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.
Its really telling to see the destruction limited to where the structures used to be rather than to all of the surrounding green spaces. If the destruction of civilian dwellings was purely an accident you'd expect to see the destruction spread evenly over the area. Instead it looks much more like a prolonged set of surgical strikes to destroy the buildings while preserving as much of the surrounding areas as possible.
The 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?
a_paddy 2 hours ago [-]
How does bulldozing a family home have any affect on a tunnel?
MiroslavPokorny 16 minutes ago [-]
Its called something like collective punishment, something that many cultures practiced around the world.
vkou 2 hours ago [-]
It encourages the former occupants leave the country. Once they all leave or die, there will be no more tunnels or insurgents.
Not quite. Perhaps you were thinking of "ethnic cleansing" ?
latexr 27 minutes ago [-]
It seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives. Talk about loss of perspective.
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
4gotunameagain 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cess11 19 minutes ago [-]
No, it predates the nazis. Zionist terrorism and genocidal actions in Palestine started earlier.
biimugan 15 hours ago [-]
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.
skissane 8 hours ago [-]
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.
elcritch 7 hours ago [-]
It also looks similar to Mosul in Iraq before and after the ISIS and Iraq and coalition forces fought:
Urban warfare is brutal, especially when one side systematically digs in and uses IEDs and booby traps in civilian buildings.
megous 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 10 hours ago [-]
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kergonath 13 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
megous 1 hours ago [-]
It does not look the same, at all.
newspaper1 4 hours ago [-]
Does it look the same in the Ukraine? I haven’t seen any footage of entire cities leveled like this.
MiroslavPokorny 15 minutes ago [-]
Many of the towns along the front with Russia are also wastelands. Nearly every single building from homes, to schools, to shops are rubble.
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.
30 minutes ago [-]
virgilp 1 hours ago [-]
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.
teleforce 8 hours ago [-]
>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]:
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.
cogman10 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Sabinus 8 hours ago [-]
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?
rbanffy 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bonesss 2 hours ago [-]
There were a lot of arms used over the border on October 7th, more confiscated on video and being used on video against the IDF, and the constant stream of unguided rockets being shot at civilians year after year. Rockets are weapons.
Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.
While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.
iririririr 1 hours ago [-]
almost as if they didn't have the best interest of the civilians in mind uh
rbanffy 14 minutes ago [-]
As Emiliano Zapata once said, "Better to die standing than to live on your knees".
While I don't condone violence, it's a legitimate way to defend against occupation.
torton 6 hours ago [-]
"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."
rbanffy 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
choo-t 2 hours ago [-]
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).
The way the IDF fought in Rafah and other areas is leading with bulldozers that can take RPGs, IEDs, mines etc. to clear way for troops behind. That's how the tunnel and other guerrilla advantages are neutralized.
So yes, the destruction is absolutely purposeful, its purpose is to take away the advantage of the tunnels and guerrilla tactics, and enable excavations for tunnel access and detection.
The sequence was something like this (AI assisted):
Early May 2024, the IDF issued extensive, phased evacuation orders. This prompted an estimated 1 million to 1.4 million civilians—many of whom had previously fled to Rafah from other parts of Gaza—to evacuate to designated zones like Al-Mawasi.
Once ground troops secured these largely emptied areas, the IDF Combat Engineering Corps moved in. Objective satellite damage assessments show a massive spike in structural destruction in Rafah beginning in the summer of 2024, directly correlating with the ground invasion.
Satellite imagery confirms that ground forces used controlled explosive demolitions and heavy earth-moving equipment, including armored D9 bulldozers, to systematically clear residential blocks, agricultural land, and infrastructure.
This mechanical destruction was particularly concentrated along the Philadelphi Corridor (the Gaza-Egypt border) and in eastern Rafah. The military objective of these block-by-block clearing operations was to uncover and destroy cross-border smuggling tunnels and to establish a widened, flattened security perimeter where structures previously stood.
In summary, while aerial bombardment occurred prior to and during the invasion, you are correct that the wholesale, block-by-block leveling of Rafah was heavily driven by engineering operations using bulldozers and controlled demolitions after the majority of the civilian population had evacuated the targeted areas.
what 7 hours ago [-]
If it was genocide, why would you spare the farmers? Doesn’t really make sense.
thinkindie 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
neor 34 minutes ago [-]
Farmland wasn't bombed, but they did use Bulldozers to destroy a lot of fields.
aetch 3 hours ago [-]
It’s more efficient to spend your ammo on housing and city buildings.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
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?
a_paddy 2 hours ago [-]
You're right, it is, hence the strikes on World Central Kitchen and the blockade on food entering the area.
iririririr 1 hours ago [-]
they send armed settlers for the farms. they can't destroy those
choo-t 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cavisne 5 hours ago [-]
Oh 100%, you can see specific buildings (mostly marked as schools) that are still standing.
ImPostingOnHN 15 hours ago [-]
They just use bulldozers to flatten whatever the bombs don't. They can drive a bulldozer pretty precisely, especially when they don't care who's in front of it or under it.
Caterpillar even supplies the IDF with bulldozers just for this purpose, which then get up-armored and sent into Palestinian civilian areas to do this (including unmanned versions).
Worth noting that Corrie was killed 23 years ago during a different phase of the conflict and under a previous government. (In which Netanyahu served as minister of finance.)
yyyk 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
antonvs 6 hours ago [-]
Only a child thinks 2003 was a long time ago.
laimewhisps 8 hours ago [-]
Of course it's relevant. Regardless, there are many instances of Israel killing civilians with bulldozers in Gaza.
tpowell 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ImPostingOnHN 15 hours ago [-]
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*).
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.
YZF 2 hours ago [-]
You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
None of Israel's critics is able to suggest some significantly different strategy that would allow Israel to after Hamas. So the discussion inevitably ends up (with said critics) at Hamas had a right to commit these crimes, because they are the oppressed/occupied, and Israel has no right to defend itself by going after and defeating Hamas while minimizing its casualties like any other western army would do and has done (see Mosul or many other examples).
bayarearefugee 2 hours ago [-]
> You forgot the extensive tunnel infrastructure dug under all these civilian areas. The fighting in civilian clothing. Weapon caches and tunnel entrances in civilian buildings. Booby trapping civilian structures to kill soldiers that attempt to search/enter them. Mining roads in civilian areas to inflict damage on invading forces.
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
iririririr 1 hours ago [-]
maybe just stop funding it?
Hikikomori 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fesoliveira 1 hours ago [-]
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.
esjeon 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
gbriel 2 hours ago [-]
Also Russians have just bombed a Dobrobut hospital in Kyiv. One of many war crimes happening every day. We also need to be talking about that conflict as well.
fesoliveira 1 hours ago [-]
The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations nor is it an ally to most of NATO countries. The gripe many of us have with Israel's actions is that we enable them directly by providing money, weapons and manpower. No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes, whereas just recently we started seeing some manner of blowback to Israel's.
lostlogin 2 minutes ago [-]
> The main difference here is that Russia is not funded by western nations
Incorrect.
The west still buys Russian gas. Half of Russian gas exports go there.
> No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes
The US doesn’t condemn Russian aggression, and try get the current administration to say that Russia invaded or is committing war crimes.
Skwid 8 minutes ago [-]
The situations are not the same, but western nations are absolutely funding Putin’s actions through oil and gas imports.
Despite a lot of posturing, and a fair amount of presumably sincere effort, billions continue to flow.
vkou 2 hours ago [-]
How much more do we need to talk about it?
For one thing, there isn't a major, bi-partisan, pro-Russian-war-crime lobby with a controlling interest currently sitting in government.
King-Aaron 2 hours ago [-]
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.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
As soon as you murder civilians you lose all your justification.
I mean both sides.
skavi 2 hours ago [-]
if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.
ako 2 hours ago [-]
In every war civilians are murdered. By both sides: bombing of rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima…
King-Aaron 2 hours ago [-]
Correct.
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
boxed 2 hours ago [-]
Also using child soldiers.
megous 1 hours ago [-]
You really need to quantify each of those things and many more to be able to compare. Otherwise it's meaningless.
raverbashing 1 hours ago [-]
You mean, Hamas, one of the only armies that doesn't fight with a uniform and hides artillery in civilian buildings?
defrost 1 hours ago [-]
Do the settlers wear uniforms when they kill villagers?
I wouldn't call them an invention of Israel, but they were allowed/encouraged to flourish.
boxed 2 hours ago [-]
They won the election in Gaza and has been running the entire thing for years.
King-Aaron 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder why
niemandhier 3 hours ago [-]
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.
monideas 2 hours ago [-]
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.
