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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
That's not really a response to the point being made.
The claim I was responding to was: "By the time the bulldozers are there civilians have long moved out of the area."
Rachel Corrie's case is a counterexample to that general claim: she was a civilian physically present in the area of an Israeli military bulldozer operation.
Saying that it happened 23 years ago, under a different government, doesn't make the counterexample cease to exist.
It only tells us that the example isn't evidence about every Israeli bulldozer operation today.
If you're arguing that civilians currently leave before demolition operations in Gaza, then make that case.
"That happened under a previous government" doesn't establish that.
I'm not arguing for anything. I'm just adding context, because your comment read as if it happened during the 'current phase' of the conflict. That's a crucial detail to omit, imho.
> your comment read as if it happened during the 'current phase' of the conflict
I don't think anyone else "read" it like that.
> That's a crucial detail to omit
It really isn't. No international body decided on "phases" to delinate combat, and given that there is not yet apology or atonement or peace since, that "phase" never ended.
Everyone who has not heard of her before thought that you are referring to something that happened now and not decades ago.
I was surprised and felt mislead.
I'm not sure what are you even arguing with me about. If it doesn't weaken your argument than it shouldn't matter to you that I've added factual context.
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.
Interesting claim. Where did you hear that? The IDF is pretty infamous for crushing people alive with these bulldozers, and also for denying search & rescue access to find civilians buried in the wreckage (and also for just killing said SAR and hiding the bodies and lying about it*).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Palestinian lives > zionist feelings. If you think 1,200 people is devastating, what do you think about the 75k+ Palestinians murdered by Israel? Again, 1,200 is far, far less than the number of Palestinians murdered by Israel prior to Oct 7th. History can no longer be denied.
The 75k deaths in Gaza should be blamed on the side that chose the conflict: Hamas. Human shield deaths are ugly, but the blame must go to the side that caused them to be human shields. The alternative is to create a situation where evil can prevail by hiding behind enough human shields.
The Zionists chose this conflict when they invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed the indigenous Palestinians. That you call Palestinians murdered by Israel "human shields" is evil.
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.
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.
"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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
Hamas has launched 10s of thousands of rockets and mortars at Israel what is an appropriate response for them? Should they just sit there letting someone try to kill them or should they retaliate? How many casualties is an acceptable amount?
When did they murder an entire country? Last time I checked people still live in Palestine, in fact the population been steadily increasing over the past 40 or so years. Is your solution that the people of Israel should just die instead of fighting back?
Every Israeli prime minister has been European. Every one. The answer is to return to their homeland and let the remaining Palestinians return to theirs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He also promotes transphobia. Chomsky was friends with Epstein and acquaintance of Steve Bannon. I don’t think that discredits his entire body of work, but I think we should stop promoting him when there are sources that are less problematic.
You are mixing Chomsky (the subreddit) up with Norm (the book author). Norm was friends with Chomsky but not Epstein or Bannon. I'm unaware of him having transphobic views.
Norman Finkelstein's treatment of sources is dubious at best , dishonest at worst, and he is not very good at defending his position when challenged on them
At least that was my takeaway after watching his debate with Destiny (the streamer) and Benny Morris (the historian):
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
"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)
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."
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.
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.
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.
(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
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?
You know how you don't convince a flat earther with evidence? You're not looking to be convinced, you just want to prove you're smarter than everyone else. You'll always have some silly vague argument that you can hang on to for dear life and pretend that invalidates the other person's case. I don't have time for pointless exercises you need as validation.
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.
Look at Google map of Gaza city, Rafah, Khan-Younes, Al Qarara, ... pretty much all building have been destroyed. You want to try to argue that every one of them was somehow hiding a tunnel ?
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.
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.
EDIT: And more: Yassin Rabia, Khaled Nagar, Osama Tabesh, Ayman Mabhouh, Samer Ismail Khadr Aby Daqqa. Fact check me. Also Israel has documented rocket launching from humanitarian zones. Israel has also retrieved bodies of hostages (including Hersh Goldberg) from tunnels under humanitarian zones.
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.
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?
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?
> 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 should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.
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
You neglected to mention the decades-long blockade, or Netanyahu doing everything in his power to keep Hamas in charge. A true "peace process" has never been tried. (Well, except by Rabin, so of course they murdered him)
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."
> Like when packaged food gets potentially contaminated, you don't test each package for bacteria.
You're comparing wiping out tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian people's lives... to disinfection.
Like yeah, there's plenty of examples of israel's current leaders calling the Palestinian race sub-human, vermin, animal, saying it should be wiped off the earth, etc, but I didn't expect it on HN, JFC.
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, too.
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.
This is a good rebuttal to the claim that no part of Mosul was struck hard or leveled. But nobody claimed that.
From your linked AP article:
"Nearly a third of the Old City [a specific neighborhood] was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by U.N. Habitat using satellite imagery"
From MSF re Rafah:
"Over 15 months of all-out war on Gaza have left 92 percent of housing units and about 70 percent of all structures destroyed or damaged."
So we have 1/3rd of a particularly hard-hit neighborhood destroyed in Mosul versus 70% of the entire city of Rafah.
You are comparing different things. You should be comparing the intensive part of the battle in both cases. Mosul vs. Rafah is a great comparison. The total number of civilians were similar. The number of combatants were similar. Rafah is a lot denser. Israel's war results in significantly less civilian casualties. The allies pounded Mosul with its civilian population with heavy bombardments. The criticism of Israel on this is orders of magnitude higher than any criticism levelled at the allies (well basically none). If you look at why did the allies go to war on ISIS there is nothing even borderline comparable to the Oct 7th attack on Israel from Gaza. Something to ponder.
That Israel kept looking for tunnels and destroying empty buildings for strategic reasons after the battle was over and Rafah was mostly abandoned is not relevant to evaluating the main battle.
That MSF statement is not specifically about Rafah in your link either. It's about the entire Gaza strip. And just like Rafah a lot of the destruction happened in evacuated areas for tactical reasons, searching for tunnels, preventing guerrilla attacks, dealing with booby traps etc. We can argue about the necessity and legality of those but they are a different kind of discussion vs. the main battle portion.
Gaza in total had a population of about 2 million people and about 70,000 casualties. Israel's own estimate in 2025 claimed 8,900 of those were combatants.
Mosul had 1.5 million people at the time of the battle and ~10-20k civilian casualties + ~10-20k combatants.
Hard to do direct comparisons and all the numbers are obviously squishy, but your claim that Israel's war results in significantly fewer casualties seems... dubious at best.
And in any case, we actually know for a fact that Israel's non-combatant casualty cut-off value (NCV) -- i.e. their accepted rate in decision-making -- is several multiples higher than the coalition forces were.
> Peter Gersten, former deputy commander of operations and intelligence for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, states that “[w]ith Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV value of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, when he was head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) during the war against ISIS, would personally be called to authorize an operation with a “high” NCV of 14 or 15.
Re the Jabalia Camp attack:
> Satellite visual analysis of the attack site shows at least five large craters, including two approximately 40 feet wide, consistent with the impact of 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The attack destroyed not just one residential apartment building, but a whole block.
> Even without specific further intelligence, on the basis of this information Israel’s CDE must have resulted in a very high estimate for civilian casualties. Given the location, population spread, and choice of weapons, the actual toll of hundreds of civilians killed or wounded would have been a reasonable expectation.
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.
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
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)?
> 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.
> 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?
> All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
> When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing
> 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?
> They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it
They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened? You say, "that's not an argument," but I think it is. If we accept your claims, then it follows that Israel has had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill everyone in Gaza for years (at least).
The fact that they still haven't done that suggests that your claims are false.
> Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them.
Ah, so it's just international pressure holding them back. Right.
I don't buy it. Israel has hardly shown itself to be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions. And at the end of the day, they are a nuclear power and functionally immune to military threats from rational actors. If the IDF started the genocide tomorrow ain't nobody gonna do shit about it.
Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
> Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
The questions needed to be asked at all because it was your comment that was of the lowest caliber. All smoke and no fire.
> They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened?
The same can be said for any conflict in which one side has overwhelming capacity and does not choose to engage on it for various reasons. But yes, diplomacy and public pressure actually matter a lot, as evidenced by the fact that Israel spends billions of dollars in state propaganda and funding political campaigns in the West to continue to receive military aid and avoiding sanctions.
You are saying that Israel has shown itself to not be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions yet it engaged for decades in political and diplomatic action to be where it is today; it was not looked at that favorably by Western powers even a few decades backs. And it understands that apartheid South Africa was not on anyone's radar for decades until it was. AIPAC and other lobbying agencies fund hundreds of political campaigns in the US in order for this to happen.
So yeah, if in five years' time the Democratic Socialists end up overtaking establishment DNC Zionists and get their share of power such that they allow BDS to work and stop military aid then Israel is going to have a much more difficult time, as evidenced by their desire to have the US engage Iran without them participating directly because they are not actually as powerful militarily as they project themselves to be.
> Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
That works until it doesn't, much like how China did not dominate on renewable energies until it did, or how proprietary Unix dominated the server market until Linux appeared. It takes remarkably little time to turn a country into a pariah state. For the past two decades Germany theorized that economic connections to Russia would prevent them from doing anything stupid regarding Ukraine.
And Israel does not just have to care about external issues. Economic sanctions hit economies hard, and even a recession is enough to turn the tables against candidates during election years, so given that certain political parties are the ones who hold the cards at any time, they are not keen to lose elections.
Also Israel depends very much on its network of high-tech companies, companies that are extremely sensitive to any sort of sanctions regime or any loss of trust such that no amount of lobby money suffices to get profitable military or high-tech contracts.
And once Israel is politically and militarily isolated it becomes a much easier target against rivals in the Middle East, so being politically associated with the West is very much a matter of survival. In this sense they have all the time in the world to perform their campaign of ethnic cleansing to restore Eretz Israel.
None of what I'm saying is speculation, this is very much what political analysts in Israel say and have been saying for decades. The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
> The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
Also it's a self-reinforcing cycle. The far right keeps testing what they can get away with, becoming increasingly emboldened. The leftists are packing up. Those in the middle see global backlash grow and realize there's no going back to pre-2023 world, so they might as well go all-in with the right. Israel is like a heroin addict using the very thing that's destroying them, in order to cope with the damage it already caused. Without intervention it generally doesn't end well.
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.
And if the structure isn't actually being used for military purposes they just have to say "oopsie"? It makes sense for occasional houses that are being used for military purposes to be destroyed, but destroying all houses simply due to suspicion seems like too much.
Personally I haven’t. I know my office is gone. I know the hotel I used to stay in (always fun to wake up seeing a gunboat a couple of miles off shore pointing at you out the window) has gone.
My colleagues have seen these tunnels. At least ore 2023. Israel has denied them entry since then.
Because I can say that both sides are deplorable and wrong? In fact, I can even say they're both deplorable and wrong in uneven amounts, but that both meet the bar of "deplorable and wrong."
You think you have to choose a side between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? You think you need to send one of them money?
Well I care about it principally because of the degree to which it distorts our politics. The funding is one cause and effect of that distortion but there are others. For example the theological allegiance between US evangelicals and Zionists is a shockingly powerful force in US politics.
But yes the component that morally implicates me personally is the funding and it’d be a big improvement not to participate in it.
Just like I don’t think it’s obvious that we should fund Sinaloa despite them being decidedly less monstrous than New Generation.
Why wouldn’t you answer the question that I asked? Do we need to pick a side in the cartel wars? If no, why is that different?
Israel is the great betrayal. In 1948 it was supposed to become a secular country based on European values not a Jewish theocracy. It is dragging us down and for what?
The power imbalance allows one side to exhibit restraint and use more civilized options. These aren’t actors on the same footing. It’s a nuclear power with a multi billion dollar military against some of the poorest people on the planet.
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.
“ 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.
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.
It seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives, like some kind of deranged Clippy. Talk about loss of perspective.
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
I will add as a comment—because I can no longer edit the post—that it’s also bonkers how much the upvotes and downvotes are fluctuating on this. I couldn’t care less about the points, but the threshold for a downvote is higher than an upvote so it does show a certain tendency, and it’s disgusting that such a large part of this community values nitpicking of words over empathy and human lives.
Not that that was in question. HN is, after all, in too large a part a reflection of the greedy US tech industry. It has shown time and again that it’s selfishly OK with human exploitation and supremely susceptible to being manipulated by the right amount of technicality while simultaneously arrogantly believing it is immune to being influenced.
Some days I’m truly ashamed of this community and find myself incapable of defending it against the mockery and contempt it receives from the rest of the internet.
> seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives
The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions [1]. That requires killing with industrial efficiency, something that made it categorically unique from the "wipe out the village" warfare that goes back to, probably, before civilisation. (Chimpanzees do it. To my knowledge, they're the only other species that annihilates versus merely fighting off enemies.)
At lower kill volumes, even in the tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands, the line between conventional warfare done conservatively, conventional warfare done brutally and a process that, if left unhindered, will reach a million-man death toll.
(Then you have the ambiguity, one which does not apply in Gaza, introduced by displacement also being included in genocide and it starts to intersect pretty much perfectly with war.)
If we want these words to keep having meaning, we have to nitpick around their use. Otherwise, overinclusivity will consume them.
Nitpick all you want, but at some point you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place, and whether it's time for the international community to step in. Those approaches aren't mutually exclusive.
> you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?
My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.
> The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions
So if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide? Seems like a very obtuse understanding of the word, which is also defined in the wiki you linked.
> if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide?
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
I did not. I lamented (it was not a question) that we’re nitpicking (it’s not a debate) the definition, especially when the person in question suggested an alternative which is not defined.
I do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed. If one of those people were in front of you crying for their home and life and asked for your compassion and help in fleeing the genocide, would you turn to them and say “ackchyually, someone on Hacker News said this is merely an ethnic cleansing, you’re on your own”?
> do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
Right. So what I’m saying is let’s have some empathy and compassion for other people. Let’s focus on how horrible it is and what we can do, the same way we would hope others would do for us if we were the ones in that situation.
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
>A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation.
Which is why zero armenians remain after the armenian genocide
oh wait no nevermind, your definition is just bullshit. Only one set of people define what is or isn't a genocide: historians. The ICC only covers crimes against humanity. Historians are also in wide agreement (except for the Israel aligned ones) that it is a genocide in Gaza.
The legal definition of genocide is precise and includes an element that is often hard to prove: "intent."
Determining whether a situation constitutes genocide is factually and legally complex. It should only be made following a careful and detailed examination of the facts against relevant legislation.
This examination is carried out to establish State responsibility or individual criminal responsibility for the crime of genocide. It must be done by a competent international or national court with jurisdiction to try such cases, after an investigation that meets appropriate due process standards.
Correct. If no such court case has delivered a verdict, then by definition no one can rightly claim genocide has occurred.
As for whats happening, the over represented proportion of male combatant age deaths, the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare, the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians, stopping for polio vaccines, population numbers remaining stable etc puts a question on the "Only Reasonable Inference" standard.
What would you consider a proportionate response given Hamas's initial charter, the rockets fired over the years, the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank and the abhorrent attack of October 7th?
Major General Gholam Ali Rashid—commander of the Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters, which is the highest Iranian operational command level and responsible for all joint operations— expanded on this concept in a May 2024 interview and demonstrated how Iran is continuing to learn from Hamas. Rashid argued that the Hamas attack into Israel in October 2023 highlighted how effective and valuable ground attacks could be.[iii] Hamas’ attack demonstrated, Rashid said, that the Axis of Resistance could destroy the Israeli state by launching surprise attacks from Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank simultaneously—echoing Salami’s comments. Rashid stated that such an attack would need 10,000 fighters from Lebanon, 10,000 fighters from the Gaza Strip, and 2,000-3,000 from the West Bank. Rashid’s interview is particularly noteworthy given his importance in Iranian military decision-making and planning as Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters commander.
You know what, it's been a while since I took the piss out of the hasbara, let's have fun.
> the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare
Ah, yes, the very urban warfare art of bombing hospitals and refugee camps. Very urban. Much warfare. And you also get to claim that the civilians didn't die from the fighting, merely from the starvation!
>the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians
Yep. Nothing happened before October 7. 1947 ? Doesn't exist. Nakba? Probably some arab term that means nothing. Close to a century of warfare, torture, humiliation and putting Gazawis into concentration camps ? Naaaah. Hamas is responsible. Bad Hamas.
> population numbers remaining stable
There has been no accurate population counts for three years. But thank you for being so generous and letting palestinians reproduce while you park them in camps. Very kosher <3
>Hamas's initial charter
No shit, the armed resistance group that was formed to resist with arms against an attacker wants the attacker gone ? Silly Hamas. They should have done like Bibi and kept the actual plan quiet in cabinet meetings.
Hint: armed resistance against an occupier is legal and encouraged under international law.
>the rockets fired over the years
Yep. Israel did nothing. Didn't shoot children in the head, didn't regularly murder palestinians in prisons, didn't conduct raids on Palestinian territories or encourage settlers to colonize more. Poor little Israel.
>the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank
You regularly bomb another country, and you think that the other country is in the wrong for finding literally any way to make you eat shit ?
> the abhorrent attack of October 7th
A regrettable event and a needless loss of life. I'm not fully sure it justifies a retaliation that causes fifty times more death, destruction and horror, nor will the tribunal that will judge you for your crimes against humanity.
.. any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (check)
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (check)
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (check)
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (check)
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[8] (check)
Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state and the biggest threat to the stability of the middle east. Whataboutism will not change facts.
Well, Israel certainly doesn't intend to destroy Arabs, Muslims, or brown-skinned people more broadly, and you can't honestly claim "Palestine" is a nation:
- no defined territory--and certainly none widely recognized
- no unique language or ethnicity
- a culture only distinguished from Egypt and the Levant by their penchant for terrorism
- a history that only meaningfully diverged from their neighbors within the last half-century, and which divergence springs entirely from their consistent unwillingness to pursue peace with Israel
So even if Israel had the intent to commit genocide--which, unfortunately[1], they don't--the Arabs in Gaza don't qualify as a distinct group that can be subjected to genocide.
If Colombia had decided to annihilate the FARC, just kill them all--would that have qualified as a genocide, too? It seems to me they meet at least as many tests for nationhood.
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.
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.
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.
> An Israeli military unit (COGAT) is not a trustworthy source of data for the aid they provide to an area they are actively blockading and starving.
From my understanding no organization other than COGAT even has the ability to track the total aid deliveries, there is no evidence of mass starvation or that COGAT data is unreliable from what I've seen.
> No but it is like taking Russia's word for how many troops they lost.
Russia mostly just doesn't publish those figures at all last I checked. OSINT researchers however following the Russia/Ukraine war will typically use data from Russian, Ukrainian and independent sources where available however so it also wouldn't be advisable to completely ignore the Russian data either. Even extremely biased/limited data can sometimes be used to identify trends, at least for cases where the bias factor tends to be consistent.
Israel also isn't a dictatorship and has what most would consider to be a relatively free press that is not afraid to criticize the government(i.e. Haaretz) so it would be rather difficult for Israel to deliberately publish outright fabricated data on a large scale without getting caught doing so.
I'm also not saying you should blindly trust any specific sources, however much of the COGAT data can also be corroborated via independent sources such as satellite imagery.
Keep in mind it's also not the case that the UN data meaningfully contradicts the COGAT data either, it's entirely possible for both to be reasonably accurate. In general I would say both COGAT and UN data are both likely reasonably accurate once factoring in the published limitations on that data.
The reason the numbers are different is simply because they are measuring different things. In the case of COGAT they generally measure total aid going through border crossings while the UN measures aid reaching only a subset of distributions points within Gaza.
So if you want to estimate per capita food aid going into Gaza you would want to use the COGAT figures since that data is collected at all border crossings and can be used to get a rough per capita figure on aid entering Gaza. On the other hand if you want to measure something like aid reaching UN system aid distribution points within Gaza then you would want to use the UN data.
Attempting to use UN data to calculate per capita food aid going into Gaza would clearly be wrong as the UN's own published data collection methodology clearly shows they are not measuring total aid entering Gaza.
The UN often seems to publish reports analyzing their own data while clearly failing factor in their own published data limitations into their calculations which results in inaccurate conclusions in their analysis. Usually these sort of analysis mistakes are very obvious as the UN generally publishes the math behind their calculations.
You shouldn't blindly discard data simply because you think the source might be biased in one direction, rather you should try to understand the limitations of the data and corroborate it against secondary sources where possibly while also trying to factor in bias where feasible.
Essentially it's not the raw data where there is disagreement, it's the various interpretations of what the data actually means.
> How is comparing a state that is conducting a genocide to another group that did so too against the Jewish people ?
A war is not the same thing as a genocide. The Jews did not start a war with the Nazi's. Hamas started a war with Israel with openly genocidal goals, Hamas simply did not have the military capability to accomplish their genocidal goals.
We've banned this account because it has been using HN primarily (even exclusively?) for political/national/etc. battle for many months. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're for or against. (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(and I suppose I'd better add: (1) yes, this would be the same if the person were arguing exactly the opposite; and (2) yes, I'm sure there are others doing just as badly which we haven't banned yet. If so, the reason is that we haven't seen them yet. We read HN pretty randomly, and can't come close to seeing everything.)
> What about that jameshilliard guy that has tens of flagged dead comments about Israel ?
I think overall most of my comments are positive. Some people seem to flag comments as a way of disagreeing I guess.
> Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
I don't think that's really an accurate characterization, it's certainly not 99%, are comments correcting factual inaccuracies/misinformation in threads related to Israel considered political just because the surrounding topic is politically contentious?
Most of my comments on threads involving Israel are me just correcting some of the more obvious misinformation/conspiracy theories and/or trying to provide more factual background context/nuance to the discussions. I try not to push a specific political agenda/ideology for the most part. It's not like I'm trying to start political/ideological discussions either, there just seems to be more factual misinformation around topics involving Israel and that happens to be something where I know a lot of the history.
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.
Indeed. I'll never forget setting out to find out the origins of terrorism thinking it was Iranian, and finding out it was mostly British and Zionist... and I worked in anti-terrorism and hadn't been taught much of that history...
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.
What is your expectation of how the civilian population of Gaza are meant to live after this? You can repeat your propaganda all you like, but what is the actual outcome you expect from this? In five years time, is this land occupied? By the same population that was displaced, or by Israelis? Or by no one?
