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).
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*).
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.
Different war I am referring to the 2023 Gaza war but my point still stands the incident you linked is not a civilan being run over. "the IDF was engaged in an operation involving the demolition of Palestinian houses in Rafah. Corrie was part of a group of three British and four American ISM activists attempting to disrupt the IDF operation." If you are embedding yourself in Gaza 2003 during the 2nd intifada and doing this you arent a civilan.
I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.
They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
Wouldn’t it actually be much more efficient to just destroy all the food infrastructure and just have everyone die from hunger instead of destroying all the houses?
there are videos of bulldozer in the West Bank eradicating secular olive trees from Palestinian farmland. There is no Hamas in West Bank, no tunnels, no fighters.
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
Also the Palestinian buildings are practically made of cardboard because that's all the supplies they can get (because mysteriously supplies keep not arriving, oh well, no way to know why they don't)
You can find lots of videos of Russia firing thermobaric weapons into populated areas - you will find none fired by Israel into Gaza. And I don't think that's because IL doesn't have them.
(i can't edit apparently): why the downvotes? Serious question I don't understand, is there anything I said above false? The parent comment is questioning whether RU cruelty in Ukraine is anything close to what IL did - and the answer is yes, it's actually much worse, especially when you factor in that it's completely unprovoked.
There is no way it’s worse. To be comparable the Russians would have to have flattened Kyiv and most other cities which is extremely far from reality. The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.
> The cities being flattened are all in the frontline as there is no way to take a city by force without basically destroying every building.
It's exactly the same in Gaza! You basically justified Israel's actions here... Check the distance between Gaza City & Israel border, vs distance beetween Bakhmut & Russia's border. Tell me which one is farther away - I'll wait
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.
> and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position. Everything gets pounded, even forests and tree lines. It’s more like Verdun than anything that happened in Gaza.
> What happened on the Ukrainian frontlines is a war of position
If Gaza is a genocide then Ukraine almost certainly is too. The same messaging about exterminating a culture that doesn't "actually" exist from senior leadership. The same attacks on children. The same destruction and systematic razing of civilian settlements.
It can be (and is imho) true that both Russia and Israel have broadcasted genocidal intent with the consequences being war crimes and still not look identical
It seems like the state of Ukraine frontline cities is due to intense artillery fire and air bombingn whereas gaza cities states seem to be more of systematic bulldozing of entire areas which would erase the marks of actual bombings and make the scale harder to assess
The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
Systematic destruction of urban areas is sadly what modern urban combat operations look like.
When an enemy digs in and choose to fight and die in an urban area, this is how war plays out.
> The same thing happens in Ukraine in the urban front lines. Villages get erased with artillery and bombs, as basements are the best place to survive drones and fires from artillery and bombs.
But that’s not what we see in Gaza. The parents specifically mentioned that only towns were leveled. The destroyed towns are not the only relevant aspect. The other one is that major damage happens only there. And of course it would, because the Israeli forces don’t want to sterilise the land; they want to take it. In contrast, Russia is happy to be king of the rubble as long as Ukrainians eat shells.
If your enemy is dug in in an urban area, you bomb the hell out of it before you send in infantry to clean up. If you don’t use artillery and bombs the defenders will mow down the assault units.
This is how urban war is played out between near peer armies.
Think about this, I’m in a concrete bunker with a machine gun, do you want to charge the bunker and get shot, or do you want to call in an airstrike to destroy the bunker with the machine gun position? I know what I’d do
Or, if you're the IDF, and the bunker is filled with neutral UN Observers monitoring for war crimes, you also send in a laser-guided bunker-busting airstrike. Then you insist it was an "accident" while refusing to cooperate with the subsequent investigations.
Of note, just days before the strike, one of the Observers sent an unencrypted email home to his wife noting that he was observing Israeli war crimes and would be reporting them.
I'm sorry, Ukraine war discussion was labeled political on HN, not allowed, actively moderated and shutdown. Please don't post it here. Only Gaza/Israel get's a special carveout for these sorts of discussions on HN.