MiroslavPokorny 13 minutes ago [-]
Strange way to measure success, reducing everything to a powerpoint with graphs, its almost like humans dont exist.
dominicrose 16 minutes ago [-]
I think he was talking about a political war. Now we have on HN's home page a link pointing to someone using the term holocaust against Israel/Jews, which is quite perverse if you know history.
croes 2 hours ago [-]
> Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged
Is that the same program that was compeletly damages last year?
crote 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ifwinterco 3 hours ago [-]
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?
kotaKat 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaway198846 1 hours ago [-]
> 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."
son_of_a_star 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kiproping 24 minutes ago [-]
That's the sad thin? not the destruction and wholescale murder?
reorder9695 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
indy 3 hours ago [-]
"Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective"
Yes it is, and some countries have become very good at doing that
nomilk 3 hours ago [-]
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).
vnorilo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
phoe-krk 2 hours ago [-]
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.
stein1946 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
abdelhai 2 hours ago [-]
"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_origami_fox 2 hours ago [-]
Hamas's own Health Ministry says 70,000 dead, not 100,000, including around 10,000 natural - all deaths for the last 3 years have been labelled as matryr - and that figure does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. By Hamas' own military figure pre-war and Israel's war assessments, up to half could be non-civilian.
choo-t 1 hours ago [-]
> By Hamas' own military figure pre-war and Israel's war assessments, up to half could be non-civilian.
You are quoting Wikipedia which quotes an article by the Guardian that the IDF had identified ~9000 Hamas/PIJ casualties by name. It is a logical fallacy to then assume the remainder are not part of Hamas/PIJ. Further, identifying adversary combatant deaths by name is an extraordinary high standard for warfare and is applied to no other conflict on earth.
choo-t 51 minutes ago [-]
Oh boy, more disinformation and "we do this better than any other military" bullshit.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
abdelhai 2 hours ago [-]
Those numbers don't account for people still under the rubble.
xinuc 55 minutes ago [-]
which one you called terrorist?
surely the one creating such destructions and deaths no?
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.
abdelhai 3 hours ago [-]
Usually a football field.
kpozin 5 hours ago [-]
For comparison, here's Mosul in Iraq after the defeat of ISIS:
This should be higher I think - it is pretty clear that cities get demolished during war, whether purposefully or not.
throw310822 1 hours ago [-]
It's pretty clear you didn't look at the pictures. The destruction in Mosul appears very limited compared to the annihilation of Rafah.
abrookewood 1 hours ago [-]
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.
throw310822 1 hours ago [-]
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.
olalonde 25 minutes ago [-]
Stupid question but if Israel is willing to flatten cities, how have they not won the war yet?
MiroslavPokorny 7 minutes ago [-]
Too many Palestinians have nothing to live for, except revenge.
wilburx3 16 hours ago [-]
The icons from what was there before are a haunting digital ghost. School, Restaurant, Pharmacy all the city is just rubble.
Havoc 1 hours ago [-]
At this stage I just feel nihilism/defeatism towards the Middle East. In 500 years they’ll still be killing each other with all sides genuinely believing in their righteousness and that it’s all the other sides fault
15 minutes ago [-]
leokennis 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
esjeon 17 minutes ago [-]
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)
totetsu 3 minutes ago [-]
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..
Ellis_dev 3 hours ago [-]
Google Maps acting as a real-time war damage tracker is a sobering use case. The raw satellite data is a stark visual.
juliusceasar 3 hours ago [-]
Israeli regime is pure terror.
almogo 8 hours ago [-]
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.
MomsAVoxell 4 hours ago [-]
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?
red75prime 1 hours ago [-]
Can you try to free your brain from political bullshit for a moment and think which kind of a person can come up with a plan to kill civilians not in the heat of battle, but with premediation and purpose? And in which kind of society this idea could have a wide enough support to be implemented.
anon48293 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
eastbound 3 hours ago [-]
For me (France), it's not October 7, it's the 9 previous months. From January 1st, French TV was showing about 1,000 rockets per month sent onto residential Israeli quarters. Sure beautiful pictures of the counter-missiles destroying them in flight, but I remember thinking:
"How long can Israel counter 30 rockets a day? What's the cost?"
"How is not each of them (7,000 in total) a war crime by Palestinians?"
"Sure it's not Palestinians it's Hamas, but the last time there was an election, they've elected Hamas, so what do you do?"
"Seriously, how is this not 7,000 counts of war crimes? Why is Israel not reacting? Why is Israel militiae into Gaza to catch the authors?"
Turns out the limit is 7,001 attacks.
flowerlad 7 hours ago [-]
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?
almogo 4 hours ago [-]
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.
incompatible 3 hours ago [-]
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."
2 hours ago [-]
moi2388 2 hours ago [-]
No, twice they offered and twice Palestine rejected. Read some history please.
incompatible 2 hours ago [-]
The history is vast, you'll have to be more specific about what you are referring to.
"Palestinian right of return" was a perfectly normal political position, but you don't hear much about it these days.
> 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.
crote 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
porjo 3 hours ago [-]
> 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
eastbound 3 hours ago [-]
> they kept bombing Gaza
It was an automated system that immediately responded within 60s to rockets sent from Gaza. Shoot one rocket from Gaza, get the building destroyed within 60 seconds. Also, the first rocket is a war crime (indiscriminate attack), the second is a military target.
You can't just say "Israel bombed Gaza" and play the victim, omitting information.
axus 7 hours ago [-]
Probably tougher to do politically than me stopping ICE from putting non-violent immigrants in concentration camps
choo-t 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mandevil 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nixon_why69 7 hours ago [-]
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.
mandevil 7 hours ago [-]
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).
nixon_why69 7 hours ago [-]
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.
breppp 4 hours ago [-]
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
2 hours ago [-]
tomnipotent 4 hours ago [-]
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.
breppp 3 hours ago [-]
the UNHR is comically biased against Israel though and controlled by totalitarian countries with less than stellar human rights records
tomnipotent 3 hours ago [-]
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.
breppp 3 hours ago [-]
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
4 hours ago [-]
4 hours ago [-]
deaux 6 hours ago [-]
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.
FpUser 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
0xDEAFBEAD 4 hours ago [-]
Would you have preferred that the US stay out of WW2 to avoid killing any civilians? Sure, the Nazis took over, but at least our hands are clean!
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recovers and in subsequent years grows above its pre-invasion value. Far from being "destroyed", Iraq is now doing better than ever.
For Palestine, the dip is about 3x larger.
mempko 3 hours ago [-]
How many people died in Iraq? The country is completely broken. Look what's happening in the latest Iran war.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
0xDEAFBEAD 3 hours ago [-]
>The country is completely broken.
"Iraqis celebrate their comeback with soccer tournament after decades of isolation"
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
>The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
Hikikomori 2 hours ago [-]
You deleted your other comment, funny.
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
0xDEAFBEAD 1 hours ago [-]
I didn't claim that Iraq's invasion of Iran was justified.
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
Hikikomori 2 hours ago [-]
Iraq was in a bad state because of the previous war where US intentionally targeted civilian infrastructure like power, industry, hospitals and such. They wanted to create a failed state. This was after supporting Saddam in the Iran war and selling him chemical weapon precursors while knowing what he would use them for.
2 hours ago [-]
tick_tock_tick 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nixon_why69 4 hours ago [-]
9/11 did happen to us.
Admittedly, this was before social media but back then you didn't get 50% support for gassing anybody.
breppp 4 hours ago [-]
That ended in a million dead over bi-partisan 20 years of war. Without 9/11 including massive hostage taking, rape or mass murder with torture in people homes.
The other main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it an ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
miracle2k 2 hours ago [-]
The actual violent civilian caused by coalition forces are estimated to be around 15,000 in Iraq and 10,000 in Afghanistan - over a period of 20y and populations around 25x that of Gaza.
Everyone knows that Israel essentially went on a rampage of revenge, which you basically seem to agree with given your explanation for the destruction (i.e. not military necessity while protecting civilian lives).
Hikikomori 2 hours ago [-]
Hamas offered the hostages to end the war within the first week or so, Israel refused, as they did many times later. They also got many warnings about the attack, even from Hamas. It was always about the destruction of Gaza, the situation is manufactured.
stanfordkid 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
alterom 4 hours ago [-]
Did Native Americans also pick "the wrong patch of land to occupy"?
jimbob45 4 hours ago [-]
Native Americans overwhelmingly died from Smallpox that was accidentally brought over by Europeans. There is no credible evidence that the transmission was malicious.
In return, Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis. Fair trade? Probably not, although the all-time death totals aren’t as incomparable as you might think.
soperj 4 hours ago [-]
> America also did not conduct genocidal actions in the manner Israel has.
First Nations
> Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception.