The ideal situation would be something like after WW2:
- large international combined army occupies the entirety of Gaza
- every hamas official gets arrested
- trials in Hague (or somewhere else) where we separate between who was just party members, who tried to reduce the evil and who were the masterminds behind the worst parts of it. Some go free, some get a few years and some get life without parole
- international military administration until they are ready for normal elections. In Germany that took 9 years
- lots and lots and lots of campaigns to make them understand that they are not the victims (Germans also thought they were the victims until 1945 and beyond and it took effort to fix that)
- keep a close eye on them for the next 50 - 60 years
Will it happen?
Of course not. But it would be the absolute best outcome for civilians on Gaza.
Why won't it happen? Because half of the world think that the Gazans are the victims because more Gazans have died than Israelis lately. Imagine if we taught WW2 that way: "Germans were mostly innocent victims, over 350 000 absolutely innocent Germans died vs under 10 000 US civilians, wHiCh mEaNs WW2 wAs a aCsHuAlLy a gEn0cIdE aGa1nSt tHe GeRmAn pEoPlE".
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!"
Well, now we have let it happen again, the facists of Gaza has attacked israel for 20 years while we looked the other way and finally, after their old provocations (or should I just write terrorist attacks?) stopped working (after Iron Dome and better border controls) they did the the unspeakable things in 2023.
The region has been locked in tit-for-tat since (at least) Israel broke the initial colonial independence process.
There was never any intention whatsoever from the Israeli side to live in peace with its neighbors. I'm not sure it's incumbent upon the existing residents of an area to welcome someone who quite clearly intends to take all of your land.
Ben-Gurion wrote this to his son eleven years before Israel was created. Before the holocaust started even!:
> A Jewish state in part of Palestine is not an end, but a beginning... We shall bring into the state all the Jews it is possible to bring... then we shall expand to the whole country... We will break through the borders imposed on us...
Same letter:
> If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant... What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish... [underlined]We want to change the status quo.[/underlined]
Note that he refers to this being a state created in Palestine. He refers to bringing people from elsewhere into this state.
No sympathy from me. Both sides are sufficiently horrible and indefensible to be simply horrible and indefensible.
"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."
None of these are far-right sources. Although, well, considering how chosen ones are buddy-buddy with nazis these days, that doesn't hold much water. These are mainstream sources.
"The Torah explicitly commands us regarding hostile populations that endanger Israel: “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the Land from before you, then those whom you leave over will be as spikes in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will harass you in the land in which you settle” (Bamidbar 33:55). The Torah further states, “And I will make your boundary from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the river, for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hands, and you shall drive them out from before you” (Shemot 23:31)."
Why is this "antisemitic" when it's the clearly stated goal of Israeli leadership? We're also commenting on a post where Israel destroyed an entire city. There's a great twist of propaganda where people are more upset at people being upset about a genocide, then they are about the actual genocide. Expecting that to work is an "avalanche of stupidity".
Under-reportedly, many thousands from Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa and of course Palestine were lured in via social media, messaging platforms and job websites are offered jobs but ended up in their sex industry, do forced labor and/or have their organs sold.
Officially it isn't allowed but the police wont do anything. You can see how it works in how angry they were when raping Palestinian kids in prison wasn't allowed anymore.
I've been seeing this kind of argument increasingly often from Israel's defenders and I have to say "Look at this other horrific atrocity that might be even worse than the one we're doing, but gets far less coverage in the US media" is a terrible defense. If that's the best Israel can come up with, and they continue down the path they are on, their western support will be gone before they know it.
To take this example, the Azerbaijani president didn't talk the American one into a major shit show of a war; one that is materially harming American lives. The Azerbaijani government doesn't run a major political influence operation in the US, spending 10s of millions of dollars against candidates for the sin of mildly criticizing them. The Azerbaijani government doesn't receive anything close to the level of military, diplomatic, and financial support from the US that Israel gets. The Azerbaijani prime minister didn't give an address to the US Congress to undermine a major foreign policy agreement, one which has only looked better in hindsight.
So no, it's not at all weird that the citizens of the US care more about Israeli committed atrocities than Azerbaijani ones. The US is far more involved with Israel's actions and has far more influence over them, influence that has so far not been used to try and alleviate the suffering in Gaza.
Yes, that was an atrocity. What does that have to do with what Israel is doing? We shouldn't be ok with atrocities just because worse atrocities that dont get as much media coverage exist.
English media also routinely violates house-style by using the passive voice when reporting actions by Israel: "50 civilians killed in Gaza" vs "Hamas/Syria kills 50 civilians". Boo English media
English media also does this for crimes in their own countries, depending on the narrative they want to spin. Im sure other countries do too, but i dont watch news in foreign languages.
I suggest creating two tabs, one for Google Maps link [1] and another for Apple Maps link [2], then quickly switch between these two pages. It made me realize how much have been destroyed. Heart wrenching.
I'm a little confused by this one, because if you hit the "Show historical imagery" button, and go back through the prior years, I don't really see much or anything of a playground there.
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.
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.
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. Imagine an enemy that with time and ease, outside of active conflict, engages in the systematic erasure of a city- the houses, its history, and every place that is familiar to its inhabitants. Gone forever. That's what Israel did in Gaza.
The Nazis are not infamous for the demolition of houses. 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 for housing projects. 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.
Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
But the West does acknowledge it, almost exclusively. Any criticism of Israel's war crimes are followed by "But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?" and "Do you condemn Hamas and the attack they conducted in Oct 7"? Mainstream media only shows Hamas actions, and only recently started highlighting Israel's war crimes due to increased souring of their reputation among audiences. Hamas actions also shouldn't be taken in isolation, the atrocities of October 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, but as a reaction to a conflict that has been happening for almost 80 years that is overwhelmingly one sided.
> But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
Israel is doing colonial violence to steal land and do ethnic cleansing. Hamas is doing anti-colonial violence to free themselves from people oppressing them.
You could argue that Israel is doing this because Hamas is so bad, but then you look at what Israel is doing in the other part of palestine not controlled by Hamas? Daily pogroms and violent ethnic oppression of all kinds.
The problem is that Israel is based on ethnic supremacy. The way the victims (the palestinians) react is not relevant.
A new Haaretz investigstion found that on October 7 Hamas offered to release the hostages. Israel said no. That's because Israel needs the hostages to be hostages as a casus belli.
It should be noted that Hamas exists because of the occupation and atrocities that Israel has been committing for decades and decades. All war is atrocious, the actions of terrorists are disgusting, BUT you cannot discuss the actions of Hamas in a vacuum and forget why they even formed in the first place and continue to carry out their actions.
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
It's a thought that is intuitive and intellectually satisfying but you produce no evidence for your claims.
Blair Mountain was a total defeat for the miners. Union organizing in West Virginia collapsed afterward and only recovered with New Deal labor law in the 30s
For native Americans, well, do you really want to discuss the results ?
For India you could argue that it's not non-violence but the fact the empire was exhausted militarily that worked. But it's hard to make the case that violent uprisings, who were either suppressed or contained well enough, had an effect. If anything the popularity of the insurgents may have done more that the actual violence but you can get that kind of popularity with non-violence too.
The only time when insurgency is working is when you are able to hide, endure and survive until your enemy is down for other reasons. It can be quite long. Think Mao. Was it the case for India ? Maybe but it's not obvious at all
I actually agree about Malcolm X... except it didn't actually use violence. Only violent rethoric and advocating self-defense. Annnnnd biggest wins like the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) passed before the Watts riot (August 11, 1965) and the wave of urban uprisings that followed
Also, who exactly "loses justification": just the individual perpetrators or their whole collective? I hope you wouldn't say that every black slave lost their right for freedom after Nat Turner's gang killed civilians? [0]
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
> f you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly
Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.
But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.
Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?
A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)
> What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.
Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group? Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany.
> Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group
But it doesn’t. It hardens resolve on the other side that you are actually monsters. It’s the same reason “strategic” air bombing campaigns like the London Blitz, designed to wear down a population, systematically fail.
> Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany
German Jews weren’t systematically targeting German civilians in attacks. If they had been, it would have probably backfired. (They didn’t have a military to “strike” the Nazis in any conventional sense. The Poles in Warsaw did. Guess what they, too, didn’t do.)
I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse. If I were occupied and facing extinction, I’d probably lash out. What I’m saying is I hope I’d stop and realize, not necessarily that it’s wrong and mis-targeted, but that it’s ineffective and likely counterproductive.
Aim at military targets. People can tell when you’re trying and missing versus conducting a terror campaign. And degrading the adversary’s military will save more of your lives than pissing off its civilians.
> There is no evidence that if Hamas stops attacking Israel, Israel would stop attacking Hamas
I never said to stop attacking. I said not to target civilians.
Forward looking, for Hamas to credibly swear off civilian violence, it would have to hold its leaders who ordered those attacks who remain accountable. I don’t see that. I do, however, see such an action pretty aggressively shifting attitudes in Europe and Asia, potentially also America, potentially even in Israel given they’re in an election where Netanyahu is on the back foot.
> Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead
This was a concerted effort between Israel, America and Iran. (Hamas is pretty decently modeled as an Iranian occupying force. This analogy extends to Hezbollah.)
And yet we can and we should still make distinctions when we talk about those subjects
Estimates for the death toll of US and British strategic bombing, for instance, range from 300,000 to 600,000 in Europe and around 330,000 in Japan (including the atomic bombings)
Now compare that with 12–17 million civilians killed deliberately by Nazi Germany and the around 6 millions killed deliberately by imperial Japan
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
It's not a war. It's US/Israeli propaganda to call it as such. Wars occurs between state actors. This is wholesale slaughter of people on land you claim that you've deliberately put in an open air prison and starved.
The level of violence is set by the occupier. Would there be pearl-clutching about the Warsaw Uprising, John Brown or Nat Turner? What about resistance to British occupation of Ireland (or India or any number of other British colonial projects)? The ANC in South Africa was incredibly violent in its resistance to apartheid. Resistance movements in occupied Europe were also incredibly violent (eg killing collaborators).
What you seem to have fallen for is tone policing a 78 year long resistance. A lot of people (generally, not you specifically) have this belief that things began on Oct 7. You will get questions of "why can't they resist peacefully?" Well, they have. Multiple times. Most recently with the March of Return several years earlier. Many don't know about it because it was barely reported on. What happened? For the "crime" of standing within a few hundred yards of the fence, the IOF used protestors as target practice. 500+ dead, 8000+ wounded. "Wounded" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting too because it included deliberately and permanently maiming people by blowing their legs off deliberately [1].
"Terrorism" is a political designation. And the US doesn't face such threats? Really? The police kill over 1000 people every single year. Mass shootings? Why isn't that seen as terrorism? Or the violence committed by ICE against random US citizens or detainees?
I'll leave you with this quote from JFK [2]:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
In every such post you have people both-sidesing. Killing almost 100k people is not equivalent to whatever Hamas has done. Hamas bad, Israel worse. It's not very difficult.
Hamas has every right to resist. Unguided rockets? There's IDF in nearly every building in Israel. The excuses used to genocide Palestinians far more aptly describe Israel.
The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
But considerably less than before the war and the EU are making efforts to decouple themselves, it's just not a switch that could be turned off, certainly not in the same way that support for Israel could be or could have been in the past decades.
I support Ukraine with all my heart (and a little money) but whatabouting will get you nothing. This is a thread about the hamas-israeli war. There's no reason to change the subject and it doesn't take away ability to talk about Ukraine elsewhere.
Actually some people have mentioned the invasion and occupation of Ukraine in this comment section to draw parallels or make distinctions
ukranians massacred civilians in Izyum, Kupyanzk, Kursk, just to name a few, for not wanting to side with them. They arbitrarily kill people (elderly, women, children) who want to escape to the Russian side (or if they just want to exclude this possibility). These are facts (source: telegram channels, which, confronted with your "free journalism", are a more reliable source of information).
This is the war, which were not you around, would never happen.
> You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
The IDF could have engaged in actual urban warfare, going house-to-house. ISIS does all those things far more than Hamas does, but Mosul is in far better shape than Rafah!
The allies bombed the heck out of Mosul and killed a lot more civilians than the IDF killed in Rafah. Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.
Hamas was more prepared than ISIS. Better equipped. More tunnels. And the population density in Rafah was higher.
Also the British, Canadian, Australians, Americans, etc. did not send any of their soldiers to go house to house. They sent the poor Iraqis. After demolishing the place, killing a ton of civilians in the process.
Easy for you to say that Israel should have sent its soldiers to be ambushed house to house, blown up by booby traps in houses (which happened a lot despite the tactics), blown up on the streets by mines etc. I mean that's how Hamas wanted it to play out and obviously not the way Israel was going to do it.
> Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.
Exactly incorrect. The Battle of Mosul is very comparable to the war on Gaza, but the IDF has done much worse in terms of civilian harm. US and allied forces killed significantly more combatants than they did civilians in Mosul; in contrast, the IDF has killed over 4 times as many civilians than combatants in Gaza. The IDF directly killed more children in Gaza than any other armed group in any other armed conflict in the 21st century—and the same for absolute number of adult women killed, as well as proportion of children among those killed.
Don't forget Israel gov 100% knew Hamas was going to attack on October 7th, and intentionally allowed it to happen because of the public outcry it would generate. The more hostages and the worse it was, the better the propoganda. They'll take the West Bank. They're taking Lebanese land too.
They knew the attack was going to happen and allowed the music festival to go on a day longer, one might guess they were frothing at the mouth at how good that propoganda was going to be.
Take a read of the book title The Palestine Laboratory - How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World - and you'll even learn that Israel has a long long history of murder around the world, aint none of this new.
One side won the propoganda war, and it wasn't the dirt poor Palestinains.
Got that in more conspiracy? If you have evidence then a lot of Israelis would want to see that. Hopefully after the elections there will be more fact finding.
More conspiracy? Why does it take conspiracy level thinking to believe that the IDF missed plans for the attack when the head of security of Egypt personally flew to Israel to tell them about the attack?
How do you miss that exactly? You don't, you miss it intentionally.
IDF showed a few weapons "found" in al shifa is pretty much all they managed to show, and by found I mean obviously planted after being seen carrying them into the hospital in brown boxes.
Hey guess what, Hamas are terrorists, I can easily say that. I can also say that Israel isn't behaving any better while supposedly is the only democratic country in the middle east with the most moral army in the world. And really never since this conflict started because the goal of Zionism was always to take over more and more of the are and create an ethno state. Even the nakba was done because the ethnic composition of the would be Israeli state was not congruous with their democratic ideals so they needed people gone.
Because the alternative was seen as too corrupt. Which is kinda hilarious considering how Hamas then stopped elections and stole food that was shipped in by the UN to sell back to the population.
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.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
> 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.
I don't have a strong position on this but seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
> seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
Well the official story IIRC is the border was more lightly manned than normal (and with more reservists than normal) because it was a national holiday.
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
Official? It is well known in Israel and for it's enemy that on holidays there are less people. Nothing weird or reasons to doubt it.
> But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
No, if they did they wouldn't have anyone on the border.
Dear reader, notice how they shifted their claim from "And everyone just happened to not be at their posts" to the official story (wink wink although I offered no real evidence) is that the border was lightly manned.
Bibi had the advance knowledge and let it happen because he’s fine with collateral damage even if it’s his own countrymen. A few dead Jews are nothing to him if it means More Land To King Over.
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
> The basic idea behind what you’re saying is that people are basically good and oppression or deprivation makes them do bad things. This is simply not an accurate model of human psychology.
Have you heard of survival? Personal, cultural, geographic. People will do anything if you push them hard enough or deprive them of alternatives.
"October 7th" disproves every single one of your claim. Unless you think that was unprovoked of course, and not the result of years of oppression. If you do, then there really is nothing left to argue here.
And here you're saying that October 7th happened because Palestinians were not oppressed enough so I'm going to just disagree with you and wish you a good day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the mother and children were strangled to death instead of being held as leverage 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.
So yes it is appropriate to use the term Palestinians here. It wasn't just Hamas and it wasn’t just “Gaza”, it was the Palestinian civilians too.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
"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 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.
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
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.
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.
South Africa is a meme analogy which doesn’t fit the history. If you’d like a better analogy (though there are no good ones) I’d look at India and Pakistan in the 1940s.
I also happen to know the history of my own country, Australia, and when I try to draw parallels between Australian history and Israeli history, I see that the excuses we give for continuing our presence here are weaker in every way. So it would be hypocritical for me to holier-than-thou the decision of Jews to declare a homeland where a non-trivial portion of their global population have always lived.
They have won. The goal is keeping Netanyahu in power and ethic cleansing.
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) has repeatedly called for the "voluntary emigration" or forced removal of Gazan residents and urged the permanent resettlement of Israelis inside the Gaza Strip.
They don't want to completely destroy Gaza. In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza, plus they'd have no guinea pigs for the surveillance and military tech. All the big Israeli surveillance firms test their products on Gaza first, it's the most surveilled place in the world.
But they also don't want it to get too big or powerful. Israel calls it "mowing the lawn"[1]. You want to have grass on the lawn, but not too much, so you periodically cut off the excess grass.
Doubt it. Bibi operates above all that noise. Same as Putin.
Accountability isn’t achievable, as far as I can tell. Especially when there’s some lucrative real estate deals for Gaza land on the table. IDF brings bulldozers as part of their attacks on other countries for a reason.
Both Bibi and Putin hold their positions more precariously than you'd think, although they do manage to maintain them.
How easy do you think it would be for anyone close to Putin to slip him some poison or just stab him with a knife? To prevent that happening, a whole lot of stuff has to be kept oriented towards him remaining the president.
One of Bibi's support pillars is the perpetual threat of Israel's destruction. He positions himself as standing between Israel and destruction, so replacing him would be dangerous.
Genocide doesn't actually work as a tactic, especially in an urban setting. It strengthens the victim's resolve. The Palestinian people are not known for giving up on survival.
I'm sorry, but that's quantitatively incorrect. In ancient settings, particularly for pre-agrarian forces, "genocide" was another word for "victory", but we have plenty of examples.
North America of course, but Africa is an overlapping series of successful genocides, Argentina's "Conquest of the Desert", Qing conquest of the Dzungar, Russia's conquest of the Circassians, Athens and Melos 416 BCE, Rome and Carthage, Rome and lots, Mongolians and whew even more than that -- all of them victories but also a "Where are the Khazars?" sort of event. They're just gone. Violence will forever be Mankind's one true Universal Language -- easier to learn than Esperanto.
Post-Trinity, the thermonuclear deterrent has put the kibosh on genocide as a working tactic. For a bit. The evolution post Cold-War might well turn out to be that genocide is back, baby, as long as the genocidee doesn't have a nuclear deterrent. It's cosmically fitting that the great genocidal wars of the 20th century birthed the final perfected weapon for doing genocides.
Push far enough north and you're also sharing engagement area with Turkey, which has already been a bit of a worry even this year.
I also suspect that the Great Alliance between the Sunni/Arab autocracies and Israel is more fragile than it appears. Or, more accurately, and the Sunni/Arab autocracies themselves are more fragile than they appear.
It's sad that so much of this conversation has devolved into technicalities of whether this is a genocide.
You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
Eh. First, they made a mistake: the ICC cannot hold anyone accountable - it only will only determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel did, in fact, do a genocide. Despite finding it beyond a shadow of a doubt (which is why it's taking so long), they will be doubted anyway.
I've searched through the Haaretz investigation; nowhere does it claim that Israel shot all (or any, for that matter) hostages that were released by Hamas.
3 people were killed accidentally during IDFs attempts to free the hostages. That's not the same thing as "shot all of the hostages they did release". In fact it's the opposite. Because those people were not released, the IDF went in to try to get them.
It’s not “terrorist propaganda”. It’s documented by Haaretz.
> obviously that would never have been acceptable for Israel as leaving the Hamas threat intact in Gaza was never going to happen.
Sounds like typical Zionist terrorism. Sacrifice and kill your own people just so you can kill even more Palestinians. Israel is a psychopathic killer entity.
Are you claiming there is a Haaretz article that states that Hamas was willing to unconditionally give up the civilian hostages after the Oct 7th attacks? I would like to see which article you are referring to as I have been unable to find any with a claim remotely along those lines.
> Sacrifice and kill your own people just so you can kill even more Palestinians.
Israel does not use their own civilians as human shields, they use their military to protect their civilians. You're probably thinking of Hamas here since they use their civilians to protect their military.
> Israel does not use their own civilians as human shields, they use their military to protect their civilians. You're probably thinking of Hamas here since they use their civilians to protect their military.
The article confirms what I suspected which is that Hamas did not unconditionally offer to give back the civilian hostages. The attached conditions would almost certainly have prevented Israel from dealing with the Hamas threat.
No one claimed “unconditional” hostage return. Of course there are conditions, Hamas is fighting 80+ years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, that’s the whole point. Israel decided committing genocide was more important than retrieving their settlers. That’s on them.
> I don't see how this is at all related to your claim that Israel uses human shields at all.
This is Israel’s policy of killing their own settlers. Human shields would be how the IDF is located in nearly every building in Israel.
> No one claimed “unconditional” hostage return. Of course there are conditions
You responded with that article in response to this question of mine "Are you claiming there is a Haaretz article that states that Hamas was willing to unconditionally give up the civilian hostages after the Oct 7th attacks? I would like to see which article you are referring to as I have been unable to find any with a claim remotely along those lines.".
As expected the article fully confirmed my understanding in regards to what Hamas offered. This was not a real offer to return the hostages but rather a demand for Israel to effectively surrender and leave Hamas in place to carry out future attacks.
> Hamas is fighting 80+ years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, that’s the whole point.
Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005.
> Israel decided committing genocide was more important than retrieving their settlers. That’s on them.
There were no settlers in Gaza on October 7th when Hamas launched their attack.
> This is Israel’s policy of killing their own settlers. Human shields would be how the IDF is located in nearly every building in Israel.
This is wrong for multiple reasons, first of all Hamas doesn't care if Israeli civilians get killed so such a tactic would be entirely ineffective, second of all Israel puts their military defenses in front of their civilians, not the other way around. Israeli soldiers simply aren't hiding behind Israeli civilians.
> Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005.
Please, there’s no use continuing this conversation since you’re not arguing in good faith. This is just open, gratuitous Israeli propaganda. That said, no one is buying it at this point.
I don't think you read that article you linked to. The Hannibal Directive is a policy about using extreme force to prevent soldiers being taken hostages. Soldiers are by definition not civilians.
It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
This. It's just so much more compelling to follow these discussions as they happen, compared to reading a historical correspondence or something. Of course I'd much prefer if there weren't genocides taking place at all.