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 ?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Heat trigger sensors can be had for a few dollars in China these days. As long as you got a decent electrical engineer and a supply chain... you can probably whip up a working prototype in a day or two.
You're right, that's totally doable.
However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive. It's unlikely an AliExpress package full of PIR sensors is going to make it's way through the blockade.
> However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive.
Yeah, but guns absolutely can. Iran is pretty good at supplying Hamas with everything they need to maintain control over the population - you might expect that after three years of absolutely brutal warfare Hamas would be beaten into submission, but clearly they are not.
That's kind of what they did. Just in the most heavy-handed indiscriminate way imaginable. But the booby-traps are cleared, and they did use teleoperated robots to do that
Over a million people live here. The estimate was that "448 to 593 civilians were killed due to coalition military operations", orders of magnitude less than Israel has killed. Basra was not wiped off the map or seized and annexed by coalition forces while the population was herded into a concentration camp.
It is simply slander against the US military to suggest they have in the 21st century done anything like what the IDF has done in this genocide.
There were weeks of airstrikes by the coalition and then artillery barage("Down Barage").
Basically Mosul was leveled before a single soldier entered it.
Here's historical satellite imagery. Go to 2017-08. You can see Mosul airport and surrounding facilities leveled, immediately adjacent to a city that is obviously a city and not 1) flattened Mosul airport or 2) similar in any way to the Rafah imagery above.
If you are describing Mosul as "leveled" then what adjective do you use to describe Rafah? It cannot possibly be also "leveled" given that vast areas of Rafah are actually a flat pile of rubble and Mosul is clearly a city with a destroyed airport, even in late 2017.
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.
Or, if you are not a genocidal terror group, you actually go house-to-house and check. Difficult, dangerous, but not a war crime. That's why Mosul isn't a pile of rubble, even though ISIS was more than willing to use booby traps!
---
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
The problem with Ghaza is, that its the living proof that the peace process never could work. Charon returned it, des-ettlered it, the hippies moved near the border to help, they integrated them into the economy- only to get murdered on the 7th of october.
Not even egypt allows ghazans in- 10.000 euros for one passport is insane. And all those walls and checkpoints. And egypt is pretty islamist itself, so natural ally to hamas and the like.. but they know had that brush with the mb
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
It's okay to have an agenda, just be honest about it please. Anti-Zionists tend to be pretty open about their agenda: opposing colonialism, ethno-states, genocide etc. It's telling that modern Zionists often seem less willing to express theirs.
You 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.
Not only tunnels. Almost every house was rigged with explosives, like what happened in Gaza city, entire neighborhoods would explode once the troops arrive. If not rigged then it would be a stash of weapons somewhere in the house or under, you are not going to spend days on each house that is potentially rigged looking for a needle in a haystack.
Unfortunately the worst for Gaza will come after the Israeli elections. Israel has 2 years of politically favorable US president to clear out Gaza City once and for all to correct the mistake of 2005 withdrawal.
Prolonged "surgical" strikes continued so long that there is almost nothing left to operate on I guess. And your justification is that some farms are not completely destroyed? What a disingenuous remark.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.
Mosul is a large city and Rafah is one neighborhood in Gaza. There are many buildings remaining in Gaza (if you look at other parts of the map).
Rafah has been demolished to create a buffer zone near the border (after the population had been evacuated). Egypt likewise has demolished Rafah on its side of the border in 2013 to create a security zone.
> "Israel is allowed to unilaterally declare their home is no longer allowed to exist and I don't see a problem with that"
Just translating what accepting that "demolished to create a buffer zone" is a reasonable justification for levelling Rafah (and a lot of the rest of Gaza) means. Those peoples lives, homes and businesses are expected to just be subject to the whims and desires of the Israeli government all while they allow(ed) the blockage of aid going into the territory and fired on the camps they drove people into.
