reselling weapons from the United States. Sigh.)
"By the late 1980s, the South African state was in profound crisis, crippled by international sanctions, a stagnant economy, and widespread resistance. Recognizing the unsustainable nature of the perpetual conflict, the government under P.W. Botha began tentative, secret contact with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders."
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
Sorry buddy, you can't just attack children at a music festival and get away with it, even if you're desperate. It's not a justification. If it was, then whatever Israel is doing is fine because they're just responding as victims should, right?
I heard the recordings the ecstatic guys screaming with pleasure that they murdered as many Jews as they could, one guy called his mother in ecstatic joy, it was absolutely sick shit.
Ukraine could blow up children's schools in Russia couldn't it? But it doesn't. Russia does though...
What a bizarre claim and outright lie. They kept them locked up and starving. They could’ve just dropped them off near the border with Israel or Egypt, or handed them over to the Red Cross (which wasn’t even allowed to visit and check on the hostages).
Oh look, brand new account doing hasbara. Where have we seen this before? Are you a part of Israel's $1B spent on online propaganda? [1]
I cited my source. But there were also sources in October 2023 about Hamas wanting to return the hostages. The Haaretz articles reveal that it was privately even earlier than expected and the Netanyahu was warned of the attack in advance yet he chose to do nothing about it.
Why not just drop them off? Well for 1 they actually wanted the hostages to get home alive. The IDF didn't care about killing hostages as they relentlessly bombed the region.
Why not let the Red Cross see them? Because the IDF was closely watching and, shocker, if you take someone directly to the hostages guess what building gets blown up next?
Essentially your point is that Hamas protected the hostages from the IDF by not returning them and keeping them underground in chains in near starvation conditions.
This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.
Are they wrong? On October 7, Hamas released three hostages. Israel shot and killed the hostages, so Hamas said they won't release any more hostages without some kind of security deal. That sounds like protecting them to me.
These are the types of conflicts over basic values and senses of right and wrong for which distinct countries with borders and militaries exist. Basically I don’t think discussions like this are fruitful. Historically these types of cross cultural exchanges were very rare, now they’re very common because of the internet.
Very interesting to compare this wording with your previous comment.
When it's about Hamas imprisoning hostages: "Hamas kept them underground in chains in near starvation conditions. This is abject insanity."
When it's about Israel murdering hostages: "Well, you know... We don't always agree on right and wrong. That's why different countries exist. Is this discussion really fruitful?"
That is completely incorrect. The terrorists that were put in charge of these hostages fled and left them alone in a war zone. They were definitely NOT released.
They were killed because of mistaken identity, which is horrible, but it happens in war, some IDF soldiers died from friendly fire.
Hamas definitely didn’t ask protection for the hostages, they asked protection for themselves.
There are many hostages reports of Hamas terrorists saying to hostages that if IDF will draw near, they will shoot the hostages.
Yes, because Hamas routinely does that to lure IDF soldiers.
Let’s use occams razor hear.
Option A - mistaken identity because the enemy wears no uniform, embeds itself in civilians, and uses inhumane tactics to confuse IDF soldiers (like putting explosives on dead bodies, placing speakers with hostages recording as bait)
Option B - IDF decided to kill the hostages they came to rescue for some evil reason
> They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored.
That Hamas was open extremely early on in the conflict to negotiations for returning hostages and Israel and the US knew this while they waged a bombing campaign and pretended like Hamas wasn't trying or willing to return hostages.
Negotiations weren't happening because Israel didn't want those negotiations, not because they weren't available.
And, I don't know if you are aware, but negotiations involve give and take. Israel didn't need to "traded for all of the concessions Hamas wanted in exchange for them".
The reason the hostages weren't returned sooner is because Israel didn't want them. In 2024 Hamas accepted all of Israel's terms multiple times only for Israel to change terms. Israel knew they'd have fewer justifications for their genocide if they got the hostages back.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
This is where you notice that the world is more complicated than social media posts.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
If the UN went into Gaza, got attacked by Iran, then had to respond, next minute they're attacking a close Russian ally, and maybe even China might have to get involved in that.
What would've been good is if October 7 didn't happen, and that goes for both sides.
Iran would WELCOME UN peace keepers in gaza, are you kidding? Hell, I think even Hamas would welcome their presence. UN peace keepers would mean the likes of UNRA could operate once again in Gaza to deliver aid. It would also mean that Israel would have to stop it's aggression.
> Iran is helping Russia
lol, no, other way around. Though the Russia hasn't really been involved with Iran since Ukraine started. It's actually China that's the biggest Iranian trade partner.
The only party that'd be upset over UN peace keepers in Gaza is Israel.
I don't think what you're saying is actually right, if peacekeepers came in, it would (likely) mean a freezing of the current borders / situation, and isn't that what most people say justified October 7, "the theft of land"?
Allowing international journalists in would make the genocide even harder to deny and at that point there's no more returning to the "current situation". Regarding the border, at least for Hamas the 1967 borders would be just fine: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full (article 20).
They never cancelled their original charter, and their position is to accept borders only as a stepping stone towards getting all of the land as a Muslim waqf.
Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year. The best implication of that 'accepting borders with Palestinian majority on both sides on them', which is just a funny way of taking all the land.
I'm immune to Hasbara and not wasting more time debating it, but just leaving some Wikipedia snippets below as a kind of a "community note".
> They never cancelled their original charter
Wikipedia [0]:
This document [the 2017 charter] reflects our position for now (...) The old charter was a product of its era, 30 years ago. We live in a different world today.
> Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year.
Wikipedia [1]:
The first demonstrations were organized by independent activists, but the initiative was soon endorsed by Hamas, the governing party of Gaza, as well as other major factions in Gaza.
Only if you think Israel is entirely correct in their assessment that every single civilian building actually houses dangerous hamas terrorists. I don't think that assessment is correct so I don't think the UN peacekeepers would be behaving exactly like Israel and the IDF has behaved in Gaza. Nor do I think the UN would put the same restrictions on aid coming into Gaza. They wouldn't stop peanut butter and baby formula from entering.
Iran gave Russia their Shahed drones, exports artillery shells and missiles.
UN cannot allow UNRWA - since any actual operation would require Israeli cooperation given Israel is the only open border to Gaza - and it won't hinder Israeli operations just like UN peacekeepers never hindered them in Lebanon despite being on the ground.
Make it make sense. The question is what should have happened. You say I answered what should have happened. But you also say "that's not how the answer was phrased".
How is my "should have" happened not a direct answer to the question?
That would result in the USA going to war against the UN. There is a reason the UN only takes action when the security council agrees. Countries on the security council can plausibly use their military might to prevent any UN action, so to prevent the senseless deaths of peacekeepers, they are given a verbal veto instead.
I tend to agree. The US bears a pretty large amount of blame here and I don't think Israel would have continued their aggression had the US withdrawn aid (or threatened to). But if they had continued, then that's where UN peacekeepers should have been deployed.
> Lie. It was a deal to get complete immunity for a massacre. Also, 'Civilian' per Hamas is anyone over 60. 'Let Hamas murder and keep nearly all hostages' was not in Israel's playbook.
You are making stuff up. Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card. And the fact still remains that they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
> Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the agreement and change the terms. That was all public. It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
> Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yes, it's relevant when the IDF explodes clearly marked aid vehicles rendering aid. There's no reason to not do that.
> Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
Does that really matter? The question wasn't "how effective will this be" it's "What world leaders should have done". That's what world leaders should have done.
> I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
These are weaker lobbies because of US laws. The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens (in behest of Israel). No other nation has that sort of organizations in the US. The closet you can find is things like the weirdo Shen Yun cult.
This allowed them to spend $60M in a democrat primary. You won't find that sort of direct spending from Qatar or the Saudis (barring the clear bribe in the Jet. They aren't exactly giving away jets to every primary run).
>Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card
'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.
> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.
>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.
You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.
>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).
>Two wrongs don't make a right
Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.
>That's what world leaders should have done.
Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.
>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens
Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.
Isn't it interesting how Israel always seems to do bad things in error. Have they ever improved their processes to stop doing things in error? Nope. In fact it seems they just continue doing more and more very bad things in error.
Remember they know exactly who everyone is and where everyone is at all times. Gaza is the most thoroughly surveilled place on earth.
Hamas was willing to return hostages if israel freed all thousands of Palestinians prisoners, including those captured in Israel while committing the Oct 7 massacre.
And that is exactly what sinwar wanted to achieve in every one of his wars, just like when in 2014 Israel traded 1 captured Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinians prisoners.
So basically Hamas wanted israel to surrender, accept Hamas terms, and ignore Oct 7.
> Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed.
This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.
If you had to guess, what do you think they might do? I feel like questions like this are in bad faith. Think about it for a minute, and try to come up with some things that they might do.
Send all collaborators to the international criminal court. (In the US, especially congress critters and members of the executive branch.)
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
The remaining non-corrupt members of the executive branch (or the state governments) would uphold the oaths they took, lock potus and friend in boxes, and ship them off.
As for Israel, as I understand it, the next election will mean domestic jail time for the incumbents unless the polls are wildly wrong.
At that point, it would be easy for Israel to start climbing out of lawlessness too.
Do not forget that world leaders are heads of sovereign states that are in charge of their self defense. Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies, need to make public statements that are not hypocritical about what they would do for self defense. This is why both U.S. administrations support Israel's actions
> Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.
They just use bulldozers to flatten whatever the bombs don't. They can drive a bulldozer pretty precisely, especially when they don't care who's in front of it or under it.
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
Worth noting that Corrie was killed 23 years ago during a different phase of the conflict and under a previous government. (In which Netanyahu served as minister of finance.)
Interesting: the word "nakba" translates to Hebrew as "shoah" which is what many Jews call the (German) Holocaust - they're not even trying to hide what they're doing.
nakba translates to "catastrophe" (a description of what happened to Palestinians)
did someone else call their catastrophe a catastrophe too? guess it just goes to show how different cultures independently come up with similar names for similar things. ideally there are no catastrophes.
for what it's worth, over decades of being a jew, I've never once heard anyone refer to the holocaust as "Shoah". I did have a jewish friend named that, though. Interesting.
Different war I am referring to the 2023 Gaza war but my point still stands the incident you linked is not a civilan being run over. "the IDF was engaged in an operation involving the demolition of Palestinian houses in Rafah. Corrie was part of a group of three British and four American ISM activists attempting to disrupt the IDF operation." If you are embedding yourself in Gaza 2003 during the 2nd intifada and doing this you arent a civilan.
I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.
They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
I would caution against uncritical consumption of Finkelstein's work. He is a bit unhinged, and limited in what content he can analyse as he can't read Arabic or Hebrew.
I don't know what that means and I am not going to search for it. Have fun with your ingroup that uses words that only you all know what they mean to recognize each other from the outgroup.
A war requires at least two militaries. This is what happens when a well armed military engages a mostly unarmed civilian society unable to mount significant opposition.
The Gaza military (Hamas) hid in tunnels under the cities and in public buildings, ensuring the people of Gaza were the battlefield between the two armies.
"Before the October 7, 2023 attacks, the total size of Hamas’s military wing (the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades) was estimated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence agencies to be between 25,000 and 30,000 fighters, with some intelligence assessments placing the upper limit as high as 40,000.
This army was organized into five regional brigades and 24 battalions."
"Hamas's military force prior to October 7, 2023, was roughly 3 to 4.5 times larger than the United States military when measured as a percentage of their respective total populations."
Anyway, IDF as ≈170k active duty personnel and 465k reservists[1].
Literally a different order of magnitude.
Add to it the vast different of resources, access to an air force and nuclear weapons and it become even more clearer that there is no comparison possible.
(And comparing personnel count to the USA is laughable as it is vastly different military type. Both a fighter jet pilot and a foot soldier count as one personnel, but it's neither the same force projection nor the same investment of civilians working for the war machine).
You don't need to compare the military forces. You can compare the casualties on both sides or, for a different perspective, you might count the civilians killed inside their own territories (you might count the West Bank if you really want accurate numbers).
Forced displacement is also considered a war crime and, considering what is happening in Gaza and at the West Bank, it would qualify as genocide as well.
Yeah, there even is this old archaic rule from the bible/torah/quran, "eye for an eye" that is usually considered barbaric and outdated. But here they go by 35:1 ratio.
It is obvious, but it is also to be expected that a significant number of people here, as elsewhere, will rationalize genocide ... and the comment you responded to is particularly crude in its lack of humanity.
The IDF has killed not just a higher number but also a higher percentage of civilians, and a much higher percentage of children, than the October 7 attacks[0]. Even if collective punishment was considered not cruel but moral by the larger community, Israel has far surpassed it.
That percentage comparison is fascinating. Say only 1 fighter remains in a tunnel when all the civilians have been finally bombed out and sniped off. By that measure that would mean Hamas is what, 50 times larger than the USA's military?
There were a lot of arms used over the border on October 7th, more confiscated on video and being used on video against the IDF, and the constant stream of unguided rockets being shot at civilians year after year. Rockets are weapons.
Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.
While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.
This is actually codified in international law IIRC - a nation that's subject to some kind of apartheid occupation has literally unlimited rights to resist its occupiers.
While Hamas does have a right of armed struggle against the occupation, the taking of hostages and the killing of civilians are not permissible forms of resistance.
That said, it is almost impossible to imagine that the Israeli response would have been something lesser than the current genocide attempt if Hamas had just taken POWs during the October 7 attack. Bibi would have arguably been even more humiliated if Hamas had been acting with restraint, so the impulse for revenge would be even greater.
It is almost impossible to imagine Israel would even look at the direction of Gaza had they just taken the statehood offers presented to them in 1947, 2000, 2001, or 2008, instead of repeatedly choosing terrorizing civilians over gasp compromising.
>It is almost impossible to imagine Israel would even look at the direction of Gaza had they just taken the statehood offers presented to them in 1947, 2000, 2001, or 2008
Hey another flat out lie by the same user...
"the Second Intifada began immediately after the collapse of major peace negotiations."
You seem to be mixing up the aggressor with the Aggressé, seemingly intentionally, multiple times in a row.
This show how little you understand Israelis. First this isn't about Bibi, second ot wasn't humiliation but failure, third no atrocities on civilians would certainly changed the response - probably equivalent to a larger cast lead operation which also act as precedent of how Israel acted on the past.
According to International Humanitarian Law:
Targeting, killing, or kidnapping civilians is strictly prohibited and constitutes a war crime, regardless of the legality of the underlying cause.
Torture, hostage-taking, and executions of captured individuals are strictly forbidden under all circumstances.
All of which are actions that were done by Hamas and Gazans who invaded on Oct 7th.
A lot of which was recorded on video, by Hamas and Gazans.
Wouldn’t it actually be much more efficient to just destroy all the food infrastructure and just have everyone die from hunger instead of destroying all the houses?
there are videos of bulldozer in the West Bank eradicating secular olive trees from Palestinian farmland. There is no Hamas in West Bank, no tunnels, no fighters.