I have been watching the atrocities that Israel have been committing since 1987 and there is simply zero argument any supporter of the regime can make to change my mind that they are evil, by every definition of the word.
There is no justification for their actions. There is no justification for the greater Israel project they are pushing. There is no justification for them to be taking a leadership role in the global security technology industry. The whole thing is just absolutely Fkd and I find any person trying to contort the argument in a way to justify this shit to be evil themselves.
The fact that this comment is being upvoted as much as down shows me that evil exists here too.
Maybe you missed the sarcasm. Btw the descendants of the people there 2000 years ago are the current Palestinians; the current Israelis are mostly the descendants of West European colonizers from the 1948 invasion.
Well, like I said, no. And to be clear, you're free to ignore that. But, of course, that's exactly what I wrote and you managed to miss that, so I suppose none of us are communicating very well.
I read your full comment and got the sarcasm, but I don't blame people who read the first line and tuned out the rest because it was such a perfect example of the genocide apologia that we've seen so much of already.
I get that in this case the rest of the comment was short and the obvious indicator of sarcasm came quickly, but it's all too common for this to devolve into paragraphs of repetitive, uncreative slopaganda, which has resulted in many who disagree just tuning out early.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Then you notice world energy markets are going to be effected by a massive conflict etc.
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"?
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.
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.
Iran gave Russia their Shahed drones, still exports artillery shells and missiles to Russia.
UN cannot allow UNRWA - since any actual operation would require Israeli cooperation given Israel is the only open border to Gaza - and Israel will not allow what it considers to be an extremist front.
UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have proven to be unable to restrain terrorist attacks, and proven to be unable to restrain the Israeli response.
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?
> 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.
> 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 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).
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.
> 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.
Yes it would have been insane to accept any concessions. If you don’t understand that then you have work to do on yourself. This is a very weak and suicidal position to take.
There were many temporary ceasefires in exchange for hostages but this was done as part of the broader war effort, ultimately Israel is not bound to anything in these “agreements”. It’s basically just saying and doing whatever needs to be said and done to accomplish the war goals.
If that is what you’re talking about ok, but it sounds like you were saying to actually make concessions.
The point is to accomplish the aims of the war. There are no concessions that have to or should be made. Israel is by far the stronger power.
A ceasefire is a concession. And my point, which I think is clear, is there's a pretty wide gap between "They have to accept all hamas concessions" and "they have to negotiate".
It's pretty hard for you to argue against the fact that there are, in fact, reasonable concessions that aren't "suicidal".
That is not the context of the discussion. The context is "what should world leaders have done differently".
And, I never said that the war was either avoidable or that Israel was wrong to use force after Oct 7.
What I am saying is that the war could have ended years ago and that Israel has committed genocide. I'm also saying that the pretext that it was about "getting the hostages home" was false.
And with that context, yes there are things world leaders should have done to stop Israel from committing genocide.
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 a lot like protecting them to me.
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
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?"
My dude, they pointed a sniper rifle at an unarmed naked Israeli man holding a white flag and shouting for help in Hebrew, centered him in the scope, and pulled the trigger.
You provided a list of reasons why you feel like teenagers at a music festival should be murdered, right?
Like my personal sentiment is, war is senseless, and both sides are wrong in some way or another. But yeah, I don't think children should be murdered period, so I'm not going to try and give a list of reasons why it's OK, because there isn't one.
Anyone committing war crimes should be punished for it, period.
My original question was simply, what should have been done differently "by the world leaders"?
Their options are to prolong this forever-war (it's worked so far, 75 years, but getting precarious), or actually do the thing and destroy Palestine once and for all (won't be hard - they have nukes), or negotiate peace (also not difficult - it's always Israel who rejects reasonable peace deals), or accept their own destruction and flee.
How many teenagers were killed by Hamas? And are there independent sources that verify this?
Also, is Oct 7 enough justification to shoot 335 bullets at 6 year old Hind Rajab?
Your questions reek of bias by trying to centre everything to Oct 7, as though history began there. If you really cared about children, you'd have referenced the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel before Oct 7.
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.
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?
There's not a single shred of evidence in either of those reports. The Sandberg one is fully debunked, she literally works with the IDF.
> She admitted that her team “approached women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation” but found that “they simply weren't contacted” by any alleged victims of rape on October 7th.
One of the most insidious things about this genocide is how complicit western media is in spreading lies and Israeli propaganda like this. Again, zero victims, zero evidence nothing but Goebbels level media manipulation.
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.
You just described all cities in Israel, only they've been hyper-militarized since Nakba, the ethnic cleansing on Palestine in 1948. Israel has mandatory conscription and most of its inhabitants serve or have served in the IDF.
I was not aware that every city in Israel has an extensive military tunnel network. Is that the case?
If Hamas were to take one of those tunnel cities and Israel were doing guerrilla warfare from them I wouldn't blame Hamas for bulldozing.
Israel does have mandatory conscription. They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian. While in the military they're all fair targets, and if they're not serving, and at a music festival, they're not.
Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
> They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian.
When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian". When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
>Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
And Hamas is permitted, as per the rules of war, to target that military infrastructure. If Israel has co-located it with civilian buildings, and attacks miss their targets, then too-bad for Israel.
>When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian".
This is very arguable for the West Bank settlers, but the Israeli civilians that were targeted by October 7 are not settlers and are in very solid Israeli land from a conflict 80 years prior. Arguing that all civilians in Israel proper are valid targets makes you no better than Smotrich and Ben-gvir, and you are essentially advocating for the genocide of Israelis.
Which is your right to do, I guess, but that's certainly not going to convince the (nuclear armed, remember) Israelis to moderate and compromise, or actually bring about justice for Palestinians.
> When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Military uniforms are for the protection of civilians. If you forgo them, then your civilians will receive more harm. Israel is responsible for their actions and many war crimes, but Hamas is responsible for theirs.
Zionists are not civilians, they're literally living on stolen land. It doesn't matter that they've been stealing it for 80 years, it's not their land and the relatives of the people they murdered have every right to defend themselves and get their land back, by any means necessary.
If that's the way you want the conflict to be sorted, which is a genocide competition, then Israel will win that competition. I assume you don't want that?
"You're on stolen land and you've done it this time with the genocide, Israel, now you have to dissolve yourself and migrate back to Poland, Brooklyn and Iraq" is not a realistic ultimatum to deliver to a nuclear armed state established precisely because it's citizens experienced centuries of persecution living as scattered minorities.
Israel under Netanyahu has done plenty to criticise but I would actually like to see an Israel/Palestine deal not the West following both sides into radicalisation.
The "anti-Israel" source post is literally a satellite map documenting Israel's razing of Rafah. It includes zero editorial, people's eyes can see for themselves what Israel is doing.
> I would like to know how would anyone give a positive spin to genocide and civilian displacement
Well... what did Hamas expect after Oct 7th, other than the IDF riding into Gaza and cleaning shop for good?
As for the genocide claim... we're seeing average casualty and collateral damage reports for highly urban warfare. Hard to make a credible claim of genocide.
Ah yeah, one side starved and bombarded civilians for years, cut off their water and food. But only the side that unleashed a day of savage terrorism is the "barbaric" one.
Funny how plenty of people still think if someone defends the barbarism of Hamas (which I'm not doing), this person should be lynched, but if another person defends the barbarism of the Netanyahu regime, it's fine, because (insert justifications here)... What the fuck's the difference?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, don't you think? That "day of savage terrorism" flowed the other way every single day both before and after 7/10/2023.
And so what, yes the Egyptians closed the border, does that mean you consider it fine for Israel to do those things, and they can escape being labelled of "barbaric war criminals", because... why? Because Egypt?
It's like an abusive father beating his kids, and when the neighbor doesn't want to have the burden of taking care of the kids for the foreseeable future (because the police/government clearly prefers to pretend "everything is fine"), you say "Well, it's the neighbor's fault those kids are getting beat up!".
Well, your reply to my reply is flagged to death, so you can see how the "community" here thinks how sane you sound...
You wrote:
> Well, the day I see you protesting against Egypt and blaming them for the situation in Gaza I might consider respecting you more.
This is like saying "The day I see you agreeing that the world is flat I might consider respecting you more". Hah, a hardcode defender of the mass killing might respect me? Thanks, I don't need any of that. Yes, arguing with you is like arguing with a flat-earther or a 9/11 truther, nothing will ever convince you that your views are deranged and so far from the truth. You can easily comfort yourself in your own "tower of ego-defense" by dismissing any argument as having the basis of antisemitism. Just like 9/11-truthers would rather deny reality rather than accept that they've been misled so deep into a rabbit hole, because admitting they're wrong would be admitting that they've been dumb for some 20-plus years.
Of course, I'm aware my arguments won't get anywhere; if a Genocide-supporter told me I was acting like a flat-earther, I'd also return to the "facts" that I know and conclude "What a dumb deranged fuckwit".
Now we're just going in circles (because you'd rather just rely on repetition rather than rethink your position, rethinking would let in doubt about how solid your arguments are). And if one side commited a genocide (or bombing and starving civilians for, hmm, wow, 2 years minus 1 week now), how much is the price to pay? Of course you believe "a genocide is justified when the other side starts a war" and "it's Egypt's fault that a genocide is happening", and I can also circularly refer to my comment.
"Because they (Hamas) started it!", is the justification you'll scream. It'd be like burning your neighbor's house down because you hated each other and he smeared dogshit all over your porch. In a lawful country, would that get you sent to a court, and would the judge let you go with the argument "he started it"?
The 1948 war between the newly formed Israel vs Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon? Do you notice which imaginary country you suggest about is missing from the list?
Ethnic cleansing, then. But this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - very typical of Israel supporters: they debate you on the letter instead of acknowledging that what we see here is horrendous.
Then they suggest that this is justified because Israel is a jewish ethnostate.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers or data, but that's just false. At least 60,0000 innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza, and Israel is to blame for this.
Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.
I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".
> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.
Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.
So all Jews who had to leave their lands, from Morocco to Pakistan, left of their own free will and emigrated to Israel? None were driven out? Are you saying they can return to their former homes then?
If Hamas supporters argue that what they did on Oct 07 is payback for "Naqba" (or whatever historical injustice dujour they fancy), then the question becomes: why can't Israel retaliate?
What about the Jews who lived in Saudi Arabia before Mohammed came along? What about the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza (the three biggest tribes)?
Such weak whataboutism as well. I know so many pro-Palestine people personally and people I follow online that also speak out about Sudan, Iran, other ME countries.
Heck, I know so many Muslims critical of Muslim majority nations.
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.
That’s an awful false equivalence. We’re not talking about people being arrested by their own government with, presumably, probable cause. We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
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, intentionally put civilians in just as much harms way. How is doing that justified as a reaction to Israel exactly?
They aren't a Robin Hood like resistance. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
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.
I don’t use TikTok, but I’ll chip in and cite the United Nations [1], the International Association of Genocide Scholars [2], Physicians for Human Rights-Israel [3], Amnesty International [4], Human Rights Watch [5], and Doctors Without Borders [6] to get started.
While the genocide case brought against Israel hasn't concluded as of now, to say there's no reason to believe this is genocide is incorrect.
If you’d like to share some sources (rather than only telling others to), maybe we can compare.
What, succinctly, is your point? You first claimed that this was not a genocide, then posted a link to a list of other genocides. Are you saying that none of the genocides in your list happened? Or that they are miscategorized?
My point is that wikis are not reliable sources no matter how many sources they link to. You'd have to check all the other sources to verify their veracity and that only gets harder the more sources are linked.
Lazy dismissal ,but then again, you don't really have a leg to stand on to defend your point.
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
Which of these organizations should I trust on their word? Give me 5 of them and I'll see if I feel like I can trust them. As to them "all being Hamas", well, who knows. The Swedish television special reporter from that region is so it isn't unheard of. It is not as if it is possible for anyone to just barge in there and report anything he sees, interview anyone he wants and visit any place he cares.
was always a lurker so never had an account. I just think it's important to counter Israel's misinformation campaign :) very telling you think those words have lost their meaning though. I don't think we need further discussion
You're wrong on so many counts here but it seems obvious you're not in a place to listen to reason. Your confirmation bias has to be very strong to think you know better that the majority of neutral genocide experts.
I’m a bit more optimistic about wars where there isn’t a strong religious aspect on both sides. Can still be bloody (WW1/2) but doesn’t have the same dynamics that make me so pessimistic about the Middle East
> I just feel nihilism/defeatism towards the Middle East. In 500 years they’ll still be killing each other with all sides genuinely believing in their righteousness
Phrasing it as something that happens over there is disingenuous when it resource extraction and foreign interference that directly contributed to political unrest and radicalization and war. It is the CIA that poured literal millions in funding extremists groups. It is western troops and bombs and that landed on their soil again and again.
It's not something that simply happens over there, war is not some unforgivable trait related to tanned foreign people who believe in islam. Our governments have their hand in this cookie jar.
The middle east is an outdated term referring to a conflict zone that the West itself created.
You're not being as sly as you think you are. You said "they’ll still be killing each other", implying that this is the nature of the "Middle Eastern" people.
This, of course, is a statement that almost required the person who replied to you to add context due to the absurdity of the statement.
If you genuinely did not mean to imply this, you might consider reading your comments before submitting.
That's not what you said. You implied it's simply in the nature of the Middle East to be fighting religious wars, and that is why you are hopeless.
In fact, the aggressors in this case are European colonists, only 3rd generation or so, and they are pretty much following the standard historical playbook for how European colonists treat locals, including the assumed divine right of genocide ("manifest destiny") The Middle East isn't an especially belligerent place otherwise.
We don't have to bring peace to the region, but for god's sake can we stop funding the eviler side in every conflict? The USA spends more money blowing up schools of brown people than it does on keeping its own schools running.
> Sure, buildings were demolished, is that unusual in a war zone?
I'm going to assume good faith in your framing, rather than intentional minimization. Suffice it to say, more has happened than "buildings were demolished", and those more things are the subject of the article. Like, for example, an entire city systemically flattened with every single civilian inhabitant killed or exiled on their own land.
To answer your question in that context: yes, that is unusual in war these days, because it is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
That's absurd. History didn't start on October 7th. All of this is downstream from Nakba and the Balfour Declaration. Zionism was by its very definition genocidal.
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.
The Zionists invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed over 750,000 people off their land. That is the war they started, Hamas are just the relatives of the people Israel murdered fighting the occupying invaders. Thankfully they opened the world's eyes to Israel's crimes and now it's a dead man walking. Israel will not last another generation.
From how I understand the history, in 1948, the attacking Arab armies from neighboring countries told the local Arabs (Palestinians) to leave the war zone to be safe. But when Israel won the war, those Arabs could not return.
The way I heard it, there was a bit of everything. There was some attacks because of the violence that had been happening previously, some fled because of rumours of violence, and some were encouraged by the Arab armies.
The Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister have openly stated that the destruction of Rafah was intended as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of civilians.
You seem to be confused about what genocide means, and your nonchalant careless use of it denigrates those who were actually victims of it, like those in Rwanda or Burma, where governments expressly systemically sought to murder and eradicate all members of particular ethnic groups. What Hamas clearly aspired to was genocide in the formal definition (ie, their stated end goal was and is the destruction of Israel and murder of all Jews). To my knowledge Israel has never expressed any desire to eradicate the Palestinians in whole or in part on the basis that they are Palestinian, nor can such a desire be imputed. Just because you don’t like what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t make it genocide, and you (and others) would be taken slightly more seriously if you saved that term for appropriately serious situations (with the requisite mens rea), which Gaza is not.
You people keep saying this is what Hamas wants. I've read the original scary charter everyone keeps pointing at. They never say to murder Jews. They do say to dismantle the apartheid state and replace it with a justice oriented one. That doesn't require marching 7 million Israelis into the sea, it just requires a regime change.
There's no proof of that. However there is proof of Israel invoking the Hannibal directive on Oct 7 and torching hundreds of cars from the air, which were then buried.
Have you seen the video evidence Israel says they have of Hamas's brutality? I haven't either.
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.
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?
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
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.
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....
> 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?
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.
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 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?
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.
why are you still putting "disengagement" in quotes? if south korea prevents food from entering north korea, does that mean according to you south korea is currently "engaged" in north korea?
in both cases the countries border with multiple countries and one country doing whatever it wants with its own borders does not constitute a blockade.
now answer the damn question: didn't they do that in south lebanon and then quickly rockets appear near the border and nearby towns get evacuated semi daily and didn't the same happen during gaza disengagement?
> 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?
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.”
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.
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 absurd.
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.
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.
A lot of the stories that came out of Abu Ghraib sure sound like they have very strong parallels to what is happening today. At the level of "poorly trained reservists trying to do something difficult without sufficient oversight and getting frustrated and turning to torture" it sounds very similar.
And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).
Abu Ghraib was a scandal, some people got punished, probably not all of the right ones.
When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.
That's a very flat take. That ignores the fact that the doctor that saw the prisoner reported it for investigation or that the military had chose to prosecute it, also you don't mention this was one case, not "systematic"
Even ignoring the fact that protests do not imply popular support, there is no comparison as 9/11 did not include widespread sexual violence and ongoing hostage rape was still going on at the time this happened.
So even if this seemed terrible to most Israelis, it was hard to find someone who will publicly defend a rapist from rape in jail
Sure if you ignore the UN Commission of Inquiry report from March 2025 that concluded sexual and gender-based violence was used systematically against Palestinian detainees.
Except Israel calls all criticism against it biased or anti semitic. Even a bad programmer can spot another bad programmer, sharing the trait doesn't mean you're not qualified to call it out in others.
I don't know, an example, Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese spreading nazi era conspiracy theories about Jews controlling political systems.
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
The reaction of Americans to Abu Ghraib and the reaction of Israelis to the - larger scale - torture of Palestinian prisoners, is miles apart. It's also why there was always an end in sight to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet there isn't for Gaza until it has not a single Palestinian left.
That ended in a million dead over bi-partisan 20 years of war. Without 9/11 including massive hostage taking, rape or mass murder with torture in people homes.
The other main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it an ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
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).
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.
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 demonstrate a commitment to reforming your style of 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 marked [flagged] and the account 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. This community only works when people make the effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down further.
> 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:
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.
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.
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recovers 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?
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
>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?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
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 didn't claim that Iraq's invasion of Iran was justified.
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
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:
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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".
“in part” this would only require 1 building to be destroyed to satisfy this definition, in fact any sort of action taken at all during war or any sort of inter ethnic conflict would satisfy this definition.
That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.
If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.
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" and destroying everyones home. 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.
> 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.
Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
How can you simultaneously decide you do not need to care about the lives of a group of people on the basis of a difference of ethnicity as you prioritize the formation of an ethnic state, and simultaneously refuse the premise that the formation of that state is to blame for ethnic strife? Your first and last paragraphs cannot be reconciled.
If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
I don’t know this “everyone” you speak of, and I don’t identify or cheerlead for one group of murderers the other, and I empathize with all of the many innocent victims.
But I agree that those with the power and the weapons do seem to only believe in simple, violent solutions.
There might be complex solutions to be had, but it will take different leaders, and that seems unlikely in the short term.
The Germans thought the Jews started a war against the Germans, but now we know that's not true. There is an answer even if one side pretends it is not the answer.
I should have qualified it as “in any conflict going back more than a generation or so” because you’re right: there are net new attacks that are simpler.
But if you’re attempted to draw a parallel between Hitler’s use of an ethnic minority as a nationalist punching bag and the situation in the Middle East, that I totally reject.
The Zionist ethnic cleansing and now genocide of Palestinians is even more straight forward than WWII. Europeans created Zionism which at it's very onset, required the removal of Palestinians from their land. They've been enacting that policy with Western support since then.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
> But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII.
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
> Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
> I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict.
Hang on though, isn't it Palestine who keeps accepting peace deals and then Israel keeps rejecting them and dropping a few more missiles? Do they not teach you that part? E.g. on October 7 Hamas released 3 Israeli hostages. Israel shot them dead, so Hamas didn't release any more.
I do wonder, isn’t there a sense the Palestinians face the survival of their people today?
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
An ethnostate generally is a bad, illiberal idea, but concerning Israel, the ideas that are good in terms of ideology would have been, and possibly still would be, worse in practice.
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
Exactly! I have the same experience. Most jews I know are not Zionists and are amazing people. Israel is not about religion, but about ideology as you point out and is deeply illiberal.
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
What is modern are states like we have now. Passports didn't exist before WW1 for example. The idea that people can't freely move across land and imaginary lines we call borders is a modern idea.
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
Wow, has reading comprehension escaped the world? What is different about the passport system compared to the examples you gave? Just think about it for a while.
The distinction is a world wide system of borders we call countries where you need passports to cross. That is distinctly a modern thing. The way countries work now is a distinctly modern thing. Yes, there were always some places that had walls and borders, but never as a world-wide system.
The way boats and airplanes work is also a distinctly modern thing, with those technologies curiously advancing around the time you claim passports were invented.
And ironically the average person travels less than 500 years ago. Shocking but true. Evem though technology made traveling easier. The reason is money and urbanization. You now need money to travel when I'm the past you didn't.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
Ok, totally true but faith and race are conflated for jews, much more so than muslims or christians. Mizrahi jews aren't called Arab jews, judaism is not a proselitizing religion in general for 5,000 years so of course it has bloodlines rather than converts.
Israel is an ethnostate apartheid system on that conflated definition. After all, religion is almost as hereditary as race.
I guess I don't see the distinction as all that important? Aside from the fact that it would be an all-time troll if 2 million people in Gaza declared that they're Jewish now and applied for aliyah.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...
[flagged]
There is a possibility to use https://www.google.com/streetview/contribute/
There was internet connectivity at least before the widespread destruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Palestine#Ga...
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.
You realize people get cameras and phones into actual prisons, right?
You realise Gaza is more tightly controlled than actual prisons, right?
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.
For a great example of this, look at this pin https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZcMbdFcx87PrqoYNA
And here's a pin of where the farms were spared https://maps.app.goo.gl/iZbbTH4iH27FCz4s9
This wasn't done with strikes, but with (remote controlled) bulldozers. https://idfclub.org/remote-controlled-warfare-how-israels-ro...
Wow. So the next Rachel Corinne will be killed by a robot.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF_Caterpillar_D9
By the time the bulldozers are there civilians have long moved out of the area.
Rachel Corrie would like a word. [0]
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
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.
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.)
That's not really a response to the point being made.
The claim I was responding to was: "By the time the bulldozers are there civilians have long moved out of the area."