Interesting. Despite the images of Mosul (e.g. on the NYTimes) being presumably selected to show the areas with largest impacts, the destruction is in patches and you can see many houses still standing. In Rafah, every single house has been razed to the ground.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
"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".
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.
Eh, those are short term gains. Popular opinion has shifted away from Israel since they've increased their attacks and basically no longer hide the fact they want to eradicate Palestinians wherever they may be. They can't throw antisemitism rhetoric anymore because people have caught on to their victim syndrome. What they're doing is the same thing the US has been doing for decades, creating terrorists by oppressing entire generations and it will end the same way, eventually, when a critical mass opposes their regime or until they elect someone as dumb as the US did and throws all pretenses out the window. They either succeed in their genocide or all they're doing is motivating people who will one day have an impact.
You can use the term Palestinians if you want. Many of the people who engaged in atrocities on October 7th were Palestinian civilians, not Hamas.
For example the Bibas children and their mother were kidnapped by Palestinian civilians and sold to a Salafi terrorist organization within Gaza, they weren’t taken by Hamas. This is why 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.
You are wrong, this is the mindset that allows such atrocities to become possible, even from non-psychopaths. Sadly, to a lot of people, there are not "humans" but "enemies", and once that's given, any atrocity follows.
Fascinating idea. On individual level I wouldn't agree, because whenever you take a strong stance about something you also tend to create enemies. Same for small groups of people. On state level however, it does sound more reasonable and should be the overall principle at least. Scale matters.
This seems like some serious rose colored outlook. Support for Israel in their patron state has absolutely plummeted in the last year. Support is almost certain to be cut back sharply by the next administration and might go to zero in the near future.
Iran's nuclear program has hardly been destroyed long term and there is almost no chance a durable nuclear agreement comes out of this war. It will almost certainly be a vague memorandum where Iran pinky swears to never build a nuke and then starts building one as soon as the fighting stops. America isn't going to start endless wars to prevent that and Israel can't do it alone. The long term future looks grim for the Middle East, especially for Israel.
I wish I could share your optimism, but the fact of the matter is that American politicians are beholden to their sponsors on both sides of the aisle, and the military industrial complex and American imperialism which Israel is a part of, are both popular initiatives among their primary funding sources.
Meanwhile, most of the voter base (perhaps understandably) cares more about domestic issues than they do about the plight of people on the other side of the world who they are killing and exploiting with their tax dollars.
Given all this, I don't know how you can be so certain that anything will change with a new administration, even with polling demonstrating that voters do disapprove of support for Israel now. Most of the people who disapprove of funding Israel don't care about it strongly enough for it to be a significant factor in their engagement with electoral politics (which for most people is also just limited to voting once every 2 to 4 years)
Somehow a powerful state army destroying homes and killing civilians is not "terrorist". It's only "terrorist" if the weak try to respond in kind, using means available to them. It's almost like "terrorist" is a propaganda term used by the strong against the weak who try to resist.
As the saying goes "war is terrorism with a bigger budget".
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.
This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong, like saying indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined mostly by lehalmimmgirwnts, built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy, in South Africa.
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.
The problem is the inexorable logic of war - fighting everyone everywhere all the time - has led to the war expanding until it collides with an enemy that is actually comparable to Israel, i.e. Iran. And that war has now expanded to include the world's supply of oil.
It's going to affect everyone, and I don't think you can stop Western voters noticing that the price of fuel has gone up. Then they're going to start sharing the blame around: Iran, yes, but also Trump and Netenyahu.
It's hard to blame Iran when they literally weren't doing anything until we attacked them. You don't blame a child for punching back against the school bully - unless you're also a bully.
I don't think Iran are entirely blameless given their sponsorship of Hezbollah and participation in the Yemeni (and previously Lebanese!) civil wars. They've been maintaining a sort of sub-threshold threat in the area for a long time. Which was why, yes, it was an incredibly bad idea for US/Israeli attacks to escalate that.
Any rocket or bullet turned against Israel for the past 20 years has its roots in Iran. Iran controlled Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and Iraq through its militias.