What do they call it in the US? Manifest Destiny?
avazhi 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
samudrijan 4 hours ago [-]
What is happening in Gaza is a genocide.
3 hours ago [-]
tomnipotent 3 hours ago [-]
> has never expressed
Yes, the 4% of the Palestinian population they've killed is definitely not a form of expression. Like somehow killing only matters if you talk about how fun it is first.
For the record that's greater than the % of Bosniaks killed in the Bosnia genocide.
avazhi 3 hours ago [-]
4% isn’t much in the grand scheme of things and again, yes you have to be able to prove the intent. Pretty basic legal principle. It could be 85% and that wouldn’t by itself prove genocide.
Do you guys even bother being minimally informed before commenting? Like, Wikipedia is right there…
Hikikomori 2 hours ago [-]
Hey I found this wiki page for you, hope you enjoy
You (and the contributors to that particular article) seem to not know the difference between war crimes (which Israel has probably committed) and genocide, which is much more onerous to prove. What you should be doing is looking at how genocide is defined generally and at how genocide cases have been prosecuted historically. Only by changing the goalposts of how genocide is defined can you attempt to construe what’s happening in gaza as genocide, which is what that article (which presupposes that what is happening in gaza is genocide by its title, obliterating any notion of objectivity) does throughout.
Put simply, if you use any legally accepted definition of genocide (as a matter of the historical record) then what is happening in gaza doesn’t even come close. And of course the legally accepted definition is ultimately all that matters. That’s very different from whether laymen think it’s genocide because what’s happening hurts their feelings.
megous 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
themgt 7 hours ago [-]
Most people in Israel have not, and probably will not see this
The only requirement to join the world's leading association of genocide scholars is paying a $30 membership fee. No expertise required. This makes it trivial to manipulate the association for propaganda purposes. Its declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was approved by less than 20% of its members. The remaining 80% were never even asked or never voted on it. An acquaintance of mine has been a member since 2013 and is a real scholar with genuine expertise on the Rwandan Genocide. She was not made aware that this resolution was being proposed and learned of its adoption in the press.
monideas 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
aetch 3 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t call that necessarily a good thing. Stable societies can have a decrease in population after peaking.
monideas 3 hours ago [-]
They’re not all actually decreasing in population, they are increasing via mass migration, legal and illegal. That is how the elite strata of Western European societies and the Anglo sphere countries (US, Canada, Australia) are dealing with this.
In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.
7734128 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think appealing to how good a country is at breeding is a valid counter to its genocidal tendencies. That's probably the strangest argument I've ever seen.
monideas 3 hours ago [-]
Well we’ve already established that the use of the term genocide is nonsense, I’m arguing something different. In this case that the type of defective thinking displayed in the idea you need to be a member of some institution to apply your intellect is in part responsible for the fact every other developed society is dying, it has to do with agency and libido (the psychological sense of the term).
crote 3 hours ago [-]
"Destroying all the buildings" is already a genocide on its own. In the Genocide Convention this would fall under "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part".
monideas 3 hours ago [-]
“in part” this would only require 1 building to be destroyed to satisfy this definition, in fact any sort of action taken at all during war or any sort of inter ethnic conflict would satisfy this definition.
That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.
If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.
mempko 6 hours ago [-]
Does this help you sleep? Rationalization is a coping mechanism.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
This "lawyer" mentality is so dumb.
monideas 4 hours ago [-]
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lorecore 8 hours ago [-]
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almogo 8 hours ago [-]
Israelis generally do learn about the Nakba in school. But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII. We don’t see it in the way you describe. For us it was a matter of the survival of our people.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
claykkari 22 minutes ago [-]
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
> There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
As is true in every war.
The question is who started it.
brookst 5 hours ago [-]
If that’s the question, it truly is hopeless. Because whoever you think started it, they don’t see it that way. So there can be no shared understanding, ever. It’s just circular blame across centuries.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
jbenjoseph 41 minutes ago [-]
>it truly is hopeless
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
noosphr 5 hours ago [-]
The British like usual.
expedition32 1 hours ago [-]
That is unfair. The British actually did not like the Zionists and they tried to keep the peace.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
> But we’re much more concerned about the circumstances Jews find themselves in after the Holocaust/WWII.
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
hitroicasd 35 minutes ago [-]
> Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
7 hours ago [-]
lorecore 6 hours ago [-]
> Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it!
That’s not what reparations are, that’s ethnic cleansing.
sudosysgen 6 hours ago [-]
How can you simultaneously decide you do not need to care about the lives of a group of people on the basis of a difference of ethnicity as you prioritize the formation of an ethnic state, and simultaneously refuse the premise that the formation of that state is to blame for ethnic strife? Your first and last paragraphs cannot be reconciled.
fnordpiglet 5 hours ago [-]
I do wonder, isn’t there a sense the Palestinians face the survival of their people today?
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
mempko 7 hours ago [-]
An ethno state is a stupid backwards idea.
EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?
thomassmith65 2 hours ago [-]
An ethnostate generally is a bad, illiberal idea, but concerning Israel, the ideas that are good in terms of ideology would have been, and possibly still would be, worse in practice.
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
Didn't downvote but I'll bite: Haven't states largely always been ethno-states, and isn't "ethno-state bad" a relatively modern and potentially as-yet unproven argument in the big scheme of things?
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
mempko 4 hours ago [-]
What is modern are states like we have now. Passports didn't exist before WW1 for example. The idea that people can't freely move across land and imaginary lines we call borders is a modern idea.
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
expedition32 3 hours ago [-]
Orthodox Jews are against marrying non Jews. Is this not known?
They do not share Western social values.
hactually 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nixon_why69 5 hours ago [-]
There are black French and Muslim French.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
46 minutes ago [-]
thomassmith65 34 minutes ago [-]
Due to the (most likely innocent) conflation between 'arab' and 'muslim', that is misleading.
4 hours ago [-]
esafak 5 hours ago [-]
So is Israel the homeland of the Jews? If so, what does that make Palestinians? Tourists?
AlexandrB 5 hours ago [-]
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saligne 4 hours ago [-]
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itchyouch 6 hours ago [-]
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hactually 5 hours ago [-]
Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?
Tarq0n 2 hours ago [-]
No. Look into the history of human rights. It's long been recognized that there need to be backstops against excesses of (democratic) government.
rootusrootus 5 hours ago [-]
> Is it not good that the US and Israel govt are generally doing what their people want though?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
hhh 3 hours ago [-]
I mean it was 49.8% it's not like it was 30 or even 40. There are plenty of people that actually wanted Donald Trump to be elected.
zmmmmm 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
paulus_magnus2 51 minutes ago [-]
IANAL nor ICJ nor ICC to officially name genxxide but
This looks much (MUCH) worse than the worst thing Putin did to Ukraine
King-Aaron 2 hours ago [-]
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.
igleria 16 hours ago [-]
Atomic dome vibes when looking at some of the few buildings still standing
umeshunni 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Ozzie_osman 2 hours ago [-]
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.
boxed 2 hours ago [-]
> it needs to stop
It did stop. When the hostages were freed and Hamas gave up. Which they could have done at any point. Or you know, they could not have started the war too.
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.
krembo 2 hours ago [-]
Rafah is like Nazi Germany Dresden.
You start a war, You Lose a war, You pay the price.
a_paddy 2 hours ago [-]
But Israel started the war, in 1948.
krembo 2 hours ago [-]
Against whom? The British mandate?
a_paddy 4 minutes ago [-]
Against the people of Palestine who didn't meet the ethno religious profile of the new state.
saturn_vk 16 hours ago [-]
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.
bamboozled 10 hours ago [-]
What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
hedora 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sdenton4 10 hours ago [-]
Cut off weapon gifts+sales to Israel, impose sanctions. Same way we dealt with the South African apartheid state.
lelanthran 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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).
crote 3 hours ago [-]
So you're suggesting that Israel would drop a nuke on a Western country imposing a boycott? Somehow, I doubt it.
almogo 8 hours ago [-]
Nuclear weapons sure, but what is this about Epstein?
MC995 7 hours ago [-]
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.
slim 7 hours ago [-]
he's referring to the fact that epstein is a mossad agent and that compromised world leaders are being blackmailed to support the genocide
7734128 3 hours ago [-]
At the very least diplomatic condemnation and a South African level sanction.
cogman10 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Hamas was willing to return hostages if israel freed all thousands of Palestinians prisoners, including those captured in Israel while committing the Oct 7 massacre.
And that is exactly what sinwar wanted to achieve in every one of his wars, just like when in 2014 Israel traded 1 captured Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinians prisoners.
