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Full report: https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...

Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM

alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM

The last time I came across Forensic Architecture was their report on the Beirut Port Explosion, someone posted it here on HN.

Mind blowing analysis.

https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...

This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.

The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.

I think the only defense here would be if the soldiers came up with some reasonable explanation of why they thought the vehicles were hostile. Its kind of hard to imagine, especially with shooting the follow up vehicles, but motive seems like the only unclear part where there is any potential for a defense.

One part that is really confusing, is if they knowingly intentionally targeted the ambulance because they thought they could get away with it if they destroyed the evidence, why leave witnesses alive? If you assume the motive was an intentional massacare with point blank executions, it doesn't entirely make logical sense to leave witnesses.

The motive was pretty clear i.e. to murder aid workers helping Palestinians and assumed to be Palestinian. The report is very clear that the IDF could see the vehicle lights the entire time, making it clear they were protected aid workers. They attacked the first ambulance, the follow up ambulances, the UN truck, and the UN bus, before and after dawn, with plenty of time between. If this were a movie, there could be a clever twist to show some other motive, but in the real world, this is as clear as you get without confessions to tell you what was in their heads.

Why didn’t they murder everyone? As testimony says [0], when one of the survivors called out that his mother was Israeli, the IDF soldiers lowered their weapons and helped him up. It seems to me that these are soldiers that have decided that Palestinians are less than human, or that Palestinians will never coexist and it is “them or us”. This mindset happens in many wars, but actual incidents depend on leadership at all levels and how much it is implicitly allowed. I think their cover up actions speak the loudest to how widespread these things are. The on the ground commander clearly wasn’t worried about destroying any and all evidence or leaving witnesses. Buring everything was to make it too difficult for outsiders confirm what happened, not to prevent leadership from putting them in jail. They were counting on being protected, and they were. A letter of reprimand for the commander, and losing his position as deputy commander (not loss of rank or being kicked out of the military) is little more than a speedbump to their military careers.

[0] Page 36-37 of report

> One part that is really confusing, is if they knowingly intentionally targeted the ambulance because they thought they could get away with it if they destroyed the evidence, why leave witnesses alive? If you assume the motive was an intentional massacre with point blank executions, it doesn't entirely make logical sense to leave witnesses.

Couldn't the ability to make this very argument be a reason why?

Without the witness we probably wouldn't be having this conversation at all.

We probably would.

The most concrete evidence of this incident is clear video, not eyewitness testimony. It was obtained about a year ago from the dead when the grave was unearthed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...

> A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.

Intimidation tactics do not work well without someone to tell the story.

I think people being murdered is pretty good intimidation frankly.

Maybe it's like a kind of brag?

Like, it the monsters massacre people and no one's left to report on how awful it was then they kind of "lose the gloat value" to a degree?

> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried

Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.

Ex A:

  Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.

Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.

However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.

> evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.

That might be a little strong. A cover up can happen for other reasons than covering up crimes (for example covering up bad PR that doesn't raise to the level of criminality). It does seem like a crime is what happened in this case, but i don't agree with applying that logic in general.

The IDF has some accountability for criminal behavior. If you search you will find plenty of examples were soldiers were held criminally responsible for their actions. It's true that the default (and maybe the correct default) is to shield soldiers from actions taken during the course of war. This is not unique to the IDF, it's true for all western armies. Try and find me if the US pilot that bombed a hospital in Kandahar, or the US security contractors that mowed down people in the Baghdad market, were ever held criminally responsible.

And just to be clear, my position is that if there was a criminal act here the IDF should absolutely prosecute. To my understanding this is still not settled for this case, i.e. there has not been a decision to not prosecute. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is somehow different.

Indeed, and a fig leaf does technically provide some amount of coverage.

For an example of how big this accountability is, when 3 of the hostages escaped they were killed by the IDF and that's ok because there was no malice in the act of shooting bare chested unarmed civilians waving a white flag as they approach.

Was there ever a serious prosecution and serious punishments by IDF personnel? They always make PR circus how they investigate another war crime, but nothing ever happens from what I could find.

You are correct about others but it doesn't change anything here - war crimes and atrocities are the worst of human behavior. Whataboutism shouldn't diminish outrage, and every such person should be extremely severely punished and ostracized by rest of humankind till end of their days, no exception, doesn't matter what passport they hold. Basic morality and all that.

> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.

May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?

  "The Israeli tank commander who has fought in one of the Syrian wars is the best engineering executive in the world. The tank commanders are operationally the best, and are extremely detail oriented. This is based on twenty years of experience — working with them and observing them."

  Eric Schmidt (Start-up Nation / Saul Singer et al / pg. 41)

The tank commanders of another, bygone war also had the reputation for attention to detail. Funny how history rhymes.

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What's more suicidal? Wanting to reach a peaceful settlement with your neighbors or funding the radical segments of that society while preaching intolerance towards them? Because that's what the Israeli right has been doing for years.

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That's because it's not a war. It's a genocide. An occupied people have the right to resist their occupation. Occupiers do not have the right to prolong their occupation of said peoples. Israel is on the wrong side in all cases from its inception.

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You're right. It wasn't under occupation, it was worse. It was an open-air prison and concentration camp.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/14/gaza-israels-open-air-pr...

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/20/norman-finkelstein-gaza-...

If you're hung-up about the word occupation, then use the word under seige. Gaza was under seige the entire time you claim it was under no occupation. Israel completely controlled what went in and went out, operated a naval blockade over Gaza, and performed military operations known as "mowing the lawn" (population reduction measures) as well as shooting peaceful protestors. They literally counted calories of nutrition going to keep them barely above a starvation diet.

Nothing else you said in your reply is relevant. Israel has been occupying Gaza or worse the entire time. Typical Zionist deflection.

Ironically, your framing is the failure and your Zionism is showing. Don't defend genocide. Just don't do it.

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Its entirely possible to despise hamas and wishing them horrible death, while despising what state of israel was and is and will be doing there. Defenders of israel often bring the masacre of 2023 like its good enough excuse to perform another civilian masacre. Heck, you want to drag people who dare to speak out into automatic hamas supporters, thats a bit cheap trick. What about focusing on civilians here, on all sides, like a normal moral human being should do? What did those murdered kids and rest of civilians on both sides did to deserve any of this?

Yes it is a concentration camp, the very definition of it. Maybe you are mixing this with nazi extermination camps, those were a different category - then I suggest some reading on that topic.

Let me ask - how easy it was, even before current war for regular palestinian to lets say move to another part of the world? I don't mean som israeli farmers using/abusing them as extremely cheap labor, I mean normal travel. Stateless people, kept in utter poverty by design, almost malnourished, effectively forbidden to leave what looks like the definition of open prison or what say US did to its japanese population during WWII. Some digged tunnels don't change anything here.

It's also not like they are even attempting to neutrally determine the truth. Their stated plan is to challenge anything that tonight be pro-Israel:

> Examine, interrogate, and where necessary challenge and correct the description of the massacre offered by the Israeli military, international media, and the UN.

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When the first attack on an aid convoy to provoke outrage came out, I saw someone put it best: there is a difference between "war is chaos, and no matter how hard we try, some incidents regrettably occur" and "our rules of engagement are designed in such a manner to make these incidents almost certain." And the IDF... is pretty clearly in the latter category.

> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.

Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.

The only clarity here is in the eyes of those who made their decision in advance and are cherry picking. Yes- There have been quite a few incidents but the percentage is still small. There were also many friendly fire incidents. All of these happen in every war. The difference is this war is being put under a microscope and there are powerful actors trying to push a narrative.

It is the nature of how Hamas wages war in Gaza that is driving the assumptions here and the consequences. Not the "instilling via training".

> It is the nature of how Hamas wages war in Gaza that is driving the assumptions here

When the bad guys use human shields, it’s on the “good guys” to somehow resist the “good guy” urge to blow the whole city up.

Hamas has killed something in the order of 800 idf soldiers during this conflict, if we exclude the ones killed on oct 7th. In that same time at least 75,000 palestinians have been killed - most of which were women and children. So, unless you’re saying this is a justified collective punishment for oct 7th, what on earth are you possibly referring to? Hamas isn’t “waging war” in any real sense.

I think he's saying that this is par for the course for asymmetric conflicts with deeply rooted insurgent groups.

So if you are going to say the handling of this conflict has more to do with Israeli training/mindset/etc and is not related to the type of conflict, do you have other armies in mind that have fought similar conflicts and done better?

Battle of Fallujah? The war against ISIS in Iraq in the 2010s?

Before the most recent invasion of Gaza started, there was an interview with an Israeli general about the imminent invasion. And when the question came up about what lessons Israel was drawing from other urban conflicts like the Battle of Fallujah, the response was a very indignant we-don't-need-to-learn-anything. Small wonder that the IDF claims to have achieved unprecedentedly low civilian casualty ratios in their invasion of Gaza when in reality, they're commensurate with WW2 ratios and well above the urban assaults of the US's Iraq War.

> Battle of Fallujah

Which one? There was five, and they generally were pretty bloody.

For the second battle of Fallujah (seems like the one you are talking about), US estimated that most civilians had already left the city. However that is somewhat disputed with some people claiming usa used that as an excuse to claim everyone left in the city was a combatant.

To quote the guradian:

> Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men "of fighting age" from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They leveled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population".

Another guardian quote:

> "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."

> The war against ISIS in Iraq in the 2010s?

So according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Iraq_(2013%E2%80%932017... there was 200,000 killed and 5 million displaced.

To quote from the human rights section of the article "Iraqi government forces and paramilitary militias have tortured, arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared and executed thousands of civilians who have fled the rule of the Islamic State militant group", which doesn't sound great.

So i think it raises the question of if the Americans were really better than the Israelis or just better at the PR game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...

> the single deadliest conflict for journalists in all known conflicts in the history of the world, according to the Costs of War Project

Does that sound like “par for the course”?

By that measure, every other army in every other war prior has done better.

This “war” (genocide) is not normal.

This list seems to include people who were journalists but weren't killed while acting in the capacity of a journalist (as far as i can tell). If this is how you define journalist then world war 2 was certainly much much deadlier for journalists. To put it bluntly, i have my doubts that its making an apples to apples comparison with other conflicts.

Yeah - for example Abdullah Ahmed Al-Jamal was killed because he was holding three hostages in his apartment, yet he was included in the list of "journalists killed" anyway.

> Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise

All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.

I'm trying to say this dispassionately because I'm aware that people get defensive, but lets say that you have to fight some enemy but they present as the most vulnerable of a population, how can you fight them without looking awful?

Though "it's complicated" is not, by itself, a conclusion - and neither is "better training" a sufficient answer to a problem this structurally difficult."

> All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.

So let me check this reasoning: if there was a single US soldier in the WTC towers, the 9/11 attacks were justified because the soldiers were hiding among the civilians?

Or if Hamas killed a single israelian soldier in their horrendous attacks in private homes, then it's justified because there were soldiers in those houses?

Or if the israelian reservists have their weapons at home and can be called upon directly from home to action, does that mean Iran or Hamas are justified at flattening residential buildings in Israel because those could host soldiers?

You've collapsed two meaningfully different things into one: 'soldiers exist near civilians' and 'soldiers deliberately operate from within protected populations as a systematic tactic.' Your three examples all illustrate the first. I was describing the second. These are not the same argument, and treating them as equivalent doesn't advance the discussion.

I have conflated those two, but my main point is the monstrous, one-sided destruction Israel has caused in Gaza is a clear proof Israel has gone way, way, way into the genocide territory and not just into the "hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians and after considering the international laws for such cases SOME civilians were killed".

Israel demonstrated complete disregard for human life for the sake of expediency to say in a gentle way, but in a harsher way, you could say the aftermath and details that are emerging point to malicious collective punishment.

The scale of the destruction doesn't retroactively validate the tactics that made it more likely. 'It got very bad' is not a justification for abandoning the framework that might have contained it.

If anything it's an argument against it.

Also trying to speak dispassionately: If your enemy presents as the most vulnerable as the most vulnerable of a population, shouldn't that be an indication that you're colonizing? That you're squeezing so hard, oppressing so vehemently that an entire people become your enemy? Or the entire people were your enemy the whole time.

How could Israel be "colonizing" Gaza when they've repeatedly tried to hand it off to other governments? They offered it back to Egypt after the six-day war (Egypt refused), and included it in several offers which would have created a new Palestinian state, and finally failing that, unilaterally withdrew in 2005. They removed all Jewish settlements, which is literally the opposite of colonizing.

Think of another conflict like that and you’ll have an answer.

the Taliban are an occupying force that do his.

> Upon reaching the aid workers, the soldiers moved between them and the vehicles and executed some of the aid workers at point blank range, as close as one meter away." -> we know not all the aid workers were killed. I believe two were taken alive.

This is the part that gives me the most pause. The FA report makes it sound like they went on a murder spree for the hell of it and then tried to cover up the evidence (i.e. they knew it was an ambulance and intentionally targeted it). But if that was the case, and they had no qalms about killing people, why would they leave witnesses and then release said witness a month later. If the motive was some ethnic hatred fueled revenge, why leave witnesses?

You leave witnesses because a) you know nobody will prosecute the IDF, and b) it allows people like you to question whether the clear mass murder was a mass murder.

> you know nobody will prosecute the IDF

Then why bother with the cover up at all?

FWIW, to me what it looks like based on the very limited information we have, is initially the soldiers thought (for whatever reason, possibly unreasonably) the vehicle was an acceptable target. At some point it becomes clear it wasn't and they have an "oh shit" moment and engage in a cover up after the fact.

If this is actually what happened (obviously,very big if), whether or not a war crime was comitted would come down to what the soldiers knew when they attacked the vehicle (and what would have been reasonable for them to have known at that time) since war crimes do have an intent element.

Which to be very clear, even with all the above, its very plausible a war crime was comitted. But i'm not sure its certain based on the publicly available information.

You forgot to mention that there were two separate incidents. That's why the thing took two hours. They shoot an ambulance, I suppose you could argue that was a mistake. They check the ambulance (at that moment they had to know that there were not fighters there). Later, when more help vehicles appeared they shoot everybody in them too. That's the five minutes shooting.

You forgot to mention that they destroyed the vehicles and they buried the dead with them in the sand. And that, was not made by the same people that killed the help workers.

You forgot to mention that they lie about what happened.

You forgot to mention that, after the investigation, one of the official was demoted, and that's it.

All this seems to point, not to a mistake, but to a pattern of behavior, in my opinion. Personally, I'm done with the 'mistakes', like blocking baby formula from entering Gaza and all that.

> "The emergency lights and markings of the victims’ vehicles would have been clearly visible to the soldiers at the time of the attacks." -> speculative. The soldiers argued they were wearing night vision equipment and did not see either the markings or the emergency lights. This is at least plausible (as someone who has used thermal night vision equipment).

Is it plausible?

There were four ambulances and a fire truck with flashing lights on the roofs and the report says the soldiers had a clear view from the elevated sandbank. Night vision would obscure the markings, but lights still show in both thermal and image-intensified NVG. Even if they weren't sure they were ambulances, they should still be wondering about the emergency lights. And if they weren't sure, did no soldier look even briefly without night vision? This occurred during twilight, about half an hour before sunrise.

If they could see so little that they couldn't recognize 4 ambulances and a fire truck with emergency lights, and the aid workers never fired shot, why did they open fire?