If you knew anything about how Iran is doing this, you'd know they are happy to throw money or materiel at anyone who can put together a force against Israel, or even Serbia during the Bosnian war. They hardly direct or control anything afield, other than being mostly ideologically aligned. They don't need to pull puppet strings like you say. They happily work with resistance forces regardless of sect.
Imagine the death and destruction caused by the hands of Israel.
Realize that this reaction wasn't necessary. Those who run Israel are adults. They could have chosen a path with much less deaths. They were not forced to commit a genocide, they chose it.
Realize that when people see such pictures, of entire cities completely leveled to the ground, that people get extremely upset. Imagine the place you live reduced to rubble and how atrocious you would find this. The inhabitants of Gaza are humans just like you and the world is justified in their disdain.
I'm confused about your opening line. First you say the terrorists won, then you continue to elaborate how the terrorists are losing. So they won but now they are losing again?
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.
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.
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.
It's sad that most world leaders do nothing to combat such genocide. There are so few sanctions against the state, or specific people, of Israel. Foreign forums are very much still open for business to them.
1) Ultimately, money means more to foreign nations than what happens with internal affairs of their trading partners
2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.
Israel has both nuclear weapons and the Epstein files, so that's not really an option (granted: SA had nuclear weapons too, but nobody really to drop them on).
Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell in particular) are widely believed to have operated as a massive Mossad blackmail operation, collecting (and creating) blackmail material against western politicians and influential individuals to ensure their support for Israel.
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
and it seems pretty likely that's exactly what was happening.
The idea that a nation-state was/is running a child sex trafficking ring, and we're *not* turning over heaven and earth to investigate that so that country faces unprecedented consequences...I don't even know what to say
Didn't he have ties to basically all powerful people? Is there something special about his Israel ties that are different to his Bill Gates ties?
I thought this was interesting, from Al Jazeera to boot:
Political Reactions: While critics and unverified intelligence memos pointed to the deep relationship as a sign of state ties, current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly dismissed the notion, stating on social media that Epstein's close ties to Barak (a political opponent of Netanyahu) actually "proves the opposite" of Epstein working for the Israeli state.
Of course. A very valid way to view it, and the same way I would've viewed it in 2016 if you told me there was a global elite pedophile ring that helped get Trump elected.
Epstein is thought to have been working for Mossad. If that's true, they probably have copies of all the video tapes (which we know were made) of all the stuff rich people did on Epstein island. This theory would single-handedly explain why almost everyone in the Epstein files supports Israel so strongly.
> Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
Who's this "we" who dealt with the SA apartheid state?
The international pressure on SA did absolutely nothing to change their mind (I'm old enough to have seen PW Botha's Rubicon speech live on TV). The NP (political party in charge) was slowly and carefully convinced to push out the hardliners.
The people left, like FW De Clerk, actually did the dismantling - unbanned the ANC, released Mandfela from prison, switched to allowing black voters, etc.
The rest of the world's pressure had absolutely no effect on the leadership. Change only came when leadership started changing.
The actual on the ground resistance was of central importance in the end of South African apartheid, but the international pressure and sanctions greatly increased the need for negotiations to begin. The point is to increase the pressure to change leadership through democratic means.
This could hopefully happen somewhat faster with Israel, given that the government isn't a literal Nazi remnant, as the South African government was. (Though, ironically, the main arms supplier to South Africa during the arms embargo was Israel, often reselling weapons from the United States. Sigh.)
"By the late 1980s, the South African state was in profound crisis, crippled by international sanctions, a stagnant economy, and widespread resistance. Recognizing the unsustainable nature of the perpetual conflict, the government under P.W. Botha began tentative, secret contact with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and the exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders."
Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed. This is why Hamas changed policies to only give up hostages through 3rd parties. They reached out to israel to try and return hostages and were ignored. They reached out to the US to return hostages and were ignored. [1]
So for starters, the US could have pressured Israel to negotiate with Hamas to return the hostages.