Rachel Corrie's case is a counterexample to that general claim: she was a civilian physically present in the area of an Israeli military bulldozer operation.
Saying that it happened 23 years ago, under a different government, doesn't make the counterexample cease to exist.
It only tells us that the example isn't evidence about every Israeli bulldozer operation today.
If you're arguing that civilians currently leave before demolition operations in Gaza, then make that case.
"That happened under a previous government" doesn't establish that.
I'm not arguing for anything. I'm just adding context, because your comment read as if it happened during the 'current phase' of the conflict. That's a crucial detail to omit, imho.
> your comment read as if it happened during the 'current phase' of the conflict
I don't think anyone else "read" it like that.
> That's a crucial detail to omit
It really isn't. No international body decided on "phases" to delinate combat, and given that there is not yet apology or atonement or peace since, that "phase" never ended.
Everyone who has not heard of her before thought that you are referring to something that happened now and not decades ago.
I was surprised and felt mislead.
I'm not sure what are you even arguing with me about. If it doesn't weaken your argument than it shouldn't matter to you that I've added factual context.
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.
Wow. I had no idea.
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.
First sentence. "The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
Interesting how both peoples independently arrived at a similar word, but I guess when something truly is a catastrophe, other words can fail you.
Thanks for sharing. At this point I'm so numb to the destruction that this piece of trivia got to me more than the new satellite photos.
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Only a child thinks 2003 was a long time ago.
Of course it's relevant. Regardless, there are many instances of Israel killing civilians with bulldozers in Gaza.
And then they bomb them in their tent cities while blocking aid, all while murdering hundreds of journalists so no one sees...
Been watching it for years. A great stain on history, with weapons paid for and built by Americans, not to mention a complicit media.
Interesting claim. Where did you hear that? The IDF is pretty infamous for crushing people alive with these bulldozers, and also for denying search & rescue access to find civilians buried in the wreckage (and also for just killing said SAR and hiding the bodies and lying about it*).
* surprise, it was in Rafah, the city formerly located in the wasteland from the article we're discussing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_paramedic_massacre
Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
Let's be clear and honest: Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians and they routinely murder civilians as part of this.
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.
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.
It also looks similar to Mosul in Iraq before and after the ISIS and Iraq and coalition forces fought:
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.
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.
> 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.
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flattens the entire city? absolutely not, this is not a standard anyone should consider normal
Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Warsaw, Grozny, Aleppo, Mariupol, Carthage... war is hell.
Sadly it does seem pretty normal.
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.
only 1,200 people? are you nuts? every Israeli felt the loss. they are a small country. How can you just say 1,200 people as if its nothing.
Palestinian lives > zionist feelings. If you think 1,200 people is devastating, what do you think about the 75k+ Palestinians murdered by Israel? Again, 1,200 is far, far less than the number of Palestinians murdered by Israel prior to Oct 7th. History can no longer be denied.
The 75k deaths in Gaza should be blamed on the side that chose the conflict: Hamas. Human shield deaths are ugly, but the blame must go to the side that caused them to be human shields. The alternative is to create a situation where evil can prevail by hiding behind enough human shields.
The Zionists chose this conflict when they invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed the indigenous Palestinians. That you call Palestinians murdered by Israel "human shields" is evil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
This is not the argument in favor of Israel you think it is
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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.
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.
"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."
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?
No link to a source ?
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...
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.
Maybe they should be treated like the festival goers?
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
They would be better off if they were.
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I was hoping the numbers would make it obvious the reaction is disproportionate and careless with the lives of civilians.
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.
Hamas has launched 10s of thousands of rockets and mortars at Israel what is an appropriate response for them? Should they just sit there letting someone try to kill them or should they retaliate? How many casualties is an acceptable amount?
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/06/11/19000-rockets-launch...
What do they expect when they murder an entire country full of people and steal their land? Israel shouldn't exist, problem solved.
When did they murder an entire country? Last time I checked people still live in Palestine, in fact the population been steadily increasing over the past 40 or so years. Is your solution that the people of Israel should just die instead of fighting back?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
Every Israeli prime minister has been European. Every one. The answer is to return to their homeland and let the remaining Palestinians return to theirs.
new Voight-Kampff test just dropped
I wish I could turn off empathy at my convenience.
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.
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Source: the aggressors
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almost as if they didn't have the best interest of the civilians in mind uh
As Emiliano Zapata once said, "Better to die standing than to live on your knees".
While I don't condone violence, it's a legitimate way to defend against occupation.
Targeting military - yes, under certain conditions.
Targeting civilian homes and a festival - nothing legitimate about that.
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.
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.
Making up scenarios sure is fun. Let me try!
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
It's very much possible to imagine that.
Considering every single offer that was accepted by both sides was immediately violated by the Israeli side
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.
What were the offers?
Bibi was aware of the plans, and allowed the attack to manufacture support for the greater Israel project.
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Then maybe the civilians should kill their Hamas neighbors, instead of cheering them in the streets and supporting the actions of Oct 7th…
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>this is entirely purposeful
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
What a nice, objective guy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/uyqjn2/norman_fink...
He also promotes transphobia. Chomsky was friends with Epstein and acquaintance of Steve Bannon. I don’t think that discredits his entire body of work, but I think we should stop promoting him when there are sources that are less problematic.
You are mixing Chomsky (the subreddit) up with Norm (the book author). Norm was friends with Chomsky but not Epstein or Bannon. I'm unaware of him having transphobic views.
Norman Finkelstein's treatment of sources is dubious at best , dishonest at worst, and he is not very good at defending his position when challenged on them
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...
Save your Hasbara. It is backfiring.
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.
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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.
Also Tucker Carlson? Seriously?
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.
> Looks the same in Ukraine
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.
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.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/10/28/how-russias-invas...
WAR IS HELL
> 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.
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."
Rafah was no village, with 250,000 to 280,000 people.
Similar size to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol
> It does not
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 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
> If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too.
Both are the results of aggressive madmen, but both situations are different. And the genocide aspect is not what is discussed here.
Also, why do you think that “Russia is doing the same thing” is some kind of gotcha?
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Well, it happened in germany with the hitleryouth and volksturm.
Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this.
Many of the towns along the front with Russia are also wastelands. Nearly every single building from homes, to schools, to shops are rubble.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/10/28/how-russias-invas...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-26/damage-data-reveals-e...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/5/24/satellite-...
And that just from the start of war.
Yeah, we can look at how Mariupol looks on satellite images. It looks nothing like Rafah. You have to be completely blind to not see the difference.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mar'inka,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...
Here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TncezF72LxaWAKYY7
That’s Bahkmut which is still close to the frontline. They were talking about Mariupol which the Russians have actually rebuilt already, see here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mariupol,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...
"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)
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."
Seriouslly?
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.
To busy using white phosphorous on kids.
Well, Russia's use of white phosphorous during the invasion and ensuing occupation of Ukraine is well documented
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.
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744 ukranian children killed.
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.
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 call it a awful thing to do.
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.
(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
I wonder why Israel put the border there. It didn't used to be the border.
The destruction in Ukraine is mostly focused on the front line. Gaza was treated as a front line almost in its entirety, with almost no place to hide.
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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.
> who I'm told aren't even considered people
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?
It was a figure of speech. I'm told with evidence.
Care to share the evidence?
You know how you don't convince a flat earther with evidence? You're not looking to be convinced, you just want to prove you're smarter than everyone else. You'll always have some silly vague argument that you can hang on to for dear life and pretend that invalidates the other person's case. I don't have time for pointless exercises you need as validation.
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.
It does not look the same, at all.
Cities in the heat of the conflict (i.e boots on the ground) sure do look like that
I’m not sure your point? They are not civilians when they are covering up tunnels in their homes for Hamas to use.
Look at Google map of Gaza city, Rafah, Khan-Younes, Al Qarara, ... pretty much all building have been destroyed. You want to try to argue that every one of them was somehow hiding a tunnel ?
Is having tunnels in their own territory a problem?
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> evacuation orders. This prompted an estimated 1 million to 1.4 million civilians
"Evacuating" a million people who will not be allowed to return is "ethnic cleansing".
1) They will be allowed to return.
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 not even evacuation because the IDF does not provide facilities to go to, it's just forced displacement.
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.
EDIT: And more: Yassin Rabia, Khaled Nagar, Osama Tabesh, Ayman Mabhouh, Samer Ismail Khadr Aby Daqqa. Fact check me. Also Israel has documented rocket launching from humanitarian zones. Israel has also retrieved bodies of hostages (including Hersh Goldberg) from tunnels under humanitarian zones.
If you just kill everyone you do often kill the people you were looking for as well.
If it was genocide, why would you spare the farmers? Doesn’t really make sense.
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.
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It’s more efficient to spend your ammo on housing and city buildings.
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?
You're right, it is, hence the strikes on World Central Kitchen and the blockade on food entering the area.
they send armed settlers for the farms. they can't destroy those
Farmland wasn't bombed, but they did use Bulldozers to destroy a lot of fields.
Food production was target, even in different part of Palestine (west bank).
Farmers were killed, even in different part of Palestine.
Killing farmers have nothing to do with the definition of genocide.
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?
How does bulldozing a family home have any affect on a tunnel?
> 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 should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.
The problem is that the homes are booby trapped. US would not send soldiers into iraq towns too- one trap - one ambush, and its artillery o clock.
Every single house in the entire city of Rafah was booby-trapped?
No, but how do you tell which ones are and which ones aren't?
Like when packaged food gets potentially contaminated, you don't test each package for bacteria. You throw away the whole lot.
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
You neglected to mention the decades-long blockade, or Netanyahu doing everything in his power to keep Hamas in charge. A true "peace process" has never been tried. (Well, except by Rabin, so of course they murdered him)
https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus-sup...
Part of Hamas' militias fought alongside the Egyptian army against IS & AQ in Egypt, so that's not entirely true.
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 kidnap a civilian at gunpoint and force them to trigger the trap. It's called the "Mosquito Protocol", an IDF classic: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-03-30/ty-article-opinio...
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
Mosul doesn't have a massive network of underground tunnels that use civilian homes as entrances and exits.
If Hamas cared about Palestinians, they could just use military buildings for that.
Hamas doesn't care much about civilians, nobody says otherwise. But that's no legitimation for also murdering civilians.
Eh, that is exactly what ISIS did in Mosul
Did exactly what?
Dig tunnels and taking civilians hostage and used them as human shields. Nobody gave a fuck.
True. Hopefully one day brown people will be considered people too.
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> Like when packaged food gets potentially contaminated, you don't test each package for bacteria.
You're comparing wiping out tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian people's lives... to disinfection.
Like yeah, there's plenty of examples of israel's current leaders calling the Palestinian race sub-human, vermin, animal, saying it should be wiped off the earth, etc, but I didn't expect it on HN, JFC.
These buildings being bulldozed are empty, they are left booby trapped for when Israel sweeps them for tunnel entrances.
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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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49890287#49898968
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).
Man, i cant wait for qatar to run out of money and send these bots back to McDonalds.
"It's not a lie, if you believe it" — George Costanza
How do you know which ones are booby trapped?
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, too.
Can you link to any documented cases of the US leveling a city after encountering a trap or ambush?
Battle of Mosul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016%E2%80%93...
Huh? The Battle of Mosul was notable for its extremely intense infantry combat.
There were weeks of airstrikes by the coalition and then artillery barage("Down Barage"). Basically Mosul was leveled before a single soldier entered it.
Uhh... no.
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...
here are better ones, with clear complete devastation of large parts of the city:
NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
and AP drone imagry https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2017/7/14/mosul-drone-footage-...
This is a good rebuttal to the claim that no part of Mosul was struck hard or leveled. But nobody claimed that.
From your linked AP article:
"Nearly a third of the Old City [a specific neighborhood] was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by U.N. Habitat using satellite imagery"
From MSF re Rafah:
"Over 15 months of all-out war on Gaza have left 92 percent of housing units and about 70 percent of all structures destroyed or damaged."
So we have 1/3rd of a particularly hard-hit neighborhood destroyed in Mosul versus 70% of the entire city of Rafah.
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/destruction-hom...
This is very obviously a completely different scale and comprehensiveness of destruction.
You are comparing different things. You should be comparing the intensive part of the battle in both cases. Mosul vs. Rafah is a great comparison. The total number of civilians were similar. The number of combatants were similar. Rafah is a lot denser. Israel's war results in significantly less civilian casualties. The allies pounded Mosul with its civilian population with heavy bombardments. The criticism of Israel on this is orders of magnitude higher than any criticism levelled at the allies (well basically none). If you look at why did the allies go to war on ISIS there is nothing even borderline comparable to the Oct 7th attack on Israel from Gaza. Something to ponder.
That Israel kept looking for tunnels and destroying empty buildings for strategic reasons after the battle was over and Rafah was mostly abandoned is not relevant to evaluating the main battle.
That MSF statement is not specifically about Rafah in your link either. It's about the entire Gaza strip. And just like Rafah a lot of the destruction happened in evacuated areas for tactical reasons, searching for tunnels, preventing guerrilla attacks, dealing with booby traps etc. We can argue about the necessity and legality of those but they are a different kind of discussion vs. the main battle portion.
Gaza in total had a population of about 2 million people and about 70,000 casualties. Israel's own estimate in 2025 claimed 8,900 of those were combatants.
Mosul had 1.5 million people at the time of the battle and ~10-20k civilian casualties + ~10-20k combatants.
Hard to do direct comparisons and all the numbers are obviously squishy, but your claim that Israel's war results in significantly fewer casualties seems... dubious at best.
And in any case, we actually know for a fact that Israel's non-combatant casualty cut-off value (NCV) -- i.e. their accepted rate in decision-making -- is several multiples higher than the coalition forces were.
> Peter Gersten, former deputy commander of operations and intelligence for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, states that “[w]ith Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV value of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, when he was head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) during the war against ISIS, would personally be called to authorize an operation with a “high” NCV of 14 or 15.
Re the Jabalia Camp attack:
> Satellite visual analysis of the attack site shows at least five large craters, including two approximately 40 feet wide, consistent with the impact of 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The attack destroyed not just one residential apartment building, but a whole block.
> Even without specific further intelligence, on the basis of this information Israel’s CDE must have resulted in a very high estimate for civilian casualties. Given the location, population spread, and choice of weapons, the actual toll of hundreds of civilians killed or wounded would have been a reasonable expectation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Basra_(2003)
I was more opposed to the Iraq war than 99.9% of Americans, and this is just ahistorical bullshit.
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.
> the homes are booby trapped
Robots. These things can be cleared. Particularly if the population isn't there.
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
Furthermore, in a way that’s conveniently equivalent to ethnically cleansing the land.
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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)?
Come on.
> 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.
> 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?
> All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
> When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing
Then why is it taking so long?
> 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?
> They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it
They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened? You say, "that's not an argument," but I think it is. If we accept your claims, then it follows that Israel has had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill everyone in Gaza for years (at least).
The fact that they still haven't done that suggests that your claims are false.
> Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them.
Ah, so it's just international pressure holding them back. Right.
I don't buy it. Israel has hardly shown itself to be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions. And at the end of the day, they are a nuclear power and functionally immune to military threats from rational actors. If the IDF started the genocide tomorrow ain't nobody gonna do shit about it.
Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
> Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
The questions needed to be asked at all because it was your comment that was of the lowest caliber. All smoke and no fire.
> They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened?
The same can be said for any conflict in which one side has overwhelming capacity and does not choose to engage on it for various reasons. But yes, diplomacy and public pressure actually matter a lot, as evidenced by the fact that Israel spends billions of dollars in state propaganda and funding political campaigns in the West to continue to receive military aid and avoiding sanctions.
You are saying that Israel has shown itself to not be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions yet it engaged for decades in political and diplomatic action to be where it is today; it was not looked at that favorably by Western powers even a few decades backs. And it understands that apartheid South Africa was not on anyone's radar for decades until it was. AIPAC and other lobbying agencies fund hundreds of political campaigns in the US in order for this to happen.
So yeah, if in five years' time the Democratic Socialists end up overtaking establishment DNC Zionists and get their share of power such that they allow BDS to work and stop military aid then Israel is going to have a much more difficult time, as evidenced by their desire to have the US engage Iran without them participating directly because they are not actually as powerful militarily as they project themselves to be.
> Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
That works until it doesn't, much like how China did not dominate on renewable energies until it did, or how proprietary Unix dominated the server market until Linux appeared. It takes remarkably little time to turn a country into a pariah state. For the past two decades Germany theorized that economic connections to Russia would prevent them from doing anything stupid regarding Ukraine.
And Israel does not just have to care about external issues. Economic sanctions hit economies hard, and even a recession is enough to turn the tables against candidates during election years, so given that certain political parties are the ones who hold the cards at any time, they are not keen to lose elections.
Also Israel depends very much on its network of high-tech companies, companies that are extremely sensitive to any sort of sanctions regime or any loss of trust such that no amount of lobby money suffices to get profitable military or high-tech contracts.
And once Israel is politically and militarily isolated it becomes a much easier target against rivals in the Middle East, so being politically associated with the West is very much a matter of survival. In this sense they have all the time in the world to perform their campaign of ethnic cleansing to restore Eretz Israel.
None of what I'm saying is speculation, this is very much what political analysts in Israel say and have been saying for decades. The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
> The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
Also it's a self-reinforcing cycle. The far right keeps testing what they can get away with, becoming increasingly emboldened. The leftists are packing up. Those in the middle see global backlash grow and realize there's no going back to pre-2023 world, so they might as well go all-in with the right. Israel is like a heroin addict using the very thing that's destroying them, in order to cope with the damage it already caused. Without intervention it generally doesn't end well.
> Ethnic cleansing complete?
Are you seeing the same images we are in the article? Yes, the city has been ethnically cleaned.
> 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.
How advanced do you think Hamas are? One of their main weapons is the Qassam rocket, a dug up sewer pipe filled with sugar.
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.
There are wheelchairs that can climb stairs. This is a solved problem if you want it to be.
These things are gimmicks. They work in stairs constructed by code, but are not usable in warzones both in terms of resiliency and speed.
The problem is that it's genocide.
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And if the structure isn't actually being used for military purposes they just have to say "oopsie"? It makes sense for occasional houses that are being used for military purposes to be destroyed, but destroying all houses simply due to suspicion seems like too much.
It’s frustrating when people use civilians as pawns.
It's frustrating when people rationalize genocide.
It's demoralizing when people idolize Hamas committing crimes against humanity and starting wars.
> It's demoralizing when people idolize Hamas committing crimes against humanity and starting wars.
It's sickening when people blatantly lie like that ... especially in the service of rationalizing genocide.
Its called something like collective punishment, something that many cultures practiced around the world.
Those cultures sound like savages to me
What do you think of the cultures that practiced it?
Dont harm the messenger, im just telling you the fact of past humanity.
Which is a war crime
Agreed, im simply telling you why its done.
have you seen the extent of tunnels that were there?
No, have you? Is there any independent confirmation of their existence?
Personally I haven’t. I know my office is gone. I know the hotel I used to stay in (always fun to wake up seeing a gunboat a couple of miles off shore pointing at you out the window) has gone.
My colleagues have seen these tunnels. At least ore 2023. Israel has denied them entry since then.
Tons of pictures and videos were published by both sides.
Yes, hamas posted about it?
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Yes exactly like that.
"We're no worse than Hamas!" is an interesting argument.
So if two sides are doing the same things in an existential struggle, how can you say one sides tactics are deplorable and wrong?
Because I can say that both sides are deplorable and wrong? In fact, I can even say they're both deplorable and wrong in uneven amounts, but that both meet the bar of "deplorable and wrong."
You think you have to choose a side between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? You think you need to send one of them money?
So if we stopped sending money to Israel you’d stop talking about Israel and Gaza forever?
This idea that people only care about Israel because we support them with our tax dollars is such a joke
Well I care about it principally because of the degree to which it distorts our politics. The funding is one cause and effect of that distortion but there are others. For example the theological allegiance between US evangelicals and Zionists is a shockingly powerful force in US politics.
But yes the component that morally implicates me personally is the funding and it’d be a big improvement not to participate in it.
Just like I don’t think it’s obvious that we should fund Sinaloa despite them being decidedly less monstrous than New Generation.
Why wouldn’t you answer the question that I asked? Do we need to pick a side in the cartel wars? If no, why is that different?
What if... wait for it... They are both wrong?
Israel is the great betrayal. In 1948 it was supposed to become a secular country based on European values not a Jewish theocracy. It is dragging us down and for what?
The power imbalance allows one side to exhibit restraint and use more civilized options. These aren’t actors on the same footing. It’s a nuclear power with a multi billion dollar military against some of the poorest people on the planet.
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.
“ 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.
> 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.
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And how would they leave? What countries take refugees from Gaza?
That is a definition of a genocide[1].
[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
Not quite. Perhaps you were thinking of "ethnic cleansing" ?
It seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives, like some kind of deranged Clippy. Talk about loss of perspective.
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
I will add as a comment—because I can no longer edit the post—that it’s also bonkers how much the upvotes and downvotes are fluctuating on this. I couldn’t care less about the points, but the threshold for a downvote is higher than an upvote so it does show a certain tendency, and it’s disgusting that such a large part of this community values nitpicking of words over empathy and human lives.
Not that that was in question. HN is, after all, in too large a part a reflection of the greedy US tech industry. It has shown time and again that it’s selfishly OK with human exploitation and supremely susceptible to being manipulated by the right amount of technicality while simultaneously arrogantly believing it is immune to being influenced.
Some days I’m truly ashamed of this community and find myself incapable of defending it against the mockery and contempt it receives from the rest of the internet.
> seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives
The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions [1]. That requires killing with industrial efficiency, something that made it categorically unique from the "wipe out the village" warfare that goes back to, probably, before civilisation. (Chimpanzees do it. To my knowledge, they're the only other species that annihilates versus merely fighting off enemies.)
At lower kill volumes, even in the tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands, the line between conventional warfare done conservatively, conventional warfare done brutally and a process that, if left unhindered, will reach a million-man death toll.
(Then you have the ambiguity, one which does not apply in Gaza, introduced by displacement also being included in genocide and it starts to intersect pretty much perfectly with war.)
If we want these words to keep having meaning, we have to nitpick around their use. Otherwise, overinclusivity will consume them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides
Nitpick all you want, but at some point you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place, and whether it's time for the international community to step in. Those approaches aren't mutually exclusive.
