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Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

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Jimmy Higgins said:
This is Hamas, not some state with actual military infrastructure.
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Gaza may not be an internationally recognized state, but it is a territorial polity with actual military infrastructure and which is ruled by - checks notes - Hamas. So you are trying to make a distinction without difference. Like claiming NSDAP as a political party has no "actual military infrastructure" because it belongs to the German state.
There can be caches and the like, but how many civilians need to die to slow down Hamas or whatever alternatives are out there? Again, the civilian toll needs to be weighed against the security gain.
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The civilian toll is 100% the fault of Hamas that rules Gaza, who started this war, and who placed their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas.
 
Derec said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
This is Hamas, not some state with actual military infrastructure.
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Gaza may not be an internationally recognized state, but it is a territorial polity with actual military infrastructure and which is ruled by - checks notes - Hamas. So you are trying to make a distinction without difference. Like claiming NSDAP as a political party has no "actual military infrastructure" because it belongs to the German state.
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So Israel was attacked by the equivalent of the German Wehrmacht on October 7. Godwin mitt Uns! No wonder Israel was overrun and is still fighting a life and death struggle to this very day.

Derec said:
There can be caches and the like, but how many civilians need to die to slow down Hamas or whatever alternatives are out there? Again, the civilian toll needs to be weighed against the security gain.
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The civilian toll is 100% the fault of Hamas that rules Gaza, who started this war, and who placed their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas.
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Israel has the perfect excuse to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza--"Godwin made us do it."
 
TomC said:
Jimmy Higgins said:
This is Hamas, not some state with actual military infrastructure.
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Then, can we agree that October 7 was a Gazan assault on Israel?
Tom
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We all agree that the October 7 terrorist attack in Israel was planned and carried out by Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization based in Gaza that controls civil matters there.

We do not agree that Gaza is a State, or that it has any of the usual institutions of a State such as a military, or a border patrol, or a police force, or even a fire department. It has Hamas.

We do not agree that Hamas has the support of a majority of Gazans, that they approve of terrorism, or that they approve of Hamas digging tunnels under their apartment blocks, schools, streets, etc.

And we do not agree that if a terrorist organization embedded in Gaza attacks people living in Israel that means it's open season on Gazans and the Israelis are free to slaughter tens of thousands of civilians with impunity.

Did you read the information contained in Don2's post about Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir? What did you think of the video of him and other party guests stabbing a picture of the toddler who burned to death in a terror attack carried out by Zionist terrorists in the West Bank? Do you honestly think he isn't using the October attack as an excuse to slaughter Palestinians and clear more or Eretz Israel for Zionist settlements?

Also, do you think the presence of Zionist terrorists in the West Bank settlements means it's acceptable for the PA to kill thousands of civilian settlers in retaliatory strikes as long as PA authorities said they were going after infrastructure? Would you be arguing that the settlers started that war and the terrorists were using them as human shields, so the death toll is entirely on the Zionists?

I don't think you'd buy what you're selling.
 
Copernicus said:
The Biden administration is slowly beginning to acknowledge what so much of the rest of the world has already acknowledged, not to mention college protesters across the country:

Biden admin says it’s ‘reasonable to assess’ Israel used American weapons in ways ‘inconsistent’ with international law​

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International law states that “persons with civilian status may not be directly targeted in attacks” (unless civilians are located in Ukraine or Africa” sarcasm added). I haven’t seen evidence that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians.
 
Harry Bosch said:
Copernicus said:
The Biden administration is slowly beginning to acknowledge what so much of the rest of the world has already acknowledged, not to mention college protesters across the country:

Biden admin says it’s ‘reasonable to assess’ Israel used American weapons in ways ‘inconsistent’ with international law​

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International law states that “persons with civilian status may not be directly targeted in attacks” (unless civilians are located in Ukraine or Africa” sarcasm added). I haven’t seen evidence that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians.
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Well, read the report. It makes reasonable assumptions about the use of US weapons, since Israel, unlike Ukraine, has not made a point of differentiating their use from purely Israeli manufactured weapons. We know that the IDF has deliberately targeted civilians that could not even credibly be called "human shields"; for example, the humanitarian aid convoy that was systematically taken out car by car with IDF precision strikes. I guess that would not be seen as evidence of Israel deliberately targeting civilians, or maybe you just forgot about it. We don't know whether American weapons were used.
 