So basically Hamas wanted israel to surrender, accept Hamas terms, and ignore Oct 7.
cromka 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bamboozled 8 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 8 hours ago [-]
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.
yyyk 9 hours ago [-]
>Hamas tried to return civilian hostages
Lie. It was a deal to get complete immunity for a massacre. Also, 'Civilian' per Hamas is anyone over 60. 'Let Hamas murder and keep nearly all hostages' was not in Israel's playbook.
>They reached out and were ignored.
Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
>As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times)
Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
>the UN should have deployed peace keepers
Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
>our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money
I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
cogman10 8 hours ago [-]
> Lie. It was a deal to get complete immunity for a massacre. Also, 'Civilian' per Hamas is anyone over 60. 'Let Hamas murder and keep nearly all hostages' was not in Israel's playbook.
You are making stuff up. Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card. And the fact still remains that they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
> Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the agreement and change the terms. That was all public. It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
> Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yes, it's relevant when the IDF explodes clearly marked aid vehicles rendering aid. There's no reason to do that.
> Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
Does that really matter? The question wasn't "how effective will this be" it's "What world leaders should have done". That's what world leaders should have done.
> I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
These are weaker lobbies because of US laws. The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens (in behest of Israel). No other nation has that sort of organizations in the US. The closet you can find is things like the weirdo Shen Yun cult.
This allowed them to spend $60M in a democrat primary. You won't find that sort of direct spending from Qatar or the Saudis (barring the clear bribe in the Jet. They aren't exactly giving away jets to every primary run).
yyyk 8 hours ago [-]
>Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card
'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.
> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.
>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.
You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.
>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).
>Two wrongs don't make a right
Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.
>That's what world leaders should have done.
Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.
>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens
Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.
bamboozled 9 hours ago [-]
So you feel like after October 7, there should've just been a talk about what happened and some form of negotiation ?
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
Quote exactly where I even implied that.
ebbi 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bamboozled 8 hours ago [-]
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ebbi 8 hours ago [-]
sorry buddy, you can't just kill 700k people, displace the rest into an open air prison for decades, and expect no blowback.
You can't just continue to 'mow the lawn' where children are killed and kidnapped, put into Israeli prisons, and expect no blowback.
You can't just shoot people in the knees while protesting peacefully, and then expect no blowback
You can't just rape Palestinian prisoners (most of whom have been arrested under no charges), and expect no blowback.
You can't just install bombs in pagers, and set it off amongst civilians, which resulted in children being injured or killed, and expect no blowback.
Sorry buddy, but your days of gaslighting is over.
bamboozled 8 hours ago [-]
You provided a list of reasons why you feel like teenagers at a music festival should be murdered, right?
Like my personal sentiment is, war is senseless, and both sides are wrong in some way or another. But yeah, I don't think children should be murdered period, so I'm not going to try and give a list of reasons why it's OK, because there isn't one.
Anyone committing war crimes should be punished for it, period.
My original question was simply, what should have been done differently "by the world leaders"?
ebbi 8 hours ago [-]
How many teenagers were killed by Hamas? And are there independent sources that verify this?
Also, is Oct 7 enough justification to shoot 335 bullets at 6 year old Hind Rajab?
Your questions reek of bias by trying to centre everything to Oct 7, as though history began there. If you really cared about children, you'd have referenced the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel before Oct 7.
hamsteredf 9 hours ago [-]
> Hamas tried to return civilian hostages
What a bizarre claim and outright lie. They kept them locked up and starving. They could’ve just dropped them off near the border with Israel or Egypt, or handed them over to the Red Cross (which wasn’t even allowed to visit and check on the hostages).
monideas 2 hours ago [-]
What he means is they could have been traded for all of the concessions Hamas wanted in exchange for them.
And yes this is true but the reason you couldn’t comprehend his point is because his point is insane.
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
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monideas 2 hours ago [-]
Essentially your point is that Hamas protected the hostages from the IDF by not returning them and keeping them underground in chains in near starvation conditions.
This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.
tourist2d 8 hours ago [-]
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skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
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.
thinkingtoilet 9 hours ago [-]
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.
lenerdenator 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bjork 15 hours ago [-]
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phantompeace 15 hours ago [-]
History will look back on people like you quite unfavourably.
ImPostingOnHN 15 hours ago [-]
Please. We can judge for ourselves, and don't need you to try this "jedi mind trick" schtick.
Please try posting more constructive content than unconvincing, blanket denials. It doesn't make for good discussion.
762236 9 hours ago [-]
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
crote 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?
rixed 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, the need to self defense against US dangerous neighbors. Looking at you, Canada!
dboreham 9 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that's not why US administrations support Israel's actions.
762236 8 hours ago [-]
Bad phrasing on my part. That is one of many reasons
dartharva 5 hours ago [-]
Have you been living under a rock? The time when "public statements" used to work is long, long gone.
slim 7 hours ago [-]
need to make public statements that are not hypocritical
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
16 hours ago [-]
antman 1 hours ago [-]
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modzu 8 hours ago [-]
jesus fucking christ
anramon 9 hours ago [-]
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aerodog 10 hours ago [-]
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thehappypm 8 hours ago [-]
This is not factually accurate to say they own most of Google, the most I’ve seen of the two of them combined owning presently is 12%
azornathogron 8 hours ago [-]
Page and Brin together hold over 50% of voting shares, even though their economic share is lower as you suggest. Different share classes.
cities do not get systematically flattened with bulldozers in urban warfare, you only completely wipe out cities when you don't want any the civilians to come back.
db48x 15 hours ago [-]
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ardit33 16 hours ago [-]
nah... it is explicit genocide, and the deliberate destruction of every civilian possible. Everyone knows what's going on.
khazhoux 8 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the goal is to kill every Palestinian. It's more of a flagrant disregard for Palestinian life. Those are different things.
therealdrag0 7 hours ago [-]
> deliberate destruction of every civilian possible.
Clearly not? Sometime like 2% of gazans have been killed. IDF could kill many many more if it wanted.
slim 7 hours ago [-]
no, they can't. it's their maximum geoncide capacity
16 hours ago [-]
the_origami_fox 15 hours ago [-]
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mittensc 14 hours ago [-]
Imagine this was Jerusalem and someone made a similar comment.
What would you respond?
Sabinus 12 hours ago [-]
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newspaper1 11 hours ago [-]
You just described all cities in Israel, only they've been hyper-militarized since Nakba, the ethnic cleansing on Palestine in 1948. Israel has mandatory conscription and most of its inhabitants serve or have served in the IDF.
Sabinus 9 hours ago [-]
I was not aware that every city in Israel has an extensive military tunnel network. Is that the case?
If Hamas were to take one of those tunnel cities and Israel were doing guerrilla warfare from them I wouldn't blame Hamas for bulldozing.
Israel does have mandatory conscription. They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian. While in the military they're all fair targets, and if they're not serving, and at a music festival, they're not.
newspaper1 9 hours ago [-]
Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
> They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian.
When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian". When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Sabinus 8 hours ago [-]
>Israeli cities have far more threatening military infrastructure than tunnels. They literally have nuclear weapons.
And Hamas is permitted, as per the rules of war, to target that military infrastructure. If Israel has co-located it with civilian buildings, and attacks miss their targets, then too-bad for Israel.
>When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian".
This is very arguable for the West Bank settlers, but the Israeli civilians that were targeted by October 7 are not settlers and are in very solid Israeli land from a conflict 80 years prior. Arguing that all civilians in Israel proper are valid targets makes you no better than Smotrich and Ben-gvir, and you are essentially advocating for the genocide of Israelis.
Which is your right to do, I guess, but that's certainly not going to convince the (nuclear armed, remember) Israelis to moderate and compromise, or actually bring about justice for Palestinians.
> When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Military uniforms are for the protection of civilians. If you forgo them, then your civilians will receive more harm. Israel is responsible for their actions and many war crimes, but Hamas is responsible for theirs.
laimewhisps 8 hours ago [-]
Zionists are not civilians, they're literally living on stolen land. It doesn't matter that they've been stealing it for 80 years, it's not their land and the relatives of the people they murdered have every right to defend themselves and get their land back, by any means necessary.
Sabinus 8 hours ago [-]
If that's the way you want the conflict to be sorted, which is a genocide competition, then Israel will win that competition. I assume you don't want that?
"You're on stolen land and you've done it this time with the genocide, Israel, now you have to dissolve yourself and migrate back to Poland, Brooklyn and Iraq" is not a realistic ultimatum to deliver to a nuclear armed state established precisely because it's citizens experienced centuries of persecution living as scattered minorities.
Israel under Netanyahu has done plenty to criticise but I would actually like to see an Israel/Palestine deal not the West following both sides into radicalisation.
ntkh 7 hours ago [-]
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AuthAuth 15 hours ago [-]
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crayforbrains 8 hours ago [-]
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lwansbrough 9 hours ago [-]
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FridayoLeary 9 hours ago [-]
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lwansbrough 9 hours ago [-]
Ethnic cleansing, then. But this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - very typical of Israel supporters: they debate you on the letter instead of acknowledging that what we see here is horrendous.