> you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
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One of the items on this list has only 3000 deaths. Genocide isn't about how many people you succeed in killing.
Oddly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide is not listed?
I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?
My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.
> The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions
So if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide? Seems like a very obtuse understanding of the word, which is also defined in the wiki you linked.
> if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide?
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
> OP asked why this is being debated.
I did not. I lamented (it was not a question) that we’re nitpicking (it’s not a debate) the definition, especially when the person in question suggested an alternative which is not defined.
I do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed. If one of those people were in front of you crying for their home and life and asked for your compassion and help in fleeing the genocide, would you turn to them and say “ackchyually, someone on Hacker News said this is merely an ethnic cleansing, you’re on your own”?
> do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> would you turn to them and say “ackchyually
What is this.
> No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
Right. So what I’m saying is let’s have some empathy and compassion for other people. Let’s focus on how horrible it is and what we can do, the same way we would hope others would do for us if we were the ones in that situation.
At what point does Israel go
"Ya know what, everybody already has us marked as commiting genocide, so why don't we just actually do it?"
The civilian population of Palestinians has shrunk ~1% since the war started, despite Israel have the weapons to actually just kill everyone.
There is a technical definition of genocide. There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing, only people like you who are probably concern trolling.
> There is a technical definition of genocide
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
>A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation.
Which is why zero armenians remain after the armenian genocide
oh wait no nevermind, your definition is just bullshit. Only one set of people define what is or isn't a genocide: historians. The ICC only covers crimes against humanity. Historians are also in wide agreement (except for the Israel aligned ones) that it is a genocide in Gaza.
https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/assets/pdf/Guid...
Correct. If no such court case has delivered a verdict, then by definition no one can rightly claim genocide has occurred.As for whats happening, the over represented proportion of male combatant age deaths, the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare, the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians, stopping for polio vaccines, population numbers remaining stable etc puts a question on the "Only Reasonable Inference" standard.
What would you consider a proportionate response given Hamas's initial charter, the rockets fired over the years, the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank and the abhorrent attack of October 7th?
https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/how-iran-plans-to-d...You know what, it's been a while since I took the piss out of the hasbara, let's have fun.
> the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare
Ah, yes, the very urban warfare art of bombing hospitals and refugee camps. Very urban. Much warfare. And you also get to claim that the civilians didn't die from the fighting, merely from the starvation!
>the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians
Yep. Nothing happened before October 7. 1947 ? Doesn't exist. Nakba? Probably some arab term that means nothing. Close to a century of warfare, torture, humiliation and putting Gazawis into concentration camps ? Naaaah. Hamas is responsible. Bad Hamas.
> population numbers remaining stable
There has been no accurate population counts for three years. But thank you for being so generous and letting palestinians reproduce while you park them in camps. Very kosher <3
>Hamas's initial charter
No shit, the armed resistance group that was formed to resist with arms against an attacker wants the attacker gone ? Silly Hamas. They should have done like Bibi and kept the actual plan quiet in cabinet meetings.
Hint: armed resistance against an occupier is legal and encouraged under international law.
>the rockets fired over the years
Yep. Israel did nothing. Didn't shoot children in the head, didn't regularly murder palestinians in prisons, didn't conduct raids on Palestinian territories or encourage settlers to colonize more. Poor little Israel.
>the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank
You regularly bomb another country, and you think that the other country is in the wrong for finding literally any way to make you eat shit ?
> the abhorrent attack of October 7th
A regrettable event and a needless loss of life. I'm not fully sure it justifies a retaliation that causes fifty times more death, destruction and horror, nor will the tribunal that will judge you for your crimes against humanity.
.. any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state and the biggest threat to the stability of the middle east. Whataboutism will not change facts.Well, Israel certainly doesn't intend to destroy Arabs, Muslims, or brown-skinned people more broadly, and you can't honestly claim "Palestine" is a nation:
- no defined territory--and certainly none widely recognized
- no unique language or ethnicity
- a culture only distinguished from Egypt and the Levant by their penchant for terrorism
- a history that only meaningfully diverged from their neighbors within the last half-century, and which divergence springs entirely from their consistent unwillingness to pursue peace with Israel
So even if Israel had the intent to commit genocide--which, unfortunately[1], they don't--the Arabs in Gaza don't qualify as a distinct group that can be subjected to genocide.
If Colombia had decided to annihilate the FARC, just kill them all--would that have qualified as a genocide, too? It seems to me they meet at least as many tests for nationhood.
[1]: See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49912637
Bruh it's literally text book.
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.
Begone foul genocide apologist.
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.
It is unjustifiable. It is vile.
> 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.
You are spewing propaganda.
> Is this a joke ?
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.
> 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/
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.
An Israeli military unit (COGAT) is not a trustworthy source of data for the aid they provide to an area they are actively blockading and starving.
This is a genocide, and you are complicit through your online hasbara.
> An Israeli military unit (COGAT) is not a trustworthy source of data for the aid they provide to an area they are actively blockading and starving.
From my understanding no organization other than COGAT even has the ability to track the total aid deliveries, there is no evidence of mass starvation or that COGAT data is unreliable from what I've seen.
35000 tons of aid, 60% percent of it food. So.. 10kg of food per person, per month.
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.
> 35000 tons of aid, 60% percent of it food. So.. 10kg of food per person, per month.
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.
COGAT is an Israeli military unit.
Trusting their statements is like trusting the statements of the Nazis during the previous genocide.
> COGAT is an Israeli military unit.
That doesn't mean the data is unreliable.
> Trusting their statements is like trusting the statements of the Nazis during the previous genocide.
Comparing Israeli's to Nazi's is a common antisemitic trope.
> That doesn't mean the data is unreliable.
No but it is like taking Russia's word for how many troops they lost.
> Comparing Israeli's to Nazi's is a common antisemitic trope.
How is comparing a state that is conducting a genocide to another group that did so too against the Jewish people ?
> No but it is like taking Russia's word for how many troops they lost.
Russia mostly just doesn't publish those figures at all last I checked. OSINT researchers however following the Russia/Ukraine war will typically use data from Russian, Ukrainian and independent sources where available however so it also wouldn't be advisable to completely ignore the Russian data either. Even extremely biased/limited data can sometimes be used to identify trends, at least for cases where the bias factor tends to be consistent.
Israel also isn't a dictatorship and has what most would consider to be a relatively free press that is not afraid to criticize the government(i.e. Haaretz) so it would be rather difficult for Israel to deliberately publish outright fabricated data on a large scale without getting caught doing so.
I'm also not saying you should blindly trust any specific sources, however much of the COGAT data can also be corroborated via independent sources such as satellite imagery.
Keep in mind it's also not the case that the UN data meaningfully contradicts the COGAT data either, it's entirely possible for both to be reasonably accurate. In general I would say both COGAT and UN data are both likely reasonably accurate once factoring in the published limitations on that data.
The reason the numbers are different is simply because they are measuring different things. In the case of COGAT they generally measure total aid going through border crossings while the UN measures aid reaching only a subset of distributions points within Gaza.
So if you want to estimate per capita food aid going into Gaza you would want to use the COGAT figures since that data is collected at all border crossings and can be used to get a rough per capita figure on aid entering Gaza. On the other hand if you want to measure something like aid reaching UN system aid distribution points within Gaza then you would want to use the UN data.
Attempting to use UN data to calculate per capita food aid going into Gaza would clearly be wrong as the UN's own published data collection methodology clearly shows they are not measuring total aid entering Gaza.
The UN often seems to publish reports analyzing their own data while clearly failing factor in their own published data limitations into their calculations which results in inaccurate conclusions in their analysis. Usually these sort of analysis mistakes are very obvious as the UN generally publishes the math behind their calculations.
You shouldn't blindly discard data simply because you think the source might be biased in one direction, rather you should try to understand the limitations of the data and corroborate it against secondary sources where possibly while also trying to factor in bias where feasible.
Essentially it's not the raw data where there is disagreement, it's the various interpretations of what the data actually means.
> How is comparing a state that is conducting a genocide to another group that did so too against the Jewish people ?
A war is not the same thing as a genocide. The Jews did not start a war with the Nazi's. Hamas started a war with Israel with openly genocidal goals, Hamas simply did not have the military capability to accomplish their genocidal goals.
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We've banned this account because it has been using HN primarily (even exclusively?) for political/national/etc. battle for many months. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're for or against. (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(and I suppose I'd better add: (1) yes, this would be the same if the person were arguing exactly the opposite; and (2) yes, I'm sure there are others doing just as badly which we haven't banned yet. If so, the reason is that we haven't seen them yet. We read HN pretty randomly, and can't come close to seeing everything.)
What about that jameshilliard guy that has tens of flagged dead comments about Israel ?
Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
> What about that jameshilliard guy that has tens of flagged dead comments about Israel ?
I think overall most of my comments are positive. Some people seem to flag comments as a way of disagreeing I guess.
> Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
I don't think that's really an accurate characterization, it's certainly not 99%, are comments correcting factual inaccuracies/misinformation in threads related to Israel considered political just because the surrounding topic is politically contentious?
Most of my comments on threads involving Israel are me just correcting some of the more obvious misinformation/conspiracy theories and/or trying to provide more factual background context/nuance to the discussions. I try not to push a specific political agenda/ideology for the most part. It's not like I'm trying to start political/ideological discussions either, there just seems to be more factual misinformation around topics involving Israel and that happens to be something where I know a lot of the history.
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.
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We don't call migration colonialism indeed, that's because they are fundamentally different concepts.
And guess what ? Someone can be both against unconstrained migration, colonialism, zionism and apartheid states.
Weak hasbara, try with a new throwaway account
> You don’t call it colonialism when it’s Muslims migrating en masse to Europe
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.
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No, it predates the nazis. Zionist terrorism and genocidal actions in Palestine started earlier.
Indeed. I'll never forget setting out to find out the origins of terrorism thinking it was Iranian, and finding out it was mostly British and Zionist... and I worked in anti-terrorism and hadn't been taught much of that history...
You say civilian dwellings, I say fighting positions. You see the same sort of thing in any urban combat zone.
How many apartment buildings are left standing in Bakhmut?
Oh 100%, you can see specific buildings (mostly marked as schools) that are still standing.
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.
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What is your expectation of how the civilian population of Gaza are meant to live after this? You can repeat your propaganda all you like, but what is the actual outcome you expect from this? In five years time, is this land occupied? By the same population that was displaced, or by Israelis? Or by no one?
The ideal situation would be something like after WW2:
- large international combined army occupies the entirety of Gaza
- every hamas official gets arrested
- trials in Hague (or somewhere else) where we separate between who was just party members, who tried to reduce the evil and who were the masterminds behind the worst parts of it. Some go free, some get a few years and some get life without parole
- international military administration until they are ready for normal elections. In Germany that took 9 years
- lots and lots and lots of campaigns to make them understand that they are not the victims (Germans also thought they were the victims until 1945 and beyond and it took effort to fix that)
- keep a close eye on them for the next 50 - 60 years
Will it happen?
Of course not. But it would be the absolute best outcome for civilians on Gaza.
Why won't it happen? Because half of the world think that the Gazans are the victims because more Gazans have died than Israelis lately. Imagine if we taught WW2 that way: "Germans were mostly innocent victims, over 350 000 absolutely innocent Germans died vs under 10 000 US civilians, wHiCh mEaNs WW2 wAs a aCsHuAlLy a gEn0cIdE aGa1nSt tHe GeRmAn pEoPlE".
Ukraine looks nothing like this
Tell me you know nothing about the war in Ukraine without telling me?
Please look up Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Soledar, Toretsk, Vugledar and Volnovakha. Those are just from Donetsk oblast.
And if you go beyond just the buildings it gets a lot uglier.
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!"
Well, now we have let it happen again, the facists of Gaza has attacked israel for 20 years while we looked the other way and finally, after their old provocations (or should I just write terrorist attacks?) stopped working (after Iron Dome and better border controls) they did the the unspeakable things in 2023.
So the question is now: will we let it continue?
When was the "looking the other way" happening?
The region has been locked in tit-for-tat since (at least) Israel broke the initial colonial independence process.
There was never any intention whatsoever from the Israeli side to live in peace with its neighbors. I'm not sure it's incumbent upon the existing residents of an area to welcome someone who quite clearly intends to take all of your land.
Ben-Gurion wrote this to his son eleven years before Israel was created. Before the holocaust started even!:
> A Jewish state in part of Palestine is not an end, but a beginning... We shall bring into the state all the Jews it is possible to bring... then we shall expand to the whole country... We will break through the borders imposed on us...
Same letter:
> If I were an Arab I would have been very indignant... What we really want is not that the land remain whole and unified. What we want is that the whole and unified land be Jewish... [underlined]We want to change the status quo.[/underlined]
Note that he refers to this being a state created in Palestine. He refers to bringing people from elsewhere into this state.
No sympathy from me. Both sides are sufficiently horrible and indefensible to be simply horrible and indefensible.
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"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
And Israhell allies, EU and USA.
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Why?
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Is the truth antisemitic now?
https://jewishlink.news/when-did-torah-values-become-extreme...
https://www.dw.com/en/from-the-nile-to-the-euphrates-inside-...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-it-may-be-justified-t...
None of these are far-right sources. Although, well, considering how chosen ones are buddy-buddy with nazis these days, that doesn't hold much water. These are mainstream sources.
An excerpt from the first link:
"The Torah explicitly commands us regarding hostile populations that endanger Israel: “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the Land from before you, then those whom you leave over will be as spikes in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they will harass you in the land in which you settle” (Bamidbar 33:55). The Torah further states, “And I will make your boundary from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the river, for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hands, and you shall drive them out from before you” (Shemot 23:31)."
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Why is this "antisemitic" when it's the clearly stated goal of Israeli leadership? We're also commenting on a post where Israel destroyed an entire city. There's a great twist of propaganda where people are more upset at people being upset about a genocide, then they are about the actual genocide. Expecting that to work is an "avalanche of stupidity".
It's antisemitic because they cant kill you right now for talking about them. And with killing I mean torture to death slowly.
https://2021-2025.state.gov/reports/2024-trafficking-in-pers... > the country faces ongoing challenges with domestic and transnational networks that exploit vulnerable populations for forced labor and sex trafficking
Under-reportedly, many thousands from Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa and of course Palestine were lured in via social media, messaging platforms and job websites are offered jobs but ended up in their sex industry, do forced labor and/or have their organs sold.
Officially it isn't allowed but the police wont do anything. You can see how it works in how angry they were when raping Palestinian kids in prison wasn't allowed anymore.
https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2024/8/13/israeli-p...
https://www.omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/israe...
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/july/cor...
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/our-sons-plundered-for-th...
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I've been seeing this kind of argument increasingly often from Israel's defenders and I have to say "Look at this other horrific atrocity that might be even worse than the one we're doing, but gets far less coverage in the US media" is a terrible defense. If that's the best Israel can come up with, and they continue down the path they are on, their western support will be gone before they know it.
To take this example, the Azerbaijani president didn't talk the American one into a major shit show of a war; one that is materially harming American lives. The Azerbaijani government doesn't run a major political influence operation in the US, spending 10s of millions of dollars against candidates for the sin of mildly criticizing them. The Azerbaijani government doesn't receive anything close to the level of military, diplomatic, and financial support from the US that Israel gets. The Azerbaijani prime minister didn't give an address to the US Congress to undermine a major foreign policy agreement, one which has only looked better in hindsight.
So no, it's not at all weird that the citizens of the US care more about Israeli committed atrocities than Azerbaijani ones. The US is far more involved with Israel's actions and has far more influence over them, influence that has so far not been used to try and alleviate the suffering in Gaza.
Yes, that was an atrocity. What does that have to do with what Israel is doing? We shouldn't be ok with atrocities just because worse atrocities that dont get as much media coverage exist.
Lots of countries condemned it. Maybe you're just not paying attention?
The Biden administration paused diplomatic relations, put out public states condemning it, and more.
In fact, Azerbaijan came out and complained about the US's "biased" stance against it.
https://asbarez.com/aliyev-criticizes-biden-for-biased-towar...
English media failed to pick up those stories.
English media also routinely violates house-style by using the passive voice when reporting actions by Israel: "50 civilians killed in Gaza" vs "Hamas/Syria kills 50 civilians". Boo English media
English media also does this for crimes in their own countries, depending on the narrative they want to spin. Im sure other countries do too, but i dont watch news in foreign languages.
Azerbaijan did that with 70% Israeli weapons! BFFs learn from one another
So you're agreeing the Israelis are shit, and then adding another example of someone else also committing war crimes.
DOES NOT MAKE THIS OKAY YOU CLOWN
TL;DR: "Azerbaijan's genocide is better than Israel's genocide because they keep the homes".
What an argument.
This is a typical Israeli harbara pattern. Oh, you anti-semite, I see you are ignoring this other non-Israeli genocide.
Save it.
I suggest creating two tabs, one for Google Maps link [1] and another for Apple Maps link [2], then quickly switch between these two pages. It made me realize how much have been destroyed. Heart wrenching.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2963743,34.2449952,1665m
2. https://maps.apple.com/frame?map=satellite¢er=31.296508%...
This is insanity. So much destruction and loss :(
this is unbelievable!
If you want to compare before and after:
https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649... - then click "show historical imagery" next to the search box.
The horror of the "Playground" marker here: https://earth.google.com/web/@31.28532193,34.25349609,77.611...
I'm a little confused by this one, because if you hit the "Show historical imagery" button, and go back through the prior years, I don't really see much or anything of a playground there.
Usually a football field.
That's a playground when you are poor
idk if it's the same "playground" we found, but honestly just looks like an site prepared for building: https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649...
Cried seeing this. So much loss.
For comparison, here's Mosul in Iraq after the defeat of ISIS:
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...
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.
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This should be higher I think - it is pretty clear that cities get demolished during war, whether purposefully or not.
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.
It's pretty clear you didn't look at the pictures. The destruction in Mosul appears very limited compared to the annihilation of Rafah.
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. Imagine an enemy that with time and ease, outside of active conflict, engages in the systematic erasure of a city- the houses, its history, and every place that is familiar to its inhabitants. Gone forever. That's what Israel did in Gaza.
> just like the nazis did in Warsaw
The Nazis are not infamous for the demolition of houses. 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 for housing projects. It’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s not “like the Nazis”.
> No one cares about the buildings
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
> 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.
The icons from what was there before are a haunting digital ghost. School, Restaurant, Pharmacy all the city is just rubble.
https://xxcancel.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
But the West does acknowledge it, almost exclusively. Any criticism of Israel's war crimes are followed by "But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?" and "Do you condemn Hamas and the attack they conducted in Oct 7"? Mainstream media only shows Hamas actions, and only recently started highlighting Israel's war crimes due to increased souring of their reputation among audiences. Hamas actions also shouldn't be taken in isolation, the atrocities of October 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, but as a reaction to a conflict that has been happening for almost 80 years that is overwhelmingly one sided.
> But do you agree that Israel has a right to exist?
I've started to think this worry about a particular nation's right to exist is really a great rhetorical trick: nobody is particularly upset the nation of east Germany ceased to exist, and you don't hear Erdogan opposing Kurdish independence with "Doesn't the Turkie have a right to exist?"
There is a basic human right of self determination, but if you think what follows is that you should get your own nation then look at how the soviet policies of providing exactly that worked out. They even created a the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east!
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Pin-pointing Hamas and Oct 7 is pretty much a logical trap, because Netanyahu and Hamas had been symbiotic -- which put them in the very same ballpark. Both enjoyed their own external threats, and, through that, established strong political influence.
The one difference is that Israel always had been able to control the situation for decades to its liking, while Hamas had been passively reaping the hatred that Israel had sown -- only until October 7.
So, Israelis fearing Hamas? That's a horror they created through their democracy, purely by abusing powerless people. Total hypocrisy.
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Netanyahu literally created them because their alternative was getting too peaceful and if Gaza was peaceful they wouldn't have a justification to keep destroying it. This is well-known info.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
What's the actual, concrete, material, actual reality that actually exists?
Is Hamas killing every Jewish person or is the Likud party of Israel actually killing the residents of Palestine?
Let's look at the actual material reality.
For instance, Israel intentionally destroyed all the farms and ruined the fields to grow crops. They have a naval blockade that stops them from fishing so you can't get food there either. They've cut off all external water supplies, blocked food aid from coming in and have openly said they are trying to starve the population to death. Actual, concrete, material reality, available on any news website, with interviews, videos, satellite photos, extremely well documented.
Amnesty International, Doctors without borders, Human Rights Watch, the IPC, the UN, all have been unequivocal in their condemnation of this. Even Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers have been critical of it.
Here's a scholarly peer reviewed paper from the Science of Remote Sensing documenting the farm destruction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266601722... Scroll down to see the photos.
Even right wing news, such as Fox has covered this: https://www.foxnews.com/world/before-after-images-show-devas...
There's two possibilities here: Either every international organization, news source, academic journal, independent third party, satellite, photographer,and videographer is controlled by a powerful invisible puppetmaster or reality is reality.
I know stuff like this is unwelcome but someone's gotta stand up for reality.
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If you can't bother to write it why would anyone bother to read it?
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Israel is doing colonial violence to steal land and do ethnic cleansing. Hamas is doing anti-colonial violence to free themselves from people oppressing them.
You could argue that Israel is doing this because Hamas is so bad, but then you look at what Israel is doing in the other part of palestine not controlled by Hamas? Daily pogroms and violent ethnic oppression of all kinds.
The problem is that Israel is based on ethnic supremacy. The way the victims (the palestinians) react is not relevant.
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A new Haaretz investigstion found that on October 7 Hamas offered to release the hostages. Israel said no. That's because Israel needs the hostages to be hostages as a casus belli.
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3 Israeli hostages were released on that day. Israel shot them. Israel doesn't give a shit about hostages.
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> but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict
Often we don't acknowledge the horror of Israel's multi-decade siege on Gaza¹ and occupation of Palestinians when talking about this conflict.
There, I fixed it for you.
[1] As early as 1967, U.S. Senator Albert Gore Sr. called Gaza “a vast concentration camp on the sand”.
You really need to quantify each of those things and many more to be able to compare. Otherwise it's meaningless.
It should be noted that Hamas exists because of the occupation and atrocities that Israel has been committing for decades and decades. All war is atrocious, the actions of terrorists are disgusting, BUT you cannot discuss the actions of Hamas in a vacuum and forget why they even formed in the first place and continue to carry out their actions.
What was there before Hamas?
The PLO, which was getting too peaceful for Netanyahu's tastes so he had to prop up Hamas instead.