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
Also the Palestinian buildings are practically made of cardboard because that's all the supplies they can get (because mysteriously supplies keep not arriving, oh well, no way to know why they don't)
You can find lots of videos of Russia firing thermobaric weapons into populated areas - you will find none fired by Israel into Gaza. And I don't think that's because IL doesn't have them.
(i can't edit apparently): why the downvotes? Serious question I don't understand, is there anything I said above false? The parent comment is questioning whether RU cruelty in Ukraine is anything close to what IL did - and the answer is yes, it's actually much worse, especially when you factor in that it's completely unprovoked.
There is no way it’s worse. To be comparable the Russians would have to have flattened Kyiv and most other cities which is extremely far from reality. The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.
> The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.
It's exactly the same in Gaza! You basically justified Israel's actions here... Check the distance between Gaza City & Israel border, vs distance beetween Bakhmut & Russia's border. Tell me which one is farther away - I'll wait
Entire Gaza is frontline. It's 365 square kilometers - a lot smaller than UKR frontline. It's barely the size of Mariupol (which according to UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report [1] had 90% of high-rise buildings destroyed or heavily damaged; and 60% of private houses. But if you know anything about former communist countries - in cities like Mariupol, most people lived in high-rise buildings). Now, bear in mind that according to the discussion we have here, a lot of people seem to believe that Mariupol got off easily and the destruction it suffered doesn't even compare to destruction in Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Vuhledar etc
That's exactly why Gaza took it far worse than anything Russia can do in Ukraine. Gaza is like shooting fish in a barrel and Israel fishes with dynamite and white phosphorus in that barrel. The Gaza war is about sterilizing that land of all its people, who I'm told aren't even considered people by their enemy. Even Russia didn't go that far.
If that was really the goal, I go back to my previous point - wouldn't thermobaric bombs be faster, more economic & more convenient? It just makes no logical sense. If you already declared them to be monsters, what exactly is holding them back?
Red herring, my argument was not "everything IL army did was good", it was "RU army's behavior is so much worse, how can you even question that?". IL obviously was at the very least "not very concerned" about civilian population; but I don't think there's established evidence that they were actively trying to kill civilian population, just for the sake of it, with no military advantage. Whereas, e.g. "human safari" is a well documented thing in the Russian army.
I think your distinction is a valid one, Israel has some war crimes going on whereas russian invasion of Ukraine was a war crime festival but you are fighting an uphill battle because trying to make distinctions in levels of evil is generally frowned upon because to many people it looks like justification. The reason is because most people can't imagine any other value to making distinctions in evil. I personally can but each time you are going to do it, you should be prepared to defend why, in fact, making those distinctions is useful while being clear that the purpose is not justification of evil acts. It's a thin line to walk on.
There are a bunch of people here who _genuinely_ do not comprehend that Russia is on a completely different league of evilness compared to Israel (and may even consider Israel worse!). This, while Russia is literally the source/engine of a significant part of all the evil in this world - and I wish I was hyperbolic when saying that. FWIW, that's exactly their doctrine, that "everybody is bad, so why bother to make the distinction, it's not like the others are good". And that's exactly how you end up in other countries too with genuinely evil rulers like some of those we see today.
Anyway. Rant over, otherwise I'll veer too much into politics :)
Only children matter? But, fine. How many were kidnapped? At least IDF can claim that they didn't intentionally target children - with kidnapping, that's harder. And the discrepancy in numbers can also be caused by how much Ukraine vs Hamas care about said children / how much they are put in harm's way.
What do you call aiming a sniper rifle at a child, centering her in the scope, accounting for drop, and then pulling the trigger? Seems pretty intentional to me, but maybe the sniper's finger slipped and did all that by accident?
you believe those were sniper kills? :o Where did you get that from, the Hamas "x-rays" where bullets conveniently lodged inside a child cranium instead of shattering the surrounding bones?
There are enough Israeli videos, texts, interviews & testimonies about IDF soldiers intentionally targetting children & bragging about it. No need to depend on Hamas communications.
I don't know what you are referring to. I suppose yet another war crime from the israeli army but this conflict generates a lot of dis/misinformation and it's hard enough to assess the trustworthiness of a source. If you don't even care to provide any source, you are just venting
It's not because you are angry about the state of the world that it absolves you of the moral duty to engage usefully with others. I know I have changed my mind on some subjects but it was never with one lazy comment like this one.
Now why is what you are talking about worse than aiming deliberately a supermarket full of civilians with a missile or hunting a grandpa with a fpv drone ? I don't really understand why you would choose to draw a line there. We already have a internationally recognized line in the sand that is somewhat actionable: War crime. It's hard to argue for genocide, it's easier to denounce and investigate suspected war crimes.
I, for one, think all war crimes are bad and should be the line in the sand where international pressure should be at its maximum.
Gaza invasion is a counterinsurgency type of war in an tighlty urbanized environment where the invader has apparently quite limited care about human life. It is not really surprising that more children would be killed there. Those are two different wars with war crimes happening in both.
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't actually exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
It can be (and is imho) true that both Russia and Israel have broadcasted genocidal intent with the consequences being war crimes and still not look identical
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
So explain all these videos then, all gen AI perhaps? Maybe those aren't really locals who have returned, but paid/forced actors? Poots might be Hitler 2.0™ but but the situation in Gaza ain't exactly same:
The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
> The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
But that’s not what we see in Gaza. The parents specifically mentioned that only towns were leveled. The destroyed towns are not the only relevant aspect. The other one is that major damage happens only there. And of course it would, because the Israeli forces don’t want to sterilise the land; they want to take it. In contrast, Russia is happy to be king of the rubble as long as Ukrainians eat shells.
If your enemy is dug in in an urban area, you bomb the hell out of it before you send in infantry to clean up. If you don’t use artillery and bombs the defenders will mow down the assault units.
This is how urban war is played out between near peer armies.
Think about this, I’m in a concrete bunker with a machine gun, do you want to charge the bunker and get shot, or do you want to call in an airstrike to destroy the bunker with the machine gun position? I know what I’d do
Or, if you're the IDF, and the bunker is filled with neutral UN Observers monitoring for war crimes, you also send in a laser-guided bunker-busting airstrike. Then you insist it was an "accident" while refusing to cooperate with the subsequent investigations.
Of note, just days before the strike, one of the Observers sent an unencrypted email home to his wife noting that he was observing Israeli war crimes and would be reporting them.
I'm sorry, Ukraine war discussion was labeled political on HN, not allowed, actively moderated and shutdown. Please don't post it here. Only Gaza/Israel get's a special carveout for these sorts of discussions on HN.
And the one major time (and probably many more unreported) that they did provide an evacuation site, they waited for the evacuation, then bombed the shit out of the evacuation site claiming "Hamas is here lol"
Well. Hamas was there. Those attacks targeted specific people and we know they were killed. Israel did not bomb the shit out of the evacuation site, the number of civilians killed in Al-Muasi was extremely low. A lot less than e.g. the allies killed in Mosul where they did not evacuate the population.
Mohammed Deif. The head of Hamas' military wing. Was killed in the humanitarian zone. Rafah Salameh. The head of the Khan Younis brigade. Was killed in the humanitarian zone.
These claims are repeated a lot. They are baseless. A critical mind and a bit of research will prove that to you.
It doesn't matter what Israel does. In Rafah Israel objectively and measurably did much better than western armies fighting against Mosul in terms of civilian casualties (and you can include those in the humanitarian zones, still better). But Israel is held to a higher standard.
3) If we compare this to the Battle of Mosul. Which is a pretty good comparison. They are very similar. That battle had a much larger civilian casualty count. The allies there decided to not evacuate the population and the result of that was a much larger number of civilian deaths. Are you proposing that Israel should have done the same? I.e. not evacuate the population and have a significantly higher number of civilian casualties? Do you feel that if Israel did that it would enjoy a similar support as the allies had when they went after ISIS in Mosul?
Basically Israel did the right thing here. Provably better (judging by the number of civilian casualties) than the western armies that allied against ISIS did in Mosul. The ethnic cleansing allegation is not supported by evidence and really can't be proven until the war is over.
> It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
It's obviously intentional that Hamas built their military infrastructure underneath and within civilian infrastructure(which is a war crime) and not in open farmland. So it's quite obvious why the civilian infrastructure gets destroyed when the military infrastructure is targeted.
You can also see a lot of buildings demolished on the Egyptian side too.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
Yeah, this is not what happened here. You can look up Israeli articles from the time that described that nothing was going on for weeks on end other than demolitions. Basically no fighting. You get Israeli politicians repeating beforehand that Rafah will get leveled.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
The problem is the reporting--it's only "fighting" if Hamas is actually shooting guns or doing things that actually kill Israelis. Anything below this threshold is either not mentioned or is "peaceful".
Thus anything that precludes Hamas from actually inflicting harm is not "fighting", even if it's demolishing Hamas booby traps or demolishing structures Hamas would use. Hamas knew what would happen, they intended the result. The more Gaza suffers the more the world blames Israel.
Just because the Israeli politicians knew what was going to happen doesn't change this. Urban combat flattens cities.
Even if you take Israel at its word, Hamas only killed 1200 people. How many people did the Nazis or Imperial Japan kill before their cities were destroyed? And even that interpretation is completely neglecting the 78 years of terror and ethnic cleansing Israel has been inflicting on the Palestinians. 1,200 people is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Palestinians murdered by Israel prior to Oct 7th.
> some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah
Can you please remind me where they finally found Yahya Sinwar? And was that before or after they "level[ed] the city"? Do you think they would have found him if they left the city untouched? Why was he there in the first place?
> And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them
Hamas isn't following a ceasefire; they've been militarily degraded.
There's a causal relationship here: If the IDF hadn't destroyed so many fighting positions and booby-trapped buildings, there would have been many, many more attacks and IDF soldiers KIA.
You say "there's no justification" but unwittingly go on to point out exactly why it's justified.
The buildings were levelled with bulldozers for the most part after the civilians left during combat operations against the tunnel infrastructure and any remaining combatants. Not sure what the "surgical strikes" comment is about. Are you asking why weren't open spaces destroyed or attacked?
Collective punishment like launching rockets at civilian cities indiscriminately? Collective punishment like kidnapping civilians from music festivals?
> How does bulldozing a family home have any affect on a tunnel?
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place would have been overkill. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels themselves. And after you've bulldozed, it gets tougher to find those voids.
Heat trigger sensors can be had for a few dollars in China these days. As long as you got a decent electrical engineer and a supply chain... you can probably whip up a working prototype in a day or two.
You're right, that's totally doable.
However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive. It's unlikely an AliExpress package full of PIR sensors is going to make it's way through the blockade.
> However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive.
Yeah, but guns absolutely can. Iran is pretty good at supplying Hamas with everything they need to maintain control over the population - you might expect that after three years of absolutely brutal warfare Hamas would be beaten into submission, but clearly they are not.
That's kind of what they did. Just in the most heavy-handed indiscriminate way imaginable. But the booby-traps are cleared, and they did use teleoperated robots to do that
Ethnic cleansing and property damage are not the same thing. The claim of ethnic cleansing can't be determined now. I would say with almost complete certainty that Gazans will eventually be allowed to return to a rebuilt Rafah. There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent. Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now. So it is saying it will withdraw when Hamas disarms.
To be clear. There are cases where civilian property damage is a war crime. And we do need to evaluate that. But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
> The claim of ethnic cleansing can't be determined now.
When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing what exactly are you pretending to defend?
> There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent.
All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
> Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now.
They used to say they would withdraw when the hostages were returned. The goalposts were moved, as is typical.
> But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
> So they're all dead now? Ethnic cleansing complete?
That's not an argument.
> Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
Who made that argument? They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it, although some sure do have murderous beliefs but that's besides the point.
> Then why is it taking so long?
Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them. When they go too fast Western governments get public pressure, when it's slow nothing of importance happens.
Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
Sorry, nearly the entire population of these cities has been displaced, their homes all destroyed (not “damaged” but basically completely razed) and you’re saying it’s not ethnic cleansing because Israel says they will withdraw when Hamas disarms (e.g. when pigs fly)?
Over a million people live here. The estimate was that "448 to 593 civilians were killed due to coalition military operations", orders of magnitude less than Israel has killed. Basra was not wiped off the map or seized and annexed by coalition forces while the population was herded into a concentration camp.
It is simply slander against the US military to suggest they have in the 21st century done anything like what the IDF has done in this genocide.
There were weeks of airstrikes by the coalition and then artillery barage("Down Barage").
Basically Mosul was leveled before a single soldier entered it.
Here's historical satellite imagery. Go to 2017-08. You can see Mosul airport and surrounding facilities leveled, immediately adjacent to a city that is obviously a city and not 1) flattened Mosul airport or 2) similar in any way to the Rafah imagery above.
If you are describing Mosul as "leveled" then what adjective do you use to describe Rafah? It cannot possibly be also "leveled" given that vast areas of Rafah are actually a flat pile of rubble and Mosul is clearly a city with a destroyed airport, even in late 2017.
Or, if you are not a genocidal terror group, you actually go house-to-house and check. Difficult, dangerous, but not a war crime. That's why Mosul isn't a pile of rubble, even though ISIS was more than willing to use booby traps!
---
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
The problem with Ghaza is, that its the living proof that the peace process never could work. Charon returned it, des-ettlered it, the hippies moved near the border to help, they integrated them into the economy- only to get murdered on the 7th of october.
Not even egypt allows ghazans in- 10.000 euros for one passport is insane. And all those walls and checkpoints. And egypt is pretty islamist itself, so natural ally to hamas and the like.. but they know had that brush with the mb
There's bottomless evidence of israel crushing people alive with their armored bulldozers, as well as piling their civilian victims into unmarked mass graves and bulldozing over them, and there is no evidence that every building israel bulldozes is "booby trapped".
If you check the parent for this thread, the conversation is about Israel use of bulldozers to flatten Rafah, and the reason they do it is the same reason you toss any possible contaminated food. It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps. Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
Here is a link to the conversation topic to help clear your confusion:
Again, you're comparing the ethnic cleansing of an entire city to "tossing possibly contaminated food".
Take a step back and see the echoes of your words in history.
> It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps
That's life. That you might find it hard to achieve your military conquest without engaging in ethnic cleansing isn't a legal or moral excuse for perpetrating ethnic cleansing. Find a way that doesn't require ethnic cleansing or pick more realistic military objectives.
> Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
A forced expulsion of all existing inhabitants of a city without any right of return is commonly called "ethnic cleansing". So is razing the city. It's called that because it is cleansing the city of all people and/or traces of an ethnicity, like israel did here. Both constitute crimes against humanity, regardless of the excuse (the nazis had excuses for their similar crimes too, look how that went for them).
They didn't claim to. They are responding to a claim that all the houses were demolished because they all contained booby traps, because "might contain booby traps" is obviously a legally and morally insufficient justification for demolishing every home in the city and cleansing it of the previous inhabitant race. Your home might contain booby traps.
There isn't any requirement at all to preserve civilian infrastructure being used to military purposes by the other side. If you are using it to hide a tunnel and booby trap it, the enemy can and in every case destroy it rather than risk their own troops.