Anybody on the forum still have any empty for Israel? Not me.

I feel for Jews subjected to hate in this country, but Israel as state is only worthy of contempt and condemnation.

From reporting by a military strategist for all the devastation Israel has not met any of its goals, ad all Netanyahu can do is double down. I do not see much difference between Putin and Netanyahu.

In the news Gaza has about 3 days of food left. The only word is genocide. Zionists think they have an historical and divine right to the land.

I watched pathetic Israeli propaganda about Jews and Arabs together in schools peacefully. Similar images in the past of smiling Arabs ad Jews.
 
A statement by our government in the news.

The destruction of the war makes finding evidence of violation of international humanitarian law and violation of the Israeli-American agreement on use of our weapons impossible,

Right never you mind those babies and young children directly killed and injured, and who are starving. Or herding people like cattle around a small confined area with no escape.

We repeatedly attack China for how it deals with a Myslim minority, yet we gave Israel a pass for decades for actions in the West Bank.

We supported Kurds in teir drive for an independent state who Turkey tries to eradicate as 'terrorists' within there borders. Kurds inside Turkey are to Turkey what Poinsettias in the West Bank are to Israel.
 
Reports mount of mass graves at Gaza hospitals, some bodies found ‘without heads’ | The Hill
A third mass grave was discovered Wednesday at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza’s media office announced, including some containing bodies without heads, raising concerns of potential war crimes after Israeli military sieges on the territory’s hospitals.

The new discovery raises the total to seven mass grave sites between three Gaza hospitals, containing the bodies of about 520 men, women and children.

...
The mass graves contained some people stripped naked with their hands tied, further raising concerns over potential war crimes, the U.N. said, describing the bodies as “buried deep in the ground and covered with waste.”

U.N. human rights experts said in a report Monday they were “horrified” over the reports, adding that many of the bodies found were “reportedly showing signs of torture and summary executions, and potential instances of people buried alive.”

...
The U.N. human rights experts said in the report that the Israel-Hamas war has been especially dangerous for women and children, with about 14,500 of the nearly 35,000 Palestinians killed in the war children and another 9,000 of them women.

About three-quarters of the estimated 75,000 injured are women, the experts said. The group also denounced the Israeli government for a lack of a proper investigation regarding repeated reports of systemic sexual assault against Palestinian women in Israeli custody.
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Sde Teiman: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center | CNN
t a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.

Rows of men in gray tracksuits are seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights.

A putrid stench filled the air and the room hummed with the men’s murmurs, the Israeli who was at the facility told CNN. Forbidden from speaking to each other, the detainees mumbled to themselves.

“We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.”

Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them,” the source added.
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More...
They paint a picture of a facility where doctors sometimes amputated prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing; of medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics earning it a reputation for being “a paradise for interns”; and where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot.

According to the accounts, the facility some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws.

“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital.

“(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”
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Revenge -- that seems like a very honest assessment of Israel's conduct in the war.
 
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza - "The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal."
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
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The system's operators would typically only spend 20 seconds on a Lavender-marked target, to see if that target was male.
This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.
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Because they were easier to find that way. They also had a system, "Where's Daddy?" for tracking their targets and bombing them when they entered their homes.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
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For low-level militants, the targeting officers preferred to use dumb bombs that can destroy entire buildings. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one Israeli officer said. That likely explains all the dumb bombs dropped in the war.
Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
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That's why the bombing seems indiscriminate - it involves willingness to kill many more civilians than Hams and PIJ personnel.
“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”

“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low,” said one source about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. “I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — highrises that are evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction.”
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lpetrich said:
For low-level militants, the targeting officers preferred to use dumb bombs that can destroy entire buildings. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one Israeli officer said. That likely explains all the dumb bombs dropped in the war.
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Maybe Biden should authorize more high tech bombs being sent to Israel rather than limiting them to appease extremists in his own party.

As to the casualty numbers, UN seems to have reduced the numbers of estimated female and minor fatalities.