As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times). The US could have at a minimum threaten to withhold aide. In fact, there are laws on the books that a country such as Israel committing war crimes is ineligible for aide.
Finally, the UN should have deployed peace keepers to gaza specifically to stop the genocide.
Actions could have been taken, but they weren't because our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money as to turn a complete blind eye to it's misdeeds.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
This is where you notice that the world is more complicated than social media posts.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
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"?
Allowing international journalists in would make the genocide even harder to deny and at that point there's no more returning to the "current situation". Regarding the border, at least for Hamas the 1967 borders would be just fine: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full (article 20).
They never cancelled their original charter, and their position is to accept borders only as a stepping stone towards getting all of the land as a Muslim waqf.
Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year. The best implication of that 'accepting borders with Palestinian majority on both sides on them', which is just a funny way of taking all the land.
I'm immune to Hasbara and not wasting more time debating it, but just leaving some Wikipedia snippets below as a kind of a "community note".
> They never cancelled their original charter
Wikipedia [0]:
This document [the 2017 charter] reflects our position for now (...) The old charter was a product of its era, 30 years ago. We live in a different world today.
> Also, Hamas literally operated the 'March of Return' (demanding the 'right of return') that year.
Wikipedia [1]:
The first demonstrations were organized by independent activists, but the initiative was soon endorsed by Hamas, the governing party of Gaza, as well as other major factions in Gaza.
Only if you think Israel is entirely correct in their assessment that every single civilian building actually houses dangerous hamas terrorists. I don't think that assessment is correct so I don't think the UN peacekeepers would be behaving exactly like Israel and the IDF has behaved in Gaza. Nor do I think the UN would put the same restrictions on aid coming into Gaza. They wouldn't stop peanut butter and baby formula from entering.
Iran gave Russia their Shahed drones, 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?
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.
> Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed.
This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.
If you had to guess, what do you think they might do? I feel like questions like this are in bad faith. Think about it for a minute, and try to come up with some things that they might do.
Send all collaborators to the international criminal court. (In the US, especially congress critters and members of the executive branch.)
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
The remaining non-corrupt members of the executive branch (or the state governments) would uphold the oaths they took, lock potus and friend in boxes, and ship them off.
As for Israel, as I understand it, the next election will mean domestic jail time for the incumbents unless the polls are wildly wrong.
At that point, it would be easy for Israel to start climbing out of lawlessness too.
Do not forget that world leaders are heads of sovereign states that are in charge of their self defense. Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies, need to make public statements that are not hypocritical about what they would do for self defense. This is why both U.S. administrations support Israel's actions
> Those that actually have to defend themselves, like the US, rather than relying on strong allies
Sure, but are we going to ignore about the US having to rely on its "helpless" allies to provide staging points and cannon fodder for its illegal imperialistic wars? How much of a superpower would it be without its overseas bases?
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.
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.
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.
I support Israel, but not wholeheartedly. I understand how Nakba was a matter of survival of your people. But why is this still going on today? Why is Israel continuing to expand settlements? Can you not understand how Palestinians must feel to constantly live in fear of being pushed out of their own homes? This is what gives me heartache. Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
> Can't you draw a line and say, what happened in the past cannot be reversed, but we will not continue to expand settlements?
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
"shortly after". Let's just forget for a moment that Israel made that happen, intentionally. What happened during that "shortly", was there a food blockade?
Netanyahu preferred Hamas to the PLO in order to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank.
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
I'm a Zionist only in the sense that I believe both the Jews and Arabs (Palestinians) have/had a right to states in their respective majority areas because of secular reasons after studying the history of both sides; not on religious or theological grounds.
It's partly what led me to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy which doesn't believe in "Christian Zionism" as a form of end-of-days prophecy. The level of crazy I saw in Evangelical churches and groups during my time there could become 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.
Nothing makes them more "worthy" of empathy. It's that I have somewhat more of a personal connection to them. During my studies the Arab Christians on the campus in Tel Aviv were some of the most peaceful and kind people I met over there and it influenced me greatly.