Take a look see of what's happening to peoples houses in Ukraine.
The words you are looking for are combatants. How does bulldozing a combatants home have any affect on a tunnel? Because it destroys the entrance to the tunnel. There are no innocents in Gaza.
This is true. Their crime is not having been born a Jew. According to the Torah, the Talmud and the Talakha, shkotzim and shiksim like us must be slaughtered as is the right and the duty of the Chosen Ones to honor G-d.
“ There are no innocents in Gaza.” funny, this is exactly what people said to defend what Hamas did on October 7th.
The babies and young children in Gaza are as innocent as they are everywhere else in the world. If you can’t see that, you should reexamine the lens you use to look at the world, it’s distorting things massively.
An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.
This is despicable, inhumane. It is generational trauma that started with the Nazis, now propagated to the poor souls around the new western colony of Israel.
> An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.
Israel left Gaza back in 2005 after forcibly expelling all Jews and only later on only blockaded Gaza due to weapons being smuggled in, so they tried that and it clearly didn't work. It seems unilateral disengagement is simply not a strategy that can be succesful here.
This is such a spin. A 20 year blockade (and allowing Qatar to fund Hamas) leading to the Oct. 7 attack - the justification - for the ongoing atrocities, framed as "unilateral disengagement" that was not successful. Therefore it is the Palestinian's at fault.
It is clear that Israel is the source of violence. Which makes sense, as it is a new Western colony occupying (and constantly expanding) land where people lived for thousands of years, under the justification THAT IT'S IN THE BIBLE.
A religious fundamentalist colony, funded and armed by the west.
> A 20 year blockade (and allowing Qatar to fund Hamas)
The blockade only started after Hamas was elected into power, to reduce their access to more missiles and weapons. The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons. But no matter what Israel does it is accused of being evil - both allowing the money through and blocking it would be considered wrong by the haters.
> a new Western colony occupying (and constantly expanding) land
The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years (with the return of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace).
Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
> The blockade only started after Hamas was elected into power
Israel has been restricting Gaza's economic viability since the 90s, much before the official blockade. (source: UN, wikileaks about Gaza economic policy)
> The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons
Is this a joke ? The humanitarian Israel that does not let international flotillas with aid reach Gaza ? Or the humanitarian Israel that kills children ?
> The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years
The spin of the century. They gave back uninhabitable desert, while continuing expansion all over Palestine.
> Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
Firstly, it has nothing to do with religion. Secondly, migration is quite different than a formation of a military state that constantly occupies land and expands, attacking its neighbours that has been there for millennia.
What they blocked was a sailboat carrying a bag of oranges and anti-Israel activists trying to carry out a media stunt for attention and virtue-signalling.
You obviously have an agenda here and are being disingenuous. I will disengage and leave you spewing your lies.
It's okay to have an agenda, just be honest about it please. Anti-Zionists tend to be pretty open about their agenda: opposing colonialism, ethno-states, genocide etc. It's telling that modern Zionists often seem less willing to express theirs.
You don’t call it colonialism when it’s Muslims migrating en masse to Europe, you don’t oppose ethno-states when they are Arab states that have cleansed all their Jews, and you don’t give a shit about actual genocides.
You have to be very careful when looking at this sort of data, from my understanding UN data only tracks UN 2720 Mechanism aid deliveries. I think you need to look at COGAT data to see total aid deliveries as there are non-UN aid deliveries as well that won't show up in the UN data.
Not only tunnels. Almost every house was rigged with explosives, like what happened in Gaza city, entire neighborhoods would explode once the troops arrive. If not rigged then it would be a stash of weapons somewhere in the house or under, you are not going to spend days on each house that is potentially rigged looking for a needle in a haystack.
Unfortunately the worst for Gaza will come after the Israeli elections. Israel has 2 years of politically favorable US president to clear out Gaza City once and for all to correct the mistake of 2005 withdrawal.
Prolonged "surgical" strikes continued so long that there is almost nothing left to operate on I guess. And your justification is that some farms are not completely destroyed? What a disingenuous remark.
- secondly had an option to accept a ceasefire and not immediately violate it 15 minutes later by firing barrages of unguided rockets into civilian neighborhoods
- had the option to actually respect the ceasefires and exchange hostages as scheduled
Gaza is being flattened because that is the only way Israel has to make sure this won't happen again. This is not unusual. Same situation as when the allies flattened nazi Germany.
But this time we are absolutely somewhat responsible because we reward hamas every time they do insane things that makes sure civilians get hurt.
If the understanding in media and among thought leaders back in 1945 were at todays levels we would have had people crying about the "genocide against the Germans"[1] and how the allies were the actual bad guys and we would still have a small nazi country in the middle of what is Germany today.
[1]: I mean seriously, at least 350 000 civilian ethnic Germans died in the war compared to well under 10 000 civilian Americans - and well under 2000 if we exclude sailors, so the numbers are very comparable
After the Allies flattened Nazi Germany (and Japan), civilized peoples looked at what they had done and said "wow we need to agree that this never happens again."
It's always funny hearing these defenses of Israel or Hamas which resolve to "hey what can you expect, they have the moral intuitions of cavepeople!"
> Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.
The targets(Hamas infrastructure) are located underneath and within civilian structures(which is a war crime). So it's quite obvious why these structures get destroyed when the military infrastructure of Hamas is targeted. This tactic is part of the Hamas strategy.
80 years ago "updated maps shows the destruction of the city of Berlin"
Same for Tokyo
Same but even more for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Not to mention Dresden
All of these have one thing in common: they are cities in countries which started a war and suffered the consequences of that decision. The fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were not in any way humane actions but when was war ever humane?
What belief is being expressed in your comments? That if someone wins a military conflict, any action they took is justified? That seems like either moral relativism or ahistorical, blind patriotism. The Soviets also won that war -- does that mean they were justified in their constellations of gulags?
If anything, the more apt historical comparison is to the Czechoslovakian and Polish partisans who wanted nothing less than to harry the Germans on (or within) their borders before the war. The British and French ambassadors (i.e. Qatar, etc) took great pains to try and convince the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments to restrain their partisans from attacking German people or positions, since they suspected Germany would use any and all provocation, no matter how small, as a casus belli. Anyone who's read a bit of WW2 history also knows how often the German government attempted to engineer exactly these kinds of events to justify their aggression.
It sounds straight out of the Likud playbook, doesn't it? But in what universe does an attack that kills 1000 people, a good number of them active duty soldiers, justify killing and maiming over 100,000 civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of buildings? If the shoe were on the other foot, this implies Hamas also has the moral imperative to do just the same to Israel. That's moral relativism for you.
Perhaps Europe had a better understanding of this topic when they instituted the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian law after the war than we do today, 100 years out, trying to now claim none of it actually matters and the means justify the ends.
It's so great to see that this thread is not filled with the usual violent, racist, hateful antizionist speech that accompanies anything to do with Israel on HackerNews. And people are pushing back against the genocide claim.
This result is exactly what the anti-Israel coalition wanted. They bet Bibi would go nuts and burn up the remaining global goodwill that Israel had, leaving them isolated.
It doesn't seem to have that many negative consequences for Israel though, and Oct 7 gave them enough justification for what they're doing in Gaza that they can get away with it internationally, and it has likely also limited the backlash they're getting for the escalating settlements in the West Bank.
Israeli here. Maybe I can give some helpful context.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.
Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.
My own country lost its mind after 2,977 people died in one terrorist attack a quarter of a century ago and we made many many bad decisions for a long time afterwards. It sucked. In October 2023 I had hoped that my countries well publicized example would help your country not make the same choices but it's hard to learn from other people's mistakes.
America didn't do things like this after 9/11, we tried to build democracies in a naive way, failed, and got a lot of people killed unnecessarily. Iraq was completely unjustified and based on fabrications.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
>"That's an entirely different category of crime" - cut the moralizing bullshit please. You have killed shitload of people and that is all that matters.
> Ooh, look at you and your amazingly nimble faculties for discerning one horrific catastrophe from another.
> What will you do for your next feat? Lecture us on the fine differences between lynchings and honor killings?
The guidelines include:
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Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
You've been politely asked to observe the guidelines several times over the years. Most others don't find it hard, and this is only a place where anyone wants to participate because enough people make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down.
Edit: looking over your comment feed, I even see you reminding others of the guidelines, so it's not that you don't know them. Please try harder to be an upstanding community member in all your participation here.
lol you flagged me but not the parent? I only posted this under the assumption this entire thread was going to be taken down for the blatant insanity and guideline violation of the parent comment
Please don't act like a jerk. That comment was already "flagged" and the user is now banned. The absence of that doesn't make your comment defensible. The whole thread is a hellscape, and I was doing what I could to deal with some of it, very late in the evening, in between other moderation cleanup work. It's not a good defense that you posted an awful comment, knowingly, only because you thought that moderators were going to clean up the mess anyway. We need people to raise the standards not drag them down further.
We've banned this account. We've asked you politely many times over the years to observe the guidelines, but still your comment feed is infused with belligerent, fulminatory rhetoric. When someone acts like this, eventually we have to assume they want to be banned. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to reforming your style of participation here.
Hamas offered the hostages to end the war within the first week or so, Israel refused, as they did many times later. They also got many warnings about the attack, even from Hamas. It was always about the destruction of Gaza, the situation is manufactured.
And then Israel has done everything it could to kill the hostages. Perhaps because it's afraid the stories might get out, of how Hamas treated them. I wonder why it might be afraid of that.
The actual violent civilian caused by coalition forces are estimated to be around 15,000 in Iraq and 10,000 in Afghanistan - over a period of 20y and populations around 25x that of Gaza.
Everyone knows that Israel essentially went on a rampage of revenge, which you basically seem to agree with given your explanation for the destruction (i.e. not military necessity while protecting civilian lives).
> But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge.
Yes you were. Gaza is just another Fallujah. Just another Raqqa. Just another Mosul.
Your nation had multiple states in its cross-hairs after 9/11 and every single one of them was destroyed, somehow.
The “War on Terror” is a racist war, and ‘terrorist’ is just the era’s n-word, which is a word that dyed in the wool racists can’t use openly any more so they invented a new one.
The USA has been destroying states its ruling, racist elite deem inferior for decades. Israel is just following the precedent set by its partner in crime.
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recoveries and in subsequent years grows above its pre-invasion value. Far from being "destroyed", Iraq is now doing better than ever.
How many people died in Iraq? The country is completely broken. Look what's happening in the latest Iran war.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
Iraq was in a bad state because of the previous war where US intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure like power, industry, hospitals and such. They wanted to create a failed state. This was after supporting Saddam in the Iran war and selling him chemical weapon precursors while knowing what he would use them for.
How did that one start? Oh yeah, it was because Saddam attempted to conquer a neighboring country, same way Russia attempted to conquer Ukraine. (Not the first time Saddam did this!)
>supporting Saddam in the Iran war
Imagine if we'd let Iran have its way with Iraq, offering zero support--what do you think the Iranians would've done to the Iraqis? Do you suppose it might've put Iraq in a bad state?
This is the typical "internet commenter mode of foreign policy moral analysis". Always focus the lens on alleged crimes of the US and other "western" powers. Never mention anything helpful which western powers did. Never suggest that non-western powers might have even a smidgen of culpability.
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
No but the way you wrote it you seemed to be okay with US supporting Iraqs invasion of Iran but totally against it when it came to Kuwait. So your opinion and morality is not consistent. I can say that Both wars were bad and unnecessary and that Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I can also say that the current Iran regime should not be in power or even exist. But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor, even compared to their enemies, who are only their enemies because of US meddling in the region. I hope you can straighten out your moral compass at some point.
More distortions on your part. (I notice you said nothing about the hospital point.) The US supported Iraq when Iran's counterattack was going too well, to prevent Iraq from being conquered by Iran, a regime you yourself say "should not be in power".
>Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I don't think this is intrinsically bad. The US also supported Stalin during WW2. Our rapprochement with China helped lift millions out of poverty. Were those mistakes?
>But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
This is some serious mental gymnastics to blame the US for a rebellion motivated in part by anti-Americanism. By your own logic, maybe the US is actually in the wrong for not giving the Shah even more support in order to crush the rebels.
If anti-Americanism caused a rebellion that you acknowledge as destructive, why do you lend support to anti-Americanism as an ideology?
You've created a catch-22 where the US can be the bad guy even if it supports a leader that's better than the plausible alternative for the country in question. What if the USSR had turned Iran into another satellite like in Eastern Europe? Ask the Poles how they feel about life under the Soviets.
I think these questions are simply not as obvious as you're making them out to be.
>The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor
We haven't initiated a war of conquest since the late 1800s. Even being a superpower after WW2, our territory actually shrunk when we gave the Philippines their independence "for free".
How many historic great powers can you name which were so restrained when it comes to territorial conquest? Considering the great powers during WW2: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, British Empire, French Empire, Italian Empire, USSR, PRC, USA. Who among those is the angel that you would've liked to see crowned global leader?
The world has generally become a much better place while the US has been hegemonic:
This is a false equivalence. 9/11 is not Oct 7 and the US is nothing like Israel, in fact the US was attacked for (amongst other things) it's support of Israel. America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.
Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception. Gaza is a refugee camp of descendents of people displaced from their homes during the Nakba. There's a saying there: "My Grandmother is older than Israel" -- and it is true.
To look at Oct. 7 as some sort of isolated incident ignores the history of the project: After the holocaust Western Jews decided to move to an area already occupied by other people based on some loose notion of having claim to it millennia ago. They used western governments to push this concept forward. Sure, America displaced Native Americans, but Israel did it during modernity... and those natives also happen to have access to modern heavy weaponry... what did they expect to happen?
I think Israeli people are ingenious and talented but they picked the wrong patch of land to occupy -- the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is as sacred as the Vatican and you have 1.5 billion (often crazy) Muslim people revolving around this sacred conceptualization. This is why the common people even of places like UAE/Saudi all back Palestine despite the political actions of such states. It is a recipe destined for disaster, especially with the Iran war de-coupling the Gulf States from the USA. It seems to me there is no way out.
You have no clue what genocide means, and your nonchalant careless use of it denigrates those who were actually victims of it, like those in Rwanda or Burma.
Perhaps educate yourself about the meaning of different words before typing long missive.
Yes, the 4% of the Palestinian population they've killed is definitely not a form of expression. Like somehow killing only matters if you talk about how fun it is first.
For the record that's greater than the % of Bosniaks killed in the Bosnia genocide.
4% isn’t much in the grand scheme of things and again, yes you have to be able to prove the intent. Pretty basic legal principle. It could be 85% and that wouldn’t by itself prove genocide.
Do you guys even bother being minimally informed before commenting? Like, Wikipedia is right there…
You (and the contributors to that particular article) seem to not know the difference between war crimes (which Israel has probably committed) and genocide, which is much more onerous to prove. What you should be doing is looking at how genocide is defined generally and at how genocide cases have been prosecuted historically. Only by changing the goalposts of how genocide is defined can you attempt to construe what’s happening in gaza as genocide, which is what that article (which presupposes that what is happening in gaza is genocide by its title, obliterating any notion of objectivity) does throughout.