It doesn't explain well why they initially said the vehicles were acting suspiciously by driving with their lights off and only changed their story after video emerged. And it doesn't explain why they shot at the "clearly marked UN vehicle" when it arrived well after sunrise.

I don't know anything about how things work in situations like this, but logic would lead me to think a convoy of aid workers wouldn't be returning fire so shooting at them with all the shots coming from the IDF side might indicate some sort of mistake quite early in the encounter. The fact they carried on shooting for 5 minutes is either a signal that they knew and just didn't care, or that they're some of the worst trained soldiers imaginable.

I don't really think that follows.

5 minutes is a really short period of time, i can easily believe that a convoy of combatants might not return fire in that time period, especially if taken by surprise at night and the people shooting are under cover and far away so its not immediately clear where to even return fire to.

> We know that the soldiers lied about some of the facts and some have been disciplined and removed from command.

Removed from command for killing aid workers point blank? That seems like a light wrap on the wrist, not commensurate with the severity of the deed, no?

There is no actual evidence that they killed people blank point knowing they were aid workers. As I mentioned references an article from the Guardian as "proof" of that where even the Guardian acknowledges this is not known.

Removing from command is a pretty serious penalty as far as the military goes. Yes, it is not a criminal punishment but that action was taken "out of the loop" of the investigation towards criminal charges.

> Removed from command for killing aid workers point blank?

But we don't know that that was the reason they were removed from command. E.g. if they failed to cooperate with the investigation but the investigators didnt find enough evidence charge them with something, then removal sounds like an appropriate choice.

Do you want to comment on the point where the IDF presumably realised what happened and decided to (physically) bury the evidence, and then gaslight the world until video evidence emerged?

I think you're being a bit too forgiving to what's become a clear documented pattern of behaviour during this genocide [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

You keep deleting and entirely rewriting your posts here, so posting something so its not lost (own your opinions and don't be ashamed of them, how else you want to discuss this?) :

> It was not any of these things. It was not an open air prison or a concentration camp. That's the truth. Both these accusations are cheap propaganda that doesn't stand the most cursory fact checking. Look into how many people traveled to and from Gaza a year. Check out the vast tunnel network and rocket arsenal Hamas manged to build. That Hamas preferred to smuggle CNC machines and lathes and explosives from Egypt instead of food for the Gazan population is on them.

> Hamas took over Gaza by force, killing their Palestinian brothers, tossing them from roof tops. Israel just responded to Hamas' war on it. You know, rockets and such. All along Gaza had a border with Egypt which Israel did not control.

> Don't defend Hamas. Just don't do it.

Its entirely possible to despise hamas and wishing them horrible death, while despising what state of israel was and is and will be doing there. Defenders of israel often bring the masacre of 2023 like its good enough excuse to perform another civilian masacre. Heck, you want to drag people who dare to speak out into automatic hamas supporters, thats a bit cheap trick. What about focusing on civilians here, on all sides, like a normal moral human being should do? What did those murdered kids and rest of civilians on both sides did to deserve any of this?

Yes it is a concentration camp, the very definition of it. Maybe you are mixing this with nazi extermination camps, those were a different category - then I suggest some reading on that topic.

Let me ask - how easy it was, even before current war for regular palestinian to lets say move to another part of the world? I don't mean som israeli farmers using/abusing them as extremely cheap labor, I mean normal travel. Stateless people, kept in utter poverty by design, almost malnourished, effectively forbidden to leave what looks like the definition of open prison or what say US did to its japanese population during WWII. Some digged tunnels don't change anything here.

> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect. There is never a clean war and certainly not the kind of war that has been fought in Gaza.

That and the abundant evidence of genocidal intent in Gaza and the explicit ethnic cleansing of the West Bank with full support of the Israeli society is the reason why it is evil. This incident is one of literal hundreds.

> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect.

Defenders of Israel always try to put a label on us: anti-Semites, anti-Iaraelis etc. You are trying to make it seem like this was some kind of isolated incident, an unfortunate consequence of the war. It wasn't: Gaza is in ruins, Israel continues ethnic cleansing in West Bank all while gaslighting everyone who opposes it. Israel is evil.

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> So this label is not accurate? You are not anti-Israel but rather pro-Israel?

This is a form of splitting or black-and-white thinking and it's not rational. If doesn't make you anti-Semitic to refuse to defend Israel with every breath as they commit a genocide against a people under their steward.

> Gaza is in ruins because it attacked Israel.

Gaza has been under Israeli occupation for 50+ years. It didn't "attack Israel", it attacked its occupiers, it is an occupied part of Israel itself, de facto.

> As to the Israeli policy in the west bank I generally do not support it but it's mostly only tangentially related.

It is much more than tangentially related. It shows that the Hamas attacks was mostly just a pretext, and that the Israeli government and some part of the population is going to attack or steal land from Palestinians regardless of any provocation. If there were no ongoing oppression in the West Bank, you could maybe make a case that the razing of Gaza is really strictly a reaction to the October 7th attack. But that is an absurd position when you look at the ongoing and accelerating oppression happening in the West Bank, despite no provocation motive there.

> If the Palestinians had been serious about a peaceful win-win solution we wouldn't be here.

If the Israeli government had been serious about democracy and had any acceptance of peaceful coexistence, they wouldn't be occupying these territories in the first place, and oppressing and refusing to extend citizenship rights to the people inside them.

You can invent your own version of what the Israeli government wants, and it sounds nice. But Netanyahu has been clear: his life's work has been to prevent any chance of a two-state solution ever being reached. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are even more extreme, and have been quite clear that their goal is to get rid of what they consider sub-humans living in these territories. Herzog has been clear that he considers that the people of Gaza are collectively responsible for the October 7th attack, making the razing of Gaza at least a clear case of collective punishment. Members of the Knesset have been much more virulent. What the heads of colonist movement say goes even further beyond that.

This version of the world in which any major Israeli political force has any intention whatsoever of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people is completely fictitious, and not supported by any public statements any of them make.

If you are seriously claiming the attack on Gaza was not a reaction to October 7, you need to explain why Gaza was not attacked in the 20 years prior to Oct 7, but was attacked shortly after it. If you think that Israel always intended to occupy Gaza, you also need to explain why they withdrew from it in 2003.

I'm claiming that October 7th was a pretext. If October 7th hadn't happened, they would have done the exact same thing with some other occasion (and they could always provoke some kind of attack from Gaza by killing a few people with no reason, as they have periodically done for the last 30 years).

And the reasoning for why now and not in 2003 is simple. In 2003, they had a much weaker international position - USA leadership was slightly less zionist, and the Arab states around them were much more belligerent towards Israel, and would have likely intervened directly at that time. Israel itself was also much weaker militarily - it has only increased its military spending in all the time since. And finally, a much smaller percentage of the Israeli population in 2003 was actively rooting for ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, especially since the population had been less exposed to the violent anti-Palestinian propaganda, and that propaganda itself had been less rabid.

> you need to explain why Gaza was not attacked in the 20 years prior to Oct 7

Is this a joke?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_War_(2008%E2%80%932009)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2012_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Gaza_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Gaza_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2018_Gaza%E2%80%93Isr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2019_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2019_Gaza%E2%80%93Isr...

(and another dozen or so in the list on Wikipedia)

> If you think that Israel always intended to occupy Gaza, you also need to explain why they withdrew from it in 2003.

I would note that the current PM of Israel resigned in protest when that happened.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/middleeast/...

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The reason your comments are being flagged is because you are defending the patently indefensible.

Do you currently serve or have you over the last two-and-a-half-years served in the IDF (or one of its supporting directorates) or do you currently work or have you over the last two-and-a-half-years worked in one of the Israeli intelligence agencies?

I ask this because you admit to having used thermal night vision equipment, you know what is being discussed in Hebrew-language Israeli media; and you call your interlocutors armchair critics implying you do more than just sit in an armchair. In the interests of full disclosure -- are you a neutral third-party or do you have skin in the game?

Nausea inducing attempt at whitewashing.

Soldiers vs aid workers, and you're defending the murderers, and propagating a particular stereotype, thus further hindering your cause.

Can't tell if this is due to a lack of self insight, institutionalised delusion or cold hearted intentional weaponisation in a self declared war.

The team involved in this analysis, Forensic Architecture, have a pretty decent youtube channel showing how they do things: https://www.youtube.com/@forensicarchitecture1967/videos

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can you provide that history? the best I can find is a single story where they incorrectly reported four children as dead, which I can only really find being discussed in reddit comments. surely if they have a 'documented history of being wrong' you're referring to something more material?

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This seems pretty damning.

https://ngo-monitor.org/ngos/forensic-architecture/

Depends how much you weight you place on 'anti-Israel NGO'. Assessing for myself by simply watching the content, I do not find it objectionable. Referring to what is happening in Gaza as 'ethnic cleansing' is not biased language, it is calling a spade a spade. IMO.

I skimmed through that page but did not notice anything remotely negative.

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The Wikipedia page for ngo-monitor.org is quite revealing:

> NGO Monitor is a right-wing organization based in Jerusalem that reports on international NGO (non-governmental organisation) activity from a pro-Israel perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGO_Monitor

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Huh. You, a comment earlier: "They also have a documented history of being wrong."

Care to "refute the claims" in the linked report instead of attacking the messenger?

Even the IDF had to admit it happened when the video came out. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...

Someone said I shouldn't be trusted because I'm a zionist. Not because I've gotten things wrong or made errors, but because of who I am. That's a classic ad hominem.

By contrast, I correctly pointed out that Forensic Architecture has a history of getting things wrong. That is true and useful as one heuristic in evaluating their present argument.

So there is a clear difference.

With that said, it is fair of you to ask me to refute the specific claims. Here are some problems I notice based on a skim.

- No independent verification: raw audio/video isn’t published, no hashes/chain-of-custody, and key artifacts are "available upon request" (shot-marking files, scripts). They also use ML denoise for speech enhancement. In a poisoned info space, that’s a giant trust-me step, no good for OSINT.

- Model guided by testimony: the minute-by-minute reconstruction claims relies on witness walk-throughs in a 3D model to fill gaps. Wartime testimony (especially in Gaza) is notoriously unreliable, yet the writeup reads like courtroom certainty.

- Headlin eexaggeration. "point blank range" reads like the whole event was muzzle-close. In the report it’s basically "8 shots from between vehicles" + one inferred 1–4m shot. That’s not killed point blank.

- Overconfident negatives: no exchange of fire is a strong claim based on limited recordings. Absence of audible return fire in a few clips isn’t proof.

- Quick search reveals names of 15 dead are PRCS: Mustafa Khafaja; Ezz El-Din Shaat; Saleh Muammar; Refaat Radwan; Muhammad Bahloul; Ashraf Abu Libda; Muhammad al-Hila; Raed al-Sharif. Civil Defense: Zuhair Abdul Hamid al-Farra; Samir Yahya al-Bahapsa; Ibrahim Nabil al-Maghari; Fouad Ibrahim al-Jamal; Youssef Rassem Khalifa; Anwar al-Attar. UNRWA: Kamal Mohammed Shahtout.

The IDF claims that the six in the Hamas civil defense force were militants. I can't personally verify this, but I'd say that's a rather important detail missing from this article.

>- Headlin eexaggeration. "point blank range" reads like the whole event was muzzle-close. In the report it’s basically "8 shots from between vehicles" + one inferred 1–4m shot. That’s not killed point blank.

I'm sure all those distances are well below the point blank range of the weapons used by the IDF soldiers.

None of these are refutations.

For example:

> Overconfident negatives: no exchange of fire is a strong claim based on limited recordings. Absence of audible return fire in a few clips isn’t proof.

> - Quick search reveals names of 15 dead are PRCS: Mustafa Khafaja; Ezz El-Din Shaat; Saleh Muammar; Refaat Radwan; Muhammad Bahloul; Ashraf Abu Libda; Muhammad al-Hila; Raed al-Sharif. Civil Defense: Zuhair Abdul Hamid al-Farra; Samir Yahya al-Bahapsa; Ibrahim Nabil al-Maghari; Fouad Ibrahim al-Jamal; Youssef Rassem Khalifa; Anwar al-Attar. UNRWA: Kamal Mohammed Shahtout.

Even the IDF itself won't go this far in trying to muddle the waters.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-85076...

"The IDF did not use the six Hamas terrorists who were wearing dual hats, as medics and terrorists, as an excuse for the mistakes made in the episode, given that the IDF forces involved did not know whether they were Hamas – and when the soldiers got up close to them, they found that they were unarmed."

None of those things is "a history of getting things wrong". You've failed to link to any evidence criticizing their past investigations.

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The problem GP is the claims and the messenger are the same in this case. I have now spent 15 minutes trying to validate your claims and can't find anything substantial. It's a waste of reader's time.

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Awesome technicalities aside, it is really hard to watch the non-sensical violence and destructions when nobody is held accountable.

Accountability has gone out of the window a long time. The only way it will come back is when the people fight back.

Many of us are waiting for the people in the US to start taking their responsibility seriously.

By buying US products, using US-based media, and adopting US narratives? That's a part of the problem. This world is lacking multilateralism.

I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.

All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...

There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...

There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).

Never heard (and couldn't find anything) about it. That "Board of Peace" you're most likely referring to is nothing more than your usual Trump grift - each country willing to join has to pay 1 billion $, and there have been 25 countries declaring their intent to join.

Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?

It's a bit more complicated: the peace deal Trump got passed through the Security Council did create a board in charge of monitoring some aspects of the Gaza process (I'm not sure on the exact details) so there is a real UN body in the mix.

Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking.

There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.

> All the hospitals are now rubble

Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).

[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.

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> Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?

From the article we're discussing:

"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."

I would describe that as a walk-back.

>"Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.

I guess we're in agreement that Reuters isn't engaging with the topic neutrally.

A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat

> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...

Hmm.

Yeah, Israel has done some infiltration like that. Not proper, but you're pointing out a molehill while ignoring the mountain.

When the molehill is a war crime, sure.

So is the mountain, though

Yes. You will not find me defending Hamas war crimes, of which there are many too.

You'll just only point out the Israeli war crimes?

I'm so tired of this conflict. Both sides can eff off. The Israelis under Netanyahu are basically ever bad stereotype of Jewish people made real, and the Palestinians are the "woe is me we are innocents" while being controlled by murderous thugs and just siphoning the aid they beg for.

Nobody actually wants peace, well, those that would be at the negotiating table don't. The Israelis want the Palestinians dead, the Palestinians want the Israelis dead.

Arafat has the last shot at peace. He allegedly walked away because of access to some religious shrines. That should tell you everything you need to know about this region. Just a bunch of religious nutheads going at it, and the rest of the world gets suckered into spending billions on it, which ultimately just goes to the religious nut heads.

And all of it only appears in headlines because of oil.

> You'll just only point out the Israeli war crimes?

Demonstrably not; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151031.

The key perpetrators of Oct 7 are dead, as is appropriate punishment for their war crimes. I don't think Netanyahu will see consequences for his.

We can agree he probably will not.

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Not falling for an obvious distraction from the extremely blatant pattern of dehumanising Palestinians.

> In leaked recordings, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva — then head of Israeli military intelligence — stated that for every person killed on Oct. 7, “50 Palestinians must die,” adding that “it doesn’t matter now if they are children.” He described mass Palestinian deaths as “necessary” to send a deterrent message.

> Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration of a “complete siege” on Gaza — cutting food, electricity, fuel, and water — was accompanied by explicitly dehumanizing language. Announcing the policy on Oct. 9, Gallant stated: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “an entire nation out there is responsible” further blurs the institutional line between civilian and combatant.

> Such statements do not determine individual targeting decisions, but they shape the environment in which those decisions are made: how civilian life is valued, how much civilian harm is expected to be scrutinized, and how much is implicitly excused.

Welcome to the Middle East. The Gulf War had 50x deaths on the other side. The repression of the IRGC against peaceful protesters had the same kind of imbalance. Its how governments assert dominance there.

Just look at the reaction of Iran's "leaders" to the USA's threat to attack them. They keep their narrative logic intact: we'll sink your ships, etc. These are fearless people who's power is derived from the appearance of power.

I find it incredible that these isolated comments, of which even the various UN-backed panels can only find a handful quoted without context, is the basis for an evidence for an intent of genocide.

Besides the fact that it's a very poor genocide that after the war has ended has 100,000 palestinians leave (mostly on medical or humanitarian grounds) out of 2M Gazans and when Israel is constantly accused of blocking them in.

Bear in mind that Israel is a democracy with proportional representation resulting in a coalition government so you are essentially accusing a the majority of the population of supporting genocidal intent based on a few out-of-context and unclear quotes from some individuals. For example Smotrich - a right wing nut IMO - party won only 5 seats out of 120 in the last election.

The PM, and the official statements overwhelmingly and repeatedly state that they were not targetting civilians, whilst also adding as has been proven that the entire strip was criss-crossed with tunnels (longer and more extensive than the London metro) with exits under schools and hospitals and that their attacks met the proportionaility test which is that the miltary advantage must be proportional to risk of civilians harmed. They said no strikes were indiscrimate, they were all against verified presence of hamas. You and I might find that ugly, vicious and can question if there was another way to fight Hamas, but illegal it aint.

Herzog's comments were taken widly out of context. It takes a very particular and pre-dermined POV to discount the actual Q&Q where there quote ignored the entire paragraph which gives it a different meaning and the very next question asked him to clarify the statement anout responsible and he immediately replied (all this within a couple of minutes of the same presser) his intent. As (e.g.) HuffPost reported: when a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” Herzog said, “No, I didn’t say that.”

Here's a transcipt of the presser:

  Journalist: "You spoke very passionately about you saying that Israel was not retaliating but
  targeting with regards to the operations in Gaza. But even President Biden, who spoke so personally
  and passionately with regard to what was happening in Israel, spoke about the importance of the laws
  of war. So, with that in mind, what can Israel do to alleviate the impact of this conflict on two
  million civilians, many of whom have nothing to do with Hamas?"

  President Isaac Herzog: "First of all, we have to understand there's a state, there's a state, in a
  way, that has built a machine of evil right at our doorstep. It's an entire nation out there that is
  responsible. It's not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved—it's absolutely not
  true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza
  in a coup d'état, murdering their family members who were in Fatah."

  Journalist: "I am sincerely sorry for what is happening in Israel right now, but I have been listening
  to your answers for the last few minutes and I am a little confused. On the one hand, you say that
  Israel follows international law in the Gaza Strip and that civilians are protected; you say you are
  very careful to prevent casualties. But at the same time, you seem to hold the people of Gaza
  responsible for not trying to remove Hamas, and therefore by implication, that makes them legitimate
  targets."

  President Isaac Herzog: "No, I did not say that. I did not say that and I want to make it clear. A
  question was raised about the separation of Hamas and civilians. I said that in their homes, there are
  missiles shooting at us. If you have a missile in your kitchen and you want to launch it at me, don't
  I have the right to defend myself? We have to defend ourselves; we have the full right to do so. Hamas
  carries full responsibility and accountability for the well-being of the hostages and for the
  situation they have brought upon Gaza."

  Journalist: "But my question is: Are civilians in Gaza held responsible for not destroying Hamas and
  therefore become legitimate targets?"

  President Isaac Herzog: "I repeat again: there is no excuse for murdering innocent civilians in any
  way, in any context. And believe me, Israel will operate and always operates according to the
  international rules."

Even in Halavi's case, he might be a right-wing nutter and meant what was reported but the head of army intelligence does not decide policy. And when you look at the original I don't think it would pass court of law. Israeli Channel 12 added the square brackets intent to "it doesn't matter now [if they] are children" but actually the original in hebrew was only "זה לא משנה עכשיו ילדים" [1] which could mean instead "it doesn't matter [to this argument the mention of] children" which is equally plausable in idiomatic Hebrew. Either way, his comments in full don't tick the boxes of genocidal intent.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNdd5QuoCFW/

> Besides the fact that it's a very poor genocide that after the war has ended has 100,000 palestinians

You seem disappointed. Anywho...

  A common misconception is that genocide must involve a very large number of deaths on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions. But this is false. The perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War were found guilty of genocide despite the massacre’s death toll being less than 9,000. Hence the fact that “only” 70,000–100,000+ people have died in Gaza in no way refutes the charge of genocide.

Genocidal feelings. Super normal.

> Even in Halavi's case, he might be a right-wing nutter

Nuts in highest military positions when warring with 4 or more states. Very normal, too.

> Bear in mind that Israel is a democracy with proportional representation resulting in a coalition government so you are essentially accusing a the majority of the population of supporting genocidal intent...

Perpetrating* a genocide, seems like.

  Is the Gaza War a genocide? Two key features of the mortality data are consistent with that charge: first, unusually high mortality among women and children; second, the sudden and dramatic fall in life expectancy. In these respects, the war resembles the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides more closely than any other recent conflict involving the US or Israel.

> Is the Gaza War a genocide? Two key features of the mortality data are consistent with that charge: first, unusually high mortality among women and children; second, the sudden and dramatic fall in life expectancy.

To be fair, you'd also see this if your opponents were using human shields and hospitals for military operations, which Hamas has been documented as doing. This is not so clear cut.

That definition of 'human shield' is basically only used in this context by Israel and its advocates. If we adhere to it, the fact that Israel has military installations embedded in residential neighbourhoods ought to qualify, but it seemingly doesn't. And if one uses the most commonly accepted definition in IHL, Israel has a long history of participating in it. Is any of that fair?

Hamas is not a military since Palestine is not a state (courtesy of Israel itself), so what they're doing can't be classified as war crimes. If you want to accuse Hamas of war crimes, you first need to recognize Palestine as an independent state.

Palestine is recognized as a state by most of the world, including recent changes of mind in the UK, France, Australia, etc. I also take that position.

“These would be war crimes… if we were a state! Muahahahaha!” is not a position I’d be comfy espousing as a positive thing.

I am glad Hamas leadership saw consequences for their war crimes. I wish I could say the same for Netanyahu and his Cabinet.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy

> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...

(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)

As it stands, the Geneva convention only applies to acts when both countries are signatories, or one is, and the other follows the convention (which Hamas unfortunately does not): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions#Common_Arti...

Is there another treaty which proscribes perfidy, which Israel has ratified?

If Israel wants to take that position, they’ll need to denounce the Nuremberg trials. “Crimes against humanity” were invented for them, as the Holocaust was legal under German law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip).

As the article indicates, prohibitions against perfidy and other war crimes predate the Conventions.

(And I’d note that, as occupying power, Israel is subject to other requirements.)

(And if this is truly your argument, “Hamas doesn’t have to follow the rules either” is the logical conclusion. Which makes whining about their uniforms a bit odd; there is no scenario where "Hamas has to follow the Conventions, but Israel does not" is a coherent position.)

Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.

> pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue

Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?

> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?

Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.

> Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?

The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.

> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.

When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)

> Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.

You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."

Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.

> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?

German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.

> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?

I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67745092

The spirit of the law is reducing the civilian cost of war. Its hard to argue that Israel's few incidents of wearing civilian clothes for special operations increased the odds of civilian costs compared to the same operation done in uniform. Meanwhile, Hamas's lack of uniforms has led to significantly increased civilian cost.

> Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.

As I already alluded to earlier, the principles and spirit are more important to me than the literal conventions and if somebody signed it. I will note that you brought up the Geneva Conventions not me.

> German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.

I'm confused to what you refer to and why you brought it up?

> I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.

This is not an example to what I asked for, this wouldn't have happened if Hamas wore uniform, IDF wore uniforms, the held hostages civilians didn't but because they were in combat they mistook them for Hamas. What I want is Israeli citizens mistaken for an enemy combatant in Israel in a non-active-combat environment or Palestinians citizens mistaken for an IDF soldier in Palestine in a non-active-combat environment.

> This is not an example to what I asked for

Me: "Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons."

You: "When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict?"

This was in the Israel-Arab conflict, and as you acknowledge, "wouldn't have happened if Hamas wore uniform". It is a perfectly responsive example to your request, and clearly illustrates the potential harm to innocent civilians from violations of the rule.

Grossly asymmetric warfare promotes and "kinda" justifies guerilla tactics from one side. Necessity knows no law and all that.

Of course, that does mean the bigger side has to get dirty too, sometimes. Just not to the extent that Israel is, who clearly just want to cleanse the land in order to own it. I mean, this is Boer war territory, not (e.g.) Algerian war where torture was used but civilians were mostly left intact.

Why would an insurgent force against an occupier ever wear uniforms? Ever? Is there any case of this happening in history?

Pretty much all of them.

National Guard and HomeGuard in every allied country has a uniform.

The ones that don't are using what would be considered unlawful tactics these days.

You're an 'unlawful combatant' if you don't wear one: the Geneva Convention still technically applies to you, just not in any way you'd find comforting.

> The ones that don't are using what would be considered unlawful tactics these days.

The British Army was very upset that ragtag riflemen in the American colonies kept running into the woods and shooting from behind cover instead of standing in a Proper Formation and exchanging volleys of fire. No true gentlemen does that!

> the British military and government frequently accused American colonial soldiers of violating the established "rules of war" (or the "laws of nations") during the Revolutionary War, largely because they viewed the conflict not as a war between sovereign nations, but as a rebellion. The British often regarded the Americans as unlawful combatants, or rebels, who used irregular tactics that disregarded traditional 18th-century European military etiquette.

> The British Army was very upset that ragtag riflemen in the American colonies kept running into the woods and shooting from behind cover instead of standing in a Proper Formation

didn't skirmishers always do that though?

> didn't skirmishers always do that though?

The European war tradition was open fields and men standing in lines firing volleys from 50-100m, roughly. Americans fought in the French/Indian wars alongside Native Americans and picked up their hit-and-run tactics. They were also using rifled barrel Kentucky Longrifles that could hit a man-sized target at 250m (roughly). The Americans also would directly target officers, which was seen as cowardly/ungentlemanly.

Why should they play by some foreign made up book just because it would suit the oppressor who massively overpowers you in every aspect? Come on, lets get real, if you defend your homeland from invader any tactic is good tactic. Thats not some higher moral ground just basic logic.

Geneva convention is just a piece of paper, sometimes adhered to by some parties, and thats about it. And thats something coming from a person living and working in Geneva lol. russians keep breaking those rules every day for years on ukraine and not much is happening, is it.

The Geneva Convention wasn't written by oppressors to protect oppressors; it was written largely because of what happens to civilians and prisoners when there are no rules. The protections run both ways: your wounded, your captured fighters, your civilian population all benefit from it. Tear it up and you're not sticking it to the powerful, you're just guaranteeing that nobody on either side has any protection at all.

And yes, Russia breaks the rules constantly in Ukraine. The response to that is not 'therefore rules are worthless,' it's 'therefore we need better enforcement.' A legal system with imperfect enforcement is not the same thing as no legal system; by that logic you'd abolish murder laws because people still get murdered.

'Any tactic is a good tactic' is also, incidentally, exactly what the oppressor says.

> Why should they play by some foreign made up book just because it would suit the oppressor who massively overpowers you in every aspect?

If they refuse to abide by the "foreign book" that dictate the rules of conflict, then I'm not sure how they could legitimately use the foreign book's classification of genocide. Those rules are what dictate how to classify a genocide.

Well they don’t have to agree with all of it. The Geneva convention is (primarily) an agreement between parties that “we’ll follow these rules so we don’t end up killing civilians and razing cities to the ground”. When the opposing side is doing that, what good does it do you to say “but under subsection 17 b of paragraph 11…”

> When the opposing side is doing that, what good does it do you to say “but under subsection 17 b of paragraph 11…”

Remaining the "good guys"?

> foreign book's classification of genocide

Why can't they just use their own? Seems silly. Not sure this makes sense.

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Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.

many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil).

Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.

This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.

But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.

---

(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.

(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).

I think we should avoid suggesting that other people on this forum are evil, even if you think their ideas and arguments are harmful.

I think sometimes people are so certain about their beliefs that they perceive any argument that challenges them to be evil, bad faith trickery. But I think the best way to respond to these arguments is simply to give compelling reasons why they are wrong (and not why the person giving them is bad).

Otherwise, some people will be mislead by these bad arguments and you will have done nothing to help but say “don’t listen to him he’s evil”, which is not very convincing really.

> intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend ... argue endlessly ... understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but ... nit picking stuff like as if the word is just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win"

I get what you're trying to say, but ...

> playing devil advocate

One look at my comment history on this topic should help dispel the notion.

People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.

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It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.

IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.

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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...

> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.

> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.

Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.

(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)

> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.

This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.

> The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.

I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.

It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.

And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"

It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.

> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.

I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.

Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?

> Do you think it should?

No.

This is asymmetrical warfare

The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders

This is nonsense. The total annihilation of Hamas and disarmament of Gaza would be sufficient for Israel and you know it.

Even if that’s true, I can’t blame Gazans for refusing to become slaves.

The OP said "destruction of Hamas and disarmament of Gaza" would suffice. Does that necessarily entail slavery?

Nothing is certain, but it seems likely since Palestinians in the West Bank don’t have basic freedoms either despite no Hamas presence.

Why would the israelis prefer to deal with PIJ through some temporary disarmament?

Anyone who listens for a bit to israeli mass media will soon be convinced that anything but the extermination of the palestinians is not enough. This is why they bulldoze everything archeological that does not play into zionist myth making. This is also why apartheid is common in local politics in Israel, and why the zionist guerillas and later IDF systematically destroyed the homes and property of the people they displaced, long before the appearance of Hamas.

As I usually do, I'd also like to remind that the zionist movement is mainly a movement of christians.

>before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders

What makes you think Israel cares about a label more than conquest via genocide? Did the Nazis care about being called genocidal? If you want to stop IL you need to do it via force.

If that was true, then why does it seem this conflict has gotten much more attention than the Russia-Ukraine war, which is on a much larger scale?

The power imbalance probably plays a role.

Certainly no one's donating Patriot batteries and F-16s to Gaza.

(I'm also not sure I'd consider the Russia/Ukraine war to be… undercovered in the press.)

The only country out of the four mentioned who was given a donation of arms is Ukraine.

That’s a gutsy claim. Delusional, but gutsy.

https://www.ajc.org/news/what-every-american-should-know-abo...

It has been going on for a century or so. It is also a crime of occidental states. One could also argue that Palestine, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and more places are in interconnected violent processes, where the 'axis' of Israel, the US, UAE, UK and allies are perpetrating heinous crimes without any semblance of accountability.

For much of that time frame, the Soviets were also meddling in the Middle East. That the middle east conflicts were themselves part of the Cold War rather than something unrelated, is knowledge that has gone forgotten in the West, I think.

