Israeli troops advance toward Gaza City as the Palestinian death toll rises above 9,000
Israeli troops advance toward Gaza City as the Palestinian death toll rises above 9,000
Wtf is wrong with people. The initial Hamas attack was bad. But Israel is now basically bulldozing Gaza and trying to turn it into a pule of rubble.
In what world does that make sense? They don't need U.S. aid or anybody else's help doing that. We should be internationally condemning what they're doing right now. Instead we are offering to give them money?
Am I crazy for thinking this is far far beyond a sane response. They have literally been killing children.
This isn't a response, it's what they wanted to do for over half a century now. Killing Palestine or shoving it to nearby countries was always the plan, Israel was just waiting for an excuse.
I think it's a mistake to pretend like this has been a monolithic response for Israel. It's a little telling when people pretend like every action by the current government is and represents all of Israel for the last 50 years. This is the actions of an extreme radically right government. Netanyahu and his far right extremist allies have set this up and very likely been behind part of the entire debacle. For this reason as you suggest. However we should not pretend like his radicals have been running the entire country for its entire history. Anyone paying attention should know that these religious radicals have been at war with their own country just as much as the palestinians.
They needed a good casus belli, this is as good as it is gonna get for them PR-wise.
Truth is virtually no country ever denounce shit if they have something to lose doing so. Geopolitics is rooted in each nation self-interest.
On top of that, Palestinians just hasn't been good neighbors and no country on earth want to bring the kind of chaos of taking them as refugees. So we have it. Most nations will root for Israel out of self-interest, and pretend there is no need to take refugees.
You are very sane.
At least on this topic.
A few months ago they were literally bulldozing roads.
Right. Insane. Even if they remove Gaza and all the people there from the face of this earth, all they will have accomplished is decades more coming back at them. The people of Israel are less safe than ever. Hamas did the same to their people as clearly they too are all less safe. When will this madness stop? This is disgusting and a worrying sign as we enter the AI age, that humanity just has not grown the fuck up.
I'm going to assume you're familiar with this long, complicated conflict. If you were in Israel's shoes, how would you respond to the Hamas attack?
Hamas has a leader in a tunnel under a refugee camp. You can 1) go into the tunnel and kill the Hamas fighters, possibly losing IDF soilders along the way, or 2) you can bomb the fuck out of the civilian houses on top of the tunnel and hope that collapses the tunnel and kills the leader, killing hundreds of civilians. A righteous country, an explicitly religious country who answers to god, would choose to sacrifice it's soilders over sacrificing innocent lives. Israel instead decided to commit a war crime. And then after being called out by the international community, did the same thing the next day.
Since you like asking questions, maybe you can answer one. Please explain how cutting off food and water for 2.1 million people is a legitimate military tactic and not just the war crime of collective punishment?
Assuming you're being genuine:
Hamas has to go. There is no stable situation leaving them in power.
We have a couple different approaches to resolving this:
Though I take small issue with your comment, the implication is, we can't do anything except kill more people. We've tried killing them before, that didn't work, we should try killing them harder this time. That's not a stable situation either - unless you kill all of them. And if that's the goal, they're doing a bad job of it. They're doing it too slowly
If I was Israeli I would dismantle my god forsaken cursed country and end the scourge that it has been in the region.
All in the name of defense of course. With the worlds most moral army, backed by the world's biggest blank cheque, how could this be anything but self defense. Oh and fuck those journalists and their families.
Two years from now there will be no Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank and the world won't do shit about it
A few hundred from the total amount of dead civilians in Ukraine.
But Russian killing bad, Israeli killing good apparently.
Fuck this empire
Israel is a terrorist state. Period.
Do you think terrorist means attacking civilians? Usually terrorism had the purpose of inciting fear on the larger side in an asymmetric conflict. Israel seems to be doing this moreso to get rid of the population, or at least to get at Hamas with absurdly low regard for civilians. Rather than making the population fearful.
Israel announced right at the start that its target is to eliminate Hamas and PIJ.
Since there are:
Then unless something substantial changes, the death toll is expected to rise to around 50k-60k . This is really just the beginning.
I think your comment is a great example of how wording matters. The use of "people" is vague enough to mean all jews or the Isreali government. One context makes your comment antisemitic while the other doesn't. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and only point out that the distinction is necessary because the Isreali government does not represent all jews. The government is hypocritical and you can find jews, even in Isreal, being critical of that hypocrisy.