What makes you believe this? Please show hard facts, not just wand waving
Netanyahu said so. Please do a quick Google before commenting, it'll make your propaganda much more effective.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
It says clearly in the article you linked that it's just a rumor. He said no such thing.
Think about how the modern communists love Hamas despite Hamas not being pro LGBT.
Think about how the PLO was a KGB linked terrorist organizations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106419296113226300
Interesting you didn't make any actual point there. On purpose, I assume. You're just doing the Joe Rogan meme of telling us to think about something.
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I used to believe this.
It seems like a reasonable take. But when we look at any oppressed group, getting murdered at the hands of their oppressors, there often is no negotiation through peaceful means.
History shows us that the threat of violence or violence becomes a necessary point of leverage to bring about change.
American schools have washed the story of the civil rights movement, but MLK only had success because of Malcolm X.
There’s many other historical instances of this. Whether it’s the Indian Independence movement in the 1940s fighting from British rule, the 1500s-1800s of native Americans resisting our ancestors colonialization, our own American revolution, and even labor movements like the battle of Blair mountain in the 1920s.
We like to propagandize American history where non-violence was productive, but violence has always been an unfortunately necessary tool when it comes to changing oppression.
It's a thought that is intuitive and intellectually satisfying but you produce no evidence for your claims.
Blair Mountain was a total defeat for the miners. Union organizing in West Virginia collapsed afterward and only recovered with New Deal labor law in the 30s
For native Americans, well, do you really want to discuss the results ?
For India you could argue that it's not non-violence but the fact the empire was exhausted militarily that worked. But it's hard to make the case that violent uprisings, who were either suppressed or contained well enough, had an effect. If anything the popularity of the insurgents may have done more that the actual violence but you can get that kind of popularity with non-violence too.
The only time when insurgency is working is when you are able to hide, endure and survive until your enemy is down for other reasons. It can be quite long. Think Mao. Was it the case for India ? Maybe but it's not obvious at all
I actually agree about Malcolm X... except it didn't actually use violence. Only violent rethoric and advocating self-defense. Annnnnd biggest wins like the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (August 6, 1965) passed before the Watts riot (August 11, 1965) and the wave of urban uprisings that followed
Where did I say non-violence?
I said don't murder civilians
Also, who exactly "loses justification": just the individual perpetrators or their whole collective? I hope you wouldn't say that every black slave lost their right for freedom after Nat Turner's gang killed civilians? [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner#Rebellion
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
> f you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly
Most war is unjustified. Violent resistance is almost never unjustified if one lacks access to elections.
But violent resistance that targets civilians robs itself and its cause of justice until that rot is removed and regretted. It's not only morally wrong. It's strategically stupid. Terrorist tactics do not work–they radicalize the enemy and unfavorably polarize the alliance space.
Remember the videos Ukraine circulated of sharing tea with Russian POWs? Imagine if Hamas had only targeted military outposts and then shared images like that one from its bunkers under Gaza City?
A cause can be fundamentally justified but still piss away its advantages with poor strategy. At the end of the day, Hamas has acted in Iran's interests. Not the Palestinians'. (Same with Hezbollah. Same with the Houthis, though to a marginally lesser degree.)
What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
> What if your ability to accurately target has been destroyed?
Prioritize a cease fire. If you can’t target you probably can’t run much of a modern economy either. Which raises the question of what you’re actually fighting for.
Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group? Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany.
> Preventing the systematic extermination of your entire ethnic group
But it doesn’t. It hardens resolve on the other side that you are actually monsters. It’s the same reason “strategic” air bombing campaigns like the London Blitz, designed to wear down a population, systematically fail.
> Read your own comment back to yourself and imagine it's about the Jews in Germany
German Jews weren’t systematically targeting German civilians in attacks. If they had been, it would have probably backfired. (They didn’t have a military to “strike” the Nazis in any conventional sense. The Poles in Warsaw did. Guess what they, too, didn’t do.)
I’m not saying I don’t understand the impulse. If I were occupied and facing extinction, I’d probably lash out. What I’m saying is I hope I’d stop and realize, not necessarily that it’s wrong and mis-targeted, but that it’s ineffective and likely counterproductive.
Aim at military targets. People can tell when you’re trying and missing versus conducting a terror campaign. And degrading the adversary’s military will save more of your lives than pissing off its civilians.
There is no evidence that if Hamas stops attacking Israel, Israel would stop attacking Hamas.
In fact the predecessor to Hamas - the PLO - did stop attacking Israel and tried hard to negotiate instead. Do you know what Israel did in response?
That's right, Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead.
> There is no evidence that if Hamas stops attacking Israel, Israel would stop attacking Hamas
I never said to stop attacking. I said not to target civilians.
Forward looking, for Hamas to credibly swear off civilian violence, it would have to hold its leaders who ordered those attacks who remain accountable. I don’t see that. I do, however, see such an action pretty aggressively shifting attitudes in Europe and Asia, potentially also America, potentially even in Israel given they’re in an election where Netanyahu is on the back foot.
> Israel deposed the PLO and put Hamas in power instead
This was a concerted effort between Israel, America and Iran. (Hamas is pretty decently modeled as an Iranian occupying force. This analogy extends to Hezbollah.)
Got any evidence that Hamas targets civilians?
In every war civilians are murdered. By both sides: bombing of rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima…
And yet we can and we should still make distinctions when we talk about those subjects
Estimates for the death toll of US and British strategic bombing, for instance, range from 300,000 to 600,000 in Europe and around 330,000 in Japan (including the atomic bombings)
Now compare that with 12–17 million civilians killed deliberately by Nazi Germany and the around 6 millions killed deliberately by imperial Japan
Relevant bluesky thread for HN's dearest historian, Bret Devereaux: https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3mw4...
Correct.
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
It's not a war. It's US/Israeli propaganda to call it as such. Wars occurs between state actors. This is wholesale slaughter of people on land you claim that you've deliberately put in an open air prison and starved.
The level of violence is set by the occupier. Would there be pearl-clutching about the Warsaw Uprising, John Brown or Nat Turner? What about resistance to British occupation of Ireland (or India or any number of other British colonial projects)? The ANC in South Africa was incredibly violent in its resistance to apartheid. Resistance movements in occupied Europe were also incredibly violent (eg killing collaborators).
What you seem to have fallen for is tone policing a 78 year long resistance. A lot of people (generally, not you specifically) have this belief that things began on Oct 7. You will get questions of "why can't they resist peacefully?" Well, they have. Multiple times. Most recently with the March of Return several years earlier. Many don't know about it because it was barely reported on. What happened? For the "crime" of standing within a few hundred yards of the fence, the IOF used protestors as target practice. 500+ dead, 8000+ wounded. "Wounded" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting too because it included deliberately and permanently maiming people by blowing their legs off deliberately [1].
"Terrorism" is a political designation. And the US doesn't face such threats? Really? The police kill over 1000 people every single year. Mass shootings? Why isn't that seen as terrorism? Or the violence committed by ICE against random US citizens or detainees?
I'll leave you with this quote from JFK [2]:
[1]: https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-snipers-brag-about-deli...[2]: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...
In every such post you have people both-sidesing. Killing almost 100k people is not equivalent to whatever Hamas has done. Hamas bad, Israel worse. It's not very difficult.
Hamas has every right to resist. Unguided rockets? There's IDF in nearly every building in Israel. The excuses used to genocide Palestinians far more aptly describe Israel.
> use of human shields
Hamas does not use human shields. Please don't spread Israeli lies and propaganda to cover for their genocide.
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Isn't almost everyone in Gaza a child since they tend to starve or get struck by missiles before reaching adulthood?
Are you saying there was mass starvation BEFORE the war now?
Things were very different in 1947, but I assume there was not mass starvation in Palestine back then.
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The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
> The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations
Incorrect.
The west still buys Russian gas. Half of Russian gas exports go there.
https://energyandcleanair.org/august-2026-monthly-analysis-o...
> No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes
The US doesn’t condemn Russian aggression, and try get the current administration to say that Russia invaded or is committing war crimes.
The situations are not the same, but western nations are absolutely funding Putin’s actions through oil and gas imports.
Despite a lot of posturing, and a fair amount of presumably sincere effort, billions continue to flow.
But considerably less than before the war and the EU are making efforts to decouple themselves, it's just not a switch that could be turned off, certainly not in the same way that support for Israel could be or could have been in the past decades.
How much more do we need to talk about it?
For one thing, there isn't a major, bi-partisan, pro-Russian-war-crime lobby with a controlling interest currently sitting in government.
I support Ukraine with all my heart (and a little money) but whatabouting will get you nothing. This is a thread about the hamas-israeli war. There's no reason to change the subject and it doesn't take away ability to talk about Ukraine elsewhere.
Actually some people have mentioned the invasion and occupation of Ukraine in this comment section to draw parallels or make distinctions
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Ah, yes...Russia had no choice but to invade the land of the sovereign nation and bomb civilian targets with hypersonic missiles.
ukranians massacred civilians in Izyum, Kupyanzk, Kursk, just to name a few, for not wanting to side with them. They arbitrarily kill people (elderly, women, children) who want to escape to the Russian side (or if they just want to exclude this possibility). These are facts (source: telegram channels, which, confronted with your "free journalism", are a more reliable source of information).
This is the war, which were not you around, would never happen.
"..in Kursk.."
In the Kursk region, during their invasion of Russia
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Do the settlers wear uniforms when they kill villagers?
The world is aware of the answer to that one.
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> You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
The IDF could have engaged in actual urban warfare, going house-to-house. ISIS does all those things far more than Hamas does, but Mosul is in far better shape than Rafah!
The allies bombed the heck out of Mosul and killed a lot more civilians than the IDF killed in Rafah. Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.
Hamas was more prepared than ISIS. Better equipped. More tunnels. And the population density in Rafah was higher.
Also the British, Canadian, Australians, Americans, etc. did not send any of their soldiers to go house to house. They sent the poor Iraqis. After demolishing the place, killing a ton of civilians in the process.
Easy for you to say that Israel should have sent its soldiers to be ambushed house to house, blown up by booby traps in houses (which happened a lot despite the tactics), blown up on the streets by mines etc. I mean that's how Hamas wanted it to play out and obviously not the way Israel was going to do it.
> Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.
Exactly incorrect. The Battle of Mosul is very comparable to the war on Gaza, but the IDF has done much worse in terms of civilian harm. US and allied forces killed significantly more combatants than they did civilians in Mosul; in contrast, the IDF has killed over 4 times as many civilians than combatants in Gaza. The IDF directly killed more children in Gaza than any other armed group in any other armed conflict in the 21st century—and the same for absolute number of adult women killed, as well as proportion of children among those killed.
Don't forget Israel gov 100% knew Hamas was going to attack on October 7th, and intentionally allowed it to happen because of the public outcry it would generate. The more hostages and the worse it was, the better the propoganda. They'll take the West Bank. They're taking Lebanese land too.
They knew the attack was going to happen and allowed the music festival to go on a day longer, one might guess they were frothing at the mouth at how good that propoganda was going to be.
Take a read of the book title The Palestine Laboratory - How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World - and you'll even learn that Israel has a long long history of murder around the world, aint none of this new.
One side won the propoganda war, and it wasn't the dirt poor Palestinains.
Got that in more conspiracy? If you have evidence then a lot of Israelis would want to see that. Hopefully after the elections there will be more fact finding.
More conspiracy? Why does it take conspiracy level thinking to believe that the IDF missed plans for the attack when the head of security of Egypt personally flew to Israel to tell them about the attack?
How do you miss that exactly? You don't, you miss it intentionally.
Read the news, not the prop slop.
maybe just stop funding it?
Funny how you're still doing unpaid Hasbara.
IDF showed a few weapons "found" in al shifa is pretty much all they managed to show, and by found I mean obviously planted after being seen carrying them into the hospital in brown boxes.
Then there's the hilarious renders provided by IDF, like the second video here https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/war-peace/realistic-fantasy-isr...
Hey guess what, Hamas are terrorists, I can easily say that. I can also say that Israel isn't behaving any better while supposedly is the only democratic country in the middle east with the most moral army in the world. And really never since this conflict started because the goal of Zionism was always to take over more and more of the are and create an ethno state. Even the nakba was done because the ethnic composition of the would be Israeli state was not congruous with their democratic ideals so they needed people gone.
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I don't know why this is getting down voted. I thought it was pretty widely known? See: - https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
I wouldn't call them an invention of Israel, but they were allowed/encouraged to flourish.
It's because it sounds like antisemitic propaganda and not everyone knows it's true.
They won the election in Gaza and has been running the entire thing for years.
I wonder why
Because the alternative was seen as too corrupt. Which is kinda hilarious considering how Hamas then stopped elections and stole food that was shipped in by the UN to sell back to the population.
The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
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.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
> 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.
I don't have a strong position on this but seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act.
I mean come on... Hamas were seen practising flying hang gliders around the strip and one of the most paranoid states in the world didn't think that merited some investigation?
And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
> seems at least plausible that the Israeli security services did in fact know about Oct 7th but chose not to act
Regardless of the facts in this specific event, you can make much the same argument about many of the major 21st century terror attacks - there were multiple warnings leading up to 9/11, and the FBI and CIA had eyes on several of the perpetrators before the attacks. They didn't "choose not to act" in so much as institutional disfunction prevented the dots from being connected or any preemptive action being taken, but from the outside it looks pretty much the same.
I would indeed also cast some suspicions on those events, yes, but also with no firm conclusion.
I'm open minded, could see it either way
Several spy agencies also tipped them off about the specific attack, I think it was UAE and Qatar as well as the IDF themselves?
> And everyone just happened to not be at their posts?
Is wrong. It is kind of you to show you don't know what you are talking about.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Well the official story IIRC is the border was more lightly manned than normal (and with more reservists than normal) because it was a national holiday.
But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
Because if that is stupidity then yes, it is very stupid
Official? It is well known in Israel and for it's enemy that on holidays there are less people. Nothing weird or reasons to doubt it.
> But again does that make sense given how the Israeli elites feel about Palestinians? Just assume because it's a Jewish holiday Hamas will also take the day off?
No, if they did they wouldn't have anyone on the border.
Dear reader, notice how they shifted their claim from "And everyone just happened to not be at their posts" to the official story (wink wink although I offered no real evidence) is that the border was lightly manned.
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Bibi had the advance knowledge and let it happen because he’s fine with collateral damage even if it’s his own countrymen. A few dead Jews are nothing to him if it means More Land To King Over.
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
Yes that would be the basic thesis.
It's a bit too 4D chess for my liking but would also explain some things that otherwise don't add up
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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.
I have no stake in this conflict.
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.
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.
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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.
You already said this in your parent comment?
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?
It's clear from their comment history what they are.
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)
Strange way to measure success, reducing everything to a powerpoint with graphs, its almost like humans dont exist.
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> 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.
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> Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
sounds like the terrorists did indeed win
> Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged
Is that the same program that was compeletly damages last year?
The same program that was two weeks away from completion since the nineties. And will again be two weeks away the next time it's convenient.
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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.
Perro is controlled by Morocco because he’s being blackmailed by Morocco for the stuff they found in his phone… using Israeli spyware.
You seem to have fallen for a well known antisemitic conspiracy theory.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspirac...
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.
[0] https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-...
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.
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> The basic idea behind what you’re saying is that people are basically good and oppression or deprivation makes them do bad things. This is simply not an accurate model of human psychology.
Have you heard of survival? Personal, cultural, geographic. People will do anything if you push them hard enough or deprive them of alternatives.
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"October 7th" disproves every single one of your claim. Unless you think that was unprovoked of course, and not the result of years of oppression. If you do, then there really is nothing left to argue here.
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And here you're saying that October 7th happened because Palestinians were not oppressed enough so I'm going to just disagree with you and wish you a good day.
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This is a psychopaths measure of success.
Well Israel is also the only developed country on earth with a fertility rate above replacement.
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.
Winning is having no enemies.
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.
Different question - same answer.
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 ?
> destroying your enemies
This is psychopathic.
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.
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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.
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.
What happened on October 6?
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Yes, also some old lady in India got up and made tea.
What happened to Gaza on that day?
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Do you know what happened to Gaza on October 5?
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.
The sexual assault thing never happened. It was simply a lie.
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.
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"Hamas and Gaza" You mean Palestinians right? But yeah, it seems genocide is a profitable business.
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 the mother and children were strangled to death instead of being held as leverage 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.
So yes it is appropriate to use the term Palestinians here. It wasn't just Hamas and it wasn’t just “Gaza”, it was the Palestinian civilians too.
Do you know what evil is ?
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.
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.
So with your argument do you imply tens of thousands civilians murdered in the ongoing genocide are "Hamas" then?
That's the sad thin? not the destruction and wholescale murder?
"Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective"
Yes it is, and some countries have become very good at doing that
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.
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.
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?
Those aren't the same people. I am pro-Palestine, I am not a terrorist.
Israelis largely consider anyone who acknowledges the existence of Arab descendants of the Canaanites as terrorists.
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.
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)
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.
This rhetoric reminds me of how, at one time, everything bad that happened to Germany was said to be orchestrated by you know who.
Those who shall not be named did not fund, arm, train and direct militias that controlled Austria, France and Poland.
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.
German media said they did
Germans believed they did
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> The sad thing is that in a way the terrorist won.
That's what the sad thing is?
> A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Interesting interpretation.
which one you called terrorist?
surely the one creating such destructions and deaths no?
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".
Indeed the terrorists did win, as we can see from these images.
"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".
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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.
> By Hamas' own military figure pre-war and Israel's war assessments, up to half could be non-civilian.
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.
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
Those numbers don't account for people still under the rubble.
They do, the Gaza health ministry numbers include those who are assumed dead and still not found.
*as of April 2024
Look at the pictures from the original post.
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.
This wasn't a reaction though, this is what Israel's been doing there since its foundation. Oct 7 only intensified existing patterns.
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I would honestly say the people committing the genocide won, as it was always their goal
That's what they said - the terrorists.
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.
> most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East
In your own words, what is the issue in the Middle East?
Unfortunately this is a story as long as time itself, with tons of narratives to it so I can't write as a HN comment.
I wish I was eloquent and knowledgeable enough to write it, I'd probably write a book.
Is it? Here's my summary for you:
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.
That’s certainly one way of describing it.
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.
What part of what I said was wrong?
South Africa is a meme analogy which doesn’t fit the history. If you’d like a better analogy (though there are no good ones) I’d look at India and Pakistan in the 1940s.
I also happen to know the history of my own country, Australia, and when I try to draw parallels between Australian history and Israeli history, I see that the excuses we give for continuing our presence here are weaker in every way. So it would be hypocritical for me to holier-than-thou the decision of Jews to declare a homeland where a non-trivial portion of their global population have always lived.
Israeli regime is pure terror.
non-X Google Maps link to ~location of screenshot: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2857778,34.2533333,1010m
Same destruction is being currently taking place in south Lebanon. After the "seize fire" the Israeli army flattened most of the villages.
Google Maps acting as a real-time war damage tracker is a sobering use case. The raw satellite data is a stark visual.
Stupid question but if Israel is willing to flatten cities, how have they not won the war yet?
They have won. The goal is keeping Netanyahu in power and ethic cleansing.
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) has repeatedly called for the "voluntary emigration" or forced removal of Gazan residents and urged the permanent resettlement of Israelis inside the Gaza Strip.
If you need protection like soldiers on every street and public areas, then you have lost.
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They don't want to completely destroy Gaza. In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza, plus they'd have no guinea pigs for the surveillance and military tech. All the big Israeli surveillance firms test their products on Gaza first, it's the most surveilled place in the world.
But they also don't want it to get too big or powerful. Israel calls it "mowing the lawn"[1]. You want to have grass on the lawn, but not too much, so you periodically cut off the excess grass.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
> In the aftermath, they would be held accountable for destroying Gaza
By who?
The ICC, their own political opposition, their own competitors within their party.
Doubt it. Bibi operates above all that noise. Same as Putin.
Accountability isn’t achievable, as far as I can tell. Especially when there’s some lucrative real estate deals for Gaza land on the table. IDF brings bulldozers as part of their attacks on other countries for a reason.
Both Bibi and Putin hold their positions more precariously than you'd think, although they do manage to maintain them.
How easy do you think it would be for anyone close to Putin to slip him some poison or just stab him with a knife? To prevent that happening, a whole lot of stuff has to be kept oriented towards him remaining the president.
One of Bibi's support pillars is the perpetual threat of Israel's destruction. He positions himself as standing between Israel and destruction, so replacing him would be dangerous.
Not every Palestinian is dead yet. And they've moved on to Lebanon. Not to mention that the war has widened to include Iran.
Has the United States won its "war on terror" yet? Why not?
Some of the people contributing here were born after the "war on terror" started.
What would qualify as having won? Every Palestinian dead?
Too many Palestinians have nothing to live for, except revenge.
Genocide doesn't actually work as a tactic, especially in an urban setting. It strengthens the victim's resolve. The Palestinian people are not known for giving up on survival.
Well, it works if you complete it, because there is nobody left to fight back. But Israel wants a short lawn, not a slab of dirt.
I'm sorry, but that's quantitatively incorrect. In ancient settings, particularly for pre-agrarian forces, "genocide" was another word for "victory", but we have plenty of examples.
North America of course, but Africa is an overlapping series of successful genocides, Argentina's "Conquest of the Desert", Qing conquest of the Dzungar, Russia's conquest of the Circassians, Athens and Melos 416 BCE, Rome and Carthage, Rome and lots, Mongolians and whew even more than that -- all of them victories but also a "Where are the Khazars?" sort of event. They're just gone. Violence will forever be Mankind's one true Universal Language -- easier to learn than Esperanto.
Post-Trinity, the thermonuclear deterrent has put the kibosh on genocide as a working tactic. For a bit. The evolution post Cold-War might well turn out to be that genocide is back, baby, as long as the genocidee doesn't have a nuclear deterrent. It's cosmically fitting that the great genocidal wars of the 20th century birthed the final perfected weapon for doing genocides.
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Push far enough north and you're also sharing engagement area with Turkey, which has already been a bit of a worry even this year.
I also suspect that the Great Alliance between the Sunni/Arab autocracies and Israel is more fragile than it appears. Or, more accurately, and the Sunni/Arab autocracies themselves are more fragile than they appear.
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It's sad that so much of this conversation has devolved into technicalities of whether this is a genocide.