Put simply, if you use any legally accepted definition of genocide (as a matter of the historical record) then what is happening in gaza doesn’t even come close. And of course the legally accepted definition is ultimately all that matters. That’s very different from whether laymen think it’s genocide because what’s happening hurts their feelings.
Sorry, can you point me to the part where an Israeli military or political leader has expressed the view that all or some Palestinians should be murdered because they are Palestinians?
I missed that part when I looked, and for that I apologise.
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
I said what Israel is doing is not genocide as that word is defined as a matter of law. Where the fuck did I say that what was happening in gaza is a good thing or 'okay'?
Native Americans overwhelmingly died from Smallpox that was accidentally brought over by Europeans. There is no credible evidence that the transmission was malicious.
In return, Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis. Fair trade? Probably not, although the all-time death totals aren’t as incomparable as you might think.
Don't understand why I'm being downvoted for a historically accurate and amoral characterization of what has truly happened. Human rights, racial equality, and international law "became a thing" at a specific point in human history. Israel is a part of modernity while Native Americans are not... and no, I don't think it was right to displace the native Americans.
Palestine is sacred land that was colonized by Britain and handed over to create Israel. Israel proceeded to displace and murder large numbers of people to give birth to it's creation. It is a colonial project. Westerners do not understand the meaning of this. Mecca and Jerusalem are significant to a very large number of people. Whether or not they are irrational for believing this is besides the point -- it is a material reality.
These are just facts. I'm not the type of person that debates whether or not something is morally justifiable or not.
When you understand that 99.99% of humanity is only capable of using words to express psychological valence or to manipulate rather than assay truth, then political discourse makes a lot more sense.
The only thing that 99.99% of humanity is capable of navigating and assaying with words is their own personal financial situation, their business, their portfolio, etc. In this domain everyone is a philosopher.
Does this help you sleep? Rationalization is a coping mechanism.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k". Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
> It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
This is just an overt admission that you are incapable of engaging in political discourse, you’re incapable of using words to express anything but your internal emotional state at that given moment. If it makes you feel any better, this is how 99.99% of humanity operates.
The only requirement to join the world's leading association of genocide scholars is paying a $30 membership fee. No expertise required. This makes it trivial to manipulate the association for propaganda purposes. Its declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was approved by less than 20% of its members. The remaining 80% were never even asked or never voted on it. An acquaintance of mine has been a member since 2013 and is a real scholar with genuine expertise on the Rwandan Genocide. She was not made aware that this resolution was being proposed and learned of its adoption in the press.
This is a very insane way of navigating the world intellectually. It will not work out for you or your society.
Since the topic is Israel, note that Israel is the only developed country in the world with a fertility rate above replacement levels. Meaning that Israelis are getting married and having children, their society is healthy and growing. That cannot be said for your society.
They’re not all actually decreasing in population, they are increasing via mass migration, legal and illegal. That is how the elite strata of Western European societies and the Anglo sphere countries (US, Canada, Australia) are dealing with this.
In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.
I don't think appealing to how good a country is at breeding is a valid counter to its genocidal tendencies. That's probably the strangest argument I've ever seen.
Well we’ve already established that the use of the term genocide is nonsense, I’m arguing something different. In this case that the type of defective thinking displayed in the idea you need to be a member of some institution to apply your intellect is in part responsible for the fact every other developed society is dying, it has to do with agency and libido (the psychological sense of the term).
50k civilians dead out of a population of 2.2M. The population of Gaza has increased since the war began. That’s not a genocide insofar as the word means anything.
If it was a genocide you would expect basically 90% of the population of Gaza to be dead. Israel controls the water supply and the food into Gaza, they could just poison the food and water, dropping bombs isn’t even necessary.
I don’t know how to make it more simple than that.
"Destroying all the buildings" is already a genocide on its own. In the Genocide Convention this would fall under "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part".
I support Israel, but not wholeheartedly. I understand how Nakba was a matter of survival of your people. But why is this still going on today? Why is Israel continuing to expand settlements? Can you not understand how Palestinians must feel to constantly live in fear of being pushed out of their own homes? This is what gives me heartache. Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
> Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
"shortly after". Let's just forget for a moment that Israel made that happen, intentionally. What happened during that "shortly", was there a food blockade?
It was an automated system that immediately responded within 60s to rockets sent from Gaza. Shoot one rocket from Gaza, get the building destroyed within 60 seconds. Also, the first rocket is a war crime (indiscriminate attack), the second is a military target.
You can't just say "Israel bombed Gaza" and play the victim, omitting information.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.
It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become crazy.
Interesting insights, thanks. I was raised Protestant (in Europe) and have similar impression of Evangelicals. I'll never be able to wrap my head around some of that shit.
Nothing makes them more "worthy" of empathy. It's that I have somewhat more of a personal connection to them. During my studies the Arab Christians on the campus in Tel Aviv were some of the most peaceful and kind people I met over there and it influenced me greatly.
They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:
I am a Christian by religion, born in Nazareth, Israel to
Arabic-speaking Christian parents and brought up in Kufur Yasief,
the hiding place of Josephus Flavius
Persecution for Christians in Israel and Palestine is not on the
scale it is in Egypt, but it is there nonetheless. It must be added
that there is a growing number of Jewish-background, and Russian
Christians in Israel, who suffer more persecution from the
Jewish state and people.
...
Christian Arabs in Israel/Palestine live in a climate of fear
and therefore hypocrisy. Pressure on Arabic-speaking Christians
to tow the Muslim Arab nationalist line is so great, that we are even
afraid of complaining about injustices against us.
We suffer:
• At the hands of Jews, because we are seen as:
o Arabs: and so enemies, and primitive.
o Christian: and so gentiles. WE are often blamed, by association,
for the European holocaust.
• At the hands of Muslims because we are Christian, and "infidels."
We are often punished for “western” bias towards Israel.
The position you’re describing is essentially the modern left position in Israeli politics. Again, we’ll see in the upcoming election, but not everyone here supports the current goings on in the West Bank. The “Palestinian situation” is a major question in Israeli politics, both wrt Gaza and the wb.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
Israel rejects the two-state solution. They seem to be aggressively pursing a one-state solution, incorporating all of former Palestine (and perhaps beyond) into Israel. Obviously this doesn't include taking in the people living there, giving them Israeli citizenship. People will be killed or expelled. All while Israel continually claims to be the victim "look at what those people trying to stop us stealing their land did to us now."
comment said: "rejecting two state solution". poll numbers I see is around half rejects it, not 80%.
comment said: "killing or expelling all people in former palestine". there is no poll numbers for that specifically and the closest numbers for expelling people I see online is less than half, not 80%.
now you say "Palestinian eradication". OK, show the polls about 80-90% of israel supporting "Palestinian eradication".
I said this is what the government seems to be doing, I don't know or care about the general population. A government can't stay in power without supporters and collaborators, however.
* Well, implied, by "Israel" I mean the state, the government.
So this situation is a bit like when the Nazis invaded Poland and then said, we have to destroy Poland because if we don't, they'll kill all our Nazi soldiers.
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
As someone that’s watched the conflict and learned about the history, the Nakba and the displacement of Palestinians far before the years of Malcolm X and Martin Luther, the conflict with Palestine didn’t start on October 7th as this comment purports.
When I didn’t have any context of the history, I took comments like this one at face value.
However it is difficult to take comments like this in good faith as it frames Israelis as folks who are pushed beyond their conscience by their government, similar to Americans in current America, when the statistics are to the contrary.
This is the typical type of propaganda that many supporters post and write hoping to reinforce the narrative to the uninformed folks of their innocence.
While I can acknowledge that there are genuinely folks who oppose the ongoing genocide, what the world ought to look out for is whether after the next set of elections, an actual change of power and direction occurs.
And when I point to elections, the potential replacement candidates all support the same policies of genocide and expulsion. Some may be less, some are absolutely more, but if nothing changes, that is on the Israeli people.
As Americans hold responsibility for the current state of politics, Israeli’s hold the responsibility for their country as well.
> Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
it is obscene that one of the perpetrators is the top comment here. if you want "peace" then stop victim blaming, stop pretending that "israeli society" is anything other than a murderous apartheid and etho-religious supremacist colony. you are settling on stolen land, i will not take your word or your sham elections for anything.
If we have to look at how October 7 shaped Israeli culture, we also have to look at how all of the dates leading up to October 6 shaped Palestinian culture. How many people were killed in the West Bank on October 6 - does that register, anywhere?
For me (France), it's not October 7, it's the 9 previous months. From January 1st, French TV was showing about 1,000 rockets per month sent onto residential Israeli quarters. Sure beautiful pictures of the counter-missiles destroying them in flight, but I remember thinking:
"How long can Israel counter 30 rockets a day? What's the cost?"
"How is not each of them (7,000 in total) a war crime by Palestinians?"
"Sure it's not Palestinians it's Hamas, but the last time there was an election, they've elected Hamas, so what do you do?"
"Seriously, how is this not 7,000 counts of war crimes? Why is Israel not reacting? Why is Israel militiae into Gaza to catch the authors?"
Where are you getting this numbers from, I am unable to find anything close to 1000 rockets throughout 2023? In May between 1000 and 2000 shells and rockets were fired in response to the Israelian operation Shield and Arrow resulting in two deaths and ten injuries.
Can you try to free your brain from political bullshit for a moment and think which kind of a person can come up with a plan to kill civilians not in the heat of battle, but with premediation and purpose? And in which kind of society this idea could have a wide enough support to be implemented.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
Someone who has no ability to accurately target because the other side destroyed it?
What should one do in war if they only have improvised rockets available, and surrendering will guarantee your extermination? You'd throw them in the general direction of the enemy, right? And the enemy knows this and will not put civilians in range of the rockets - unless they plan to use them as human shields. It is the same reason the German trenches were not full of clockmakers.
> Can you try to free your brain from political bullshit for a moment and think which kind of a person can come up with a plan to kill civilians not in the heat of battle, but with premediation and purpose?
But that is what settlers movement and Israel army were doing for decades?
Do you not see the article you are commenting on? The state of Israel is being accused with evidence ofsimilar crimes on a scale an order of magnitude larger. I just can't stand the hypocrisy....
I just looked it up and on Oct 6th Israeli 'Settlers' murdered 19-year-old college student named Labib Mohammed Dumaidi. The state of Israel later teargassed his funeral.... Perfect example of needed context if you are truly trying to understand Oct 7th
> If you want to understand the Israeli perspective
What perspective is there on murdering a hundred thousand people, starving millions, razing entire cities? this isn't a game you can play by shuffling around some moral relativism, to gain a better "perspective". This is pure unadulterated evil on a scale that can never be erased from the conscience of every Israeli citizen for generations.
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
While I vehemently disagree with the IDFs handling and it's hard to deny the genocidal effort, let's not forget Americans reacted very similarly after 9/11. People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Revenge and collective punishment may be natural human reactions to a terror attack but that doesn't make them justified. Especially when those in charge anticipated the attack and deliberately exploited it.
> People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
Israel, in the worst blunder in its history, disengaged from Gaza and left Gaza to be purely in the control of the Palestinians. The Palestinians elected Hamas, which killed of Fatah and took control of Gaza, leading to the following 20 years of escalating violence which reached a peak in the 7th October.
The only reasonable conclusion from the Gaza experiment of giving control to the Palestinians is that they will only use that to attack Israel. The mistake of the disengagement will not be repeated.
Nobody in Israel is willing to give Palestinians control anymore. We've tried that and we see how it went completely wrong. Thank god it was just Gaza because if 7th october attacks came from the west bank, Israel would be gone.
The most peace that can be achieved is sadly in the current situation where Israel maintains control of the Palestinians and they don't get a chance to organize another 7th of October from the west bank, which is just few kilometers from Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians authority can't even win elections and they have stopped doing elections. If they were to resume elections, presumably Hamas would also take control of the west bank too. The majority of Palestinians would support 7th of October attacks on the rest of Israel. Which is an existential threat to Israel.
It's worth noting that the whole notion of having Palestinian "democratic" regime alongside Israel is as far from arabic culture as possible. There are no arabic democracies. Even after the arabic spring, none of the arabic countries developed a functioning democracy. So the current situation of the Palestinians not having a "fully democratic" regime is actually the norm in all arabic countries. The most democracy that Palestinians could hope for is the current situation under Israeli control. If the entirety of Israel vanished tommorow, and the Palestinians were given democratic elections, they would immediately devolve into an Islamic state with Sharia law where the average Palestinian has less freedom than today.
So anyone judging Israel for the continued control over the Palestinians needs to remember both what would happen to Israel without this control (genocide) and what would have happened to the Palestinians themselves (Sharia theocracy with less rights).
There might be some Tel-Aviv detached people who support the Palestinians, but I guaranty you there are no Palestinian supporters in the Gaza adjacent zones which were hit in the 7th of October.
Sentiments like that are an excuse. You could have said something very similar about the IRA in Ireland before its independence from the UK, or the ANC in South Africa during apartheid. You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression. If it was you, is that really what you’d do?
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
There have been attacks on Israel long before there was "oppression" of Palestine. You're just making a circular argument, you can say the same thing to justify what Israel is doing. I think saying Hamas is justified is actually grotesque, they also starve the people of Palestine, sell of children and women into sex slavery. They aren't Robin Hood like victors. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
There are Street View photos that look like they were taken from someone driving down one of the side streets so you can pretty much walk on it. You can see apartment buildings, local shops, people going about their day... It’s heart-wrenching to contrast that life with the current aerial view, with nothing but rubble and destruction.
How did they get those cameras inside and footage out? Isn't it an open air prison without electricity or internet, where you are shot immediately when trying to approach?
They don't, that's the point. All of the street view footage is from before the start of the current genocide. Gaza is under one of the most complete internet and media blackouts on earth, even the roaming international sim card loophole has been closed.
I did look at them and the destruction in both was horrific. I'm not saying that the conflicts are in anyway comparable, but both include fairly comprehensive destruction of civilian areas.
The difference is that in Mosul the destruction is a consequence of the combats, Rafah has been demolished house by house just like the nazis did in Warsaw.
The Nazis are not infamous for the demolition of property. What they did in Warsaw was kill 90% of the Jewish population. No one cares about the buildings (many of which were actually demolished by the Soviets after the war, to make place for apartment buildings).
I know there’s an attempt by some to simultaneously downplay what the Nazis did while exaggerating the evils of Israel, but no - Rafah is not “just like the Nazis”.
A closer comparison would be the Egyptian demolition of Rafah on its side of the border in 2013. Both were done after the population had been evacuated, and to create a buffer zone along the border.
Houses are often demolished by force, to build freeways or larger buildings for housing. It’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s not “like the Nazis”.
Not true at all. Buildings are where culture happens. Systematically destroying them is a mechanism of genocide because it erases the memory in addition to the people. And yes this was a deliberate process by the Nazis [1].
> It’s not “like the Nazis”.