They also happen to be caught between a rock and a hard place where both the Israelis and the Muslim Palestinians both oppress them. Quoting from [1]:
I am a Christian by religion, born in Nazareth, Israel to
Arabic-speaking Christian parents and brought up in Kufur Yasief,
the hiding place of Josephus Flavius
Persecution for Christians in Israel and Palestine is not on the
scale it is in Egypt, but it is there nonetheless. It must be added
that there is a growing number of Jewish-background, and Russian
Christians in Israel, who suffer more persecution from the
Jewish state and people.
...
Christian Arabs in Israel/Palestine live in a climate of fear
and therefore hypocrisy. Pressure on Arabic-speaking Christians
to tow the Muslim Arab nationalist line is so great, that we are even
afraid of complaining about injustices against us.
We suffer:
• At the hands of Jews, because we are seen as:
o Arabs: and so enemies, and primitive.
o Christian: and so gentiles. WE are often blamed, by association,
for the European holocaust.
• At the hands of Muslims because we are Christian, and "infidels."
We are often punished for “western” bias towards Israel.
The position you’re describing is essentially the modern left position in Israeli politics. Again, we’ll see in the upcoming election, but not everyone here supports the current goings on in the West Bank. The “Palestinian situation” is a major question in Israeli politics, both wrt Gaza and the wb.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
Israel rejects the two-state solution. They seem to be aggressively pursing a one-state solution, incorporating all of former Palestine (and perhaps beyond) into Israel. Obviously this doesn't include taking in the people living there, giving them Israeli citizenship. People will be killed or expelled. All while Israel continually claims to be the victim "look at what those people trying to stop us stealing their land did to us now."
comment said: "rejecting two state solution". poll numbers I see is around half rejects it, not 80%.
comment said: "killing or expelling all people in former palestine". there is no poll numbers for that specifically and the closest numbers for expelling people I see online is less than half, not 80%.
now you say "Palestinian eradication". OK, show the polls about 80-90% of israel supporting "Palestinian eradication".
I said this is what the government seems to be doing, I don't know or care about the general population. A government can't stay in power without supporters and collaborators, however.
* Well, implied, by "Israel" I mean the state, the government.
So this situation is a bit like when the Nazis invaded Poland and then said, we have to destroy Poland because if we don't, they'll kill all our Nazi soldiers.
Isn't the humane solution to move the troops back out, instead? Of course the aggressors in a war will never do so, they will only press forward.
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?
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.”
While I vehemently disagree with the IDFs handling and it's hard to deny the genocidal effort, let's not forget Americans reacted very similarly after 9/11. People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Revenge and collective punishment may be natural human reactions to a terror attack but that doesn't make them justified. Especially when those in charge anticipated the attack and deliberately exploited it.
> People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I don't quite understand your argument here. In your first pin I'm struggling to find a single building that isn't leveled, or at least severely damaged. Even buildings far away from the city center in the boonies are leveled.
They are saying that this is genocidal destruction. In a war sometimes civilian infrastructure is hit as collateral. But here, all infrastructure is destroyed and it's clear this wasn't done by 1 or 2 errant bombs but rather because of direct targeting. It can't be argued to be an accident because in farmland you see no bombs which hit the farmland by mistake. In other-words, this is entirely purposeful.
>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.
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?
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.
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."
Source: the aggressors
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.
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?
If it was genocide, why would you spare the farmers? Doesn’t really make sense.
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
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.
Farmland wasn't bombed, but they did use Bulldozers to destroy a lot of fields.
there are videos of bulldozer in the West Bank eradicating secular olive trees from Palestinian farmland. There is no Hamas in West Bank, no tunnels, no fighters.
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.
Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.
Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this.
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.
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,+...
No, Mariupol was just one (arguably not the best) example answer to the original question, "Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this."