Then they suggest that this is justified because Israel is a jewish ethnostate.
FridayoLeary 9 hours ago [-]
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kelnos 9 hours ago [-]
Not sure where you're getting your numbers or data, but that's just false. At least 60,0000 innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza, and Israel is to blame for this.
Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.
I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".
> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.
Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.
lwansbrough 9 hours ago [-]
In what sense is the forced, systematic removal of people from this area based on religious grounds "factually groundless"?
They don't live there anymore, they're displaced.
mlmonkey 9 hours ago [-]
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laimewhisps 9 hours ago [-]
Jews immigrating to Israel is not "ethnic cleansing". Now the Palestinian land they moved to was ethnically cleansed by the Zionists.
pchristensen 7 hours ago [-]
Most Middle Eastern Jews were definitely not voluntary migrants in 1948. They were expelled from cities and lands they had lived in for centuries.
mlmonkey 8 hours ago [-]
So all Jews who had to leave their lands, from Morocco to Pakistan, left of their own free will and emigrated to Israel? None were driven out? Are you saying they can return to their former homes then?
slim 7 hours ago [-]
yes, they can return to their former homes and they often do. they keep their moroccan, pakistani passport too
mlmonkey 4 hours ago [-]
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lwansbrough 8 hours ago [-]
What's this got to do with Israel razing a neighbouring city?
skulk 8 hours ago [-]
I think you're not getting it. If an ethnic cleansing has happened to your direct ancestors, you're allowed to do one back. Just one though.
mlmonkey 4 hours ago [-]
Let's not try to be so dense.
If Hamas supporters argue that what they did on Oct 07 is payback for "Naqba" (or whatever historical injustice dujour they fancy), then the question becomes: why can't Israel retaliate?
skulk 2 hours ago [-]
> why can't Israel retaliate
No, I totally agree. I think for the October 7th attack, all of Gaza had to be razed. How will those terrorists learn otherwise?
mlmonkey 4 hours ago [-]
What about the Jews who lived in Saudi Arabia before Mohammed came along? What about the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir and Banu Qurayza (the three biggest tribes)?
cromka 9 hours ago [-]
> being against the only jewish country in the world.
Unironiclly, I think the US can be called one, too, at this point.
anramon 9 hours ago [-]
>everyone is a terrorist but us
And this people has the dare of accusing other people of being propagandized.
It's the good old whataboutism. It's almost a universal telltale for people in denial of their dirty consciousness.
ebbi 9 hours ago [-]
Such weak whataboutism as well. I know so many pro-Palestine people personally and people I follow online that also speak out about Sudan, Iran, other ME countries.
Heck, I know so many Muslims critical of Muslim majority nations.
8 hours ago [-]
newspaper1 9 hours ago [-]
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FridayoLeary 9 hours ago [-]
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newspaper1 9 hours ago [-]
That's absurd. History didn't start on October 7th. All of this is downstream from Nakba and the Balfour Declaration. Zionism was by its very definition genocidal.
mlmonkey 9 hours ago [-]
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laimewhisps 8 hours ago [-]
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Sabinus 6 hours ago [-]
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esalman 9 hours ago [-]
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ajot 9 hours ago [-]
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mlmonkey 9 hours ago [-]
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thehappypm 8 hours ago [-]
I have an Israeli friend. His answer:
This result is exactly what the anti-Israel coalition wanted. They bet Bibi would go nuts and burn up the remaining global goodwill that Israel had, leaving them isolated.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4 hours ago [-]
It doesn't seem to have that many negative consequences for Israel though, and Oct 7 gave them enough justification for what they're doing in Gaza that they can get away with it internationally, and it has likely also limited the backlash they're getting for the escalating settlements in the West Bank.
esalman 9 hours ago [-]
They helped Bibi stay in control. That was the end goal.
laimewhisps 9 hours ago [-]
The Zionists invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed over 750,000 people off their land. That is the war they started, Hamas are just the relatives of the people Israel murdered fighting the occupying invaders. Thankfully they opened the world's eyes to Israel's crimes and now it's a dead man walking. Israel will not last another generation.
pchristensen 7 hours ago [-]
From how I understand the history, in 1948, the attacking Arab armies from neighboring countries told the local Arabs (Palestinians) to leave the war zone to be safe. But when Israel won the war, those Arabs could not return.
monideas 6 hours ago [-]
How do you think Arabic came to be spoken in Palestine?
mlmonkey 8 hours ago [-]
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slim 6 hours ago [-]
the end goal is resistance. colonisers must be reminded they can't live in peace
peter_retief 16 hours ago [-]
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ImPostingOnHN 15 hours ago [-]
Calling this "propaganda" is propaganda.
peter_retief 15 hours ago [-]
Sure, buildings were demolished, is that unusual in a war zone?
ImPostingOnHN 15 hours ago [-]
> Sure, buildings were demolished, is that unusual in a war zone?
I'm going to assume good faith in your framing, rather than intentional minimization. Suffice it to say, more has happened than "buildings were demolished", and those more things are the subject of the article. Like, for example, an entire city systemically flattened with every single civilian inhabitant killed or exiled on their own land.
To answer your question in that context: yes, that is unusual in war these days, because it is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Leonard_of_Q 15 hours ago [-]
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dumberquestions 15 hours ago [-]
History didn't start on October 7th.
biimugan 15 hours ago [-]
What belief is being expressed in your comments? That if someone wins a military conflict, any action they took is justified? That seems like either moral relativism or ahistorical, blind patriotism. The Soviets also won that war -- does that mean they were justified in their constellations of gulags?
If anything, the more apt historical comparison is to the Czechoslovakian and Polish partisans who wanted nothing less than to harry the Germans on (or within) their borders before the war. The British and French ambassadors (i.e. Qatar, etc) took great pains to try and convince the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments to restrain their partisans from attacking German people or positions, since they suspected Germany would use any and all provocation, no matter how small, as a casus belli. Anyone who's read a bit of WW2 history also knows how often the German government attempted to engineer exactly these kinds of events to justify their aggression.
It sounds straight out of the Likud playbook, doesn't it? But in what universe does an attack that kills 1000 people, a good number of them active duty soldiers, justify killing and maiming over 100,000 civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of buildings? If the shoe were on the other foot, this implies Hamas also has the moral imperative to do just the same to Israel. That's moral relativism for you.
Perhaps Europe had a better understanding of this topic when they instituted the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian law after the war than we do today, 100 years out, trying to now claim none of it actually matters and the means justify the ends.
I don’t use TikTok, but I’ll chip in and cite the United Nations [1], the International Association of Genocide Scholars [2], Physicians for Human Rights-Israel [3], Amnesty International [4], Human Rights Watch [5], and Doctors Without Borders [6] to get started.
While the genocide case brought against Israel hasn't concluded as of now, to say there's no reason to believe this is genocide is incorrect.
If you’d like to share some sources (rather than only telling others to), maybe we can compare.
Does that make this link twice as truthful as the one you sent?
iaaan 15 hours ago [-]
What, succinctly, is your point? You first claimed that this was not a genocide, then posted a link to a list of other genocides. Are you saying that none of the genocides in your list happened? Or that they are miscategorized?
Leonard_of_Q 14 hours ago [-]
My point is that wikis are not reliable sources no matter how many sources they link to. You'd have to check all the other sources to verify their veracity and that only gets harder the more sources are linked.
constantius 12 hours ago [-]
Lazy dismissal ,but then again, you don't really have a leg to stand on to defend your point.
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
Leonard_of_Q 15 hours ago [-]
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lotadicarus 15 hours ago [-]
was always a lurker so never had an account. I just think it's important to counter Israel's misinformation campaign :) very telling you think those words have lost their meaning though. I don't think we need further discussion
Leonard_of_Q 14 hours ago [-]
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14 hours ago [-]
sammy2255 6 hours ago [-]
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brookst 5 hours ago [-]
Well it sure is a good thing for Netanyahu that the terrorists have far too much power, eh?
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
Sentiments like that are an excuse. You could have said something very similar about the IRA in Ireland before its independence from the UK, or the ANC in South Africa during apartheid. You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression. If it was you, is that really what you’d do?
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
partiallypro 5 hours ago [-]
There have been attacks on Israel long before there was "oppression" of Palestine. You're just making a circular argument, you can say the same thing to justify what Israel is doing. I think saying Hamas is justified is actually grotesque, they also starve the people of Palestine, sell of children and women into sex slavery, intentionally put civilians in just as much harms way. How is doing that justified as a reaction to Israel exactly?