Actually, if the Nazis did something and then somebody else did it too, it's exactly like the Nazis.
> Houses are often demolished by force, to build freeways or for housing projects. It’s not a nice thing to do...
You can't be serious. This is not a demolition of houses, this is the demolition of an entire city. Not for a housing project, but to erase the traces of the life human beings had there, all their collective and personal history. This- despite being far from the levels of human life destruction perpetrated by the Nazis- is genocidal in intent. When you roam around a city emptied by the war and coldly, methodically try to make it vanish from the face of the earth as if it never existed, house by house, you are not far in spirit from what the Nazis did to Warsaw.
Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.
Mosul is a large city and Rafah is one neighborhood in Gaza. There are many buildings remaining in Gaza (if you look at other parts of the map).
Rafah has been demolished to create a buffer zone near the border (after the population had been evacuated). Egypt likewise has demolished Rafah on its side of the border in 2013 to create a security zone.
> "Israel is allowed to unilaterally declare their home is no longer allowed to exist and I don't see a problem with that"
Just translating what accepting that "demolished to create a buffer zone" is a reasonable justification for levelling Rafah (and a lot of the rest of Gaza) means. Those peoples lives, homes and businesses are expected to just be subject to the whims and desires of the Israeli government all while they allow(ed) the blockage of aid going into the territory and fired on the camps they drove people into.
Interesting. Despite the images of Mosul (e.g. on the NYTimes) being presumably selected to show the areas with largest impacts, the destruction is in patches and you can see many houses still standing. In Rafah, every single house has been razed to the ground.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel.
A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
I take a harsher stance: that we should expect division to be sewn among us by our adversaries, and harden ourselves accordingly through open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate (rather than flame wars, especially in popular contexts like tv and social media).
I find it strange that the antidotes to a lot of the bad stuff going on today is basic enlightement stuff: cultivating a citizenry who value evidence-based worldview, education and rule of law. Yet it feels like that is increasingly slipping from our fingers.
The "bad stuff going on today" that you call is the opposite of enlightenment - citizenry based on emotions, tribal and racial affiliations, and rule of strength. There are countries and media that actively promote such a world, since it's easy to get rich and powerful in circumstances like these.
> open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
I cry every time as I remember the PTSD that those poor Israelis have faced, after having been forced against their will to systematically murder 70,000 unarmed civilians.
> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
The Arab world and the liberal left require the eternal enemy of the evil Jew to distract from their failings and justify their own political violence.
"The sad thing" is that 100k+ humans were brutally killed and the lives of 2 million others were destroyed. The second sad thing is that Germany will never learn. Also, I'd suggest you look up the definition of the word "terrorist".
Hamas's own Health Ministry says 70,000 dead, not 100,000, including around 10,000 natural - all deaths for the last 3 years have been labelled as matryr - and that figure does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. By Hamas' own military figure pre-war and Israel's war assessments, up to half could be non-civilian.
You are quoting Wikipedia which quotes an article by the Guardian that the IDF had identified ~9000 Hamas/PIJ casualties by name. It is a logical fallacy to then assume the remainder are not part of Hamas/PIJ. Further, identifying adversary combatant deaths by name is an extraordinary high standard for warfare and is applied to no other conflict on earth.
Oh boy, more disinformation and "we do this better than any other military" bullshit.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
Hamas's Health Ministry was destroyed in April 2024 and the official numbers stopped increasing at that time because the people who published the numbers were dead, but we continue citing then because they are the lowest numbers that it's possible to justify and of course we want Israel to look as good as possible. If you would extrapolate that rate of killing through to the present, it's about 500,000 deaths.
The Israel stock market is up about 100% since October 7.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
If there’s no nuclear weapons program then periodically bombing these nuclear sites shouldn’t be a problem. They’re just empty bases built deep underground for fun.
I think he was talking about a political war. Now we have on HN's home page a link pointing to someone using the term holocaust against Israel/Jews, which is quite perverse if you know history.
Comparing Israel to the Nazis and the treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust has been a standard piece of rhetoric for many decades before October 7, it’s not new at all. October 7 was just the natural expression of such hatred, just killing as many Israelis as possible in as brutal a fashion as possible.
Basically the kind of rhetoric and hatred you’re describing is not a result of October 7, October 7 is precisely the ultimate expression of it.
We’re basically just taking about the human capacity and tendency towards evil. This is just a fact of life to be dealt with, there is no solution to it.
There's no high ground here. There were riots in Israel after the slightest bit of pushback against torturing prisoners via sexual assault.
Decades prior to Oct 7th, the IDF was shooting children through fences and ethnically cleansing villages.
Israel has been doing a similar thing to "1st amendment auditors", the people who harass random people and police in order to get a reaction and sue. They got the reaction, now Israel is attempting to play the victim. You cannot put people in fences, force them through militarized checkpoints, and allow settlers to harass and assault people in their homes with military backing and even begin to pretend to be the victim.
Yes, it turns out Hamas didn't commit mass rape on Oct 7. The NY Times, who made up the lie, eventually admitted it was a lie and published an article about how they lied about it.
Yeah some people really go overboard with their rhetoric, I can only imagine how awful you must feel. Anyway, can we now get back to discussing how entire cities in Gaza have been razed and their inhabitants displaced or killed?
There've been many holocausts throughout history - after the WW2 one, people started studying them more closely and came up with the more scientific term "genocide", which means the same thing. Nothing in the definition says that one couldn't be perpetuated by a group that happens to be Jewish.
There are millions of humans in Israel, Jews and Arabs and others who have a great life. Israelis, including the Israeli Arabs, are generally very happy.
The neuroticism around Gaza is mostly a western phenomenon, Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
It’s easy for non-Western people to understand that when you invade a country and rape and murder 1000+ people the response is exactly what happened.
> Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
Any sources that aren’t just anecdotes? I’d love to see some details about “Arabs” understanding and respecting the atrocities in Gaza, because many news organizations including English available ones like Al-Jazeera don’t seem to.
I hear that myth repeated sometimes but never with any evidence. Like a masterful propagandist, "monideas" has a talent for making claims that are hard to believe but also hard to prove wrong.
If you traveled to Jerusalem and spent 5 minutes there you would see Arabs and Jews get along just fine. Gazans are living in tents surrounded by ruins but Arabs and Jews in Israel itself, at least in Jerusalem, still have warm relations.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Since October 7 Israel has signed major missile defense and military tech export deals with various European countries including just recently Greece which is also part of a special military alliance with Israel and Cyprus.
Also in general, the less reliant Israel is on foreign powers, especially the US, the better for Israel. The waning support in the US is a good thing, there are various domestic Israeli political reasons why this was bad.
To the extent that this international isolation exists and is growing it is a good thing.
I admire your optimism for the future. I cannot share it despite living in peace, stability and a region much les affected by planetary changes than others.
> Since October 7 Israel has signed major missile defense and military tech export deals with various European countries including just recently Greece which is also part of a special military alliance with Israel and Cyprus.
Often times when communicating an idea you need to repeat yourself.
In this case I also mentioned the Greece Israel Cyprus military alliance which I didn’t before. This is an alliance which is due to the threat from Turkey which transcends a lot of the petty ideological issues with Israel coming from Western Europe.
Or it's an indication that you're trying to push an agenda (Israel = great, Israel = winning) which from your other comments in this thread is pretty evidently the case.
And it would be one thing if you were doing this in a thread discussing geopolitics, but this one is about satellite evidence showing the total destruction of a city. And your response is to boost the state that caused this?
Total destruction of cities is generally the way that wars end. This is simply a historical fact and anyone who studied history with any sort of interest would understand this.
This wouldn't be an answer to anything, even if it were true (which it isn't): how exactly does this translate to praising states that persecute such destruction?
Maybe they would find it easier to get trade partners if they hadn't spent most of a hundred years murdering the extended families of all their potential trade partners. Somehow I'm finding it hard to have sympathy for their inability to find trade partners.
Eh, those are short term gains. Popular opinion has shifted away from Israel since they've increased their attacks and basically no longer hide the fact they want to eradicate Palestinians wherever they may be. They can't throw antisemitism rhetoric anymore because people have caught on to their victim syndrome. What they're doing is the same thing the US has been doing for decades, creating terrorists by oppressing entire generations and it will end the same way, eventually, when a critical mass opposes their regime or until they elect someone as dumb as the US did and throws all pretenses out the window. They either succeed in their genocide or all they're doing is motivating people who will one day have an impact.
You can use the term Palestinians if you want. Many of the people who engaged in atrocities on October 7th were Palestinian civilians, not Hamas.
For example the Bibas children and their mother were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians and sold to a Salafi terrorist organization within Gaza, they weren’t taken by Hamas. This is why they were strangled to death and there were issues recovering their bodies for the hostage exchanges.
They were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians unaffiliated with Hamas and handed over to a different terrorist organization which had different priorities than Hamas.
What Israel has done in Gaza is absolutely not justice, but if you categorize killing babies as evil, then you should remember that the Bibas kids were also babies.
You are wrong, this is the mindset that allows such atrocities to become possible, even from non-psychopaths. Sadly, to a lot of people, there are not "humans" but "enemies", and once that's given, any atrocity follows.
Fascinating idea. On individual level I wouldn't agree, because whenever you take a strong stance about something you also tend to create enemies. Same for small groups of people. On state level however, it does sound more reasonable and should be the overall principle at least. Scale matters.
This seems like some serious rose colored outlook. Support for Israel in their patron state has absolutely plummeted in the last year. Support is almost certain to be cut back sharply by the next administration and might go to zero in the near future.
Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.
I wish I could share your optimism, but the fact of the matter is that American politicians are beholden to their sponsors on both sides of the aisle, and the military industrial complex and American imperialism which Israel is a part of, are both popular initiatives among their primary funding sources.
Meanwhile, most of the voter base (perhaps understandably) cares more about domestic issues than they do about the plight of people on the other side of the world who they are killing and exploiting with their tax dollars.
Given all this, I don't know how you can be so certain that anything will change with a new administration, even with polling demonstrating that voters do disapprove of support for Israel now. Most of the people who disapprove of funding Israel don't care about it strongly enough for it to be a significant factor in their engagement with electoral politics (which for most people is also just limited to voting once every 2 to 4 years)
Also Mileikowsky and the roving gang of international Zionists and Chosen Ones have veto power over 90% of the governments in the world.
The US congress and senate get their laws and edicts directly from the top brass of the IDF.
Every single head of state in the Eurozone (bar Perro Sanxe, who is controlled by Morocco instead) and every single bureaucrat have to follow the rules set down by Israel, lest the union collapse.
They're everywhere you look. You don't have to fall for Hasbara or Unit 8200 propaganda about how this totally means you're an irredeemable monster, they are the ones who are pushing this.
I didn't fall for anything, I simply have two working eyes and the capacity to connect facts together.
Look at your own link. Feel free to go through my comment history. White genocide? Don't make me laugh. Cultural Marxism? I sure hope so! I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.
But that doesn't mean I'm blind, or that I'm willing to ignore the truth that is staring me right in the face. Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel. There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.
I will not willingly ignore the fact that I'm considered nothing more than cattle fit for slaughter to the chosen ones, nor to everything that they have done with their power in my country.
Even if it puts me at odds with my ideological cohort, I only hope that they are able to fully open their eyes too, soon.
> White genocide? Don't make me laugh. Cultural Marxism? I sure hope so!
There are many beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy, obviously not all of those may by applicable to you.
> I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.
Antisemitism often exists in both left wing and right wing extremists groups, the international Jewish conspiracy beliefs likewise do as well.
> Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel.
It seems the opposite is true overall.[0]
> There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.
There are deep divisions within factions in Israel, to claim otherwise is to ignore reality.
Somehow a powerful state army destroying homes and killing civilians is not "terrorist". It's only "terrorist" if the weak try to respond in kind, using means available to them. It's almost like "terrorist" is a propaganda term used by the strong against the weak who try to resist.
As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.
This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong, like saying indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined mostly by lehalmimmgirwnts, built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy, in South Africa.
The problem is the inexorable logic of war - fighting everyone everywhere all the time - has led to the war expanding until it collides with an enemy that is actually comparable to Israel, i.e. Iran. And that war has now expanded to include the world's supply of oil.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
It's hard to blame Iran when they literally weren't doing anything until we attacked them. You don't blame a child for punching back against the school bully - unless you're also a bully.
I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.
Any rocket or bullet turned against Israel for the past 20 years has its roots in Iran. Iran controlled Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and Iraq through its militias.
If you knew anything about how Iran is doing this, you'd know they are happy to throw money or materiel at anyone who can put together a force against Israel, or even Serbia during the Bosnian war. They hardly direct or control anything afield, other than being mostly ideologically aligned. They don't need to pull puppet strings like you say. They happily work with resistance forces regardless of sect.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
I'm confused about your opening line. First you say the terrorists won, then you continue to elaborate how the terrorists are losing. So they won but now they are losing again?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadhttps://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649... - then click "show historical imagery" next to the search box.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/google-maps-...
Each to their own beliefs but this is propoganda.
Please try posting more constructive content than unconvincing, blanket denials. It doesn't make for good discussion.
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
See this for more background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiations_to_end_apartheid_...
This could hopefully happen somewhat faster with Israel, given that the government isn't a literal Nazi remnant, as the South African government was. (Though, ironically, the main arms supplier to South Africa during the arms embargo was Israel, often reselling weapons from the United States. Sigh.)
"By the late 1980s, the South African state was in profound crisis, crippled by international sanctions, a stagnant economy, and widespread resistance. Recognizing the unsustainable nature of the perpetual conflict, the government under P.W. Botha began tentative, secret contact with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa_(1948%...
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-09-...
The peaceful route didn't work. Only idiots will think continuing with the status quo will result in anything different.
I heard the recordings the ecstatic guys screaming with pleasure that they murdered as many Jews as they could, one guy called his mother in ecstatic joy, it was absolutely sick shit.
Ukraine could blow up children's schools in Russia couldn't it? But it doesn't. Russia does though...
What a bizarre claim and outright lie. They kept them locked up and starving. They could’ve just dropped them off near the border with Israel or Egypt, or handed them over to the Red Cross (which wasn’t even allowed to visit and check on the hostages).
I cited my source. But there were also sources in October 2023 about Hamas wanting to return the hostages. The Haaretz articles reveal that it was privately even earlier than expected and the Netanyahu was warned of the attack in advance yet he chose to do nothing about it.
Why not just drop them off? Well for 1 they actually wanted the hostages to get home alive. The IDF didn't care about killing hostages as they relentlessly bombed the region.
Why not let the Red Cross see them? Because the IDF was closely watching and, shocker, if you take someone directly to the hostages guess what building gets blown up next?
[1] https://quincyinst.org/research/the-eighth-front-inside-isra...
This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.
When it's about Hamas imprisoning hostages: "Hamas kept them underground in chains in near starvation conditions. This is abject insanity."
When it's about Israel murdering hostages: "Well, you know... We don't always agree on right and wrong. That's why different countries exist. Is this discussion really fruitful?"