"Russia is claiming it as theirs for the last four years and has largely rebuilt it" is not really counter-evidence to destruction during the fighting
Mariupol probably did see less destruction. But for the actively contested regions, the biggest difference between Russian destruction and Israeli destruction is that the Russians use artillery, which leaves shells of buildings standing, while Israel uses bulldozers that are a lot more thorough in leaving no stone on the other
Also the Palestinian buildings are practically made of cardboard because that's all the supplies they can get (because mysteriously supplies keep not arriving, oh well, no way to know why they don't)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mar'inka,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...
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.
(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.
To busy using white phosphorous on kids.
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.
Well, Russia's use of white phosphorous during the invasion and ensuing occupation of Ukraine is well documented
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...
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
> 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.
> 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?
Well, it happened in germany with the hitleryouth and volksturm.
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
Rafah was no village, with 250,000 to 280,000 people.
Similar size to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Mariupol
> 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."
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.
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?
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.
Oh 100%, you can see specific buildings (mostly marked as schools) that are still standing.
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?
Its called something like collective punishment, something that many cultures practiced around the world.
have you seen the extent of tunnels that were there?
No, have you? Is there any independent confirmation of their existence?
Yes, hamas posted about it?
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.
What do you think of the cultures that practiced it?
Dont harm the messenger, im just telling you the fact of past humanity.
Those cultures sound like savages to me
Which is a war crime
Agreed, im simply telling you why its done.
> 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.
> the homes are booby trapped
Robots. These things can be cleared. Particularly if the population isn't there.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you link to any documented cases of the US leveling a city after encountering a trap or ambush?
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.
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.
The problem is that it's genocide.
Every single house in the entire city of Rafah was booby-trapped?
"It's not a lie, if you believe it" — George Costanza
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
“ There are no innocents in Gaza.” funny, this is exactly what people said to defend what Hamas did on October 7th.
The babies and young children in Gaza are as innocent as they are everywhere else in the world. If you can’t see that, you should reexamine the lens you use to look at the world, it’s distorting things massively.
An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.
This is despicable, inhumane. It is generational trauma that started with the Nazis, now propagated to the poor souls around the new western colony of Israel.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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%...
"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.
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 unbelievable!
This is insanity. So much destruction and loss :(
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...
This should be higher I think - it is pretty clear that cities get demolished during war, whether purposefully or not.
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.
Mosul still had tons of standing buildings where Rafah has entire neighborhoods demolished down to the ground. The destruction there is far more systematic because it's intentional and systematized to drive Palestinians out of the area.
Mosul is a large city and Rafah is one neighborhood in Gaza. There are many buildings remaining in Gaza (if you look at other parts of the map).
Rafah has been demolished to create a buffer zone near the border (after the population had been evacuated). Egypt likewise has demolished Rafah on its side of the border in 2013 to create a security zone.
> "Israel is allowed to unilaterally declare their home is no longer allowed to exist and I don't see a problem with that"
Just translating what accepting that "demolished to create a buffer zone" is a reasonable justification for levelling Rafah (and a lot of the rest of Gaza) means. Those peoples lives, homes and businesses are expected to just be subject to the whims and desires of the Israeli government all while they allow(ed) the blockage of aid going into the territory and fired on the camps they drove people into.
Interesting. Despite the images of Mosul (e.g. on the NYTimes) being presumably selected to show the areas with largest impacts, the destruction is in patches and you can see many houses still standing. In Rafah, every single house has been razed to the ground.
The icons from what was there before are a haunting digital ghost. School, Restaurant, Pharmacy all the city is just rubble.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
You really need to quantify each of those things and many more to be able to compare. Otherwise it's meaningless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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...
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.
https://xxcancel.com/AliAbunimah/status/2103890594137309425
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.
"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.
> 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?
> 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.
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
> 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?
"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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Strange way to measure success, reducing everything to a powerpoint with graphs, its almost like humans dont exist.
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.
> Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
sounds like the terrorists did indeed win
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.
"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?
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.
> 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.
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 ?
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)
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".
That's the sad thin? not the destruction and wholescale murder?