They aren't a Robin Hood like resistance. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
sammy2255 5 hours ago [-]
>You’re essentially asking people to peacefully accept their oppression
When you get arrested, do you fight back and resist?
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
That’s an awful false equivalence. We’re not talking about people being arrested by their own government with, presumably, probable cause. We’re talking about people - innocent civilians, including children - being murdered just for existing.
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
newspaper1 6 hours ago [-]
The whole world does sympathize with the Palestinians. Israel is a pariah.
oliyoung 5 hours ago [-]
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"
https://www.google.com/maps/place/31%C2%B016'58.6%22N+34%C2%...
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
[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
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.
In 2015, the Egyptian government announced a plan to demolish the entire Egyptian city of Rafah, in order to deter smuggling with the Gaza Strip. More than a decade on, most of it is gone. The residents were forcibly relocated to elsewhere in Egypt.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/15/world/middlee...
Urban warfare is brutal, especially when one side systematically digs in and uses IEDs and booby traps in civilian buildings.
They wanted to level the city, they did. That's all. There was some fighting eventually with a few fighters holed in in Rafah, but nothing that would justify this. And Israelis continue leveling entire areas the whole year after so called "ceasefire" during which there were almost no attacks on them, yet they managed to murder more than a thousand of people.
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.
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.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/5/24/satellite-...
And that just from the start of war.
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.
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
https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/uyqjn2/norman_fink...
Also Tucker Carlson? Seriously?
Hamas describes its fighters as their “military wing”. They engage in military training exercises and wear uniforms (when not fighting). That’s a military.
While it may be dumb, gross, and a hate crime against their civilians: war was the exact and predicted outcome of the attacks Hamas launched. They made statements to that effect, kicking off a regional war was central to the plan on October the 7th.
While I don't condone violence, it's a legitimate way to defend against occupation.
"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."
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.
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...
The way the IDF fought in Rafah and other areas is leading with bulldozers that can take RPGs, IEDs, mines etc. to clear way for troops behind. That's how the tunnel and other guerrilla advantages are neutralized.
So yes, the destruction is absolutely purposeful, its purpose is to take away the advantage of the tunnels and guerrilla tactics, and enable excavations for tunnel access and detection.
The sequence was something like this (AI assisted):
Early May 2024, the IDF issued extensive, phased evacuation orders. This prompted an estimated 1 million to 1.4 million civilians—many of whom had previously fled to Rafah from other parts of Gaza—to evacuate to designated zones like Al-Mawasi.
Once ground troops secured these largely emptied areas, the IDF Combat Engineering Corps moved in. Objective satellite damage assessments show a massive spike in structural destruction in Rafah beginning in the summer of 2024, directly correlating with the ground invasion.
Satellite imagery confirms that ground forces used controlled explosive demolitions and heavy earth-moving equipment, including armored D9 bulldozers, to systematically clear residential blocks, agricultural land, and infrastructure.
This mechanical destruction was particularly concentrated along the Philadelphi Corridor (the Gaza-Egypt border) and in eastern Rafah. The military objective of these block-by-block clearing operations was to uncover and destroy cross-border smuggling tunnels and to establish a widened, flattened security perimeter where structures previously stood.
In summary, while aerial bombardment occurred prior to and during the invasion, you are correct that the wholesale, block-by-block leveling of Rafah was heavily driven by engineering operations using bulldozers and controlled demolitions after the majority of the civilian population had evacuated the targeted areas.
Farmers were killed, even in different part of Palestine.
Killing farmers have nothing to do with the definition of genocide.
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
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
Been watching it for years. A great stain on history, with weapons paid for and built by Americans, not to mention a complicit media.
* 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
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.
None of Israel's critics is able to suggest some significantly different strategy that would allow Israel to after Hamas. So the discussion inevitably ends up (with said critics) at Hamas had a right to commit these crimes, because they are the oppressed/occupied, and Israel has no right to defend itself by going after and defeating Hamas while minimizing its casualties like any other western army would do and has done (see Mosul or many other examples).
Sounds a lot like how the colonists fought much of the revolutionary war here in America where I am from.
But that aside, how "honorably" would you fight back if your homeland were occupied and turned into an apartheid state and you were treated as a second-class citizen effectively living in an open air prison while armed settlers came in and claimed many of your neighbor's homes, possibly killing them in the process?
The 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.
Incorrect.
The west still buys Russian gas. Half of Russian gas exports go there.
https://energyandcleanair.org/august-2026-monthly-analysis-o...
> No nation in the west will hesitate to condemn Russia's war crimes
The US doesn’t condemn Russian aggression, and try get the current administration to say that Russia invaded or is committing war crimes.
Despite a lot of posturing, and a fair amount of presumably sincere effort, billions continue to flow.
For one thing, there isn't a major, bi-partisan, pro-Russian-war-crime lobby with a controlling interest currently sitting in government.
I'd like to point out though that Israel are unique in the sense that every single authoritative body on the subject have declared that Israel is committing genocide, Hamas for all their drama, is not.
The world is aware of the answer to that one.
I wouldn't call them an invention of Israel, but they were allowed/encouraged to flourish.
Internationally Israel is probably positioned weaker than before and there is a fissure running through liberal societies from Ireland to France, from Portugal to Germany and probably similar in the US.
This is conflict polarizes. A good example is the recent election in Berlin, which was focused on the housing crisis but now devolved into name calling based on how people think of Israel. A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Sowing dissent among your adversaries is very effective.
The Israeli Shekel is so strong against the dollar it is causing issues with exports.
Israel has signed major missile defense deals with many European countries and just signed a major new one with Greece.
Gaza is in near complete ruins, the tunnel infrastructure Hamas spent the past 2 decades building is being destroyed.
Nasrallah was killed and Hezbollah is severely diminished militarily and politically in Lebanon.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile capabilities have been severely damaged and no longer pose an existential threat, at least for the time being.
Israel is doing very well since October 7 whereas Hamas and Gaza is not.
Is that the same program that was compeletly damages last year?
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 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?
“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet” and all that.
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."
Yes it is, and some countries have become very good at doing that
That's what the sad thing is?
> A minority might have voted “pro Palestine” but most people wanted affordable flats.
Interesting interpretation.
No a single estimation are near your number : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civ...
Most are about 80 to 90% civilian killed.
First, the article cite multiple estimations by different source.
Second, there is no logical fallacy, you on the other hand are trying to frame that unidentified body (by Israel) could be majority of combatants, disregarding that nothing prove this and that lot of them are women and children.
Third, you are only quoting IDF number and no other third party, this only quoting the perpetrator to defend its body count
surely the one creating such destructions and deaths no?
https://earth.google.com/web/search/31%2e297226,+34%2e243649... - then click "show historical imagery" next to the search box.
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...
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.
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)
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.
"How long can Israel counter 30 rockets a day? What's the cost?"
"How is not each of them (7,000 in total) a war crime by Palestinians?"
"Sure it's not Palestinians it's Hamas, but the last time there was an election, they've elected Hamas, so what do you do?"
"Seriously, how is this not 7,000 counts of war crimes? Why is Israel not reacting? Why is Israel militiae into Gaza to catch the authors?"
Turns out the limit is 7,001 attacks.
One thing you will find across the board is that nobody is willing to compromise on security. Most voters today remember the second intifada. There is no serious political position where Israel fully withdraws from the wb. But there’s a big difference between “massively expanse settlements” and “phase out settlements and make room for the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.
The words “Palestinian state” are usually political suicide here in Israel, but the fact that Palestine is recognized to various extent by many countries in the world means that eventually these two realities are going to have to clash.
"Palestinian right of return" was a perfectly normal political position, but you don't hear much about it these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_right_of_return
I did a study abroad in Israel in 2005 (not jewish, just for middle eastern studies) when Israel pulled out of Gaza and did essentially that. They forcibly removed settlers and left Gaza. As I recall most Israeli's thought it'd be good step toward peace.
Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel over the next 20 years, and then launched Oct 7.
Unfortunately now there seems to be far less interest in Israel now in restricting settlers in the West Bank. I also feel for the Palestinians, particularly the Arab Christian communities, however extremists on both sides don't want peace.
Sure, if you ignore the part where they kept bombing Gaza, assassinated political leaders, did ground incursions, and blocked it by land, sea, and air.
If Israel wanted a peaceful two-state solution, why did they keep occupying Gaza by turning it into an open-air prison?
The answer is in the post you replied to.
>> Unfortunately Hamas took over Gaza shortly after and shot some 12k+ rockets into southern Israel
It was an automated system that immediately responded within 60s to rockets sent from Gaza. Shoot one rocket from Gaza, get the building destroyed within 60 seconds. Also, the first rocket is a war crime (indiscriminate attack), the second is a military target.