I have particular contempt for oppressed peoples that go on to oppress others when given the chance.
I guess you didnt read the article then, eh?
Benjamin Netanyahu, who has previously ruled out a cease-fire, said Thursday: “We are advancing … Nothing will stop us.”
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken was heading to the region for talks Friday in Israel and Jordan, after President Joe Biden suggested a humanitarian “pause” in the Gaza fighting to let in aid for Palestinians and let out more foreign nationals.
Roughly 800 people — including hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports and dozens of wounded — have been allowed to leave Gaza over the past two days, under an apparent agreement among the U.S., Egypt, Israel and Qatar, which mediates with Hamas.
But the Biden administration has pushed for Israel to let more aid into Gaza amid growing alarm in the region over the destruction and humanitarian crisis in the tiny Mediterranean enclave.
More than 3,700 Palestinian children have been killed in 25 days of fighting, and three weeks of bombings that often level large swaths of neighborhoods have driven more than half the territory’s 2.3 million people from their homes.
A senior Hamas official, Ghazi Hamad, dismissed Blinken’s visit, saying the U.S. aims “to give more cover for the vicious assault on Gaza” and “impose its own political solutions.”
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevy, said his forces were encircling Gaza City from several directions and “fighting in a built-up, dense, complex area.”
The original article contains 1,332 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is an holocaust.
It seems like Israel's position is that they will hit any valid military targets regardless of whether civilians may die as collateral damage, this is because Hamas intentionally uses civilians as human shields.
Hamas relies on the Israeli government’s aim to minimise collateral damage, and is also aware of the West‘s sensitivity towards civilian casualties. Hamas’ use of human shields is therefore likely aimed at minimising their own vulnerabilities by limiting the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) freedom of action. It is also aimed at gaining diplomatic and public opinion-related leverage, by presenting Israel and the IDF as an aggressor that indiscriminately strikes civilians.
Hamas’ most common uses of human shields include:
- Firing rockets, artillery, and mortars from or in proximity to heavily populated civilian areas, often from or near facilities which should be protected according to the Geneva Convention (e.g. schools, hospitals, or mosques).
- Locating military or security-related infrastructures such as HQs, bases, armouries, access routes, lathes, or defensive positions within or in proximity to civilian areas.
- Protecting terrorists’ houses and military facilities, or rescuing terrorists who were besieged or warned by the IDF.
- Combating the IDF from or in proximity to residential and commercial areas, including using civilians for intelligence gathering missions.
The alternatives to these bombings would be to allow them to keep launching attacks on Israeli civilians, or to send in ground forces into a well-prepared terrorists' den with the home court advantage; which means very high casualties. This is fundamentally a choice between their own civilians and soldiers or civilians and soldiers on the enemy's side.
Israel probably isn't going to let the ones responsible get away with mass slaughter of their civilians, or stand down, until they have fundamentally changed the situation and made themselves more secure by deposing Hamas and/or annexing territory.
I suspect all those who call Israel a "terrorist state" aren't accurately imagining themselves in their shoes. I'd like to hear what viable options the critics would choose instead if they were calling the shots there and wanted to keep their people safe.
The alternative to air strikes is to send in IDF troops to kill Hamas in close combat. That option would likely lead to many more IDF deaths, as ypu notes, but dont pretend Hamas rockets are an actual threat, there are no Israeli civilians at risk, or at best a small number. The airstrike option saves IDF lives, but will lead to vastly more civil deaths. There are options here, you just have to make a judgement call on who you are willing to sacrifice, your own soldiers or innocent civilians, mostly children. Israel has made it's choice, they have to live with it, and one day they can tell their god all about how letting IDF soilders die on the battle field was a politically more costly option than killing thousands of innocent children from the air, after forcing those same children to live in unsanitary conditions, starving and without access to water, for weeks before sending someone in a jet to flip a switch and end their lives.
There are options. There are choices.
Also all of this assumes that Israel, an apartied state, is actually trying to minimize civilian causalities and that Hamas is using civilians as human shields by I guess existing in the same densely populated area, that Hamas governs, as the civilians? And that Israel isn't just using this as an opportunity to end the Palestinian problem once and for all, to cause so much suffering that the Palestinians abandoned their homes and seek refuge in Egypt, kind of like the plans drawn up and recommended by the Israeli government suggest. As you said "annexing" the territory. That's ethnic cleansing btw, but who's counting. Even ignoring all that, and assuming Israel is acting in complete good faith, they are still making a choice that an IDF soilders life is more valuable than a Palestinian childs.