Yeah, bad soviets, financing and arming decolonial movements and so on.

Soviets who murdered millions of people.

Will those decolonial movements then accept complicity, even if reluctantly, for all the peoples the Soviets oppressed and even genocided?

War is always terrible and a mess. The problem is that the intention is, very clearly, ethic cleansing. And that, is, not in accordance to international law. That's the reason they target humanitarian workers and journalist. And the reason they block things like baby formula from entering Gaza. Because the worst are the living conditions to the population, the better.

If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.

Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.

By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/#/screen/home

> is, very clearly, ethic cleansing

Yes. But.

Those are weasel words. The correct, honest word, is genocide

Yup, the term ethnic cleansing became popular during the Yugoslavian civil war, so that UN states didn't have a legal obligation to intervene, as they would in the case of genocide.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide are obviously not the same. If Israel's intent were to kill virtually all Gazans, that would be genocide, but it seems very plausible that they would be entirely satisfied if all Gazans just left Gaza, which would be ethnic cleansing.

Look, I remember this being discussed at the time as a euphemism to avoid the necessity for intervention.

The wikipedia article suggests that I'm not alone in this belief: "Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group,[6][7] or calling it a euphemism for genocide or cultural genocide.[8][9]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

> This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.

You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.

You think Germans have some genetic predilection to genocide? That they were uniquely vulnerable to authoritarianism?

The Nazis were evil. But all people have the capacity for it.

You're detracting. You made a comparison between Israel and the nazis, which is wrong, and is extremely far reached.

Answering with "all people have the capacity for evil" is once again a subtle misdirection which seems like a recurring theme in your comments. This wasn't what you implied.

Put simply, Israel and nazis are night and day, you are villifying a country and its people with extreme and factually wrong accusations.

> Israel and nazis are night and day

Depends on who you ask. People are allowed to see similarities, like Lebensraum & Occupation, as two examples. They don't need anyone's certification or permission. And intimidation, I believe, has stopped working. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_between_Israel_and...

I mean, "Judeo-Nazi" was a term coined by an Israeli polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz & has been part of the Revisionist discourse for quite some time; ex: Better a Living Judeo-Nazi Than a Dead Saint (1983), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2536162 / https://archive.vn/uX42N

You would be wrong. This happens to have been a propaganda campaign invented decades earlier in the Soviet Union. In fact, it is quite stunning how similar all this is to the modern propaganda Russia uses.

> You would be wrong

Well, looks like Leibowitz did not coin the term (much to his chagrin perhaps?), but I guess he was one of the more prominent Israelis to never apologize for using it.

May be Leibowitz spoke truth to power; may be he was a Soviet asset.

> quite stunning how similar all this is

Hm.

  Michael S: Aren't you exaggerating when you use the term "Judeo- Nazi?" Do you truly believe that we are liable to decline to the level of the Nazis?

  Yeshayahu L: When the nation (or in Nazi terminology, the race) and the power of its state become supreme values, human action is no longer inhibited. This mentality is also widespread among us. In the territories under our occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, we are already behaving as the Nazis behaved in the territories under their occupation in Czechoslovakia and the west.

I thought for a bit whether I should reply to this or not. But I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct.

If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture. Their atrocities in the east are far beyond anything that has ever taken place on this Earth before or since. There is no comparison whatsoever.

> I noticed one point in here I felt obligated to correct ... If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture ...

You'd be correcting Mr. Leibowitz, not me.

> no comparison whatsoever

It is not up for debate that there isn't any comparison to be made. That said, we can choose to live in our bubbles, yeah; but on the flip side, interactions with the outside world might come as a rude shock.

Are you trying to imply there is a comparison between Gaza and Leningrad? Where a number equal to the entire modern population of Gaza perished?

Something is very wrong with education on WW2 if anyone thinks this is a reasonable thing to say. A bubble, I suppose.

> very wrong with education on WW2 if anyone thinks this is a reasonable thing to say

Pretty sure Leibowitz knew his WW2.

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> according to accepted conventions

Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?

The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.

Two things are valid at once:

- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.

- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.

Tens of millions protested the US response.

Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.

You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.

Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".

I genuinely don't know what distinction you're trying to make here. Do you think there aren't equivalent protests in Israel? There were minorities in both countries that opposed these responses from the beginning and those responses generally became more unpopular as time went on just like the men who spearheaded them, but a majority of both countries were initially supportive.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but your initial post reads as if Israel's genocide in Palestine is consistent with historical precedent such as the Iraq war when facing similar national traumas.

I'm suggesting that many of us are disgusted now by Israel's genocide, land theft, and murder ... just as millions of us were disgusted by the Iraq war.

>Perhaps I'm wrong, but your initial post reads as if Israel's genocide in Palestine is consistent with historical precedent such as the Iraq war when facing similar national traumas.

The US response was deadlier in both total number of people killed and in proportion to the inciting terrorist attacks. Both countries also committed clear war crimes along the way.

The primary distinguishing factor between the two is the label of "genocide" only consistently being applied to Israel's actions, but that is mostly due to practical reasons, namely the relative small size of Gaza in terms of both geography and population. If Afghanistan and Iraq had the population density of Gaza, not only would that have likely made the US response even more deadly due to the mechanics of warfare, but it certainly would have led to more people describing the US's actions as genocide.

Once again, this is not a defense of Israel. If this reads to you like I'm downplaying the actions of Israel, then you are underestimating the death and destruction caused by the US. Some estimates have the US responsible for as many as a million deaths.

I'll dispute that.

While I recall many at the time calling it being called a genocide by some due to the sanctions, the thrust of the military action was an illegal war.

Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians, journalists, starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent, and ... the list is tragically too long. Size and numbers have nothing to do with it.

Israels actions were ruled a genocide in the ICJ, the UN, among many other genocide experts (including Jewish experts).

The Israeli's had/have actual genocidal intent. Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.

Sure, you mention you're not defending Israel, but the implication that there is some double standard here (perhaps "antisemitic" given your focus on labelling) is in itself a defense of Israel.

The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews (not my words, but the words of Jewish scholars).

I was alive at the time. While there were some protests, i dont recall them being all that significant, and many of the objecting voices seemed more concerned with the price tag rather than the human cost.

You might be referring to a different period, but I'll note that the anti-war protests in early 2003 (immediately before the invasion of Iraq) were quite literally record breaking.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040904214302/http://www.guinne...

This is pure misinformation. I have personally never seen such large crows as the anti war demonstrations of 2002-2003. There 100k people marching several times for several weeks in the European capitals I know.

Some estimate that these were even bigger than the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. These put the total number of people going out in demonstrations world wide at 30M+. This war was massively protested against, any which way you count.

Hmm, i googled it and i guess you were right. I suppose subjectively it was something i didn't particularly notice at the time.

You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.

>the local indigenous people called Palestinians

While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.

> implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous.

Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.

Not clear, and unlikely in Australia.

* https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...

This recent genetic based view replaces the "gut feeling" view akin to yours that was long pushed by Quadrant et al.

But surely, the different tribes in Australia also moved around and replaced each other? They might all come from the same people that came to Australia first, but that doesn’t mean they are native to the place they currently live in. If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe, who gets the land now? And how do you settle that without some arbitrary statute of limitations?

> But surely, the different tribes in Australia also moved around and replaced each other?

Read article, chase up the papers, evidence says "no".

The Tasmanians and the Noongars (Southern most to east, southern most to west) have genetically been in place a long time and had no one to replace.

The article mentions "genetic diversity" between east, west, centre, north, south, etc - that comes from not mixing.

"But surely..." <-- gut feelings? You should joinn Quadrant.

> If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe

Do you have any evidence of that?

> who gets the land now?

There's a wealth of material on Mabo, Land rights, Native title, et al that address all that - if you're generally curious it's there to read.

eg: starting with, say https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case

Ok, then we settled who gets Australia.

Sorry for shifting the goalposts now, but we still need a method to determine what to do with the rest of the earth, right? Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?

"We" haven't settled anything .. neither of us is an expert or player in the domain of indigenuous land ownership.

Your "assertion" (weakly stated) was

> I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.

which is _false_.

A single counter example suffices, the Māori people of New Zealand are still in a shared treaty with European settlers and no prior humans were displaced by the Māori people when they first arrived circe 1320 or so.

Australia and that region offer up many many other examples.

> Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?

I cannot see how this is related to your global assertion nor can I see how I'm responsible to answer it.

The original problem is whether there is a "statute of limitations" for being indigenous.

Even when my original assertion that every single tribe replaced another tribe at some point is wrong, there still needs to be some mechanism do determine what to do with the rest of the world where my claim applies.

If you take the view of history that the ability to forcibly drive other people off their land grants the new inhabitants a valid claim to that land, then Israel's actions are only objectionable because they are happening now rather than in the history books. It's inherently a doctrine of might is right, and the Israelis are mightier than the Palestinians at this current moment in history.

Right, but at least historically, what alternative is there? You can’t really unroll thousands of years of human history and make everyone go back to where their ancestors came from (even just because people ended up mixing after colonizing other places), so you have to take some state as the correct one and then condemn every change after that (or just let everyone do whatever they want).

Otherwise, how would you decide who gets which part of the world?

Which is exactly why this area has been in conflict for millennia. Many different groups have valid claims to the area being their historic homeland. Dubbing one single group as "indigenous" is a refutation of all the other people's historical claims on that land and it means all the Israelis have to do is wait out this conflict until it becomes "history" and the Palestinians lose that "indigenous" label.

This will be the case tho.

US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.

Obviously Palestinians were displaced and that needs to be addressed, but ethnic cleansing is a tough sell. Their population has multiplied by 20x since then.

Forced displacement due to the mass destruction of all facilities in an area consists exactly in ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing means : systemic removal of a group or person by another group of person in an area. And it's exactly what's happening. It makes no sense to say it's neither a genocide nor ethnic cleansing if the population grows. Same as saying there were no genocide or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda or Bosnia since the population has grown.

Arabs are not indigenous to Palestine. Palestine was Roman when it was colonized by the Arabs. Before Palestine, Judea was a Jewish state which was colonized by the Romans.

They are the same people, they just converted to another religion since the diaspora that saw some of the population leave 2000 years ago.

And before that, the australopithecus

You think you are a smart alec

You can call hamas whatever you'd like, but it's certainly not hamas doing most of the terrorizing in palestine....

I am entirely behind this take.

Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.

Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.

The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.

This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.

We should stop using this term terror/terrorist, it's lost any meaning. If Hamas are terrorists because they're terrorizing Israeli population then so are Israelis' IDF or whatever force kills other country's population. And the list extends beyond that. To paint a resisting force/army as terrorists is just charged language to emotionally manipulate and pollute discourse. It would be more useful to put in balance what each side is fighting for.

Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.

Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.

Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.

> Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.

Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.

Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.

What political/ideological goal does attacking the aid workers move forward? It's a war crime, no doubt, but terrorism has a meaning that doesn't include all war crimes.

> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.

The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.

> What political/ideological goal does attacking the aid workers move forward?

Terrorizing aid workers, which reduces how much aid reaches the Palestinian population?

Israelis brag about inflicting casualties on Gaza civilians and when confronted about it say that this will stop when Hamas releases the hostages and lays down the arms. This is textbook terrorism.

Netanyahu is very clearly on the record supporting and defending a policy of allowing Qatari money into Hamas‑run Gaza, including publicly defending those payments to his own party as a way to keep Hamas and the PA separated.

There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.

Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.

There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.

You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.

> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.

[flagged]

here you go:

> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...

IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.

I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.

Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.

I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?

> and it quickly grew beyond any reason

Why did it quickly grow?

The correct answer is: because the Biden administration told them there were no red lines. Israel is completely dependent on the US, Reagan picked up the phone and got them to stop bombing Lebanon in 1982. As Israel continued to ramp up the atrocities, they discovered that nothing would cause them to lose patronage from the US.

Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?

For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.

Consider the possibility that “bomb bomb bomb” was the entire and only point of the exercise.

Because there were children to starve. Brown children.

More than half of the Israeli Jews are "brown people" from the neighboring Arab countries.

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> and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

you still refuse to call it a crime against humanity? shame on you.

It's important to note that the official death toll, acknowledged by the IDF, are of those whose bodies have been recovered.

Nor has the genocide stopped.

[flagged]

Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line

There was a second part to that which is "and surrender".

But there's definitely been a large reduction in violence since the hostages were returned. Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.

> There was a second part to that which is "and surrender".

Honest question. Why should they surrender?

> Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.

A complete and utter inversion of reality.

First page of Google results for: Israel ceasefire violations

“How many times has Israel violated the Gaza ceasefire? Here are the numbers: Since the ceasefire took effect, Israeli attacks have killed at least 615 Palestinians and injured 1,658.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/11/how-many-times-has...

“UN experts urge States to act as Israeli violations threaten fragile Gaza ceasefire” https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/11/un-experts-u...

“Israel has violated ceasefire 47 times and killed 38 Palestinians” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/israel-has-vio...

“Fact Sheet: Israel’s History of Breaking Ceasefires” https://imeu.org/resources/resources/fact-sheet-israels-hist...

> Honest question. Why should they surrender?

To save the people they claim to protect. Just like in WW2, had the Germans and the Japanese surrendered earlier, the Allies wouldn't have had to kill so many of them.

That same logic applies in reverse, though, so it can't be the answer.

If the Allies surrendered to the Axis, it would have also saved lives.

No? Hitler explicitly laid out a plan to expel and starve much of Eastern Europe.

> Honest question. Why should they surrender?

The full statement is something like "to end the war, Hamas only need to return the hostages and surrender".

Surrendering is typically what the losing side needs to do to end a war.

[flagged]

> This is from Gemini

Oh, no. Really?

Come on. Prompt it differently ("Have there been ceasefire violations in Gaza by the Israelis?") and you get this:

> As of February 24, 2026, there have been numerous and well-documented reports of ceasefire violations by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza. While a ceasefire framework has been in place since October 2025, it remains extremely fragile, with both sides frequently accusing the other of breaching the terms.

> Israel has been accused of failing to allow the agreed-upon volume of aid. Reports suggest only 43% of the 600 promised daily aid trucks and about 15% of the required fuel are entering the Strip.

> In December 2025, the US reportedly rebuked Israel for a missile strike that assassinated a high-level Hamas commander, deeming it a violation of the "Comprehensive Plan" framework.

etc.

Don't forget moving the Yellow Line: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-moved-i... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgxl6zkenqo

What was your prompt?

[flagged]

> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line

Did the ceasefire not coincide with the return of the hostages? What am I missing?

Civilian deaths have continued https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-31/israel-strikes-gaza-h...

That article says 30 deaths of "people" not civilians and that the strikes targeted commanders.

if the ceasefire only applies when targeting civilians, was agreeing to a ceasefire in the first place thus an admission of targeting civilians?

When you watch that Liam Neeson movie "Taken", do you feel sorry for the people who kidnapped his daughter?

It's been a while since I saw that movie, how many sons, daughters and neighbours of those people does he kill, maim and abuse?

Assuming he kills several, how many hospital workers trying to help them and journalists documenting his rampage does he kill?

I would feel sorry for all of those people.

Right, you're supposed to feel sorry for the people who were collateral damage (there were some in the movie).

What you're not supposed to feel however, is that he should have went "Oh well..." and let his daughter be sold into sexual slavery.

> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line

So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?

Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?

And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?

Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?