You can't just say "Israel bombed Gaza" and play the victim, omitting information.
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.
But we weren't trying to wage war against the entire civilian populations as revenge. That's an entirely different category of crime.
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).
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.
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
And that's from a human rights body, and from its representative to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index?t...
For Iraq, you can see a small dip for the 2003 invasion, which quickly recovers and in subsequent years grows above its pre-invasion value. Far from being "destroyed", Iraq is now doing better than ever.
For Palestine, the dip is about 3x larger.
Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
"Iraqis celebrate their comeback with soccer tournament after decades of isolation"
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/football/iraq-gulf-cup-comeba...
That was 2023: Iraq hosted the 25th Arabian Gulf Cup, and won the tournament.
I think if you're going to claim that something bad happened to Iraq post-2023, attributing that to the 2003 US invasion is a little dubious. Iraq was also in bad shape before the US invaded! It's a mistake to assume that if any foreign power has had any level of involvement, every bad thing that subsequently happens is therefore the fault of the foreign power.
https://i.imgflip.com/a6ptj6.jpg
>The fact that the dip is so small for both is more a reflection of the dataset. I mean, Gaza is all but completely destroyed, how can the HDI be that high?
Another possibility is that viral news stories are not always a good way to get a representative picture of how life has changed for civilians on the ground.
>Israel is committing a genocide and we are their partners in crime.
If Israel had genocidal intent -- in the sense of attempting extermination of Palestine's civilian population -- what fraction of Palestine's civilian population would you expect to be dead by now?
Once you've got that fraction in your head, try prompting your favorite LLM with something like the following:
"Please estimate the fraction of Iraq's population which died due to the 2003 US invasion, and the fraction of Gaza's population which died due to the 2023 Israeli invasion. Please provide an estimated breakdown of deaths based on whether they were due to invader military activity, destruction of civilian infrastructure, internal conflict, or other causes."
(you won't be able to paste the reply here due to HN rules against AI-generated content)
Another interesting prompt template: "Give me a sense of how civilian deaths happened in [Iraq/Gaza] due to [US/Israeli] military activity. Tell me a few representative vignettes which show various typical ways in which this occurred."
Interesting how you think Iraqs invasion of Iran was justified but not Kuwait. Or did you forget who started the Iran/Iraq war and deleted your comment out of embarrassment?
But I notice that you don't seem upset with the idea that Iran would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Iran (including direct attacks on civilian targets, not just dual-use infrastructure!), yet you do see upset that the US would retaliate against Iraq when Iraq invades Kuwait. That seems like the sort of double standard I was talking about.
I deleted my comment because I thought it would be fairly tedious to litigate this. I agree the US has done some dubious things, but I don't think they are a distinctively bad actor relative to other players in the region. I'm also not sure you are telling the truth, e.g. I haven't been able to find a source for your claim that the US targeted hospitals during the Gulf War.
Admittedly, this was before social media but back then you didn't get 50% support for gassing anybody.
The other main difference is that 9/11 ended within a few days, the hostage part of 7/10 made it an ongoing disaster for years in Israel.
Everyone knows that Israel essentially went on a rampage of revenge, which you basically seem to agree with given your explanation for the destruction (i.e. not military necessity while protecting civilian lives).
In return, Native Americans accidentally gave the Europeans Syphilis. Fair trade? Probably not, although the all-time death totals aren’t as incomparable as you might think.
First Nations
> Israel is a colonial project that annexes land and homes from people against international law and has done so since it's conception.
What do they call it in the US? Manifest Destiny?
Yes, the 4% of the Palestinian population they've killed is definitely not a form of expression. Like somehow killing only matters if you talk about how fun it is first.
For the record that's greater than the % of Bosniaks killed in the Bosnia genocide.
Do you guys even bother being minimally informed before commenting? Like, Wikipedia is right there…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_and_incitement_in_the_G...
Put simply, if you use any legally accepted definition of genocide (as a matter of the historical record) then what is happening in gaza doesn’t even come close. And of course the legally accepted definition is ultimately all that matters. That’s very different from whether laymen think it’s genocide because what’s happening hurts their feelings.
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.
It is outside their zone of interest.
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.
“The world's leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o
In Japan, Korea, China, Hungary, etc they are indeed decreasing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that a society where the marriage rates are so low is stable though. For some definition of stability yes, but usually we also mean healthy when we say stable.
That makes this definition useless, just to be clear.
If the “in part” refers to the physical destruction of the people itself rather than the potential nexus between the act and the physical destruction of the people, then clearly this doesn’t meet the definition because Israel didn’t destroy the buildings in order to bring about the physical destruction of the Gazans. The buildings were not destroyed in some round about way to kill the Gazans.
The Nazis first asked the Jewish people to leave and worked with Zionists to provide incentives for them to leave. 60k left under that law to British Palestine. It wasn't until much later in the war did they start doing mass genocide. It's not like they started with mechanized murder. It starts as ethnic cleansing and ends in genocide.
So don't be proud of "only 50k" and destroying everyones home. Israel is still at committing genocide and things can get much worse. It's not like it's over. 50k is the beginning unless Israel is stopped.
It's frankly disgusting to argue over definitions and words when people are still dieing daily.
This "lawyer" mentality is so dumb.
Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
[0] https://britainpalestineproject.org/recommendations-of-the-k...
As is true in every war.
The question is who started it.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
That’s not what reparations are, that’s ethnic cleansing.
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
You have it backwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
They do not share Western social values.
Yes, there are some Arab Israelis but the vast majority of Arabs under Israeli governance would never be suffered to assimilate, specifically because it would change the ethnic character of the state.
What's the point of a democracy if it acts against it's people like the UK does?
At least in the case of the US, I would point out that the current sitting president was elected with less than 50% support from the people who bothered to show up and vote. I would say the system is not really working well.
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.
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.
It did stop. When the hostages were freed and Hamas gave up. Which they could have done at any point. Or you know, they could not have started the war too.
https://x.com/MacaesBruno/status/2017251152900079675
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.
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_...
I won't go into details that support or refute this claim, but that is what the parent poster likely meant.
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-...
Hamas was willing to return hostages if israel freed all thousands of Palestinians prisoners, including those captured in Israel while committing the Oct 7 massacre.
And that is exactly what sinwar wanted to achieve in every one of his wars, just like when in 2014 Israel traded 1 captured Israeli soldier for 1000 Palestinians prisoners.
So basically Hamas wanted israel to surrender, accept Hamas terms, and ignore Oct 7.
UN has no such power. I am still amazed how people do not get this.
Members need to vote for such things to happen. It wouldn't, not in this climate.
> What do you think world leaders should've done differently?
Members should have voted in the UN to deploy peace keeping troops. The UN does have that power if it's voted for. This isn't a question of the current realities but a question of what the right actions are.
Like it would've been a nice idea, until you realize that Hamas is heavily backed by Iran, Iran is helping Russia, Russia is invading Ukraine, and it starts to look like that level of intervention is a step towards a world war.
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 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.
Lie. It was a deal to get complete immunity for a massacre. Also, 'Civilian' per Hamas is anyone over 60. 'Let Hamas murder and keep nearly all hostages' was not in Israel's playbook.
>They reached out and were ignored.
Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
>As Israel started to show genocidal intent (for example, killing aide workers multiple times)
Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
>the UN should have deployed peace keepers
Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
>our politicians are so bribed by Israeli lobby money
I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
You are making stuff up. Nobody reports that Hamas was shooting for a "get out pillaging free" card. And the fact still remains that they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
> Lie. There was repeated negotiations for two years after, with plenty of Hamas demands for the hostages. It was totally public too.
Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the agreement and change the terms. That was all public. It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
> Literally not relevant. The US has much bigger errors in the current conflict.
Two wrongs don't make a right and yes, it's relevant when the IDF explodes clearly marked aid vehicles rendering aid. There's no reason to do that.
> Snort. Look at how successful they were in Lebanon. Peace keepers need to be willing to fight to keep the peace, and in this case, it meant fighting both sides. LOL.
Does that really matter? The question wasn't "how effective will this be" it's "What world leaders should have done". That's what world leaders should have done.
> I suggest looking at the far bigger Qatari and Saudi expenditures (didn't they just grant an entire 747?). It's more that US politicians recall the war on terror, and know all this nonsense will one day be sent back at them with much greater force (wasn't it 4 million deaths or so?), they have no wish for the precedent to be set and deployed at them.
These are weaker lobbies because of US laws. The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens (in behest of Israel). No other nation has that sort of organizations in the US. The closet you can find is things like the weirdo Shen Yun cult.