You can't look at this, at reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank, at Israel's own government officials' statements, and not, at minimum, believe that brutal war crimes were committed on a massive basis here. Whether it's "Holocaust level" or "genocide" is a red herring. It needs universal condemnation, it needs to stop, and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
> and the people who did it need to be held accountable.
The ICC is trying to do that, but is being impeded by the US.
Sounds like quite the impotent organization then
That is why the ICC needs our help and support.
Rightful people supports the week. Only the depraved laughs when a person without power is being abused.
Eh. First, they made a mistake: the ICC cannot hold anyone accountable - it only will only determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel did, in fact, do a genocide. Despite finding it beyond a shadow of a doubt (which is why it's taking so long), they will be doubted anyway.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/18/run-get-away-w...
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Hamas offered to free all the hostages on October 7. Israel refused and shot all of the hostages they did release. Why did Israel do that?
What are your sources for both claims?
The Haaretz investigation
I've searched through the Haaretz investigation; nowhere does it claim that Israel shot all (or any, for that matter) hostages that were released by Hamas.
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The IDF themselves confirmed this. You could easily use chatgpt and check for yourself but you don't seem interested in the truth.
3 people were killed accidentally during IDFs attempts to free the hostages. That's not the same thing as "shot all of the hostages they did release". In fact it's the opposite. Because those people were not released, the IDF went in to try to get them.
Citation needed. Since there are plenty of freed hostages that have done interviews, this seems falsified on its face.
Like I told you, you can easily ask chatgpt for citations if you wanted the truth but you're more interested in hasbara.
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It’s not “terrorist propaganda”. It’s documented by Haaretz.
> obviously that would never have been acceptable for Israel as leaving the Hamas threat intact in Gaza was never going to happen.
Sounds like typical Zionist terrorism. Sacrifice and kill your own people just so you can kill even more Palestinians. Israel is a psychopathic killer entity.
> It’s documented by Haaretz.
Are you claiming there is a Haaretz article that states that Hamas was willing to unconditionally give up the civilian hostages after the Oct 7th attacks? I would like to see which article you are referring to as I have been unable to find any with a claim remotely along those lines.
> Sacrifice and kill your own people just so you can kill even more Palestinians.
Israel does not use their own civilians as human shields, they use their military to protect their civilians. You're probably thinking of Hamas here since they use their civilians to protect their military.
Here you go: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-07-...
> Israel does not use their own civilians as human shields, they use their military to protect their civilians. You're probably thinking of Hamas here since they use their civilians to protect their military.
Incorrect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
> Here you go: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-07-...
The article confirms what I suspected which is that Hamas did not unconditionally offer to give back the civilian hostages. The attached conditions would almost certainly have prevented Israel from dealing with the Hamas threat.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
I don't see how this is at all related to your claim that Israel uses human shields at all.
No one claimed “unconditional” hostage return. Of course there are conditions, Hamas is fighting 80+ years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, that’s the whole point. Israel decided committing genocide was more important than retrieving their settlers. That’s on them.
> I don't see how this is at all related to your claim that Israel uses human shields at all.
This is Israel’s policy of killing their own settlers. Human shields would be how the IDF is located in nearly every building in Israel.
> No one claimed “unconditional” hostage return. Of course there are conditions
You responded with that article in response to this question of mine "Are you claiming there is a Haaretz article that states that Hamas was willing to unconditionally give up the civilian hostages after the Oct 7th attacks? I would like to see which article you are referring to as I have been unable to find any with a claim remotely along those lines.".
As expected the article fully confirmed my understanding in regards to what Hamas offered. This was not a real offer to return the hostages but rather a demand for Israel to effectively surrender and leave Hamas in place to carry out future attacks.
> Hamas is fighting 80+ years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, that’s the whole point.
Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005.
> Israel decided committing genocide was more important than retrieving their settlers. That’s on them.
There were no settlers in Gaza on October 7th when Hamas launched their attack.
> This is Israel’s policy of killing their own settlers. Human shields would be how the IDF is located in nearly every building in Israel.
This is wrong for multiple reasons, first of all Hamas doesn't care if Israeli civilians get killed so such a tactic would be entirely ineffective, second of all Israel puts their military defenses in front of their civilians, not the other way around. Israeli soldiers simply aren't hiding behind Israeli civilians.
> Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005.
Please, there’s no use continuing this conversation since you’re not arguing in good faith. This is just open, gratuitous Israeli propaganda. That said, no one is buying it at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_the...
This is a well known fact. Arguing against this makes you look quite bad.
Are you claiming my statement is factually inaccurate?
I don't think you read that article you linked to. The Hannibal Directive is a policy about using extreme force to prevent soldiers being taken hostages. Soldiers are by definition not civilians.
Citation needed
Just replied to the sibling comment with sources.
There are no technicalities, only sophisms written by bots.
Atomic dome vibes when looking at some of the few buildings still standing
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https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
It is absolutely fascinating to see how people are justifying a genocide right before your eyes in this comment thread.
From a psychological point of view, watching what is happening in Israel right now could really help understand human behavior in previous historical events involving genocide and mass killings.
It's no secret that people get blinded by their own belief and faith. They forget how to see, how to smell, how to taste, and how to hear. They get trapped in a virtual world inside their own minds -- a gigantic Matrix, but without sophisticated machinery.
Look at the current physical state of the city, the raw sight of it -- no amount of fair punishment can justify this scale of pure, one-sided destruction of lives, daily-lives, and futures. This is directed violence, clearly beyond practical necessity -- unless practicality is defined in terms of ethnic cleansing.
Any logic that jumps through the hoops of background material (history, religion, beliefs, politics, and so on) is mere mind tricks, designed to draw your eyes away from reality -- the horrific nature of the Israeli genocide.
(EDIT: grammar check)
I don't think its just religious faith and belief, but also like how much people want to believe that the society they are part of, and that provides for their every day life, is a moral, just, and necessary one. And how much that puts on the blinders to questioning things. Israel is simply labeled a "like minded country".. at this point sounds a lot like "we have certain things in common, Jeffery" to me..
Well, the first thing that happens is "dehumanization" of the enemy. This is the root of all evil.
This. It's just so much more compelling to follow these discussions as they happen, compared to reading a historical correspondence or something. Of course I'd much prefer if there weren't genocides taking place at all.
I have been watching the atrocities that Israel have been committing since 1987 and there is simply zero argument any supporter of the regime can make to change my mind that they are evil, by every definition of the word.
There is no justification for their actions. There is no justification for the greater Israel project they are pushing. There is no justification for them to be taking a leadership role in the global security technology industry. The whole thing is just absolutely Fkd and I find any person trying to contort the argument in a way to justify this shit to be evil themselves.
The fact that this comment is being upvoted as much as down shows me that evil exists here too.
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Are you willing to give up your land so that someone else can have it as their 'homeland'? Who was there 2000 years ago?
> Are you willing to give up your land so that someone else can have it as their 'homeland'?
Many Jews lost their land.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
Maybe you missed the sarcasm. Btw the descendants of the people there 2000 years ago are the current Palestinians; the current Israelis are mostly the descendants of West European colonizers from the 1948 invasion.
> the current Israelis are mostly the descendants of West European colonizers from the 1948 invasion.
This is just factually inaccurate, Mizrahi Jews in Israel today outnumber the Ashkenazi.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Jews
You can take that or leave my feedback, but your comment didn't come across as sarcasm to me until I read this comment.
Poes law or something.
I agree with your position, but it didn't read as sarcasm to me.
> those ones don't count because uh, we said so
wasn't a dead giveaway?
Well, like I said, no. And to be clear, you're free to ignore that. But, of course, that's exactly what I wrote and you managed to miss that, so I suppose none of us are communicating very well.
I read your full comment and got the sarcasm, but I don't blame people who read the first line and tuned out the rest because it was such a perfect example of the genocide apologia that we've seen so much of already.
I get that in this case the rest of the comment was short and the obvious indicator of sarcasm came quickly, but it's all too common for this to devolve into paragraphs of repetitive, uncreative slopaganda, which has resulted in many who disagree just tuning out early.
reminded me of this post from earlier this year, also Rafah but from the ground:
https://x.com/MacaesBruno/status/2017251152900079675
Thank you for putting this together. Free Palestine!
IANAL nor ICJ nor ICC to officially name genxxide but This looks much (MUCH) worse than the worst thing Putin did to Ukraine
Are you afraid to use the word "genocide"? Just curious.
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.
What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Cut off weapon gifts+sales to Israel, impose sanctions. Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
> 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.
See this for more background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiations_to_end_apartheid_...
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa_(1948%...
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).
So you're suggesting that Israel would drop a nuke on a Western country imposing a boycott? Somehow, I doubt it.
Nuclear weapons sure, but what is this about Epstein?
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
Why is it likely ? Why not Russia ? I’ve heard it’s Russia ?
Because Epstein had ties to Israel and not to Russia. There might be a similar ring run by Russia as well, who knows.
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.
He has ties to all powerful people as his clients, but he has ties to Israel that look closer to them being his employer.
Without some pretty good evidence, it sounds like conjecture, which is fine, but nothing of substance is being presented here.
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 definitely had ties to Russia. I don't know how to assess how important those were but they did exist
he's referring to the fact that epstein is a mossad agent and that compromised world leaders are being blackmailed to support the genocide
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.
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.
How can they forcibly imprison the leaders of a soverein, nuclear armed state?
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.
And while they're at it, forget about Israel being an ethnostate and give the 5 million Arabs without any representation a vote.
The post you are responding to lists several possible actions. Another good start would be to stop providing the weapons that have done this damage.
Immediately stop all exports and money flows to Israel. Food and medical aid should still be allowed to both sides, of course.
At the very least diplomatic condemnation and a South African level sanction.
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.
A lot.
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-...
> Finally, the UN should have deployed
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.
The question was
> 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.
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.
No it wouldn't? We are talking hypotheticals. When talking about what world leaders should do I include the US in world leaders.
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.
If Biden or Trump would simply cut off funding there probably wouldn't be a need for peace keepers any more.
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.
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.
Then you notice world energy markets are going to be effected by a massive conflict etc.
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"?
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Hamas_charter#Since_2017 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...
Are you actually sending the Hamas charter and expecting me to read that and think it's reasonable ?
(I have read it before)
By all means please enlighten me, what's so unreasonable about it?
Iran gave Russia their Shahed drones, still exports artillery shells and missiles to Russia.
UN cannot allow UNRWA - since any actual operation would require Israeli cooperation given Israel is the only open border to Gaza - and Israel will not allow what it considers to be an extremist front.
UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have proven to be unable to restrain terrorist attacks, and proven to be unable to restrain the Israeli response.
That's not how that answer was phrased. It directly indicated that the UN should have taken that action.
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?
> 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.
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> 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 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).
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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.
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This is an uncharitable reading of my point and not what I meant.
What did you mean then?
> 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.
That's my point.
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You said.
> What he means is they could have been traded for all of the concessions Hamas wanted in exchange for them.
Where in my writing did I say that Israel needed to accept all concessions. Please quote me.
Do you think it's unreasonable or "insane" for Israel to have accepted some concessions for the safe return of hostages?
Yes it would have been insane to accept any concessions. If you don’t understand that then you have work to do on yourself. This is a very weak and suicidal position to take.
> Yes it would have been insane to accept any concessions.
Any? Like even a temporary ceasefire? That's a suicidal position?
Notice how you had to change from "all" to "any".
There were many temporary ceasefires in exchange for hostages but this was done as part of the broader war effort, ultimately Israel is not bound to anything in these “agreements”. It’s basically just saying and doing whatever needs to be said and done to accomplish the war goals.
If that is what you’re talking about ok, but it sounds like you were saying to actually make concessions.
The point is to accomplish the aims of the war. There are no concessions that have to or should be made. Israel is by far the stronger power.
A ceasefire is a concession. And my point, which I think is clear, is there's a pretty wide gap between "They have to accept all hamas concessions" and "they have to negotiate".
It's pretty hard for you to argue against the fact that there are, in fact, reasonable concessions that aren't "suicidal".
The context of this discussion is the idea that war could have been avoided if Israel had been willing to negotiate with Hamas over the hostages.
That is not the context of the discussion. The context is "what should world leaders have done differently".
And, I never said that the war was either avoidable or that Israel was wrong to use force after Oct 7.
What I am saying is that the war could have ended years ago and that Israel has committed genocide. I'm also saying that the pretext that it was about "getting the hostages home" was false.
And with that context, yes there are things world leaders should have done to stop Israel from committing genocide.
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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 a lot like protecting them to me.
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.
They accidentally sniped the naked guy holding a white flag and shouting in Hebrew?
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
Awfully convenient for them that whenever a hostage gets released they can just say "whoopsie" and justify it as they thought it was a lure.
It happened once.
And I see you’re sticking with the “evil IDF just decided to kill these 3 hostages without any reason” plot.
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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?"
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My dude, they pointed a sniper rifle at an unarmed naked Israeli man holding a white flag and shouting for help in Hebrew, centered him in the scope, and pulled the trigger.
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Typo correction: Palestinian hostages
So you feel like after October 7, there should've just been a talk about what happened and some form of negotiation ?
Quote exactly where I even implied that.
Well what else do you expect when you subjugate a native population for decades? Just expect perfect victims?
The peaceful route didn't work. Only idiots will think continuing with the status quo will result in anything different.
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You provided a list of reasons why you feel like teenagers at a music festival should be murdered, right?
Like my personal sentiment is, war is senseless, and both sides are wrong in some way or another. But yeah, I don't think children should be murdered period, so I'm not going to try and give a list of reasons why it's OK, because there isn't one.
Anyone committing war crimes should be punished for it, period.
My original question was simply, what should have been done differently "by the world leaders"?
World leaders should stop giving free money to the guys who are doing a holocaust. I think we can all agree on that.
What do you think Israel should do now? What would be a sensible course of action going forwards?
Their options are to prolong this forever-war (it's worked so far, 75 years, but getting precarious), or actually do the thing and destroy Palestine once and for all (won't be hard - they have nukes), or negotiate peace (also not difficult - it's always Israel who rejects reasonable peace deals), or accept their own destruction and flee.
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How many teenagers were killed by Hamas? And are there independent sources that verify this?
Also, is Oct 7 enough justification to shoot 335 bullets at 6 year old Hind Rajab?
Your questions reek of bias by trying to centre everything to Oct 7, as though history began there. If you really cared about children, you'd have referenced the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel before Oct 7.
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.
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History will look back on people like you quite unfavourably.
Please. We can judge for ourselves, and don't need you to try this "jedi mind trick" schtick.
Please try posting more constructive content than unconvincing, blanket denials. It doesn't make for good discussion.
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
Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.
Bad phrasing on my part. That is one of many reasons
> 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?
Sure, the need to self defense against US dangerous neighbors. Looking at you, Canada!
Have you been living under a rock? The time when "public statements" used to work is long, long gone.
Hamas has a lot to answer for.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt (that may or may not have been promised ot Israel 3000 years ago)
So does Israel's government. Both can be true.
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This is no war. Absolutely nothing justifies this level of destruction.
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You think that justifies the atrocities that have occurred so far? That's terrifying.
There is zero evidence that women were raped. There's not a single victim.
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There's not a single shred of evidence in either of those reports. The Sandberg one is fully debunked, she literally works with the IDF.
> She admitted that her team “approached women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation” but found that “they simply weren't contacted” by any alleged victims of rape on October 7th.
https://the307.substack.com/p/mass-rape-claims-on-october-7t...
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One of the most insidious things about this genocide is how complicit western media is in spreading lies and Israeli propaganda like this. Again, zero victims, zero evidence nothing but Goebbels level media manipulation.
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Which hostages? None have claimed to be raped. That being said I don't find any Zionist credible. Would you believe a Nazi?
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jesus fucking christ
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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.
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nah... it is explicit genocide, and the deliberate destruction of every civilian possible. Everyone knows what's going on.
> deliberate destruction of every civilian possible.
Clearly not? Sometime like 2% of gazans have been killed. IDF could kill many many more if it wanted.
You mean until April 2024 I assume because that's when the statistics end due to Israel blowing up the statistics department.
no, they can't. it's their maximum geoncide capacity
I don't think the goal is to kill every Palestinian. It's more of a flagrant disregard for Palestinian life. Those are different things.
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Imagine this was Jerusalem and someone made a similar comment.
What would you respond?
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You just described all cities in Israel, only they've been hyper-militarized since Nakba, the ethnic cleansing on Palestine in 1948. Israel has mandatory conscription and most of its inhabitants serve or have served in the IDF.
I was not aware that every city in Israel has an extensive military tunnel network. Is that the case?
If Hamas were to take one of those tunnel cities and Israel were doing guerrilla warfare from them I wouldn't blame Hamas for bulldozing.
Israel does have mandatory conscription. They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian. While in the military they're all fair targets, and if they're not serving, and at a music festival, they're not.
Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
> They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian.
When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian". When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
>Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
And Hamas is permitted, as per the rules of war, to target that military infrastructure. If Israel has co-located it with civilian buildings, and attacks miss their targets, then too-bad for Israel.
>When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian".
This is very arguable for the West Bank settlers, but the Israeli civilians that were targeted by October 7 are not settlers and are in very solid Israeli land from a conflict 80 years prior. Arguing that all civilians in Israel proper are valid targets makes you no better than Smotrich and Ben-gvir, and you are essentially advocating for the genocide of Israelis.
Which is your right to do, I guess, but that's certainly not going to convince the (nuclear armed, remember) Israelis to moderate and compromise, or actually bring about justice for Palestinians.
> When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Military uniforms are for the protection of civilians. If you forgo them, then your civilians will receive more harm. Israel is responsible for their actions and many war crimes, but Hamas is responsible for theirs.
Zionists are not civilians, they're literally living on stolen land. It doesn't matter that they've been stealing it for 80 years, it's not their land and the relatives of the people they murdered have every right to defend themselves and get their land back, by any means necessary.
If that's the way you want the conflict to be sorted, which is a genocide competition, then Israel will win that competition. I assume you don't want that? "You're on stolen land and you've done it this time with the genocide, Israel, now you have to dissolve yourself and migrate back to Poland, Brooklyn and Iraq" is not a realistic ultimatum to deliver to a nuclear armed state established precisely because it's citizens experienced centuries of persecution living as scattered minorities.
Israel under Netanyahu has done plenty to criticise but I would actually like to see an Israel/Palestine deal not the West following both sides into radicalisation.
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This is not factually accurate to say they own most of Google, the most I’ve seen of the two of them combined owning presently is 12%
Page and Brin together hold over 50% of voting shares, even though their economic share is lower as you suggest. Different share classes.
https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/
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The "anti-Israel" source post is literally a satellite map documenting Israel's razing of Rafah. It includes zero editorial, people's eyes can see for themselves what Israel is doing.
> but how come the source post is always blatantly anti Israel
I would like to know how would anyone give a positive spin to genocide and civilian displacement
> I would like to know how would anyone give a positive spin to genocide and civilian displacement
Well... what did Hamas expect after Oct 7th, other than the IDF riding into Gaza and cleaning shop for good?
As for the genocide claim... we're seeing average casualty and collateral damage reports for highly urban warfare. Hard to make a credible claim of genocide.
What did IDF expect after Oct 6th, other than Oct 7th?
IDF left Gaza in 2006.
Mango mango pineapple shoe, I can babble too.
> but how come the source post is always blatantly anti Israel?
Same reason blatantly anti Nazi sources have a higher chance of staying up compared to pro nazi sources. I'll let you process that one.
Yes, but also the source post is literally just a Google Map shot of the destruction of Rafah. It's primary evidence with zero editorial.
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Ah yeah, one side starved and bombarded civilians for years, cut off their water and food. But only the side that unleashed a day of savage terrorism is the "barbaric" one.
Funny how plenty of people still think if someone defends the barbarism of Hamas (which I'm not doing), this person should be lynched, but if another person defends the barbarism of the Netanyahu regime, it's fine, because (insert justifications here)... What the fuck's the difference?
>a day of savage terrorism
This has the tone of "a few minutes of action": https://www.espn.co.uk/college-sports/story/_/id/15997412/br...
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, don't you think? That "day of savage terrorism" flowed the other way every single day both before and after 7/10/2023.
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Israel, madam.
And so what, yes the Egyptians closed the border, does that mean you consider it fine for Israel to do those things, and they can escape being labelled of "barbaric war criminals", because... why? Because Egypt?
It's like an abusive father beating his kids, and when the neighbor doesn't want to have the burden of taking care of the kids for the foreseeable future (because the police/government clearly prefers to pretend "everything is fine"), you say "Well, it's the neighbor's fault those kids are getting beat up!".
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Well, your reply to my reply is flagged to death, so you can see how the "community" here thinks how sane you sound...
You wrote:
> Well, the day I see you protesting against Egypt and blaming them for the situation in Gaza I might consider respecting you more.
This is like saying "The day I see you agreeing that the world is flat I might consider respecting you more". Hah, a hardcode defender of the mass killing might respect me? Thanks, I don't need any of that. Yes, arguing with you is like arguing with a flat-earther or a 9/11 truther, nothing will ever convince you that your views are deranged and so far from the truth. You can easily comfort yourself in your own "tower of ego-defense" by dismissing any argument as having the basis of antisemitism. Just like 9/11-truthers would rather deny reality rather than accept that they've been misled so deep into a rabbit hole, because admitting they're wrong would be admitting that they've been dumb for some 20-plus years.
Of course, I'm aware my arguments won't get anywhere; if a Genocide-supporter told me I was acting like a flat-earther, I'd also return to the "facts" that I know and conclude "What a dumb deranged fuckwit".
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Now we're just going in circles (because you'd rather just rely on repetition rather than rethink your position, rethinking would let in doubt about how solid your arguments are). And if one side commited a genocide (or bombing and starving civilians for, hmm, wow, 2 years minus 1 week now), how much is the price to pay? Of course you believe "a genocide is justified when the other side starts a war" and "it's Egypt's fault that a genocide is happening", and I can also circularly refer to my comment.
"Because they (Hamas) started it!", is the justification you'll scream. It'd be like burning your neighbor's house down because you hated each other and he smeared dogshit all over your porch. In a lawful country, would that get you sent to a court, and would the judge let you go with the argument "he started it"?
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But Israel started the war, in 1948.
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Against the people of Palestine who didn't meet the ethno religious profile of the new state.
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That's cool, my ancestors are from Africa. Should I invade?
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Sorry. I didn't realize there was nobody there before Israel was there. So the Palestinians came later then, what year?