Actually a large number of those 1200 were killed by Israeli incendiary rounds fired from helicopters due to Operation Hannibal. It’s why the estimates kept getting rounded down from an initial 1500, because many of the bodies were too badly incinerated to be counted accurately.

This is a wild enough sounding claim it deserves a cite.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-direc...

The Hannibal directive or the more recent Dayiha Doctrine[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

The investigation into this found 14 deaths from Hannibal Directive actions. Mostly firing on vehicles carrying hostages.

Report: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-a-hrc-56-26-2...

Keep reading, you're missing the next sentences.

> The Commission also verified information indicating that, in at least two other cases, ISF had likely applied the Hannibal Directive, resulting in the killing of up to 14 Israeli civilians. One woman was killed by ISF helicopter fire while being abducted from Nir Oz to Gaza by militants. In another case the Commission found that Israeli tank fire killed some or all of the 13 civilian hostages held in a house in Be’eri.

> The Commission found that Israeli authorities prioritised identifying victims, notifying families and allowing for burial rather than forensic investigation, leading to evidence of crimes, especially sexual crimes, not being collected and preserved. The Commission also notes the loss of potential evidence due to inadequately trained first responders.

(That I'm completely fine with. But it presents challenges for verifying incidents, which probably means it's an undercount.)

> Mostly firing on vehicles carrying hostages.

That is the Hannibal Directive; "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive

If they wanted to go after Hamas, why did they employ methods of combat that were guaranteed to affect civilians, like cutting off the entire strip from food supply?

Or the massacre that this thread is about for that matter?

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Cool, now justify the things happening in the west bank. Israel so peaceful, coexists with neighbors.

The issue isn't whether or not Israel started it. It's the genocide they did once it started.

It's really about motive and targeting. Were they trying to get the hostages back or just kill people randomly? Were they targeting Hamas or aid workers?

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I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.

> I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.

I don't think "sense" is the issue.

1) Are you sure you were talking to actual people and not fake personas or even bots?

2) Keep in mind that there is A LOT of money to be made working for Israeli PR. Some people will take that money regardless of what they know is the actual truth. Some examples:

- Certain social media influencers being paid up to $7000 per post [1]

- Israel boosts propaganda funding by $150m to sway global opinion against genocide [2] [3]

- "[...] a firm called Bridges Partners LLC has been hired to manage an influencer network under a project code-named the “Esther Project.” " [4]

[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-influencers-netanya...

[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...

[3] https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/israel-has-spent-m...

[4] https://www.jta.org/2025/09/30/united-states/israels-secret-...

If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).

It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.

A review:

> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.

From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/

The Act of Killing is near the top of my list of underappreciated films. Permanently haunting.

It's one of my favourite documentaries, almost as good as The Death of Yugoslavia.

For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE

Thanks for sharing! I will definitely give this a watch.

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I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.

haaretz is a left wing rag, they are just as trustworthy as hamas health ministry

And the IDF?

They're hardly the only ones reporting this.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g...

> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.

And the IDF ain't contesting it:

> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.

1. Says the IDF accepted the fictitious 0-militants 100%-civilian death toll claim.

2. Links to a news report that has literally no source on its claims. Just says "IDF accepted" and that's it.

3. Links to another news report which does nothing but report on the previous news report as if this makes it credible.

4. Says IDF isn't contesting the report.

5. Proceeds to provide the only official, verifiable, sourced IDF quote about the report, contesting it.

The logical fallacies you're willing to accept in order to feed your hatred is impressive.

1. No, it doesn't.

2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"

(That's a state-owned news outlet, to be clear; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan_11)

3. See above.

4. Accurate.

5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.

Where is the source? Show me the actual source. Showing me that one news agency is reporting that another news agency reported something, with no way to verify anything in that chain, does and proves nothing. It's a claim with no backing.

The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data". If you see it as "no contest" we're gonna have to chalk it up to cultural differences in parsing language.

> The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data".

Officially, Israel has no nuclear weapons. (lol)

At the end of the day, you made a conscious choice to accept the claim that the IDF confirmed the death toll as truth, and to spread it online as such, despite not having any actual proof. That was Hamas strategy since 0day, long before Israel even managed to clear the last Hamas terrorist from its borders after the attack: just make anti-Israel claims. Just make them. Everybody will accept them, no questions asked.

At the end of the day, I make the conscious choice to trust three different Israeli news outlets, CNN, the fact that the IDF isn't offering a different estimate, and satellite photos of the destruction in Gaza.

The IDF is most welcome to publish a claim and have it dissected. I would remind you we're on a thread where their "official data" fell apart because of direct video evidence of their war crimes obtained from their dead victims' phones.

yes, 70,000 Gazans, 50k of whom were males of fighting age, no other army managed to achieve such low civilian-to militants casualties ratio, under such extreme war conditions

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> There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb…

There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...

"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""

Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...

Lack of fuel doesn't mean it was bombed or destroyed.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144722

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Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.

> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement

I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)

"Much of" and "all of" are very different things.

I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.

This is a common excuse, but The Truth is Israel doesn't care they're housing anything in the basement, they'll bomb it anyway. The ethnic cleansing agenda is plainly obvious at this point. In fact they seem to prefer having Hamas in predictable places, easier to take out and a convenient excuse to cull a few hundred of a superfluous population -- the Palestinian birth rate is way above that of Israelis. The operational reality is that Hamas is simply the best advertisement for the political hacks in charge of Israel, the system perpetuates itself because the current situation provides leverage for both ruling parties. And it turns out when you have two antagonistic death cults, people die. Solution: don't get born a Palestinian in Israel? Depressing.

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I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.

For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?

Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?

> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?

It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".

In the PNW there is also plenty of discussion in public school about the shame of Japanese internment camps in the US.

As others have pointed out "The War on Terror" has been nearly constantly criticized by Americans since it's inception. Mocking it on the Daily Show was a fairly common theme even 20 years ago.

The war on terror, it might have been criticized in hindsight, but let's not pretend it was unpopular at the beginning...

It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".

So yeah, I'm sure many people in Israel have a complicated view of the events that happened post October 7 too. Yet people will mostly ignore all of that and go completely out of their way to criticize basically everything Israel has done.

I'm quite partial to it all, I just hate the hypocrisy.

> I don’t like it but it was a war.

I don't disagree.

There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)

> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”

I don't think you were listening very hard.

> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?

If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.

If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.

I saw Israel using very precision weapons too. Warning people to leave areas etc. I even saw "live leak" style videos where people in Gaza were filming buildings because they knew precisely when they'd be demolished.

None of that was good enough though, clearly...war sucks, best to avoid starting one in the first place if you care about the welfare of others...people can say the IDF did all the wrong things, and you could also say it was stupidly reckless of Hamas.

For those people who are really unhappy with the IDF, also need to be eqaually unhappy with Hamas, else nothing will improve for the innocent people of the region.

> I saw Israel using very precision weapons too.

I would suggest that fairly indiscriminate use of precision weapons isn't quite what I'm referring to.

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It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.

As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.

It could not be more clear - https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144

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There are modern European states refounded after the Allies pursued a deliberate and calculated policy of ethnic cleansing to ensure Germans would never be a problem again - in some cases going from 25% of the population prewar to 1% afterwards, with mass violence and rape included. Ethnic cleansing is only really frowned upon when you lose, or when you win so hard it's a convenient virtue signal and disapproval doesn't threaten the status quo.

Everybody* east of the iron curtain was carted around in cattle carriages. Both my grandmothers were and neither was German.

*not really everybody, obviously

Yes, it's definitely true the USSR engaged in forced population transfers and genocides, but I'm talking about the Allied (not just USSR) policy for Germans outside of the then-newly-defined German borders, since the USSR on its own is generally considered a 'bad' guy. The US and UK supported and endorsed what happened in this case.

Come on, that's not an accurate depiction of what happened to ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe. It is the neo-Nazi party line though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czec...

Can we not politicize historical events? This is not historically controversial. The Czechoslovak President literally called it the "final solution" to their German problem. Or do you just want more examples? There are plenty.

If Serbs wanted their own ethnostate they should have spent the last century subverting the structures of power and media of the West. They didn't do that and the civilians of Beograd paid the price.

Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby

Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.

I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.

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You saw pictures of a hospital.

This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.

Pictures of a basically untouched hospital. The destruction is way overstated.

And let's look at the numbers. Hamas numbers are fantasy but let's pretend they're accurate. ~70k. I have not seen anyone contesting the Israeli database being combatants. ~9k. Note that even granting the most extreme claims this is still better than what western powers typically do--and it's in an unevacuated urban environment which is the worst case.

You might be the only person on the Internet still inexplicably defending the Israeli government on this.

> All the hospitals are rubble?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...

"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""

> And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes.

A lie.

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...

"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."

"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."

> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.

This is an outright lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions

"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"

> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols

That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.

From the article we're discussing:

"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."

"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"

It was "reported that", doesn't make it so. And note that one of the reasons noted was "lack of fuel". Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.

Why do you say it's a lie that they lose their protected status? Read what Geneva actually says.

And I note yet another reference to "proportionality" as if it's some magic spell. Such usages imply the actions are not proportionate--but that is never actually addressed. Underwear gnome logic.

Citing chapters in Geneva is not a rebuttal. "Geneva" is yet another magic spell. I'm reminded of the repeated denials by Hamas of bunkers under the main hospital. And Israel came out and said there's no question they exist as we built them. Israel is very big on civil defense.

Night, not illuminated. And note that your summary of Israel's conclusions does not say whether the people actually were non-combatants.

> Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_blockade_of_the_Gaza_S...

> Night, not illuminated.

The red/blue emergency lights (and headlights) are visibly illuminated in the video.

You cannot quote Wikipedia on any topic (Wikipedia policy - cite the source, not Wikipedia) but especially matters to do with Hamas/Israel war. Even Jimmy Wales has noted severe issues with bias.

Which fact would you like to dispute?

That the Geneva Conventions cover more than civilians is... not tough to back up. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949

And what is the relevance here? That's talking about prisoners of war, not talking about military use of "civilian" things.

Are POWs civilians?

Again, the claim upthread: "All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things..."

Accurate, or not?

I'm just reminding you that you have no citations in your post. I don't wish to debate you.

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In general Muslims are not out to exterminate Jews. Jews are "people of the book". They are followers of Moses who is one of the most revered prophets in Islam. Jews are brothers and sisters and it is even permitted to marry them.

The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.

> I’m not sure why the Palestinians…

> That’s Hezbollah, Hamas…

Sleight of hand happening here.

There's no sleight of hand, just a horrifying reality. It's not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Civilians from Gaza participated in October 7 and poll after poll shows broad palestinian support for the destruction of Israel.

Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.

That is kind of a dishonnest take. You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades.

You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas.

You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.

You wrote: "You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades."

This sounds like: "You make sure to avoid mentioning that the Nazis are not just a genocidal army of aggression, intent on genociding Jews and taking over Europe. They are also an administrative body that bla bla bla"

I wasn't simply saying that there was broad support for Hamas among gazan civilians, I was saying there was broad support for the destruction of Israel and the crimes against humanity that Hamas, along with a broad contingent of Gazan civilians, perpetrated on civilians on October 7.

So that excuse perpetuating a much bigger crime and killing thousands of kids who never had their say. Rrrriiight.

What Israel government and IDF has been doing is an insult to the shoah victims. Any half decent jew should condemn the likoud.

I dispute your claim on genocide and the purposeful killing of kids. so the only impact your words have on me is that I see you inventing crimes

My grandmother is a living Auschwitz survivor (one of the last, she's nearly 100). I'll let her decide what she thinks is an insult to Shoah victims.

My cousin was a Holocaust survivor, and he was utterly disgusted with what Israel was doing to Gaza - all the way back in 2014, before Israel completely leveled it and killed more than 20,000 children.

You keep comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis, which is utterly shameless, especially given that you support the side that has committed mass murder of tens of thousands of defenseless civilians and that holds millions of people under an apartheid regime.

I do not keep comparing the Palestinians to Nazis. I made an analogy between Hamas and Nazis to illustrate a rhetorical point. I stand by that comparison.

And would Israeli polling about Palestinians justify their deaths, too?

Nobody is justifying Palestinian deaths, whatever that means. You don't know my position on the war, since I haven't articulated it here.

I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?

> I’m not sure why the Palestinians and allies are complaining. Their stated aim is the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. That’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Yemen. And they’ve tried but are too incompetent to succeed.

It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.

I feel like there were a few one sided wars we’re forgetting about… This is also a strange advocacy for British or Ottoman rule. Maybe you’re right, if the Israelies acted like their colonial forebears there would be less violence.

I think they could have done better but their interest is to drag it on and slowly take over the hole area (at whatever cost because somebody else pays) . Revisit who Yitzak Rabin was, who killed him and why. I'm so sick of financing this garbage through our taxes. I want our tax dollars to help out my nation not waste it on wars and enrich some psychopaths. If there was peace there we would be no need to create an Epstein though I admit I may be too naive in believing that.

The old, they had it coming defence of genocide.

If you play with fire you might get burned.

Hamas and friends understand this and rely on western morality to protect them from complete annihilation. They may have miscalculated how often you could kick the dog before it bit back.

This, of course, cuts both ways.

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> Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one.

No such claim was made.

Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...

> Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian.

Yes, this is not allowed.

The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.

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You're absolutely right, only 95% of health services were crippled. Thanks, that changes the meaning of GP entirely.

This is an important distinction. Anti-Israeli propaganda keeps echoing the false narrative of all hospitals having been totally destroyed.

The truth is that out of the 36 hospitals operating before the conflict 19 are still operational. That's a pretty far cry from 95%. There used to be 3000 hospital beds available and now there are 2000. There are also an additional 13 field hospitals.

That's a very different story (keeping in mind that Israel has taken control of large areas and any hospital that used to be there wouldn't be in use either).

Given the scale of the war and the documented use of hospitals for military purposes we have to expect there will be some impact:

- https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....

- https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/

- https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-bord...

> So "all hospitals are now rubble" is a incorrect

Sorry, you're right. Some have partially resumed operations with the (sorta) ceasefire. My bad.

You should try to find a spelling or grammar error in his post, too.

Hamas has weaponized every hospital in Gaza. By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.

What has happened is Israel has attacked hospitals with Hamas presence using ground forces, and they have dropped bombs on hospital grounds, but not in hospitals themselves.

> By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.

An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.

I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?

Yes, it's specific. It's also a fact that is in direct contradistinction to the OP's claim.

Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).

Again:

> I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?

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...What an odd and dishonest framing of the problem. Do you define "hospital not destroyed" as "some walls are still standing"? Because an easy counterpoint to your claim is the Al-Shifa Hospital, which you will certainly agree cannot be operational in this state and thus can be defined as "destroyed":

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/%D9%85%D...

And this is one example out of the many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...

It's pointless to read further. This post is by a bot.

Israel is an oppressive, genocidal, apartheid illegally occupying force. You can't compare the two sides.

Palestinians have been under this assault by Israel and Zionists in general for nearly a century. Defending anything Israel does at this point is indefensible. Their context has ALWAYS been wrong and they've been caught lying so many times it's more accurate to believe exactly the opposite of anything the IDF says.

This is wildly one-sided and basically incorrect. The Palestinians initiated multiple conflicts against the Jews, even before the foundation of Israel. The Jewish people beat them back every time, and this same pattern continued after the Israel's founding. What happened throughout history when someone beat back a hostile enemy that attacked them? The loser lost territory, resources, and freedoms.