This allowed them to spend $60M in a democrat primary. You won't find that sort of direct spending from Qatar or the Saudis (barring the clear bribe in the Jet. They aren't exactly giving away jets to every primary run).
'Israel to withdraw and grant all other Hamas demands' is a 'get out free' card.
> they tried to return 3 hostages to show good faith who the IDF proceeded to kill.
These hostages _escaped_ and were shot in error. Not 'tried to return'. Note that there was a week's ceasefire a month earlier and Hamas could have returned everyone then if they cared to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Gaza_war_ceasefire
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/world/israel-hostages-cam...
>Hamas, on multiple occasions, agreed to all the terms only for Israel to reject the terms.
You mean all of 'Hamas's terms'. Right. The Israeli government had very different terms as the final deal (very different from what Hamas demanded) shows. The Israeli gov insisted on controlling the Egyptian border, Gaza demilitarization, etc.
>It's why the hostage families became really mad at the government.
Of course. They wanted the hostages out ASAP, and could only pressure the Israeli government (obviously Hamas wouldn't care for the families).
>Two wrongs don't make a right
Right, but there's such a thing as hypocrisy. One could make a 'genocidal' case against the country who started a war by bombing a schoolhouse and spoke of 'destroying an entire civilization' (it would still be wrong though). But they're a little too strong, and it's easier to pick on Israel.
>That's what world leaders should have done.
Most world leaders want to be reelected (or not be overthrown if they're dictators). Sending out troops to die in a foreign land for an arguably hopeless cause is not very helpful to that end. They're likely aware of the history of military involvement in the Middle East.
>The likes of AIPAC and CUFI get around campaign finance restrictions because they are operated by US citizens
Qatar etc. gets around it by donating billions to US universities or using organizations like ISNA. Everyone seems to have found a way.
The peaceful route didn't work. Only idiots will think continuing with the status quo will result in anything different.
You can't just continue to 'mow the lawn' where children are killed and kidnapped, put into Israeli prisons, and expect no blowback.
You can't just shoot people in the knees while protesting peacefully, and then expect no blowback
You can't just rape Palestinian prisoners (most of whom have been arrested under no charges), and expect no blowback.
You can't just install bombs in pagers, and set it off amongst civilians, which resulted in children being injured or killed, and expect no blowback.
Sorry buddy, but your days of gaslighting is over.
Like my personal sentiment is, war is senseless, and both sides are wrong in some way or another. But yeah, I don't think children should be murdered period, so I'm not going to try and give a list of reasons why it's OK, because there isn't one.
Anyone committing war crimes should be punished for it, period.
My original question was simply, what should have been done differently "by the world leaders"?
Also, is Oct 7 enough justification to shoot 335 bullets at 6 year old Hind Rajab?
Your questions reek of bias by trying to centre everything to Oct 7, as though history began there. If you really cared about children, you'd have referenced the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel before Oct 7.
What a bizarre claim and outright lie. They kept them locked up and starving. They could’ve just dropped them off near the border with Israel or Egypt, or handed them over to the Red Cross (which wasn’t even allowed to visit and check on the hostages).
And yes this is true but the reason you couldn’t comprehend his point is because his point is insane.
This is abject insanity and it’s a good representation of what is going on in the minds of most of humanity.
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.
Please try posting more constructive content than unconvincing, blanket denials. It doesn't make for good discussion.
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?
https://aifundingtracker.com/who-owns-alphabet/
Clearly not? Sometime like 2% of gazans have been killed. IDF could kill many many more if it wanted.
What would you respond?
If Hamas were to take one of those tunnel cities and Israel were doing guerrilla warfare from them I wouldn't blame Hamas for bulldozing.
Israel does have mandatory conscription. They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian. While in the military they're all fair targets, and if they're not serving, and at a music festival, they're not.
> They also have a firm and visible distinction between when someone is serving in the military and when they are civilian.
When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian". When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
And Hamas is permitted, as per the rules of war, to target that military infrastructure. If Israel has co-located it with civilian buildings, and attacks miss their targets, then too-bad for Israel.
>When you murder someone and squat on their land, you're not a "civilian".
This is very arguable for the West Bank settlers, but the Israeli civilians that were targeted by October 7 are not settlers and are in very solid Israeli land from a conflict 80 years prior. Arguing that all civilians in Israel proper are valid targets makes you no better than Smotrich and Ben-gvir, and you are essentially advocating for the genocide of Israelis.
Which is your right to do, I guess, but that's certainly not going to convince the (nuclear armed, remember) Israelis to moderate and compromise, or actually bring about justice for Palestinians.
> When someone murders your family and steals your land, you don't have to dress up in any particular outfit to defend yourself.
Military uniforms are for the protection of civilians. If you forgo them, then your civilians will receive more harm. Israel is responsible for their actions and many war crimes, but Hamas is responsible for theirs.
Israel under Netanyahu has done plenty to criticise but I would actually like to see an Israel/Palestine deal not the West following both sides into radicalisation.
Then they suggest that this is justified because Israel is a jewish ethnostate.
Hamas starting it is besides the point. We are capable of holding two different ideas in our heads: that what Hamas did to kick this off was reprehensible, and that what Israel has done since then has been horrifying.
I would personally argue that what Israel has done is far worse than what Hamas did, but it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with that. Israel has gone far far far beyond your notion of "fighting back".
> should work to destroy Hamas who are responsible for turning Gaza into such a hellhole.
Israel seems to be doing a good job of that on their own. And had been even prior to the current conflict.
They don't live there anymore, they're displaced.
If Hamas supporters argue that what they did on Oct 07 is payback for "Naqba" (or whatever historical injustice dujour they fancy), then the question becomes: why can't Israel retaliate?
No, I totally agree. I think for the October 7th attack, all of Gaza had to be razed. How will those terrorists learn otherwise?
Unironiclly, I think the US can be called one, too, at this point.
And this people has the dare of accusing other people of being propagandized.
It's not Genocide...
...because UN is corrupt...
...and numbers are from Khamassss,,,,
...and whatabout whatabout whatabout Iran Sudan....
...you hate us coz we're Jewssss....
Heck, I know so many Muslims critical of Muslim majority nations.
This result is exactly what the anti-Israel coalition wanted. They bet Bibi would go nuts and burn up the remaining global goodwill that Israel had, leaving them isolated.
I'm going to assume good faith in your framing, rather than intentional minimization. Suffice it to say, more has happened than "buildings were demolished", and those more things are the subject of the article. Like, for example, an entire city systemically flattened with every single civilian inhabitant killed or exiled on their own land.
To answer your question in that context: yes, that is unusual in war these days, because it is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
If anything, the more apt historical comparison is to the Czechoslovakian and Polish partisans who wanted nothing less than to harry the Germans on (or within) their borders before the war. The British and French ambassadors (i.e. Qatar, etc) took great pains to try and convince the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments to restrain their partisans from attacking German people or positions, since they suspected Germany would use any and all provocation, no matter how small, as a casus belli. Anyone who's read a bit of WW2 history also knows how often the German government attempted to engineer exactly these kinds of events to justify their aggression.
It sounds straight out of the Likud playbook, doesn't it? But in what universe does an attack that kills 1000 people, a good number of them active duty soldiers, justify killing and maiming over 100,000 civilians and leveling hundreds of thousands of buildings? If the shoe were on the other foot, this implies Hamas also has the moral imperative to do just the same to Israel. That's moral relativism for you.
Perhaps Europe had a better understanding of this topic when they instituted the Geneva Conventions and other international humanitarian law after the war than we do today, 100 years out, trying to now claim none of it actually matters and the means justify the ends.
I glad you are not AI!
While the genocide case brought against Israel hasn't concluded as of now, to say there's no reason to believe this is genocide is incorrect.
If you’d like to share some sources (rather than only telling others to), maybe we can compare.
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
[2] https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS...
[3] https://www.phr.org.il/en/genocide-in-gaza-eng/
[4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...
[5] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-exterminat...
[6] https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/our-response-is...
would you say the same?
https://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Genocides,_Cultural_Genoc...
Does that make this link twice as truthful as the one you sent?
You don't have to check all the links mate, just check a few for the organisations or institutionsnyou know. Unless you think they're all Hamas, of course.
“Sympathy” is not much use in situations like these. “Sorry your people are being murdered” doesn’t really help.
They aren't a Robin Hood like resistance. You're actually just siding with a different oppressor.
When you get arrested, do you fight back and resist?
If the choice is fighting back or being killed, many people will choose to fight back. If you’re fighting back against a state, then the form that fighting back will take is asymmetric warfare, which is typically described as “terrorism” by the state doing the murdering.
But with all this in mind, you want to sit back and say, “They really ought to be more polite about it.”
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/google-maps-...
But the concept of cause and effect is too complex for quran-reading savages.