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Israel started the war, so it's more like Bucha
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There's no Oct 7 war. There's the Israel-Palestine war, which has been ongoing since 1948.
The 1948 war between the newly formed Israel vs Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon? Do you notice which imaginary country you suggest about is missing from the list?
Nope, the 1948 war between Israel and the people who were already in that territory before some invaders came and declared that it was Israel.
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What do you mean?
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Ethnic cleansing, then. But this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - very typical of Israel supporters: they debate you on the letter instead of acknowledging that what we see here is horrendous.
Then they suggest that this is justified because Israel is a jewish ethnostate.
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Not sure where you're getting your numbers or data, but that's just false. At least 60,0000 innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza, and Israel is to blame for this.
Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.
I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".
> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.
Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.
In what sense is the forced, systematic removal of people from this area based on religious grounds "factually groundless"?
They don't live there anymore, they're displaced.
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Jews immigrating to Israel is not "ethnic cleansing". Now the Palestinian land they moved to was ethnically cleansed by the Zionists.
Most Middle Eastern Jews were definitely not voluntary migrants in 1948. They were expelled from cities and lands they had lived in for centuries.
So all Jews who had to leave their lands, from Morocco to Pakistan, left of their own free will and emigrated to Israel? None were driven out? Are you saying they can return to their former homes then?
yes, they can return to their former homes and they often do. they keep their moroccan, pakistani passport too
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What's this got to do with Israel razing a neighbouring city?
I think you're not getting it. If an ethnic cleansing has happened to your direct ancestors, you're allowed to do one back. Just one though.
Let's not try to be so dense.
If Hamas supporters argue that what they did on Oct 07 is payback for "Naqba" (or whatever historical injustice dujour they fancy), then the question becomes: why can't Israel retaliate?
> why can't Israel retaliate
No, I totally agree. I think for the October 7th attack, all of Gaza had to be razed. How will those terrorists learn otherwise?
What about the Jews who lived in Saudi Arabia before Mohammed came along? What about the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza (the three biggest tribes)?
> being against the only jewish country in the world.
Unironiclly, I think the US can be called one, too, at this point.
I am enraged at this comment
touch grass.
Why are all pro-Israel responses the same?
It's not Genocide...
...because UN is corrupt...
...and numbers are from Khamassss,,,,
...and whatabout whatabout whatabout Iran Sudan....
...you hate us coz we're Jewssss....
It's the good old whataboutism. It's almost a universal telltale for people in denial of their dirty consciousness.
Such weak whataboutism as well. I know so many pro-Palestine people personally and people I follow online that also speak out about Sudan, Iran, other ME countries.
Heck, I know so many Muslims critical of Muslim majority nations.
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Well it sure is a good thing for Netanyahu that the terrorists have far too much power, eh?
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.
>You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression
When you get arrested, do you fight back and resist?
That’s an awful false equivalence. We’re not talking about people being arrested by their own government with, presumably, probable cause. We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
>We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
This is exactly what HAMAS did on October 7th attacks - they choose to target civilians
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, intentionally put civilians in just as much harms way. How is doing that justified as a reaction to Israel exactly?
They aren't a Robin Hood like resistance. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
The whole world does sympathize with the Palestinians. Israel is a pariah.
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"
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History didn't start on October 7th.
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.
"The end justifiesthe means" https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_end_justifies_the_mean...
I glad you are not AI!
Haha, yes, that's what I meant. Written in haste :)
this is not war, it is genocide
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I don’t use TikTok, but I’ll chip in and cite the United Nations [1], the International Association of Genocide Scholars [2], Physicians for Human Rights-Israel [3], Amnesty International [4], Human Rights Watch [5], and Doctors Without Borders [6] to get started.
While the genocide case brought against Israel hasn't concluded as of now, to say there's no reason to believe this is genocide is incorrect.
If you’d like to share some sources (rather than only telling others to), maybe we can compare.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
[2] https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS...
[3] https://www.phr.org.il/en/genocide-in-gaza-eng/
[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...
[5] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-exterminat...
[6] https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/our-response-is...
Imagine this was Jerusalem
would you say the same?
try using a source other than the Israeli government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human...
Try using another source than Wikipedia which is edited by "interested groups" and as such not a reliable source for contentious issues like this one.
good thing there's 100+ cited sources in that article
I'll take your 100+ sources and raise you 200+ sources:
https://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Genocides,_Cultural_Genoc...
Does that make this link twice as truthful as the one you sent?
What, succinctly, is your point? You first claimed that this was not a genocide, then posted a link to a list of other genocides. Are you saying that none of the genocides in your list happened? Or that they are miscategorized?
My point is that wikis are not reliable sources no matter how many sources they link to. You'd have to check all the other sources to verify their veracity and that only gets harder the more sources are linked.
Lazy dismissal ,but then again, you don't really have a leg to stand on to defend your point.
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
Which of these organizations should I trust on their word? Give me 5 of them and I'll see if I feel like I can trust them. As to them "all being Hamas", well, who knows. The Swedish television special reporter from that region is so it isn't unheard of. It is not as if it is possible for anyone to just barge in there and report anything he sees, interview anyone he wants and visit any place he cares.
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was always a lurker so never had an account. I just think it's important to counter Israel's misinformation campaign :) very telling you think those words have lost their meaning though. I don't think we need further discussion
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You're wrong on so many counts here but it seems obvious you're not in a place to listen to reason. Your confirmation bias has to be very strong to think you know better that the majority of neutral genocide experts.
> neutral genocide experts.
Peak comedy, thanks for the laugh.
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I'm more optimistic. The region was relatively peaceful before WW1. Eventually there has to be "reversion to the mean".
There was something that changed after WW2 and is still there today that guarantees eternal war as long as it is there.
Compared to all the peace in Europe during the last 500 years and the on going conflict in Ukraine?
I’m a bit more optimistic about wars where there isn’t a strong religious aspect on both sides. Can still be bloody (WW1/2) but doesn’t have the same dynamics that make me so pessimistic about the Middle East
> I just feel nihilism/defeatism towards the Middle East. In 500 years they’ll still be killing each other with all sides genuinely believing in their righteousness
Phrasing it as something that happens over there is disingenuous when it resource extraction and foreign interference that directly contributed to political unrest and radicalization and war. It is the CIA that poured literal millions in funding extremists groups. It is western troops and bombs and that landed on their soil again and again.
It's not something that simply happens over there, war is not some unforgivable trait related to tanned foreign people who believe in islam. Our governments have their hand in this cookie jar.
The middle east is an outdated term referring to a conflict zone that the West itself created.
Your response to me saying everyone is blaming each other is to give your opinion as to who is to blame?
See why I’m not optimistic?
You're not being as sly as you think you are. You said "they’ll still be killing each other", implying that this is the nature of the "Middle Eastern" people.
This, of course, is a statement that almost required the person who replied to you to add context due to the absurdity of the statement.
If you genuinely did not mean to imply this, you might consider reading your comments before submitting.
That's not what you said. You implied it's simply in the nature of the Middle East to be fighting religious wars, and that is why you are hopeless.
In fact, the aggressors in this case are European colonists, only 3rd generation or so, and they are pretty much following the standard historical playbook for how European colonists treat locals, including the assumed divine right of genocide ("manifest destiny") The Middle East isn't an especially belligerent place otherwise.
So I call your characterization unfair.
We don't have to bring peace to the region, but for god's sake can we stop funding the eviler side in every conflict? The USA spends more money blowing up schools of brown people than it does on keeping its own schools running.
And over what? A bone dry desert and acres of literal dirt.
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Calling this "propaganda" is propaganda.
Sure, buildings were demolished, is that unusual in a war zone?
> Sure, buildings were demolished, is that unusual in a war zone?
I'm going to assume good faith in your framing, rather than intentional minimization. Suffice it to say, more has happened than "buildings were demolished", and those more things are the subject of the article. Like, for example, an entire city systemically flattened with every single civilian inhabitant killed or exiled on their own land.
To answer your question in that context: yes, that is unusual in war these days, because it is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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That's absurd. History didn't start on October 7th. All of this is downstream from Nakba and the Balfour Declaration. Zionism was by its very definition genocidal.
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I have an Israeli friend. His answer:
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.
They helped Bibi stay in control. That was the end goal.
the end goal is resistance. colonisers must be reminded they can't live in peace
The Zionists invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed over 750,000 people off their land. That is the war they started, Hamas are just the relatives of the people Israel murdered fighting the occupying invaders. Thankfully they opened the world's eyes to Israel's crimes and now it's a dead man walking. Israel will not last another generation.
From how I understand the history, in 1948, the attacking Arab armies from neighboring countries told the local Arabs (Palestinians) to leave the war zone to be safe. But when Israel won the war, those Arabs could not return.
The way I heard it, there was a bit of everything. There was some attacks because of the violence that had been happening previously, some fled because of rumours of violence, and some were encouraged by the Arab armies.
How do you think Arabic came to be spoken in Palestine?
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The Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister have openly stated that the destruction of Rafah was intended as collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of civilians.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/pm-said-to-tell...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/warning-of-kidn...
Another one to look at is the maps of Ukraine [0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/google-maps-...
You seem to be confused about what genocide means, and your nonchalant careless use of it denigrates those who were actually victims of it, like those in Rwanda or Burma, where governments expressly systemically sought to murder and eradicate all members of particular ethnic groups. What Hamas clearly aspired to was genocide in the formal definition (ie, their stated end goal was and is the destruction of Israel and murder of all Jews). To my knowledge Israel has never expressed any desire to eradicate the Palestinians in whole or in part on the basis that they are Palestinian, nor can such a desire be imputed. Just because you don’t like what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t make it genocide, and you (and others) would be taken slightly more seriously if you saved that term for appropriately serious situations (with the requisite mens rea), which Gaza is not.
It's not being used nonchalantly
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jy96w6pw2o
> destruction of Israel and murder of all Jews
You people keep saying this is what Hamas wants. I've read the original scary charter everyone keeps pointing at. They never say to murder Jews. They do say to dismantle the apartheid state and replace it with a justice oriented one. That doesn't require marching 7 million Israelis into the sea, it just requires a regime change.
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There's no proof of that. However there is proof of Israel invoking the Hannibal directive on Oct 7 and torching hundreds of cars from the air, which were then buried.
Have you seen the video evidence Israel says they have of Hamas's brutality? I haven't either.
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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.
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?
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
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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.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
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.
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....
> 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?
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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?"
Turns out the limit is 7,001 attacks.
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.
It's not a war crime to hit human shields. It is a war crime to use human shields.
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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.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
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?
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."
you're describing what current government does, do you think everyone agrees with them?
Polls in Israel keep showing high numbers of support. 80%, 90%, agree with Palestinian eradication
where else goalposts can be moved?
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.
> I said this is what the government seems to be doing
Yes, that's how i understood it in my reply to you. It was the follow up who moved goalposts
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The history is vast, you'll have to be more specific about what you are referring to.
"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
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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.
didn't they do that in South Lebanon and then quickly rockets appear near the border and nearby towns get evacuated semi daily?
also they did it in entire Gaza, unilateral disengagement
Was food prevented from entering Gaza during this "disengagement"?
depends if you consider israel as controlling egypt's border i guess
Why would it depend on that
why did you put "disengagement" in quotes
Because if food was still blockaded, then it wasn't one. So was food blockaded?
disengagement means mandatory humanitarian aid?
Was food prevented from entering Gaza during the "disengagement"?
why are you still putting "disengagement" in quotes? if south korea prevents food from entering north korea, does that mean according to you south korea is currently "engaged" in north korea?
Yes? A blockade is a recognized form of military action, i.e. military engagement.
Now answer the damn question. Was food prevented from entering Gaza during the "disengagement"?
in both cases the countries border with multiple countries and one country doing whatever it wants with its own borders does not constitute a blockade.
now answer the damn question: didn't they do that in south lebanon and then quickly rockets appear near the border and nearby towns get evacuated semi daily and didn't the same happen during gaza disengagement?
> 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.
> They [..] left Gaza.
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?
> Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza,
The answer is in the post you replied to.
>> Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel
"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?
wasn't Egypt in control of southern border? did Egypt participate in the blockade?
Yes.
why did Egypt participate in the blockade? did it have something to do with their president's assassination? i don't have a precise timeline in memory
Yes partly; around 2015/2016 according to the Egyptian government and more recently a surge in hamas-linked terrorist groups in the Sinai.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/egypt-court-seeks-deat... https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-egyptian-armys-c...
It's more complicated of course:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/02/27/why-e...
Probably didn't want to get invaded by Israel
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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.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/21/the-netanyahu-...
What makes Christians more worthy of empathy?
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]:
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...That caught my attention too. It's refreshing to see at least one Christian Zionist showing concern for Arab Christians though.
I don't consider myself a "Christian Zionist".
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 absurd.
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.
Probably tougher to do politically than me stopping ICE from putting non-violent immigrants in concentration camps
> you have to look at how Oct 7 shaped Israeli society these last 3 years.
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.
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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.
A lot of the stories that came out of Abu Ghraib sure sound like they have very strong parallels to what is happening today. At the level of "poorly trained reservists trying to do something difficult without sufficient oversight and getting frustrated and turning to torture" it sounds very similar.
And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).
Abu Ghraib was a scandal, some people got punished, probably not all of the right ones.
When it came out that Israel was systematically sodomizing detainees with nightsticks, they had protestors come out in favor of the guards. It's still ongoing, all charges have been dropped. Nobody is scandalized by it.
That's a very flat take. That ignores the fact that the doctor that saw the prisoner reported it for investigation or that the military had chose to prosecute it, also you don't mention this was one case, not "systematic"
Even ignoring the fact that protests do not imply popular support, there is no comparison as 9/11 did not include widespread sexual violence and ongoing hostage rape was still going on at the time this happened.
So even if this seemed terrible to most Israelis, it was hard to find someone who will publicly defend a rapist from rape in jail
Sure if you ignore the UN Commission of Inquiry report from March 2025 that concluded sexual and gender-based violence was used systematically against Palestinian detainees.
the UNHR is comically biased against Israel though and controlled by totalitarian countries with less than stellar human rights records
Except Israel calls all criticism against it biased or anti semitic. Even a bad programmer can spot another bad programmer, sharing the trait doesn't mean you're not qualified to call it out in others.
I don't know, an example, Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese spreading nazi era conspiracy theories about Jews controlling political systems.
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
Was it Jews or Israelis?
The reaction of Americans to Abu Ghraib and the reaction of Israelis to the - larger scale - torture of Palestinian prisoners, is miles apart. It's also why there was always an end in sight to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, yet there isn't for Gaza until it has not a single Palestinian left.
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9/11 did happen to us.
Admittedly, this was before social media but back then you didn't get 50% support for gassing anybody.
That ended in a million dead over bi-partisan 20 years of war. Without 9/11 including massive hostage taking, rape or mass murder with torture in people homes.
The other main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it an ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
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).
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.
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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 demonstrate a commitment to reforming your style of participation here.
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Would you have preferred that the US stay out of WW2 to avoid killing any civilians? Sure, the Nazis took over, but at least our hands are clean!
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Please don't post like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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 marked [flagged] and the account 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. This community only works when people make the effort to raise the standards rather than dragging them down further.
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Please don't post like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not clear what you're referring to.
> 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:
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.
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Here's a line graph of the HDI of Iraq and Palestine:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index?t...
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recovers 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.
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?
>The country is completely broken.
"Iraqis celebrate their comeback with soccer tournament after decades of isolation"
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/football/iraq-gulf-cup-comeba...
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
https://i.imgflip.com/a6ptj6.jpg
>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?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
You deleted your other comment, funny.
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 didn't claim that Iraq's invasion of Iran was justified.
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
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.
>US supporting Iraqs invasion of Iran
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...
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.
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Did Native Americans also pick "the wrong patch of land to occupy"?
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.
> Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis
not comparable, how do you GIVE someone (that is probably raping you) syphilis?
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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.
> America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.
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?
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What is happening in Gaza is a genocide.
> has never expressed
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% is an ancient estimate btw. It's conservatively at least 25% now. Probably much more. We won't know until the war ends and maybe not even then.
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…
Hey I found this wiki page for you, hope you enjoy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the_G...
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.
You asked for evidence of intent and you got a long list of Israeli officials currently in power doing just that.
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?
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.
Is that supposed to be the definition of genocide? Laughable.
Keep moving the goalpost I guess
Look up the word in the dictionary big guy. Also read actual case law on the subject before commenting on HN about it.
You got the legal definition.
"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:
-https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definitionI think my conversation with you has run its course. I hope you learned something today. Do better next time.
It sounds like you're suggesting that everything Hitler did was okay except for the part where he said "I want to exterminate the Jews"?
Are you a bot?
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'?
I understand Israeli perspective already, from what I've seen last few years, and read about the history.
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.
The question is what did the government know before October 7th https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/09/ra-vivian-repor...
On the day that it happened both Egypt and the US confirmed that Egypt had informed Isreal in advance.
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.
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this
It is outside their zone of interest.
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You, nor I have the credentialing to be able to call something a genocide with any authority. I’ll leave it up to the phd-experts to call it.
“The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
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.
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I wouldn’t call that necessarily a good thing. Stable societies can have a decrease in population after peaking.
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).
No we have not established that. You've asserted it without evidence.
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.
Thanks for the gish gallop.
Where do population statistics on Gaza come from?
What's the minimum number of deaths that make a genocide?
Why would Israel want to completely exterminate its pet guinea pig surveillance beta testers?
Do some people enjoy inflicting terror?
Can you inflict terror on dead people?
Ok so you agree there’s no genocide, I guess because they want to keep them alive for fun or something.
What's the minimum number of deaths that make a genocide?
"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".
“in part” this would only require 1 building to be destroyed to satisfy this definition, in fact any sort of action taken at all during war or any sort of inter ethnic conflict would satisfy this definition.
That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.
If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.
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" and destroying everyones home. 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.
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Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?
No. Look into the history of human rights. It's long been recognized that there need to be backstops against excesses of (democratic) government.
> 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.
I mean it was 49.8% it's not like it was 30 or even 40. There are plenty of people that actually wanted Donald Trump to be elected.
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Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
How can you simultaneously decide you do not need to care about the lives of a group of people on the basis of a difference of ethnicity as you prioritize the formation of an ethnic state, and simultaneously refuse the premise that the formation of that state is to blame for ethnic strife? Your first and last paragraphs cannot be reconciled.
> Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it!
That’s not what reparations are, that’s ethnic cleansing.
> There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
As is true in every war.
The question is who started it.
If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
>it truly is hopeless
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
I don’t know this “everyone” you speak of, and I don’t identify or cheerlead for one group of murderers the other, and I empathize with all of the many innocent victims.
But I agree that those with the power and the weapons do seem to only believe in simple, violent solutions.
There might be complex solutions to be had, but it will take different leaders, and that seems unlikely in the short term.
The Germans thought the Jews started a war against the Germans, but now we know that's not true. There is an answer even if one side pretends it is not the answer.
I should have qualified it as “in any conflict going back more than a generation or so” because you’re right: there are net new attacks that are simpler.
But if you’re attempted to draw a parallel between Hitler’s use of an ethnic minority as a nationalist punching bag and the situation in the Middle East, that I totally reject.
The Zionist ethnic cleansing and now genocide of Palestinians is even more straight forward than WWII. Europeans created Zionism which at it's very onset, required the removal of Palestinians from their land. They've been enacting that policy with Western support since then.
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No, it started with the creation of Zionism, which pre-dates WWII.
Not exactly, since the original version of Zionism wanted to make the Jewish homeland in New York City!
The British like usual.
That is unfair. The British actually did not like the Zionists and they tried to keep the peace.
> The question is who started it.
Zionists. Their ideology, created in Europe in the late 1800s, has the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at its very core.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
[0] https://britainpalestineproject.org/recommendations-of-the-k...
> But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII.
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
> Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
> I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict.
Hang on though, isn't it Palestine who keeps accepting peace deals and then Israel keeps rejecting them and dropping a few more missiles? Do they not teach you that part? E.g. on October 7 Hamas released 3 Israeli hostages. Israel shot them dead, so Hamas didn't release any more.
I do wonder, isn’t there a sense the Palestinians face the survival of their people today?
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
An ethno state is a stupid backwards idea.
EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?
Orthodox Jews are against marrying non Jews. Is this not known?
They do not share Western social values.
An ethnostate generally is a bad, illiberal idea, but concerning Israel, the ideas that are good in terms of ideology would have been, and possibly still would be, worse in practice.
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
Exactly! I have the same experience. Most jews I know are not Zionists and are amazing people. Israel is not about religion, but about ideology as you point out and is deeply illiberal.
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
What is modern are states like we have now. Passports didn't exist before WW1 for example. The idea that people can't freely move across land and imaginary lines we call borders is a modern idea.
You have it backwards.
That’s a pretty weird claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
Wow, has reading comprehension escaped the world? What is different about the passport system compared to the examples you gave? Just think about it for a while.
Do you maybe want to explain it, because I don’t see it. Borders that limit travel weren’t invented around WWI.
The distinction is a world wide system of borders we call countries where you need passports to cross. That is distinctly a modern thing. The way countries work now is a distinctly modern thing. Yes, there were always some places that had walls and borders, but never as a world-wide system.
The way boats and airplanes work is also a distinctly modern thing, with those technologies curiously advancing around the time you claim passports were invented.
And ironically the average person travels less than 500 years ago. Shocking but true. Evem though technology made traveling easier. The reason is money and urbanization. You now need money to travel when I'm the past you didn't.
Do you have a source for that? I couldn’t find anything on that on google and I can’t really believe it.
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There are black French and Muslim French.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
Due to the (most likely innocent) conflation between 'arab' and 'muslim', that is misleading.
I don't follow? Yes, unintentional conflation but there are arab french as well.
If the Israeli state has reluctance to assimilate arab muslims or 'black' muslims, the qualm primarily is with their faith, not their race.
That is clear from the considerable number of Mizrahi Israelis and Ethiopian Israelis.
Ok, totally true but faith and race are conflated for jews, much more so than muslims or christians. Mizrahi jews aren't called Arab jews, judaism is not a proselitizing religion in general for 5,000 years so of course it has bloodlines rather than converts.
Israel is an ethnostate apartheid system on that conflated definition. After all, religion is almost as hereditary as race.
I guess I don't see the distinction as all that important? Aside from the fact that it would be an all-time troll if 2 million people in Gaza declared that they're Jewish now and applied for aliyah.
So is Israel the homeland of the Jews? If so, what does that make Palestinians? Tourists?
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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.
> 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.
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.