Which isn't to say that Israel hasn't done some seriously unethical things, but this notion that the Palestinians are poor innocent victims that have never hurt a soul and carry no blame for their situation going back a century is absurd and ahistorical.

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Hamas didn't "weaponize every hospital in Gaza."

Finally, a refutable claim. Can you name me a hospital in Gaza that didn't have a Hamas presence?

Can you name me any official in the Israeli government who isn't lying?

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With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:

>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.

>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.

Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/

Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).

Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.

What a depressing portfolio...

Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...

What digital reconstruction? They took a witness and basically did what they said in a 3D editor. I don't see anything sophisticated about this. They also did things like count weapon sounds in audio, which might be the only factual reliable data point on this report.

> They took a witness…

And the satellite photos showing the scene, and the cell phone video showing the shooting...

From the report:

> The report by Earshot and Forensic Architecture reconstructs, minute by minute, how the massacre unfolded. Using video and audio recordings from the incident[1], open-source images and videos[2], satellite imagery[3], social media posts[4], and other materials[5], as well as in-depth interviews with two survivors of the attack[6], the groups were able to digitally reconstruct the scene and events surrounding the massacre.

So out of multiple "sources", some of which aren't even mentioned ("other materials"?), only the first one is actually from the scene. Sources 2 through 5 are not from the actual scene. The "interviews" are eye witness accounts which are extremely unreliable in this context, especially in a gunfight in the dark.

I don't know. Doesn't seem all that high-tech impressive or even reliable to me. There's also a huge problem with the team conducting this report being consistently biased in their terminology, having team members with titles like "activist", and having researchers from Ramallah and other places who are clearly a side in the conflict.

I will be glad to see a neutral, journalistic research of this incident trying to actually get to the truth and determine if there were hamas militants in the convoy, rather than see some self proclaimed activists play with google maps.

You can see the video at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr....

Decide for yourself if the initial Israeli claims that it was an unmarked, unlit convoy check out. Only need to see the first few seconds, if you don't wanna hear all the shooting and dying.

I was addressing the "digital reconstruction", replying to what you said about satellite images "showing the scene" (which is wrong), not claims on whether or not emergency light was on. It would be appreciated if you actually replied to my comment.

The satellite images start on page 39 of the report, showing the cover-up efforts.

Sorry to nitpick here, but using satellite from literally a different time cannot be part of the reconstruction of the events they appear to be showing in the post. So, this is just one of numerous small but misleading details. The actual reconstruction is not an incredible feat of technology, they have very little work with and have to lean heavily on eye witness accounts from people trying to make it through a gunfight at night time. This wouldn't pass any scrutiny by a real publication which is probably why it's on their blog and nowhere else.

>but using satellite from literally a different time cannot be part of the reconstruction of the events they appear to be showing in the post.

I'm struggling to understand why you think satellite data "cannot" be part of a scene reconstruction. Satellite data establishes things like distance, field of view, and clarifies what kinds of details would plausibly be known to the soldiers at the scene and what interpretations of events are more or less plausible. Geography of a landscape only changes over the scale of 100,000 years or more, over the time scales involved here satellite data is consistent.

The satellite shows the cover-up.

The shooting is on video, and admitted to by the IDF. After a while, when it was dug out of the grave.

Again, the video is available, from the very real publication The New York Times.

> The satellite shows the cover-up.

The satellite shows something from a time after the events which were recreated and is therefore not relevant to the "digital recreation" which is what the post is about.

Also, there is absolutely zero proof it was a coverup as multiple explanations for this were given. Sure you may choose to believe what you will. But the right way to put this, if you're truly neutral and looking for the truth, is that the satellite imagery shows a later occurance where the vehicles were uncovered, several reasons for this were suggested, and a coverup is also possible, but couldn't be verified with any factual data.

https://www.idf.il/286249

“the examination identified several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident”

“The deputy commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Battalion will be dismissed from his position due to his responsibilities as the field commander in this incident and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief.”

Sure seems like the IDF thinks someone covered shit up.

Once again, no. Nowhere does it say the intent was to cover it up. Failure to portray the situation accurately can be a result of several factors, like participating soldiers being in recovery and not able to fully describe the events, misunderstanding, failing to prioritize this event, or just incompetence. It's fair the deputy commander was let go, but this isn't an admission of a cover up.

I'd appreciate if you stopped portraying events in a biased manner and presenting speculation as fact. This is exhausting and I'm losing interest.

> I'd appreciate if you stopped portraying events in a biased manner and presenting speculation as fact.

This is a really wild statement from someone who claimed the US doesn't give Israel military aid.

* * *

What can we individually do to help the people in Gaza, but even more broadly with human rights issues. Basically, to whom give our money to?

https://gaza-verified.org/

Any risk of being accused of funding terrorism by the US if I donate there?

There are other efforts if you don't want to do direct donations. See Connecting Gaza (Rabbi Mivasair). There's also the Sameer Project.

Nothing helps as much as speaking out vigorously and unambiguously though and without equivocation. We have to stop killing Palestinians first.

The Palestinians receive billion(s) from Arabic oil states, Iran, and UN aid groups.

That money is controlled / siphoned / embezzled by the two political factions dominant in the two areas: PLO in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza.

Which the finders accept, because the primary geopolitical purpose of that aid isn't to help the Palestinians, it is the ensure Israel is distracted and doesn't use its overwhelming military advantage in the region to take over it's neighbors.

It is a quid pro quo.

If you want to hand over money to these essentially organized crime groups, hey it is your money.

No one spending big bucks in the Israel Palestine conflict is doing it out of the good of their hearts. This is ultimately about regional power and gulf oil politics.

There is no good side in this conflict. The Israelis are controlled by a murderous far right wing zealot, and the Palestinians are ruled by even more murderous people. If you give money, it goes to the murderous people in charge.

The place where humanity dies. Only a terrorist organization does this.

> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.

Damn…

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The downtrodden have become the oppressor.

As is often the case.

I think about this a lot re: Israel. I had a conversation once with an Israeli where he was convinced "everyone is racist," but we're all too woke to admit it or something, or have some belief that racism is wrong but work to overcome this inherent thing.

His arguments were all very zero sum, "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us," and from conversations with friends I'm thinking that what's happening here is the Israeli media apparatus focuses heavily on creating an "us vs them" mentality for diaspora Jewish people, which has now backfired to create a whole lot of Islamophobic and racist people.

It's interesting because one may think that people with a historical trauma of one of the worst things ever carried out in human history would be the least likely to do something like that and the most likely to see the writing on the wall if something like that was about to happen again, but sadly that was too optimistic: the opposite happened.

People with historical trauma are far more likely to inflict further wrongs than people without historical trauma. This is the case for individual trauma too. It has always been this way.

> "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us,"

And he didn’t think that Hamas could use the same lame excuse for their terror?

I've never seen a topic I couldn't upvote before?

I can upvote just fine. Perhaps you’ve already upvoted it, so the (already used) upvote button is now missing?

Nope, unvote is missing as well.

nope. I cant upvote it either. @dang

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.

And if it was, they didn't mean it.

And if they did, Gaza deserved it.

and if you don't agree, you're antisemitic

I actually got accused of being racist for saying that anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same thing.

I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.

Do you: 1 - Think that it is something different? 2 - Think that it is, but Jewish people specifically do not have it? (I believe this is racist) 3 - Think that no people have it? 4 - Something else?

If you think that Jewish people have it but just not in Palestine, where in the world do you think they should have had it?

You're wrong on the definition of zionism. Zionism is a European nationalist movement that uses the assumption there is a consensual concept of "homogeneous jewish people" who have the right to self-determination to justify Palestine's colonization.

Anti-zionism is being against the colonization of Palestine and being against nationalism and supremacism.

Anti-semitism is hating someone because of the are jew.

Thank you!

If self-determination means an enthnostate then no people has that right. If every ethnic group had its own state in which it was guaranteed supremacy, the world would be a complete mess. It doesn't work. We are seeing in Israel/Palestine a thoroughly worked out example of why it doesn't work, and what the consequences are when you try to make it work.

I don't see how Israel/Palestine is any kind of evidence that ethnostates can't work. There are Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades. There are unique historical reasons why there's so much conflict in this region.

> Palestinians that have been peacefully living in Israel just fine for decades.

when you write something like this ask yourself if were Palestinian if you would be happy if you son or daughter said they are moving to Israel to live there. if you answer Yes, we good. but of course no way you’d ever say yes…

They have not been living just fine, and Israel calls them a "demographic time bomb".

Zionism is the support of the Israeli colonial project. Jewish people have a right to self-determination regardless of Israel's existence; Israel's existence does not determine the right of self-determination for all jews. As such, the two things are not the same.

Zionism, then, is just support for a specific state (Israel), and support or lack or support for a state given its actions (colonial oppression) is not bigotry. Disliking a genocidal ethnostate does not influence in any way how you feel about the Jewish people as an ethnic and religious group. As such, anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same.

The Jewish people already loving in Palestine had a right to live there.

The problem is when you try to forcefully displace an entire civilian population to make way for a colonial movement.

In the same way I, as a Finn, would not have the right to take over any region in the Urals and kick out the people who live there, the Zionists had no right to do just that in Palestine since over a hundred years ago.

> I know Zionism as the idea that Jewish people have the right to self-determination.

I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.

Jews don’t have a right to an ethnostate. No one does. Jews have a right to live within any country in the world, but not run an apartheid government or commit genocide.

On reddit you are always an antisemite, even if you don't talk about Israel.

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I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel

Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?

Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.

How’s that similar to you?

Look, I don't disagree, but American cities looked pretty fine after WWII, and Germany was rubble. Which side gets pounded more doesn't inherently prove which side was right.

(In this case, I'm of the opinion that both sides committed clear, deliberate war crimes.)

Germany invaded most of Europe and left much of it in rubble. You're picking a very weird, specific comparison (German vs. US cities) and leaving out the obvious comparison (German vs. Soviet or Polish cities).

Also, comparing Nazi Germany, a massively powerful industrial state, with a tiny, poor territory under foreign occupation by a vastly superior power is insane.

The point is “which belligerent is in rubble” and “which belligerent started shit” isn’t always the same.

No, the point is to justify Israel laying waste to Gaza by equating the Palestinians with the Nazis.

You might wanna take a peek at my other comments on this thread before assuming that, lol.

Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries: more soldiers, more rockets, more war-fighting infrastructure. Gaza wasn't a particularly poor place before the war, certainly not by the standards of the middle east. It had mansions and average salaries that, for some professions, were higher than average salaries in Israel. It was a net food exporter.

> Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries

What? You mean countries like Monaco and Liechtenstein?

> more soldiers, more rockets

Simply counting the # of soldiers or rockets is disingenuous when this is obviously an asymmetric war.

It's clear that the method of combatant recognition employed by the IDF is flawed, given they're killing aid workers and people from the UN.

Eg, here is Hamas' bread and butter rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket

There is more technology in a modern rifle round than in those rockets + launch systems (if you even dare call them that).

> more war-fighting infrastructure

Please explain what you mean by "war-fighting infrastructure ".

> Gaza wasn't a particularly poor place before the war, certainly not by the standards of the middle east

Depends on what you mean by "standards of the Middle East", but just compare Israel($52k) and Gaza ($3455) for 2023:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

> It had mansions and average salaries that, for some professions, were higher than average salaries in Israel.

"The wealthiest in a poor country have more money than the average in a developed country", means what exactly?

How did you develop your understanding of this situation? And what are you trying to communicate here?

I claimed Hamas had a larger and more powerful military than many European countries. This is a fact.

> What? You mean countries like Monaco and Liechtenstein?

No, my claim is much stronger. I mean Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.

> Simply counting the # of soldiers or rockets is disingenuous when this is obviously an asymmetric war.

Counting things like soldiers and military arsenals is the standard way to evaluate military strength. And of course there is a force asymmetry, Israel is a global power and its air force is probably the second most effective in the world. That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate Gaza's military the way we would any other.

> Please explain what you mean by "war-fighting infrastructure ".

Well, for example, Hamas built the largest underground military tunnel system in the known world, a vast standing army numbering in the tens of thousands, gathered plenty of intelligence on Israel, militarized their population, and has a history of combat, for starters. But it goes way beyond this, and extends to the broad financial and military support they enjoyed from the IRGC.

> "Depends on what you mean by "standards of the Middle East", but just compare Israel($52k) and Gaza ($3455) for 2023:" I'm not comparing it to Israel, which is a standout in the middle east, and among the most technologically developed countries in the world. I'm comparing it to other middle eastern countries. It wasn't exactly destitute, despite its murderous, anti-woman, anti-gay, and antiy-jew jihadi philosophy. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE-xjBRKkPL/

> It's clear that the method of combatant recognition employed by the IDF is flawed, given they're killing aid workers and people from the UN.

Have you considered that the some aid workers were also Hamas militants? Or that the UN, through UNRWA, employed Hamas militants? Many of the so-called aid-workers israel killed turned out to actually have been part of Hamas. There is unfortunately extensive evidence that UN employees participated in the 10/7 attacks and the subsequent fighting. And Hamas uses world central kitchen and other aid organization vehicles and infrastructure, so distinguishing is not easy in the first place.

> How did you develop your understanding of this situation? And what are you trying to communicate here?

I have developed my understanding of this situation from decades of study on this topic, and at least a thousand of hours of research over the past 2.5 years. In the span of 15 years, I've gone from leading so-called pro Palestine rallies to my current positions. What I am trying to communicate is that reality is more nuanced than many (including a younger version of me) like to think. Reality is nuanced, and at odds with the picture you paint.

>Israel is a global power and its air force is probably the second most effective in the world

If by that you're implying the US has the most effective air force in the world, then you're probably wrong.

The most effective air force in the world is almost certainly the American one. The second most effective air force in the world may well be the American Navy.

I'm curious who you're ranking at the top here.

"Probably wrong"? Who do you think has it?

>No, my claim is much stronger. I mean Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing.

Hamas, who don't even own a single Howitzer. Much less a plane.

They were weaker than most European countries in their air power. Stronger in manpower and in munitions, which included tens of thousands of rockets.

Stronger in munitions? One western artillery shell is worth countless Qassam rockets. The Qassam rockets are largely useless from a military perspective because you aren't going to hit anything with them.

This is an apples and oranges type comparison, except Hamas is stuck with crabapples.

Qassam rockets are not "useless." They've killed multiple people, including kids. They are relatively low-yield compared to later Grad/Fajr/M-75 type rockets Hamas used, but to say they're "useless" is a huge overstatement, and the implication that they represented Hamas's entire arsenal is wrong.

The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).

In addition to the direct devastation the rockets cause, they also force large swaths of the Israeli population into bomb shelters, which has other military benefits for Hamas. It was part of the 10/7 strategy they employed.

People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.

I suggest you look up the concept of CEP, circular error probable. It's a very important measure when discussing weapons like these.

Modern western rocket artillery will strike your target from tens of kilometers away within a circle of a couple of meters.

Your typical Grad will have CEP in excess of 1.5% of range. So at 10KM you'll have only half of your rockets land within 150 meters of your target.

These are weapons where your target selection amounts to "fuck someone in that general direction". Not "better shoot at that guy before he shoots at us". Fundamentally useless for fighting wars.

The Grads can be vaguely useful, but Hamas doesn't have the launch platforms to field them as an area denial weapon as originally intended.