Hamas is evil, btw, fuck them to hell. I hope Israel succeeds in wiping them off the face of the earth. But that doesn't mean I am going to mindlessly defend an explicitly racist country cowardly killing thousands of civilians from the air and starving the survivors. The only Innocents here are the civilians, but the Israeli civilians slightly less so because they at least have political control of their government which is taking these actions and have confined Palestinians to open air prisons for decades.
send in IDF troops ... you just have to make a judgement call on who you are willing to sacrifice, your own soldiers or innocent civilians
Sacrificing significant numbers of your own soldiers to save enemy civilians sounds noble, and would make a great movie, but would deeply hurt morale, be politically unpopular, and fundamentally weaken Israel's ability to defend itself from hostile enemies on all sides. It would be both handing a victory to the enemy you are at war with, and justifying the use of further human shields to repeat this winning strategy. Ironically, your concern for civilians over your own people would likely put far more future civilians at risk.
one day they can tell their god ...
If Yahweh or Allah existed and cared I suspect they would have weighed in by now.
Also all of this assumes that Israel ... is actually trying to minimize civilian causalities
They certainly aren't trying to maximize civilian casualties; given their capabilities they could kill civilians a lot more effectively were that their goal. I wouldn't say they are indifferent because they are still calling people before strikes and creating evacuation zones. At very least it's obvious they want to minimize the blowback from the media, which means minimizing civilian casualties as long as they can still get their targets. I get the sense that Israel isn't willing to call another ceasefire until something fundamentally changes regarding their safety first, no matter how many bodies are paraded before the media or how outraged the (non-US) foreign public gets.
and that Hamas is using civilians as human shields by I guess existing in the same densely populated area
See the link in my above post for detailed info and examples of how Hamas intentionally uses human shields and puts their bases in and under hospitals, churches, mosques, etc.,
they are still making a choice that an IDF soilders life is more valuable than a Palestinian childs.
From a geopolitical standpoint, that is absolutely true. These countries are at war with each other, and someone currently on your side today is better for your national interests than someone who might potentially be on your enemy's side in the future.
Your plan is to sacrifice your soldiers and hand your enemy a victory in order to enlarge your enemy's potential forces in the future. I suspect if you were in charge of Israel it would not fare well because of your willingness to sacrifice its soldiers, but I can't help but admire your eagerness to protect innocents even if it meant your own downfall. The problem is that you'd be taking a lot of people with you and possibly dooming your nation.
I also can't help but wonder if your personal feelings about Israel are contributing to your willingness to sacrifice its soldiers. Would you feel the same way if you were sending in soldiers from whatever country you are from instead of IDF forces? Would you enthusiastically join them in such an incursion, without air support, on a possible suicide mission to save enemy civilians who are likely to support those attacking you?
And I bet Hamas or whatever terror group emerges out of that will have an easy time finding recruits.
Do you truly think that this will achieve anything other than polarising both sides? People are not animals!
History will judge them, you can't remove such a stain easily.
Reposting this what I posted a few times here already:
Let me ask you two questions.
If Hamas is using the Palestinian people as shields and is forcefully preventing civilians from moving away from them, that makes the Palestinian people effectively hostages of Hamas. So if the Palestinian hostages happen to be near Hamas terrorists, are they acceptable collateral damage if Israel bombs them?
Eventually, Israel will find out where the Israeli hostages are being kept. Obviously, there will be Hamas terrorists near them. Are the Israeli hostages acceptable collateral damage if Israel bombs them?
If you answered yes to one question, and no to the other, you should ask yourself why you put different value on the lives of innocent human beings. Is it what side of a fence they are born on? What nationality they happen to have? What religion they believe in? The color of their skin?
if the Palestinian hostages happen to be near Hamas terrorists, are they acceptable collateral damage if Israel bombs them?
Are the Israeli hostages acceptable collateral damage if Israel bombs them?
I suspect both would absolutely be considered acceptable collateral damage, that is consistent with Israel's previous Hannibal Directive, and IDF forces mortared their own Kibbutzes and bases to hit Hamas targets during the Oct 7 attack.
Interesting you presume Israel and its supporters are motivated by racism, it seems obvious to me Israel's motivation is regarding safety. Meanwhile, the other side of this conflict is explicitly genocidal.