They were killed because of mistaken identity, which is horrible, but it happens in war, some IDF soldiers died from friendly fire.
Hamas definitely didn’t ask protection for the hostages, they asked protection for themselves.
There are many hostages reports of Hamas terrorists saying to hostages that if IDF will draw near, they will shoot the hostages.
Let’s use occams razor hear.
Option A - mistaken identity because the enemy wears no uniform, embeds itself in civilians, and uses inhumane tactics to confuse IDF soldiers (like putting explosives on dead bodies, placing speakers with hostages recording as bait)
Option B - IDF decided to kill the hostages they came to rescue for some evil reason
And I see you’re sticking with the “evil IDF just decided to kill these 3 hostages without any reason” plot.
And yes this is true but the reason you couldn’t comprehend his point is because his point is insane.
That Hamas was open extremely early on in the conflict to negotiations for returning hostages and Israel and the US knew this while they waged a bombing campaign and pretended like Hamas wasn't trying or willing to return hostages.
Negotiations weren't happening because Israel didn't want those negotiations, not because they weren't available.
And, I don't know if you are aware, but negotiations involve give and take. Israel didn't need to "traded for all of the concessions Hamas wanted in exchange for them".
The reason the hostages weren't returned sooner is because Israel didn't want them. In 2024 Hamas accepted all of Israel's terms multiple times only for Israel to change terms. Israel knew they'd have fewer justifications for their genocide if they got the hostages back.
That's my point.
UN has no such power. I am still amazed how people do not get this.
Members need to vote for such things to happen. It wouldn't, not in this climate.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
If the UN went into Gaza, got attacked by Iran, then had to respond, next minute they're attacking a close Russian ally, and maybe even China might have to get involved in that.
What would've been good is if October 7 didn't happen, and that goes for both sides.
> Iran is helping Russia
lol, no, other way around. Though the Russia hasn't really been involved with Iran since Ukraine started. It's actually China that's the biggest Iranian trade partner.
The only party that'd be upset over UN peace keepers in Gaza is Israel.
Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year. The best implication of that 'accepting borders with Palestinian majority on both sides on them', which is just a funny way of taking all the land.
> They never cancelled their original charter
Wikipedia [0]:
This document [the 2017 charter] reflects our position for now (...) The old charter was a product of its era, 30 years ago. We live in a different world today.
> Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year.
Wikipedia [1]:
The first demonstrations were organized by independent activists, but the initiative was soon endorsed by Hamas, the governing party of Gaza, as well as other major factions in Gaza.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Hamas_charter#Since_2017 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...
UN cannot allow UNRWA - since any actual operation would require Israeli cooperation given Israel is the only open border to Gaza - and it won't hinder Israeli operations just like UN peacekeepers never hindered them in Lebanon despite being on the ground.
How is my "should have" happened not a direct answer to the question?
I wasn't engaging in what's likely, just what should be. Biden and Trump should have been on board with deploying peace keepers. They were not.
You are making stuff up. Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card. And the fact still remains that they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
> Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the agreement and change the terms. That was all public. It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
> Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yes, it's relevant when the IDF explodes clearly marked aid vehicles rendering aid. There's no reason to not do that.
> Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
Does that really matter? The question wasn't "how effective will this be" it's "What world leaders should have done". That's what world leaders should have done.
> I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
These are weaker lobbies because of US laws. The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens (in behest of Israel). No other nation has that sort of organizations in the US. The closet you can find is things like the weirdo Shen Yun cult.
This allowed them to spend $60M in a democrat primary. You won't find that sort of direct spending from Qatar or the Saudis (barring the clear bribe in the Jet. They aren't exactly giving away jets to every primary run).
'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.
> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Gaza_war_ceasefire
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/world/israel-hostages-cam...
>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.
You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.
>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).
>Two wrongs don't make a right
Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.
>That's what world leaders should have done.
Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.
>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens
Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.
Remember they know exactly who everyone is and where everyone is at all times. Gaza is the most thoroughly surveilled place on earth.
Hamas was willing to return hostages if israel freed all thousands of Palestinians prisoners, including those captured in Israel while committing the Oct 7 massacre.
And that is exactly what sinwar wanted to achieve in every one of his wars, just like when in 2014 Israel traded 1 captured Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinians prisoners.
So basically Hamas wanted israel to surrender, accept Hamas terms, and ignore Oct 7.
This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
As for Israel, as I understand it, the next election will mean domestic jail time for the incumbents unless the polls are wildly wrong.
At that point, it would be easy for Israel to start climbing out of lawlessness too.
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
For a great example of this, look at this pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcMbdFcx87PrqoYNA
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9
Let's be clear and honest: Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians and they routinely murder civilians as part of this.
I suggest that you learn more about the Nakba, friend. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
did someone else call their catastrophe a catastrophe too? guess it just goes to show how different cultures independently come up with similar names for similar things. ideally there are no catastrophes.
for what it's worth, over decades of being a jew, I've never once heard anyone refer to the holocaust as "Shoah". I did have a jewish friend named that, though. Interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
Been watching it for years. A great stain on history, with weapons paid for and built by Americans, not to mention a complicit media.
Please check Norman Finkelstein's latest book namely Gaza's Gravediggers on this matter [1].
He also has a very telling and chilling interview recently on Palestine and Gaza [2].
[1] Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry into Corruption in High Places [book].
[2] Norman Finkelstein Reveals Shocking Discoveries While Researching History of Israel’s Gaza Obsession [video]:
https://youtu.be/Jmv2h1WYnNo
Also Tucker Carlson? Seriously?
At least that was my takeaway after watching his debate with Destiny (the streamer) and Benny Morris (the historian):
You be the judge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X_KdkoGxSs&list=PLrAXtmErZg...
"Hamas's military force prior to October 7, 2023, was roughly 3 to 4.5 times larger than the United States military when measured as a percentage of their respective total populations."
Anyway, IDF as ≈170k active duty personnel and 465k reservists[1]. Literally a different order of magnitude. Add to it the vast different of resources, access to an air force and nuclear weapons and it become even more clearer that there is no comparison possible.
(And comparing personnel count to the USA is laughable as it is vastly different military type. Both a fighter jet pilot and a foot soldier count as one personnel, but it's neither the same force projection nor the same investment of civilians working for the war machine).
1: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2023/10/14/idf-explai...
Forced displacement is also considered a war crime and, considering what is happening in Gaza and at the West Bank, it would qualify as genocide as well.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.
While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.
While I don't condone violence, it's a legitimate way to defend against occupation.
That said, it is almost impossible to imagine that the Israeli response would have been something lesser than the current genocide attempt if Hamas had just taken POWs during the October 7 attack. Bibi would have arguably been even more humiliated if Hamas had been acting with restraint, so the impulse for revenge would be even greater.
It is almost impossible to imagine Israel would even look at the direction of Gaza had they just taken the statehood offers presented to them in 1947, 2000, 2001, or 2008, instead of repeatedly choosing terrorizing civilians over gasp compromising.
It's very much possible to imagine that.
According to International Humanitarian Law: Targeting, killing, or kidnapping civilians is strictly prohibited and constitutes a war crime, regardless of the legality of the underlying cause. Torture, hostage-taking, and executions of captured individuals are strictly forbidden under all circumstances.
All of which are actions that were done by Hamas and Gazans who invaded on Oct 7th. A lot of which was recorded on video, by Hamas and Gazans.
Targeting civilian homes and a festival - nothing legitimate about that.
What you are missing here is that Hamas' primary weapon is parading dead Gazans in front of the camera.
Farmers were killed, even in different part of Palestine.
Killing farmers have nothing to do with the definition of genocide.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/5/24/satellite-...
And that just from the start of war.
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
You can find lots of videos of Russia firing thermobaric weapons into populated areas - you will find none fired by Israel into Gaza. And I don't think that's because IL doesn't have them.
It's exactly the same in Gaza! You basically justified Israel's actions here... Check the distance between Gaza City & Israel border, vs distance beetween Bakhmut & Russia's border. Tell me which one is farther away - I'll wait
[1]https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countrie...
EXACTLY. You are told.
If that was really the goal, I go back to my previous point - wouldn't thermobaric bombs be faster, more economic & more convenient? It just makes no logical sense. If you already declared them to be monsters, what exactly is holding them back?
Anyway. Rant over, otherwise I'll veer too much into politics :)
https://gwaramedia.com/en/russia-has-killed-744-injured-almo...
20000 palestianian children killed
https://theconversation.com/a-un-report-details-the-overwhel...
more then 20 times the children killed in half time time.
I don't know what you are referring to. I suppose yet another war crime from the israeli army but this conflict generates a lot of dis/misinformation and it's hard enough to assess the trustworthiness of a source. If you don't even care to provide any source, you are just venting
It's not because you are angry about the state of the world that it absolves you of the moral duty to engage usefully with others. I know I have changed my mind on some subjects but it was never with one lazy comment like this one.
Now why is what you are talking about worse than aiming deliberately a supermarket full of civilians with a missile or hunting a grandpa with a fpv drone ? I don't really understand why you would choose to draw a line there. We already have a internationally recognized line in the sand that is somewhat actionable: War crime. It's hard to argue for genocide, it's easier to denounce and investigate suspected war crimes.
I, for one, think all war crimes are bad and should be the line in the sand where international pressure should be at its maximum.
Gaza invasion is a counterinsurgency type of war in an tighlty urbanized environment where the invader has apparently quite limited care about human life. It is not really surprising that more children would be killed there. Those are two different wars with war crimes happening in both.
It does not.
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
In absolutely does [1].
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't actually exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ySLyCjNnrI
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpetMmxbPQ
- https://www.youtube.com/@MariupolVideo/videos
Both are the results of aggressive madmen, but both situations are different.
Are the madmen you're referring to Putin and Sinwar?
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/10/28/how-russias-invas...
WAR IS HELL
But that’s not what we see in Gaza. The parents specifically mentioned that only towns were leveled. The destroyed towns are not the only relevant aspect. The other one is that major damage happens only there. And of course it would, because the Israeli forces don’t want to sterilise the land; they want to take it. In contrast, Russia is happy to be king of the rubble as long as Ukrainians eat shells.
This is how urban war is played out between near peer armies.
Think about this, I’m in a concrete bunker with a machine gun, do you want to charge the bunker and get shot, or do you want to call in an airstrike to destroy the bunker with the machine gun position? I know what I’d do
https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2015/07/24/history-july-25th-2006-m...
Of note, just days before the strike, one of the Observers sent an unencrypted email home to his wife noting that he was observing Israeli war crimes and would be reporting them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/un-officer-reported-is...
"When in doubt, send in an airstrike."
"Evacuating" a million people who will not be allowed to return is "ethnic cleansing".
Mohammed Deif. The head of Hamas' military wing. Was killed in the humanitarian zone. Rafah Salameh. The head of the Khan Younis brigade. Was killed in the humanitarian zone.
These claims are repeated a lot. They are baseless. A critical mind and a bit of research will prove that to you.
It doesn't matter what Israel does. In Rafah Israel objectively and measurably did much better than western armies fighting against Mosul in terms of civilian casualties (and you can include those in the humanitarian zones, still better). But Israel is held to a higher standard.
2) It is a requirement by international law.
3) If we compare this to the Battle of Mosul. Which is a pretty good comparison. They are very similar. That battle had a much larger civilian casualty count. The allies there decided to not evacuate the population and the result of that was a much larger number of civilian deaths. Are you proposing that Israel should have done the same? I.e. not evacuate the population and have a significantly higher number of civilian casualties? Do you feel that if Israel did that it would enjoy a similar support as the allies had when they went after ISIS in Mosul?
Basically Israel did the right thing here. Provably better (judging by the number of civilian casualties) than the western armies that allied against ISIS did in Mosul. The ethnic cleansing allegation is not supported by evidence and really can't be proven until the war is over.
It's obviously intentional that Hamas built their military infrastructure underneath and within civilian infrastructure(which is a war crime) and not in open farmland. So it's quite obvious why the civilian infrastructure gets destroyed when the military infrastructure is targeted.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
Urban warfare is brutal, especially when one side systematically digs in and uses IEDs and booby traps in civilian buildings.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
Thus anything that precludes Hamas from actually inflicting harm is not "fighting", even if it's demolishing Hamas booby traps or demolishing structures Hamas would use. Hamas knew what would happen, they intended the result. The more Gaza suffers the more the world blames Israel.
Just because the Israeli politicians knew what was going to happen doesn't change this. Urban combat flattens cities.
Sadly it does seem pretty normal.
Can you please remind me where they finally found Yahya Sinwar? And was that before or after they "level[ed] the city"? Do you think they would have found him if they left the city untouched? Why was he there in the first place?
> And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them
Hamas isn't following a ceasefire; they've been militarily degraded.
There's a causal relationship here: If the IDF hadn't destroyed so many fighting positions and booby-trapped buildings, there would have been many, many more attacks and IDF soldiers KIA.
You say "there's no justification" but unwittingly go on to point out exactly why it's justified.
Scary! Can we get photos of those? Wait, they look suspiciously like medical equipment and incubators…
(Will the Chosen Ones reclassify radiological equipment as nuclear weapons next? Stay tuned for more!)
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place would have been overkill. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels themselves. And after you've bulldozed, it gets tougher to find those voids.
Robots. These things can be cleared. Particularly if the population isn't there.
Not if the trigger is based on detecting body heat. And you can't really clear more than the ground floor either, we don't have bipedal robots yet.
Yeah, but guns absolutely can. Iran is pretty good at supplying Hamas with everything they need to maintain control over the population - you might expect that after three years of absolutely brutal warfare Hamas would be beaten into submission, but clearly they are not.
To be clear. There are cases where civilian property damage is a war crime. And we do need to evaluate that. But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing what exactly are you pretending to defend?
> There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent.
All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
> Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now.
They used to say they would withdraw when the hostages were returned. The goalposts were moved, as is typical.
> But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
That's not an argument.
> Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
Who made that argument? They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it, although some sure do have murderous beliefs but that's besides the point.
> Then why is it taking so long?
Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them. When they go too fast Western governments get public pressure, when it's slow nothing of importance happens.
Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
Come on.
You can go look at Basra right here:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Basrah,+Basra+Governorate,...
Over a million people live here. The estimate was that "448 to 593 civilians were killed due to coalition military operations", orders of magnitude less than Israel has killed. Basra was not wiped off the map or seized and annexed by coalition forces while the population was herded into a concentration camp.
It is simply slander against the US military to suggest they have in the 21st century done anything like what the IDF has done in this genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016%E2%80%93...
Here's historical satellite imagery. Go to 2017-08. You can see Mosul airport and surrounding facilities leveled, immediately adjacent to a city that is obviously a city and not 1) flattened Mosul airport or 2) similar in any way to the Rafah imagery above.
If you are describing Mosul as "leveled" then what adjective do you use to describe Rafah? It cannot possibly be also "leveled" given that vast areas of Rafah are actually a flat pile of rubble and Mosul is clearly a city with a destroyed airport, even in late 2017.
https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/wayback/#mapCenter=43.12003%2...