EDIT: and you can probably stop reading right here, I'm mostly just repeating myself after this point.

> They've killed multiple people, including kids

I never thought I'd laugh at the idea of kids being killed, but in this context it comes across as pretty hilarious. This is not a good feature in a weapon of war! In war you typically want to kill enemy soldiers, not kids.

You can point a Gazan artillery rocket towards an urban center, maybe hit someone and kill a kid. It is not feasible to hit a target more specific than that using these weapons.

You can't fire one at a smallish enemy position.

>The reality is that Hamas also had dozens if not hundreds of R-160 / M-302 medium range rockets (up to 200km) and long range Ayyash 250 rocekts (travel more than 200km).

Hamas having dozens if not hundreds of M-302s is certainly a claim I'd love to see evidence for, but even if it were true this isn't very impressive at all. These are terribly inaccurate unguided artillery rockets! Western militaries don't really have much in terms of equivalents because they're practically useless.

>People like to pretend Hamas was a tiny force. The reality is what I said: it was larger than many European militaries, with an arsenal to match.

This is a straight up lie. Hamas had a plenty of manpower, but certainly has never had an arsenal to match. Artillery rockets you can realistically only use to indiscriminately strike civilian areas are absolutely useless when fighting a war.

The whole point is that Hamas is an unconventional fighting force that does aim at civilian centers and doesn't particularly care for accuracy. You sneeringly ask me to look up CEP, as though Hamas tries to be accurate and target military installations rather than sewing terror. They know they can't go head to head against Israel militarily, and they do purposefully kill civilians (see: 10/7). I can see you laugh at kids being killed, which is horrifying!

You also scoff at the idea that Hamas had M-302s, but the reality is not only did they have them but they fired them, for example on July 9, 2014 towards Hadera. In March 2014 the IDF also siezed M-302s being smuggled into Gaza. I can go on. Your snarkiness is no substitute for research.

I wrote "people like to pretend hamas was a tiny force" and you say that's a "straight up lie." But people on this very thread have claimed that. Yes, their arsenal didn't match European countries in terms of accuracy, but in terms of raw firepower, they had lots, which is why Israel spent billions developing the iron dome.

> Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries

This is such an insane statement that you instantly disqualify everything else you say.

It's hard to believe the earth is round, but it is.

As I mentioned above, Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing. They also had tens of thousands of rockets.

It was also fully blockaded by Israeli (and Egyptian) forces on all sides? Israel was in full control of what was going in an out of it.

I don't see how that's relevant to the earlier claim, but even this claim of yours is a gross overstatement.

There was a partial blockade, not a full blockade, and this partial blockade came after Palestinians launched the second intifada. Prior to the october 7 massacre, perpetrated by Hamas and gazan civilians, tens of thousands of gazans were able to travel out of gaza through egypt and israel, where many of them worked. nearly 75,000 truckloads of food and cargo went into gaza from israel in 2022. Gaza exported lots too.

My point is that Israel had full control about exactly what Gaza was allowed to import and export (and frequently used those controls for collective punishment as well)

I don't quite see how under those circumstances, they were able to build "a more powerful army than many European countries", unless you talk about Luxembourg or the Vatican.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip

Yes, Israel and Egypt together controlled what Gaza was allowed to import and export - not as a form of collective punishment, but to ensure its own security. There's a huge difference between that and a "full blockade" (which is what Russia did to Mariupol early in the war), so precision matters.

In terms of Hamas's army being more powerful than that of many European countries, I'll respond to that below.

And the Wikipedia article you cite has been manipulated by a band of ideological editors and is not reliable, and has no value (inverse value?) as a citation.

The article currently has 361 references. Also the accusation they use it in arbitrary means, for collective punishment is widely shared, not just here.

Explain to me how continuously reducing the area permitted for fishing is necessary for Israel's security.

Also, why is there a quota system on food(!) at all? How does this aid security?

> not as a form of collective punishment, but to ensure its own security

Top Israeli officials literally said that the purpose of the blockade was "to put Gaza on a diet."

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Why do Israelis always claim the Palestinians launched the 2nd Intifada?

The 2nd Intifada was sparked by Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians.

Israel wasn't bombing those neighborhoods for revenge, they were doing it because Hamas build militarized tunnels under dense civilian neighborhoods.

> Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?

I'm not pro Israel, especially not after this report, but your point is silly. The US has sold billions in defense weapons/tools to prevent rockets from hitting Israel. Gaza did not have access to the same defenses. That is why the outcomes look different.

It's been years of missile strikes. No diplomacy worked. "Israel shouldn't exist, period". Then 7/10 happened.

What else should've Israel wait for? Dirty bomb? Nuclear attack?

> I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel

Yes. Hamas attacks civilians, the IDF attacks Hamas.

> That didn't happen.

Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.

Your comparison fails at the first step.

> And if it was, we didn't mean it.

And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.

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Good thing one can be anti genocide without being pro hamas

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Great news then, there are no conspiracy theories here. Just claims supported by the UN Human Rights Commission. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...

Why do you think the UN, an organisation that funds schools where Gazan students are taught to be martyrs murdering Jewish people, and has Iran as its current head of the human rights council, is a credible source on the Israel/Hamas conflict?

Would you care to provide specific critique of the report or just ad hom the authors?

Regardless, no further comment. You’re clearly an ideologue.

The UN isn't a man, it's an organization, and as shown, a deeply compromised one.

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I don't open links to CSAM sites

In case you wished to support legal efforts against Israeli soldiers accused of war crimes. https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/donate

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-famil...

Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...

If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US. As an American I wouldn't want to live next to or do business with a serial murderer. I certainly wouldn't want them coaching my kids sports or other community involvement.

> If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US.

I think it’s become pretty apparent that they would not face any repercussions and might even be rewarded.

Israel doesn’t extradite to the US. Hence why so many pedos escape to there

Our greatest ally doesn't extradite??

Funny that, isn't it

They certainly could be prosecuted; see https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-chicago-urges-doj-t....

But at this point the DoJ acts more like Trump's personal law firm.

[dead]

It just shows how degenerate the indoctrination really is, its just out in the open now.

Acting proportionally would make no sense though.

Exceptional report. Surprised to see that much of a confusion on HN about why it is there. MH17 posts with forensics did not seem to be offtopic when they were posted. This fits.

[dead]

>Israeli soldiers fired over 900 bullets at the aid workers

That is a LOT of shooting.

A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.

They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.

Shot, execution-style, then dumped in a mass grave. The ambulances were then buried to try and hide evidence of the attack.

What is the appropriate term to describe something that would do such a thing to a human being?

What should be done with it?

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No, you don't commit war crimes against anybody. You call them war criminals and prosecute them.

Israel killed UK army veterans, it was a targeted operation and a precision strike to send a message.

It was covered by UK media for a short period and they would gloss over the veterans and focus more broadly on WCK, there is lots of examples of UK media weird coverage like this which no doubt was intentional. It was also barely spoken about by UK politicians

RIP John Chapman, James Henderson, and James Kirby.

Iranian here! I wish freedom for the people of Gaza and an end to their suffering and oppression. Down with all the dictators and oppressors. Be it IRGC or IDF.

Hello friend.

From Palestine I want to send you all the best wishes for freedom in Iran. It's time.

And to my Jewish sisters and brothers and siblings in general I want to send a wish for for freedom and end of this stupid hatred..

There is not actually a good reason for all this violence.

Thank you for this sane comment.

As someone raised as a Jew in America, this is beautifully said. Thank you.

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"Stop hitting yourself", good old bully logic

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↑ uncouth, classless comment.

Here's a list to help ease angst about how "necessary" or "appropriate" it may or may not be to universally villainize/dehumanize Republicans/conservatives:

Beyond the foundational achievement of Abraham Lincoln in preserving the Union and ending slavery, the Republican Party has initiated several major policies that are widely regarded as landmarks of progress in American and global history. Given your focus on “material and real-world results” rather than hypothetical concepts, these examples highlight tangible shifts in infrastructure, health, and civil rights.

1. The Creation of the National Park System (Theodore Roosevelt) Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, is often called the “Conservationist President.” He used his authority to protect approximately 230 million acres of public land.

Material Result: He established the U.S. Forest Service and signed the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allowed for the protection of landmarks as National Monuments 1. This created the blueprint for the modern National Park System, ensuring that vast wilderness areas remained public rather than being depleted by unregulated industry.

2. The Interstate Highway System (Dwight D. Eisenhower) In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which authorized the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways.

Material Result: This is often cited as the largest public works project in human history. It fundamentally transformed the American economy by lowering transportation costs, enhancing national security (allowing for rapid troop movement), and physically uniting the country.

3. Founding of the EPA and the Clean Air Act (Richard Nixon) While Richard Nixon is a controversial figure, his environmental record resulted in some of the most successful bipartisan legislation in U.S. history.

Material Result: In 1970, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and signed the Clean Air Act. These actions led to a dramatic reduction in lead in the atmosphere, a decrease in acid rain, and significantly cleaner waterways across the nation 1. These laws prevented an estimated 205,000 premature deaths in their first 20 years alone.

4. The Americans with Disabilities Act (George H.W. Bush) Signed in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a landmark civil rights law that prohibited discrimination based on disability.

Material Result: This act forced a “material” change in the physical world—requiring “reasonable accommodations” like ramps, elevators, and accessible public transit. It is considered the gold standard for disability rights globally and was passed with broad Republican leadership.

5. PEPFAR: The Global Fight Against HIV/AIDS (George W. Bush) In 2003, George W. Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, primarily in Africa.

Material Result: This program is almost universally praised as one of the most successful humanitarian programs in history. As of 2024, it is credited with saving more than 25 million lives and preventing millions of HIV infections. It reflects a massive, tangible victory in global health initiated by a Republican administration.

6. The First Step Act (Donald Trump) In 2018, the First Step Act was signed into law to address issues in the federal criminal justice system, such as reducing recidivism and correcting sentencing disparities that disproportionately affected minority communities.

Material Result: This was a rare bipartisan “victory” that led to the immediate release of thousands of non-violent offenders and established new rehabilitative programs within federal prisons. ---

But yeah. "republicans are evil" is only three words and that's a whole lot easier to handle conceptually (and self-gratifyingly!), so let's just go physically attack people like Charlie Kirk, Edward Coristine ("Big Balls"), or set fire to a Tesla dealership!

"Glorious socialism is the only solution to defeating the 'evil capitalists' that are 'ruining the world' ", right?

https://museumofcommunistterror.com/

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*Quick Fun Fact:*

Debating someone who emotes instead of reasons taps into an ancient human flaw:

In argument psychology, it’s called the *backfire effect* — *when presented with evidence, people often double down instead of reconsidering.* (Brains: delightfully stubborn jelly blobs.)

https://youtu.be/qIyOpFkvKZ8?si=hffb40PEnP5WfOIk

If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.

> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more

It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.

> On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.

Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.

> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.

You could make an at least passable argument that the US offers a favorable media environment to our MENA allies (i.e., those other than Israel) during what is by all accounts an extremely brutal and mostly ignored conflict in Sudan.

> the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel

Sure. Though Western arms absolutely play heavily in Sudan and across South America. My point is it’s odd to single out Gaza as a case where the West doesn’t care. It’s more that it uniquely has folks in the West who care strongly about both sides.

> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.

Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?

I hear this sentiment a lot when it comes to people trying to justify why Ukrainians or Iranians are somehow less deserving of their attentions, and it infuriates me every time. If the goal is to try to prevent unjustified killings, then it makes no sense.

I personally raise awareness about Ukraine and Palestine in equal measure. But there is fundamental difference: Israelis will stop their violence on Palestinians the minute they lose support of the US and Europ, whereas the West doesn't hold the same leverage over Russia.

I disagree with many parts of this narrative, but even this fundamental hypothesis that Israel will just give up without Western support, that there is absolute leverage, I have no idea where it comes from or what evidence suggests this. If Israel feels they need to do this, they will just source supplies from somewhere else. And everyone will be worse off for it.

Israel couldn't even defend themselves against Iran missile attacks without US and UK stepping in. Israel wouldn't survive the the kind of sanctions the West imposed on Russia and should have imposed on Israel too.

I wonder how the victims of Russia's imperialism feel about this comparison.

If you back someone into a corner with no escape valve, they will just double down.

A Cuba style embargo on Israel until they stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population would be the end of the current direction of the Israeli establishment.

Look at the size of the country, the natural resources and where they are positioned.

They are dependent on Western imports for pretty much everything, and only export technology that Europe and the US can easily replace with domestic or other foreign sources.

> Cuba style embargo on Israel until they stop the genocide and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population would be the end of the current direction of the Israeli establishment

Doubtful. You’d just get another Iran. Israel is rich and a weapons buyer and exporter. That gives it many friends of opportunity, from Russia to India.

Building those weapons requires foreign imports. An embargo would stop that.

Rich doesn't mean much if you're under international financial sanctions and can't use your assets.

>You'd just get another Iran.

The sanctions have crippled Iran making it a much less powerful and influential version of what it would have been without sanctions. And by the looks of it is now on the verge of collapse. So I guess this kinda reinforces the point that Western sanctions on Israel would be effective?

Yes, like Russia and Iran, the fanatics in charge could continue in their direction for years, but they would be much less potent and the reaction of their population (who largely have dual nationalities and have extensive business and family ties abroad) may end up forcing a change in direction from the state policy of slow genocide and gradual ethnic cleansing of their indigenous population.

China and Russia would love to have another chess piece for their collection. While I doubt Israel would ever willingly choose to joint that circle - if you give them no choice, that's what will happen. Then you lose all leverage. Not to mention, Russian arms are a lot more likely to hit untargeted civilians.

It makes perfect sense. In a democracy your government (supposedly) represents you, thus the actions of your government are those you are partly morally responsible for and partly have some control over. If Russia or China is selling AK47s to warlords in Sudan, there's not much that westerners can do about it

> thus the actions of your government are those you are partly morally responsible for and partly have some control over

America has global force projection power. It has about as much influence in Gaza as it does in e.g. Venezuela or even, arguably, Iran.

Everyone has good reasons for why their pet war is the most central to our interests. I think it’s fair to accept that there are multiple good answers.

This is supposing that people only have an obligation to not cause harm, and that those who are able have no moral obligation to actively help protect those who need and deserve it. Kind of like the trolley problem, I suppose.

> It’s literally happening in Ukraine

Ukraine isn't part of the West.

> to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis

What was happening in Minneapolis is not only much smaller in scale than what's happening in Palestine, it's also just a completely different thing.

I doubt it is helpful to compare these conflicts because they all have an entirely different source of conflict.

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If so many comments are going to be flagged, why even bother having a comment section?

The mods need an excuse to shut this one down.

Because Attent-fueled truth-deniers might get downvoted or flagged by reasonable people.

Mods, can you look at this comment and maybe unflag it? It has some snarky language ("armchair critics") but it doesn't seem to contain anything flaggable and it provides important context, namely what I take to be the perspective from the pro-Israeli side. I for one am very curious to know what that this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147359

What is the HN community doing to use tech to combat terrorism and defend civilian security and freedom?

Well, you could join Palantir and fight terrorism: https://www.palantir.com/careers/

Well, you could join Palantir and f̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶r̶r̶o̶r̶i̶s̶m̶ help develop Israel's terrorism in Gaza.