There's not much of a fissure in Ireland, the consensus there is pro Palestine. They see parallels between how Israel is treating the Palestinians and how the UK treated Ireland. Generally they don't view the bigger country next door trying to take over a smaller country favourably, and that's even without the mention of the word genocide which certainly doesn't help Israel's case.
There are several factors involved as I see it - a lot of money from Qatar flowing to make sure Israel is always shown as the aggressor, anti-semmitism is still prevalent, most people can't grok what the issue is in the Middle East anyway, people don't understand what living 10km from people who want to kill you looks and, and war is horrible and it's always easier to side with the people who seem to be the underdog.
> 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.
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.
German media said they did
Germans believed they did
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.
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.
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.
Indeed the terrorists did win, as we can see from these images.
I would honestly say the people committing the genocide won, as it was always their goal
That's what they said - the terrorists.
Israeli regime is pure terror.
non-X Google Maps link to ~location of screenshot: https://www.google.com/maps/@31.2857778,34.2533333,1010m
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?
Too many Palestinians have nothing to live for, except revenge.
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.
Not every Palestinian is dead yet. And they've moved on to Lebanon. Not to mention that the war has widened to include Iran.
What would qualify as having won? Every Palestinian dead?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are no technicalities, only sophisms written by bots.
> 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.
Same destruction is being currently taking place in south Lebanon. After the "seize fire" the Israeli army flattened most of the villages.
Atomic dome vibes when looking at some of the few buildings still standing
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.
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.
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.
What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
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.
Cut off weapon gifts+sales to Israel, impose sanctions. Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
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).
Nuclear weapons sure, but what is this about Epstein?
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 (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
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.
So you're suggesting that Israel would drop a nuke on a Western country imposing a boycott? Somehow, I doubt it.
> 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%...
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-...
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.
> 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.
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"?
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).
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?
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_...
Only if you think Israel is entirely correct in their assessment that every single civilian building actually houses dangerous hamas terrorists. I don't think that assessment is correct so I don't think the UN peacekeepers would be behaving exactly like Israel and the IDF has behaved in Gaza. Nor do I think the UN would put the same restrictions on aid coming into Gaza. They wouldn't stop peanut butter and baby formula from entering.
Iran gave Russia their Shahed drones, 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?
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.
> Literally on Oct 7, Hamas tried to return civilian hostages, who the IDF killed.
This is literally terrorist propaganda, they tried to offer a return of a subset of the hostages in exchange for Israel not invading and dealing with the Hamas security threat. Obviously Israel was not going to leave such a severe security threat like Hamas intact.
If you had to guess, what do you think they might do? I feel like questions like this are in bad faith. Think about it for a minute, and try to come up with some things that they might do.
Send all collaborators to the international criminal court. (In the US, especially congress critters and members of the executive branch.)
Also, blockade Israel proportionally to the Gaza blockades. I doubt they would have kept murdering red cross members in Gaza once the supermarkets started running out of food.
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.
At the very least diplomatic condemnation and a South African level sanction.
Immediately stop all exports and money flows to Israel. Food and medical aid should still be allowed to both sides, of course.
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
wow, you hold a very high opinion of american politics. you must have been reading new from paper news paper for the last 30 years
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.
> 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?
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.
jesus fucking christ
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.
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?
Probably tougher to do politically than me stopping ICE from putting non-violent immigrants in concentration camps
> 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
Probably didn't want to get invaded by Israel
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...
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?
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.
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...
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
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?
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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-...
While I vehemently disagree with the IDFs handling and it's hard to deny the genocidal effort, let's not forget Americans reacted very similarly after 9/11. People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Revenge and collective punishment may be natural human reactions to a terror attack but that doesn't make them justified. Especially when those in charge anticipated the attack and deliberately exploited it.
> People are not keen on ideas of peace after a large scale terrorist attack.
Except for Palestinians of course, who suffer a terror attack every day, and are expected to remain peaceful afterwards, or they will be punished with another terror attack.