Like when packaged food gets potentially contaminated, you don't test each package for bacteria. You throw away the whole lot.
Or, if you are not a genocidal terror group, you actually go house-to-house and check. Difficult, dangerous, but not a war crime. That's why Mosul isn't a pile of rubble, even though ISIS was more than willing to use booby traps!
---
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
—Benjamin Netanyahu, 2025
https://www.maariv.co.il/news/military/article-1195594
If Hamas cared about Palestinians, they could just use military buildings for that.
Not even egypt allows ghazans in- 10.000 euros for one passport is insane. And all those walls and checkpoints. And egypt is pretty islamist itself, so natural ally to hamas and the like.. but they know had that brush with the mb
What is true is that Egypt doesn't want to take in 2 million poor, underfed, sick, homeless Gazans & have to care for them.
You're comparing wiping out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian people's lives... to disinfection.
I think you could benefit from touching grass, rather than channeling German dictators. JFC.
There's bottomless evidence of israel crushing people alive with their armored bulldozers, as well as piling their civilian victims into unmarked mass graves and bulldozing over them, and there is no evidence that every building israel bulldozes is "booby trapped".
Here is a link to the conversation topic to help clear your confusion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890287#49898968
Take a step back and see the echoes of your words in history.
> It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps
That's life. That you might find it hard to achieve your military conquest without engaging in ethnic cleansing isn't a legal or moral excuse for perpetrating ethnic cleansing. Find a way that doesn't require ethnic cleansing or pick more realistic military objectives.
> Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
A forced expulsion of all existing inhabitants of a city without any right of return is commonly called "ethnic cleansing". So is razing the city. It's called that because it is cleansing the city of all people and/or traces of an ethnicity, like israel did here. Both constitute crimes against humanity, regardless of the excuse (the nazis had excuses for their similar crimes too, look how that went for them).
Take a look see of what's happening to peoples houses in Ukraine.
It's sickening when people blatantly lie like that ... especially in the service of rationalizing genocide.
This is true. Their crime is not having been born a Jew. According to the Torah, the Talmud and the Talakha, shkotzim and shiksim like us must be slaughtered as is the right and the duty of the Chosen Ones to honor G-d.
The babies and young children in Gaza are as innocent as they are everywhere else in the world. If you can’t see that, you should reexamine the lens you use to look at the world, it’s distorting things massively.
This is despicable, inhumane. It is generational trauma that started with the Nazis, now propagated to the poor souls around the new western colony of Israel.
Israel left Gaza back in 2005 after forcibly expelling all Jews and only later on only blockaded Gaza due to weapons being smuggled in, so they tried that and it clearly didn't work. It seems unilateral disengagement is simply not a strategy that can be succesful here.
It is clear that Israel is the source of violence. Which makes sense, as it is a new Western colony occupying (and constantly expanding) land where people lived for thousands of years, under the justification THAT IT'S IN THE BIBLE.
A religious fundamentalist colony, funded and armed by the west.
It is unjustifiable. It is vile.
The blockade only started after Hamas was elected into power, to reduce their access to more missiles and weapons. The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons. But no matter what Israel does it is accused of being evil - both allowing the money through and blocking it would be considered wrong by the haters.
> a new Western colony occupying (and constantly expanding) land
The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years (with the return of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace).
Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
Israel has been restricting Gaza's economic viability since the 90s, much before the official blockade. (source: UN, wikileaks about Gaza economic policy)
> The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons
Is this a joke ? The humanitarian Israel that does not let international flotillas with aid reach Gaza ? Or the humanitarian Israel that kills children ?
> The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years
The spin of the century. They gave back uninhabitable desert, while continuing expansion all over Palestine.
> Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
Firstly, it has nothing to do with religion. Secondly, migration is quite different than a formation of a military state that constantly occupies land and expands, attacking its neighbours that has been there for millennia.
You are spewing propaganda.
Israel is currently allowing in thousands of truckloads carrying 35,000 metric tons of aid per month, according to the UN: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ocha-newsitem-7aug26/
What they blocked was a sailboat carrying a bag of oranges and anti-Israel activists trying to carry out a media stunt for attention and virtue-signalling.
You obviously have an agenda here and are being disingenuous. I will disengage and leave you spewing your lies.
How noble and humanitarian of the state of Israel.
Please do disengage, you refuted none of my statements while continuing to spread propaganda from your 3 hour old account.
That's for UN 2720 Mechanism aid AFAIU, for totals I think you need to look at COGAT data which shows much higher numbers for total food aid.
And guess what ? Someone can be both against unconstrained migration, colonialism, zionism and apartheid states.
Weak hasbara, try with a new throwaway account
Mass migration generally does more harm than good and should be reserved for very exceptional cases like natural disasters.
> you don’t oppose ethno-states when they are Arab states that have cleansed all their Jews
Such as Saudi Arabia? Seeing it (starting to) fall apart is my favorite thing about 2026 lmao.
> and you don’t give a shit about actual genocides.
I do care about them all but it makes sense to focus especially on the one being carried out with my tax money.
You have to be very careful when looking at this sort of data, from my understanding UN data only tracks UN 2720 Mechanism aid deliveries. I think you need to look at COGAT data to see total aid deliveries as there are non-UN aid deliveries as well that won't show up in the UN data.
Every structure is eventually flattened.
The only difference is that Gaza, unlike Ukraine
- first had the option not to attack
- secondly had an option to accept a ceasefire and not immediately violate it 15 minutes later by firing barrages of unguided rockets into civilian neighborhoods
- had the option to actually respect the ceasefires and exchange hostages as scheduled
Gaza is being flattened because that is the only way Israel has to make sure this won't happen again. This is not unusual. Same situation as when the allies flattened nazi Germany.
But this time we are absolutely somewhat responsible because we reward hamas every time they do insane things that makes sure civilians get hurt.
If the understanding in media and among thought leaders back in 1945 were at todays levels we would have had people crying about the "genocide against the Germans"[1] and how the allies were the actual bad guys and we would still have a small nazi country in the middle of what is Germany today.
[1]: I mean seriously, at least 350 000 civilian ethnic Germans died in the war compared to well under 10 000 civilian Americans - and well under 2000 if we exclude sailors, so the numbers are very comparable
It's always funny hearing these defenses of Israel or Hamas which resolve to "hey what can you expect, they have the moral intuitions of cavepeople!"
The targets(Hamas infrastructure) are located underneath and within civilian structures(which is a war crime). So it's quite obvious why these structures get destroyed when the military infrastructure of Hamas is targeted. This tactic is part of the Hamas strategy.
Same for Tokyo
Same but even more for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Not to mention Dresden
All of these have one thing in common: they are cities in countries which started a war and suffered the consequences of that decision. The fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were not in any way humane actions but when was war ever humane?
If anything, the more apt historical comparison is to the Czechoslovakian and Polish partisans who wanted nothing less than to harry the Germans on (or within) their borders before the war. The British and French ambassadors (i.e. Qatar, etc) took great pains to try and convince the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments to restrain their partisans from attacking German people or positions, since they suspected Germany would use any and all provocation, no matter how small, as a casus belli. Anyone who's read a bit of WW2 history also knows how often the German government attempted to engineer exactly these kinds of events to justify their aggression.
It sounds straight out of the Likud playbook, doesn't it? But in what universe does an attack that kills 1000 people, a good number of them active duty soldiers, justify killing and maiming over 100,000 civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of buildings? If the shoe were on the other foot, this implies Hamas also has the moral imperative to do just the same to Israel. That's moral relativism for you.
Perhaps Europe had a better understanding of this topic when they instituted the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian law after the war than we do today, 100 years out, trying to now claim none of it actually matters and the means justify the ends.
I glad you are not AI!
https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/
What a lovely gift for Israel, funded by the people of the United States. Shameful.
What was Hamas' endgoal? What did they aim to achieve by slaughtering those innocents on Oct 07?
This result is exactly what the anti-Israel coalition wanted. They bet Bibi would go nuts and burn up the remaining global goodwill that Israel had, leaving them isolated.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this - any “support” for Palestinians is seen as a very far-left idea after Oct 7. There are still many here who oppose the extent of the war - I see regular demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for peace. I will note that there seems to be fairly universal agreement that _something_ needed to be done after Oct 7. If you want to understand the Israeli perspective (doesn’t seem like most commenters do, but I’m not writing this for them), you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
But anyways, don’t take my word for anything, pay attention to our upcoming elections. We will see how big the tents are then.
Wishing for peace, for saner voices to rise, and for an end to this cycle of violence.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
What will you do for your next feat? Lecture us on the fine differences between lynchings and honor killings?
> What will you do for your next feat? Lecture us on the fine differences between lynchings and honor killings?
The guidelines include:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
You've been politely asked to observe the guidelines several times over the years. Most others don't find it hard, and this is only a place where anyone wants to participate because enough people make the effort to raise the standards rather than drag them down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: looking over your comment feed, I even see you reminding others of the guidelines, so it's not that you don't know them. Please try harder to be an upstanding community member in all your participation here.
Admittedly, this was before social media but back then you didn't get 50% support for gassing anybody.
The main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
The part you mentioned widespread support for "gassing" is a weird falsehood
Everyone knows that Israel essentially went on a rampage of revenge, which you basically seem to agree with given your explanation for the destruction (i.e. not military necessity while protecting civilian lives).
Yes you were. Gaza is just another Fallujah. Just another Raqqa. Just another Mosul.
Your nation had multiple states in its cross-hairs after 9/11 and every single one of them was destroyed, somehow.
The “War on Terror” is a racist war, and ‘terrorist’ is just the era’s n-word, which is a word that dyed in the wool racists can’t use openly any more so they invented a new one.
The USA has been destroying states its ruling, racist elite deem inferior for decades. Israel is just following the precedent set by its partner in crime.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index?t...
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recoveries and in subsequent years grows above its pre-invasion value. Far from being "destroyed", Iraq is now doing better than ever.
For Palestine, the dip is about 3x larger.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
How did that one start? Oh yeah, it was because Saddam attempted to conquer a neighboring country, same way Russia attempted to conquer Ukraine. (Not the first time Saddam did this!)
>supporting Saddam in the Iran war
Imagine if we'd let Iran have its way with Iraq, offering zero support--what do you think the Iranians would've done to the Iraqis? Do you suppose it might've put Iraq in a bad state?
This is the typical "internet commenter mode of foreign policy moral analysis". Always focus the lens on alleged crimes of the US and other "western" powers. Never mention anything helpful which western powers did. Never suggest that non-western powers might have even a smidgen of culpability.
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
I can also say that the current Iran regime should not be in power or even exist. But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor, even compared to their enemies, who are only their enemies because of US meddling in the region. I hope you can straighten out your moral compass at some point.
More distortions on your part. (I notice you said nothing about the hospital point.) The US supported Iraq when Iran's counterattack was going too well, to prevent Iraq from being conquered by Iran, a regime you yourself say "should not be in power".
>Saddam was a dictator supported by the US when it was convenient for them, like they've done many times before.
I don't think this is intrinsically bad. The US also supported Stalin during WW2. Our rapprochement with China helped lift millions out of poverty. Were those mistakes?
>But I also know why they are in power and it is yet again because of US direct meddling in the region as them helping with the coup in 53 and installing a western aligned leader lead directly to the religious fanatics taking power as that regime had suppressed all other viable options with the support of the US to keep power.
This is some serious mental gymnastics to blame the US for a rebellion motivated in part by anti-Americanism. By your own logic, maybe the US is actually in the wrong for not giving the Shah even more support in order to crush the rebels.
If anti-Americanism caused a rebellion that you acknowledge as destructive, why do you lend support to anti-Americanism as an ideology?
You've created a catch-22 where the US can be the bad guy even if it supports a leader that's better than the plausible alternative for the country in question. What if the USSR had turned Iran into another satellite like in Eastern Europe? Ask the Poles how they feel about life under the Soviets.
I think these questions are simply not as obvious as you're making them out to be.
>The US is a lot more than a distinctively bad actor
We haven't initiated a war of conquest since the late 1800s. Even being a superpower after WW2, our territory actually shrunk when we gave the Philippines their independence "for free".
How many historic great powers can you name which were so restrained when it comes to territorial conquest? Considering the great powers during WW2: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, British Empire, French Empire, Italian Empire, USSR, PRC, USA. Who among those is the angel that you would've liked to see crowned global leader?
The world has generally become a much better place while the US has been hegemonic:
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/The...
Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception. Gaza is a refugee camp of descendents of people displaced from their homes during the Nakba. There's a saying there: "My Grandmother is older than Israel" -- and it is true.
To look at Oct. 7 as some sort of isolated incident ignores the history of the project: After the holocaust Western Jews decided to move to an area already occupied by other people based on some loose notion of having claim to it millennia ago. They used western governments to push this concept forward. Sure, America displaced Native Americans, but Israel did it during modernity... and those natives also happen to have access to modern heavy weaponry... what did they expect to happen?
I think Israeli people are ingenious and talented but they picked the wrong patch of land to occupy -- the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is as sacred as the Vatican and you have 1.5 billion (often crazy) Muslim people revolving around this sacred conceptualization. This is why the common people even of places like UAE/Saudi all back Palestine despite the political actions of such states. It is a recipe destined for disaster, especially with the Iran war de-coupling the Gulf States from the USA. It seems to me there is no way out.
First Nations
> Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception.
What do they call it in the US? Manifest Destiny?
You have no clue what genocide means, and your nonchalant careless use of it denigrates those who were actually victims of it, like those in Rwanda or Burma.
Perhaps educate yourself about the meaning of different words before typing long missive.
Yes, the 4% of the Palestinian population they've killed is definitely not a form of expression. Like somehow killing only matters if you talk about how fun it is first.
For the record that's greater than the % of Bosniaks killed in the Bosnia genocide.
Do you guys even bother being minimally informed before commenting? Like, Wikipedia is right there…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the_G...
Put simply, if you use any legally accepted definition of genocide (as a matter of the historical record) then what is happening in gaza doesn’t even come close. And of course the legally accepted definition is ultimately all that matters. That’s very different from whether laymen think it’s genocide because what’s happening hurts their feelings.
Since you like wikipedia here's a list of organizations that say its a genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human...
The legal definition, which is not just "kill all the peoples" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
Also current legal proceedings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#Legal_proceeding...
Is wikipedia is Hamas now?
I missed that part when I looked, and for that I apologise.
Keep moving the goalpost I guess
Don't waste my time any more little bro.
I said what Israel is doing is not genocide as that word is defined as a matter of law. Where the fuck did I say that what was happening in gaza is a good thing or 'okay'?
In return, Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis. Fair trade? Probably not, although the all-time death totals aren’t as incomparable as you might think.
not comparable, how do you GIVE someone (that is probably raping you) syphilis?
Plenty of Native Americans raped European women, why make this such a victim / victimizer dichotomy?
Palestine is sacred land that was colonized by Britain and handed over to create Israel. Israel proceeded to displace and murder large numbers of people to give birth to it's creation. It is a colonial project. Westerners do not understand the meaning of this. Mecca and Jerusalem are significant to a very large number of people. Whether or not they are irrational for believing this is besides the point -- it is a material reality.