I would like to know: is there even a single person here, who actually changed his opinion regarding this whole matter upon seeing this report? Not confirmed anything, but actually was forced to re-evaluate his opinion. Like, previously you thought that IDF are good guys, and all Israel does is justified self-defense measures, and now you see this as genocide of Palestinians?

Of course, I assume, the answer is — no one. (And I'm hoping somebody will tell me I'm wrong.) So, what's the point? Is somebody gonna be held accountable? Will Israel be treated differently as a country from now on? If no, what's the point?

Seems like you’re asking “what’s the point of investigating crimes against humanity?”

And if that’s a question you have to ask, then clearly something is very wrong.

Presenting evidence has a point besides getting people to change their opinion on matters.

However, peoples' opinions often change, and when that happens, it has to happen somewhere.

Mine wasn't on reading this article, but I believe when someone on HN shared the wikipedia article on journalist deaths in Gaza, maybe around January or February 2024

Journalism isn't valued by how many opinions have changed, it is there to report on stories that are or have happened. You ask for consequences in your comment but how can there be consequences if there are no reports? Absolutely baffling take.

This is a kind of inverted-retrograde of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Gell-Mann: 1) disbelieve a bogus story, then 2) turn the page and blithely believe the next story

You: 1) believe bona fide investigative journalism, then 0) ask what the point of journalism even is.

I can tell you that the genocide and the Epstein files have made me to completely recalibrate my world view in regards to few countries. Absolutely. I bet many normies are going through these thoughts too in their heads now.

There's plenty of live footage of IDF forces targeting international aid workers and journalists.

"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.

And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.

Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.

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From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?

Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.

> the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story.

By being good guys, you surely mean by being white guys colonizing a territory, exproprating previous land owners and bringing death and despair all around them. Sounds right, that is the history of white colonization.

Im questioning whether the Israelis are the good guys. Frankly I don’t know how you can look at their history of provocation and unbalanced retaliation and not begin to wonder if maybe they aren’t the good guys

> From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story.

That's a baffling claim.

Israelis emphatically not being "the good guys in this story" is a very mainstream (though not necessarily majority) view in every country in the world, possibly with the exception of Israel itself.

Where I'm sitting, nobody would question that Israel is and has been the bad guy since 1948. Before that it was the Jewish Agency for Palestine/World Zionist Organisation and the British.

Israel has been an apartheid performing ethnic cleansing and a slow genocide during its whole existence.

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The slaughter of journalists is documented throughout modern history - by the very people those journalists worked for.

This sentence has no meaning.

We have the loosest definition of "journalist" in history. Most of the journalists on the list worked for nobody in particular or for Hamas, Iran, the Palestinian Authority, or some other group like Hezbollah. By these standards, William Joyce would be a journalist.

My stance is Mossad reading:

- Likud is an evil political party

- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal

- IDF committed many atrocities

- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.

- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.

- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.

> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.

Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years. Before October 7, Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.

> Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years.

If Mexico had started attacking the US across the border, what would the US do? I'm curious to hear what you think a country should do in this circumstance.

Are the US currently illegally occupying large parts of Mexico and progressively colonising it, displacing and oppressing the Mexican population?

And if that were the case, would you say that Mexico had started attacking the US across the border? Or would you say that the US are waging war against Mexico and Mexico is fighting back?

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There isn't really a single way to define a country. For background, I would recommend this video from the Map Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nB688xBYdY

But following their conclusion: the thing that makes you a country is being recognized as one by other countries. Most of the world recognizes Palestine as a country (including 157 UN member states). Here is a map where the green countries recognize Palestine, and grey do not: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Palestin...

What are the Palestinians then?

Historically, Palestine has never been a country. The Romans captured Judea, and later expelled the Jews and renamed the province Syria Palaestina (after previous enemies of the Jews). After the Romans, many other empires held the land: the Arabs, Mamluks, Turks, British. But at no point was it a country. Even when the Egyptians and Jordanians captured Gaza and the West Bank, they didn't give independence to Palestine. Israel captured Gaza/West Bank. They gave full control to Gaza in 2005. So you could say Gaza is a country now.

There are official old coins, newspapers, etc. with Palestine written on them. It has long been an entity.

Here’s a bit of history lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine

TL;DR has nothing to do with Palestine of today

Yes, that's the standard text, I know. (Just ignoring the arab movement since the 1880s to make it a country and the British promise to help with that).

But that wasn't my question. If Palestine isn't a country, then what are the Palestinians?

oh nice, you are making us all sob with those tough words

Many countries disagree with that. However, virtually everyone agree that it is not Israeli territory.

When you know what father of Israel did during WW2 to fund the current Israel.

Uhg, too bad its not taught in school coz history is written by winners and you have to search for it yourself.

Yes Israel commits an ongoing genocide.

And I look at this only by lens of history.

> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.

My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.

Let's also not forget that Hamas still exists and is regaining numbers and territory: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98g1klxnpxo

You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.

Well they still have the full support of the usa government, and I'm pretty sure that even democrats would still keep supporting Israel.

So what did they really lost? Do they even care that some Europeans don't like them ? Europeans are not the one who sell them 99% of their weapons.

Europe is extremely important to Israel. Their legitimacy stems from seeing themselves as European. Their loss of support from Europe is very bad in the long term.

Yes, US is supporting them to. They are losing from both sides, though. They may have part of the remaining generation in power and that's it.

The US is no longer a reliable partner. Once the current administration is gone the likelihood of US support is less than guaranteed. Even with this administration in place support is less than guaranteed. All it takes is the right moment to set off a tantrum and friends become enemies. Israel really doesn't have allies so much as accomplices and that type of friend only sticks around when it helps them.

It's notable that the US right wing have turned against Israel.

Witness Tucker Carlson dismantling Huckabee, and Zionist ideology, recently.

Where it ends up, no one knows. But this is different.

Trump is as far right as you can go and still support Israel. If America goes further to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes land Jews will wonder why they let so much evil be done in their name by the Israeli government.

Carlson has never been that strongly pro-Israel as I understand it. He's carefully toed a line that maintains a solid right-wing fanbase. See e.g. this [0] from 2012 and this [1] from 2019.

[0] https://www.politico.com/media/story/2012/01/tucker-carlson-...

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/archbishop-pelosi-says-walls...

Of course that was just one example. But Carlson has definitely let loose since his Fox News days and, if you're aware of what's going on, you'll know that there is a significant section of the US right wing now that is anti-Israel. This isn't in doubt.

On the flip side, I'm not saying they are pro-Palestine, it is definitely an America First agenda. However, the unified front on Israel is finally broken. For the best, I'd say.

I’m not sure most non-Europeans care what Europeans think about them. :)

The genocide and ethnic cleansing Israel is committing is the best recruitment campaign for Hamas.

Now that the world has knowingly seen a genocide and done virtually nothing, and that the US continues to openly support Israel, I think this was a massive victory for Israel.

>My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.

Maybe. I actually think they didnt expect to be so successful also.

> They chose between a quick death and a slow death.

It continues to be strange to me that "not choosing death" was apparently never an option.

Most people in Gaza now aren't old enough to have voted for Hamas. Median age is estimated to be under 20.

Doesn't matter, there is always going to be resistance against the occupation anyway, if it isn't called "Hamas" its going to be called something else. This is not an enemy they can ever defeat and people either know what that means or are too afraid to think that far. You just can't have other peoples land, you just can't, not without vaporizing (literally [1]) the people you took it from.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/10/israel-used-wea...

What in actuality was happening long-term is the increasing integration and cooperation of Gazans with Israel, reduction of tensions and hopes for eventual peace. Which is an existencial threat to Hamas.

Is that the same cooperation seen in the West Bank where Israel keeps sending settlers and make Palestine land smaller and smaller every single year?

I highly recommend to watch the Oscar winning movie “no other land”, for anyone that thinks that Israel would just let them leave in peace

Israeli settlers are despicable, but even in current government those who support them are minority freaks(who Hamas has empowered very much after October 7th).

Also it is a two way street, there is also a problem of Palestinian settlers, which while I do want to highlight is separate and in no way justifies the Israeli ones, is still a real problem and harnesses a lot of bad publicity when Israel destroys said illegal settlements.

> those who support them are minority freaks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht

> even in current government those who support them are minority freaks

Well, and the Minister of National Security, a settler himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir

Sure, they only have several ministers in the government, Likud politicians show up at settler events, they keep changing the laws to be more in favor of settlers, etc etc...

As for Palestinian settlers, where would those even be?

Don't make things up. Palestinians cannot settle their own land. The Israelis are the only ones settling, i.e., colonizing.

What? Settlers are totally tolerated and supported by the state. Look at Ariel, it is a fully established town settled almost 50 years ago with a university that operates in every practical way as part of Israel. If you think the government doesn't support them, what would support look like?

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Gaza has been under a near-total naval blockade since 2007 (which is an act of war BTW). Any meaningful "reduction of tensions" would have included lifting that.

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That is an obvious lie, but also, even if it were true, who cares? It doesn't really matter what the UN thinks about anything.

That's not a counterpoint to what I said.

Uh, was this happening 1967-87? Because they were sure more integrated before the First Intifada

I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.

That's interesting. It could be. Maybe some day we'll find out.

A never ending conflict is what maintain the Likoud in power. This far right party and government has no interest in peace and is insulting the memory of the people who died in the holocaust.

> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.

That is ignoring many decades of history.

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The muslims arent native to the land though. They are just colonizers.

There was never a process where Arab or Muslim conquerors completely replaced the native population, they just added to it. Conversion and Arabization gradually transformed the existing population’s identity. If descent from conquerors means colonizer, then virtually no population on earth is non-colonial. Arabs in Palestine, Normans in England, Turks in Anatolia, Romans everywhere…

Colonizer status is typically attached to an event and structure, not inherited indefinitely.

Interesting perspective. But does that mean that Taylor Swift is just as native as Sitting Bull? Or are descendants of aboriginal Americans more entitled to the land?

Under the most common frameworks for assessing claims about "indigenous status" or "land entitlement", length of continuous inhabitation and external support for migration are big factors. Considering Sitting Bull's lineage likely migrated unsupported from other regimes and his lineage inhabited North America for much longer, it's unlikely Taylor Swift would be considered "just as native." Whether descendants of Sitting Bull are specifically entitled to land is a matter of ongoing legal and cultural dispute.

They are native and converted to islam

> Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.

This is the logic of conflicts in the middle east and many or probably most parts of the world. If you don't retaliate hard and defend yourself thoroughly, it is seen as weakness. Not much more sophisticated than how bullying works.

Sounds as if you're defending genocide style killing civilians.

Reminds me of Tiananmen square in regard to how stubbornly westerners insist that NOTHING happened in Gaza before 7/23

The point isn't that nothing happened, it is that nothing _that justifies_ the attack happened.

Nothing justifies the attack on civilians because collective punishment is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

The military objectives were entirely justified though (taking out IDF bases, attempting to capture IDF soldiers, and attempting to liberate several-thousand Palestinians being held by Israel)

Of the 6000 people from Gaza who entered Israel that day, at most 12% were responsible for one of the 800 civilian casualties in Israel. If you consider that the minority who decided to target civilians were likely responsible for targeting multiple civilians, and that some number (at least 4 who are known) of those deaths resulted from the actions of the IDF, it's entirely possible fewer than 8% of insurgents targeted and killed civilians.

All told, fewer civilians were killed proportionately than have been killed in Israel's response.

What type of resistance would you have recommended Palestinians engage in prior to October 7? They tried non-violent resistance and were met with lethal force.

It was the point.

> - Hamas was the first to cast the stone.

Saying that it was Hamas who casted the first stone on 7 oct, is basically saying nothing happened before. Which is plain wrong. It's the consequence of decades of oppression, crimes, and unstopping massacre from the colonial occupier.

If you're going back decades, then Palestinians started started multiple civil wars against Jews before the founding of Israel. It's almost as if the Jews knew they couldn't peacefully coexist with most Palestinians on the same land.

That is simply wrong. Palestinians were first attacked by the British, supporting the Zionists, in the 1930s. Then, in 1947, during plan Dalet, Israel attacked Palestine and the surrounding Arab states.

Before that, of course, they colonized Palestine under the shield of the British empire.

An easier way to disarm this argument is: Why did the Zionists come and displace the Palestinians? And who would respond peacefully if you try to displace them?

- Hamas is well-funded by Israel (to false flag?).

It's not a secret. It started in the 80s and lasted until they won the election in 2005. It's not a conspiracy theory, this is History. Official History everyone one agrees on, even israel and Hamas themselves.

> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.

HAMAS is an entity formed by refugees having fled the nakba and been stored on top of each other in an open air prison.

You still have people defending the occupation forces even when the soldiers themselves are bragging no social media about killing kids, and how they wished they killed more.

Israel is a spying and killing machine. At this point it feels like they serve no other purpose.

People are tired of the endless violations to every single right a human has.

This is reductive. All kinds of other countries do the same and the purpose is crystal clear. It isnt spying and killing without purpose.

I dont like it either and i didnt like back when it wasnt trendy to not like it. But it isnt pointless. They know what they are about.

The arab states offered a peace plan in 2002 that would include full recognition in exchange of an end of the occupation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative

At some point it becomes obvious that Israel (under the current government and political climate) doesn't want peace.

In 2000 Israel offered the Palestinians what is essentially the two state solution everyone keeps talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit

At some point it becomes obvious the Palestinians (under their current government and political climate) doesn't want peace.

Wikipedia is not a good source here. There was never a sincere offer accepted by all Palestinians that acknowledged Israel's right to exist. Specifically the sticky point here is the right of return which means that Israel ceases to exist. A peace proposal that includes the destruction of Israel is not one made on good faith. Either way it's not up to the Arab states to make peace here, it's up to the Palestinians.

This proposal?

> Most sources agree, that under Israel's final proposal, the Temple Mount (including Al-Aqsa) would remain under Israeli sovereignty. Israel would also take most of the rest of East Jerusalem, while Palestinians would get some parts too. Israel would annex 8% or 13.5% of the West Bank, and would maintain a military of an additional 6–12% of the West Bank for an unspecified period of time (sometimes called a "long term lease"). According to some sources, Israel would also retain its settlement blocks in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian state would not be contiguous and the West Bank would be split into 2 or 3 sections. Finally, Israel would control Palestinian airspace.

How is that a sovereign state?

> Specifically the sticky point here is the right of return which means that Israel ceases to exist.

If you see Jewish supremacy as a core element of Israeli statehood, then I guess, yes. There are other concepts though, like a one-state solution, which would solve that.

> Either way it's not up to the Arab states to make peace here, it's up to the Palestinians.

The arab states have leverage though, and in this situation, they tried to use it.

I honestly don't see how Palestinians would be able to make peace if the result is more creeping settlements like in the west bank. What is the outlook here? Where would they live?

Anyone else notice the "lorem ipsum" on page 13?

I hear about IDF war crimes all the time, but this level of lying and cover-up is something new and causing me some serious cognitive dissonance right now.

On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used for the investigation, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.

Imagine being one of those soldiers. How could you live with yourself? How could you look anyone in the eye, your comrades, your family?

This soldier couldn't

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israe...

You have to read pretty far into this very sympathetic piece to discover he was running over hundreds of living people with a bullzdozer:

> In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”

> “Everything squirts out,” he added.

According to reports from locals in Asia and Europe, they are traveling and enjoying life to the fullest while harassing local communities during those trips.

Disgusted by this, I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it. I know for sure that

The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.

Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.