These are just facts. I'm not the type of person that debates whether or not something is morally justifiable or not.
Humanity has a deep darkness and no society is immune. USA is a partner in this and as someone living here I'm deeply ashamed.
When you understand that 99.99% of humanity is only capable of using words to express psychological valence or to manipulate rather than assay truth, then political discourse makes a lot more sense.
The only thing that 99.99% of humanity is capable of navigating and assaying with words is their own personal financial situation, their business, their portfolio, etc. In this domain everyone is a philosopher.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k". Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
This "lawyer" mentality is so dumb.
This is just an overt admission that you are incapable of engaging in political discourse, you’re incapable of using words to express anything but your internal emotional state at that given moment. If it makes you feel any better, this is how 99.99% of humanity operates.
“The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
Since the topic is Israel, note that Israel is the only developed country in the world with a fertility rate above replacement levels. Meaning that Israelis are getting married and having children, their society is healthy and growing. That cannot be said for your society.
In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.
If it was a genocide you would expect basically 90% of the population of Gaza to be dead. Israel controls the water supply and the food into Gaza, they could just poison the food and water, dropping bombs isn’t even necessary.
I don’t know how to make it more simple than that.
Where do population statistics on Gaza come from?
Which part of the definition of genocide says anything about how many people have to die?
Why would Israel want to completely exterminate its pet guinea pig surveillance beta testers?
Do some people enjoy inflicting terror?
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
The answer is in the post you replied to.
>> Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel
It was an automated system that immediately responded within 60s to rockets sent from Gaza. Shoot one rocket from Gaza, get the building destroyed within 60 seconds. Also, the first rocket is a war crime (indiscriminate attack), the second is a military target.
You can't just say "Israel bombed Gaza" and play the victim, omitting information.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.
It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become crazy.
They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:
1: https://christianpersecutionreview.org.uk/storage/2019/09/Is... 2: https://anglicanjournal.com/arab-christians-among-middle-eas... 3: https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-christians-defiant-... 4: https://jcfa.org/article/palestinian-crimes-against-christia...One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
"Palestinian right of return" was a perfectly normal political position, but you don't hear much about it these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
comment said: "rejecting two state solution". poll numbers I see is around half rejects it, not 80%.
comment said: "killing or expelling all people in former palestine". there is no poll numbers for that specifically and the closest numbers for expelling people I see online is less than half, not 80%.
now you say "Palestinian eradication". OK, show the polls about 80-90% of israel supporting "Palestinian eradication".
* Well, implied, by "Israel" I mean the state, the government.
I raise that question with Russian and American friends regularly
Israel primarily rejected a two-state solution due to Palestinians rejecting a two-state solution.
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
also they did it in entire Gaza for a while, unilateral disengagement
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047
This article is from a few days after that, but I remember that there were confirmations already during the day.
It is outside their zone of interest.
Counterpoint, a more passive turn of phrase is more fitting: How Israeli society was shaped around oct 7.
The event doesn't shape society by itself, political and media response/interest shape the society.
When I didn’t have any context of the history, I took comments like this one at face value.
However it is difficult to take comments like this in good faith as it frames Israelis as folks who are pushed beyond their conscience by their government, similar to Americans in current America, when the statistics are to the contrary.
47% support the genocidal approach - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support...
56/67/82% (depending on the polling method) support expulsion of Palestinians - https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
This is the typical type of propaganda that many supporters post and write hoping to reinforce the narrative to the uninformed folks of their innocence.
While I can acknowledge that there are genuinely folks who oppose the ongoing genocide, what the world ought to look out for is whether after the next set of elections, an actual change of power and direction occurs.
And when I point to elections, the potential replacement candidates all support the same policies of genocide and expulsion. Some may be less, some are absolutely more, but if nothing changes, that is on the Israeli people.
As Americans hold responsibility for the current state of politics, Israeli’s hold the responsibility for their country as well.
What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
What did Palestinians do in Jordan and Israel and Lebanon?
Why are modern Gazans from Egypt? Why does Egypt have massive walls and doesn’t take in Gazans? Where did the Christians go?
Who elected Hamas in democratic elections when their stated goal was literally the genocide of Jewish people and the Israeli state?
Why are they placing military installations in schools and hospitals? Why are they training children with weapons?
Perhaps don’t get mad after starting multiple wars and losing.
"How long can Israel counter 30 rockets a day? What's the cost?"
"How is not each of them (7,000 in total) a war crime by Palestinians?"
"Sure it's not Palestinians it's Hamas, but the last time there was an election, they've elected Hamas, so what do you do?"
"Seriously, how is this not 7,000 counts of war crimes? Why is Israel not reacting? Why is Israel militiae into Gaza to catch the authors?"
Turns out the limit is 7,001 attacks.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
What should one do in war if they only have improvised rockets available, and surrendering will guarantee your extermination? You'd throw them in the general direction of the enemy, right? And the enemy knows this and will not put civilians in range of the rockets - unless they plan to use them as human shields. It is the same reason the German trenches were not full of clockmakers.
But that is what settlers movement and Israel army were doing for decades?
When schools glorify martydrom[0] it's not surprising that you get terrorism and hate as a result.
[0] https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-906558
What perspective is there on murdering a hundred thousand people, starving millions, razing entire cities? this isn't a game you can play by shuffling around some moral relativism, to gain a better "perspective". This is pure unadulterated evil on a scale that can never be erased from the conscience of every Israeli citizen for generations.
Or is there some other perspective, other than what Israelis can be observed as doing? I assume what I've seen is what Israel is like.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
The only reasonable conclusion from the Gaza experiment of giving control to the Palestinians is that they will only use that to attack Israel. The mistake of the disengagement will not be repeated.
Nobody in Israel is willing to give Palestinians control anymore. We've tried that and we see how it went completely wrong. Thank god it was just Gaza because if 7th october attacks came from the west bank, Israel would be gone.
The most peace that can be achieved is sadly in the current situation where Israel maintains control of the Palestinians and they don't get a chance to organize another 7th of October from the west bank, which is just few kilometers from Tel Aviv.
The Palestinians authority can't even win elections and they have stopped doing elections. If they were to resume elections, presumably Hamas would also take control of the west bank too. The majority of Palestinians would support 7th of October attacks on the rest of Israel. Which is an existential threat to Israel.
It's worth noting that the whole notion of having Palestinian "democratic" regime alongside Israel is as far from arabic culture as possible. There are no arabic democracies. Even after the arabic spring, none of the arabic countries developed a functioning democracy. So the current situation of the Palestinians not having a "fully democratic" regime is actually the norm in all arabic countries. The most democracy that Palestinians could hope for is the current situation under Israeli control. If the entirety of Israel vanished tommorow, and the Palestinians were given democratic elections, they would immediately devolve into an Islamic state with Sharia law where the average Palestinian has less freedom than today.
So anyone judging Israel for the continued control over the Palestinians needs to remember both what would happen to Israel without this control (genocide) and what would have happened to the Palestinians themselves (Sharia theocracy with less rights).
There might be some Tel-Aviv detached people who support the Palestinians, but I guaranty you there are no Palestinian supporters in the Gaza adjacent zones which were hit in the 7th of October.
This is why we can't have nice things.
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
When you get arrested, do you fight back and resist?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...
There was internet connectivity at least before the widespread destruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine#Ga...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/middle-east/2016/11/01/battl...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mosul-satellite_n_596d34a3e4b...
The Nazis are not infamous for the demolition of property. What they did in Warsaw was kill 90% of the Jewish population. No one cares about the buildings (many of which were actually demolished by the Soviets after the war, to make place for apartment buildings).
I know there’s an attempt by some to simultaneously downplay what the Nazis did while exaggerating the evils of Israel, but no - Rafah is not “just like the Nazis”.
A closer comparison would be the Egyptian demolition of Rafah on its side of the border in 2013. Both were done after the population had been evacuated, and to create a buffer zone along the border.
Houses are often demolished by force, to build freeways or larger buildings for housing. It’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s not “like the Nazis”.
Not true at all. Buildings are where culture happens. Systematically destroying them is a mechanism of genocide because it erases the memory in addition to the people. And yes this was a deliberate process by the Nazis [1].
> It’s not “like the Nazis”.
Actually, if the Nazis did something and then somebody else did it too, it's exactly like the Nazis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Warsaw
You can't be serious. This is not a demolition of houses, this is the demolition of an entire city. Not for a housing project, but to erase the traces of the life human beings had there, all their collective and personal history. This- despite being far from the levels of human life destruction perpetrated by the Nazis- is genocidal in intent. When you roam around a city emptied by the war and coldly, methodically try to make it vanish from the face of the earth as if it never existed, house by house, you are not far in spirit from what the Nazis did to Warsaw.
Rafah has been demolished to create a buffer zone near the border (after the population had been evacuated). Egypt likewise has demolished Rafah on its side of the border in 2013 to create a security zone.
Just translating what accepting that "demolished to create a buffer zone" is a reasonable justification for levelling Rafah (and a lot of the rest of Gaza) means. Those peoples lives, homes and businesses are expected to just be subject to the whims and desires of the Israeli government all while they allow(ed) the blockage of aid going into the territory and fired on the camps they drove people into.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel. A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Yes it is, and some countries have become very good at doing that
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
So did Netanyahu. His far-right policies require an eternal enemy to distract the people and blame for everything going wrong. The October 7 attack definitely didn't hurt his position in national politics.
Antizionism is a hate movement.
No a single estimation are near your number : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civ...
Most are about 80 to 90% civilian killed.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
That's what the sad thing is?
> A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Interesting interpretation.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
Is that the same program that was compeletly damages last year?
Basically the kind of rhetoric and hatred you’re describing is not a result of October 7, October 7 is precisely the ultimate expression of it.
We’re basically just taking about the human capacity and tendency towards evil. This is just a fact of life to be dealt with, there is no solution to it.
What happened to Gaza on that day?
Decades prior to Oct 7th, the IDF was shooting children through fences and ethnically cleansing villages.
Israel has been doing a similar thing to "1st amendment auditors", the people who harass random people and police in order to get a reaction and sue. They got the reaction, now Israel is attempting to play the victim. You cannot put people in fences, force them through militarized checkpoints, and allow settlers to harass and assault people in their homes with military backing and even begin to pretend to be the victim.
The neuroticism around Gaza is mostly a western phenomenon, Arabs themselves understand and respect what Israel is doing in Gaza and why.
It’s easy for non-Western people to understand that when you invade a country and rape and murder 1000+ people the response is exactly what happened.
Any sources that aren’t just anecdotes? I’d love to see some details about “Arabs” understanding and respecting the atrocities in Gaza, because many news organizations including English available ones like Al-Jazeera don’t seem to.
The flip side of your statement is that more nations than before decided to recognize a Palestine state and that it seems for the first time in decades US support for Israel is waning.
Israel is military and economically strong. It’s also a small country in a difficult region that needs trade partners and international connections, probably more so in a future full of climate change.
Also in general, the less reliant Israel is on foreign powers, especially the US, the better for Israel. The waning support in the US is a good thing, there are various domestic Israeli political reasons why this was bad.
To the extent that this international isolation exists and is growing it is a good thing.
You already said this in your parent comment?
In this case I also mentioned the Greece Israel Cyprus military alliance which I didn’t before. This is an alliance which is due to the threat from Turkey which transcends a lot of the petty ideological issues with Israel coming from Western Europe.
And it would be one thing if you were doing this in a thread discussing geopolitics, but this one is about satellite evidence showing the total destruction of a city. And your response is to boost the state that caused this?
sounds like the terrorists did indeed win
For example the Bibas children and their mother were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians and sold to a Salafi terrorist organization within Gaza, they weren’t taken by Hamas. This is why they were strangled to death and there were issues recovering their bodies for the hostage exchanges.
They were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians unaffiliated with Hamas and handed over to a different terrorist organization which had different priorities than Hamas.
Killing babies...Babies can never be guilty of anything.
Theres a big difference between a few civilians and the entire population.
Its hardly justice of any kind to destroy an entire city and kill tens of thousands because of the crimes of a few hundred.
Some people have no shame.
I don’t know what metrics you would consider non-psychopathic.
Getting married, having children, being materially successful, destroying your enemies. These are good things.
This is psychopathic.
Just look at history, another way to judge a leader is to look at how much effort they put into protecting themselves from their loving countrymen.
How many body guards did Churchill have ? How many body soldiers were allocated to guarding Hitler ? Why did the Kings of Europe all build castles ?
Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.
Meanwhile, most of the voter base (perhaps understandably) cares more about domestic issues than they do about the plight of people on the other side of the world who they are killing and exploiting with their tax dollars.
Given all this, I don't know how you can be so certain that anything will change with a new administration, even with polling demonstrating that voters do disapprove of support for Israel now. Most of the people who disapprove of funding Israel don't care about it strongly enough for it to be a significant factor in their engagement with electoral politics (which for most people is also just limited to voting once every 2 to 4 years)
The US congress and senate get their laws and edicts directly from the top brass of the IDF.
Every single head of state in the Eurozone (bar Perro Sanxe, who is controlled by Morocco instead) and every single bureaucrat have to follow the rules set down by Israel, lest the union collapse.
They're everywhere you look. You don't have to fall for Hasbara or Unit 8200 propaganda about how this totally means you're an irredeemable monster, they are the ones who are pushing this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspirac...
Look at your own link. Feel free to go through my comment history. White genocide? Don't make me laugh. Cultural Marxism? I sure hope so! I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.
But that doesn't mean I'm blind, or that I'm willing to ignore the truth that is staring me right in the face. Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel. There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.
I will not willingly ignore the fact that I'm considered nothing more than cattle fit for slaughter to the chosen ones, nor to everything that they have done with their power in my country.
Even if it puts me at odds with my ideological cohort, I only hope that they are able to fully open their eyes too, soon.
There are many beliefs that posit an international Jewish conspiracy, obviously not all of those may by applicable to you.
> I'm an ultra-progressive extreme leftist.
Antisemitism often exists in both left wing and right wing extremists groups, the international Jewish conspiracy beliefs likewise do as well.
> Class analysis can't explain this slavish attitude that nearly every world leader has to Israel.
It seems the opposite is true overall.[0]
> There's no intra-class conflict in Israel, all disagreements vanish into the ether and they close ranks as soon as they smell the opportunity to rid the world of what they view as the filthy, of the sheqetsim, of the abominable.
There are deep divisions within factions in Israel, to claim otherwise is to ignore reality.
[0] https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
surely the one creating such destructions and deaths no?
As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".
In your own words, what is the issue in the Middle East?
I wish I was eloquent and knowledgeable enough to write it, I'd probably write a book.
In 1948 a colonial mission from West Europe invaded Palestine. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.
This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-lebanese-civil-war-in-... (article is rather more favourable to them than I would be, but it describes the basic history)
Germans believed they did
Iran has been destabilizing the entire region with their proxies for years.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.