UN seemingly halves estimate of Gazan women, children killed

Jerusalem Post said:
On May 6, the UN published data showing that 34,735 people had reportedly been killed in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.
On May 8, the UN published data showing 34,844 people had reportedly been killed, including 4,959 women and 7,797 children.
[...]
The UN also highlighted that the plurality of identified fatalities were men (40%), while children were (32%) and women (20%).
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Note again that "children" here means everybody under 18, not just actual children. And Hamas et al like to recruit younger teenagers, so many of these "children" are really combatants.
 
Copernicus said:
for example, the humanitarian aid convoy that was systematically taken out car by car with IDF precision strikes. I guess that would not be seen as evidence of Israel deliberately targeting civilians, or maybe you just forgot about it.
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Mistaken identification of a target is not the same as "deliberate targeting". There was no evidence given that these that these workers were deliberately targeted.
Misidentifications do happen in warfare, and not just to Israel. US makes mistakes too.
US military admits that airstrike killed civilian in Syria last year
 
Arctish said:
We all agree that the October 7 terrorist attack in Israel was planned and carried out by Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization based in Gaza that controls civil matters there.
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It wasn't carried out just by Hamas. Groups like Islamic Jihad and PFLP also participated.
We do not agree that Gaza is a State, or that it has any of the usual institutions of a State such as a military, or a border patrol, or a police force, or even a fire department. It has Hamas.
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Those things were controlled by Hamas, but it does (or did) have a police force, firefighters etc.
We do not agree that Hamas has the support of a majority of Gazans, that they approve of terrorism, or that they approve of Hamas digging tunnels under their apartment blocks, schools, streets, etc.
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Hamas does enjoy popular support. That's why they could recruit so many fighters.
Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas

And we do not agree that if a terrorist organization embedded in Gaza attacks people living in Israel that means it's open season on Gazans and the Israelis are free to slaughter tens of thousands of civilians with impunity.
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Civilians die during war. Many German civilians died when Germany was invaded in the closing stages of WWII.
And in Gaza especially, Hamas is hiding among (and under) civilians, placing them at extra risk. But that is on Hamas, not IDF. And note that Hamas is not some foreign entity, but rather a homegrown group that enjoys high levels of support among Palestinians. And they need to be destroyed, no matter how much support they enjoy on the deluded campus left.
 
Copernicus said:
So Israel was attacked by the equivalent of the German Wehrmacht on October 7.
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I did not say they were equivalent. I was saying that Hamas is the ruling party of Gaza, and thus it is legitimate to say that Gaza attacked Israel.
No wonder Israel was overrun and is still fighting a life and death struggle to this very day.
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Well, Hamas and Islamic Jihad receive a lot of funding and weapons from Iran.
And Biden is pressuring Israel to not destroy Hamas battalions and infrastructure in Rafah because he wants to appease extremists in his own party.

Israel has the perfect excuse to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza--"Godwin made us do it."
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Civilian casualties are a sad reality of war. How about you blame those who started this war. How about you blame those who place military infrastructure in civilian areas.
 
Derec said:
Copernicus said:
So Israel was attacked by the equivalent of the German Wehrmacht on October 7.
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I did not say they were equivalent. I was saying that Hamas is the ruling party of Gaza, and thus it is legitimate to say that Gaza attacked Israel.
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Sorry if my flippant tongue-in-cheek response stung, but you made a ridiculous analogy with Nazi Germany. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has been in charge of Gaza since they took power in 2006 and, with the connivance of the Likud governments in Israel, was allowed to build up the infrastructure to mount a hit-and-run sneak attack on October 7 right under the nose of that knucklehead government that was supposed to be paying attention. Hamas. Not Nazi Germany. Not the Wehrmacht. Not the legitimate government of a nation-state.

Derec said:
No wonder Israel was overrun and is still fighting a life and death struggle to this very day.
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Well, Hamas and Islamic Jihad receive a lot of funding and weapons from Iran.
And Biden is pressuring Israel to not destroy Hamas battalions and infrastructure in Rafah because he wants to appease extremists in his own party.
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Yes, and how did governments hostile to Israel manage to get funding and weapons into that small blockaded, densely-packed holding pen for displaced stateless Palestinians. They had no seaport and no airport, thanks to an Israeli ban. They served a purpose for the Israeli government, and that's why they were allowed to stay in power. Israel was aware of funds and supplies coming into Gaza from Muslim allies, but its government simply didn't pay all that much attention. The Israeli government was focused on West Bank settlements, and Hamas served to weaken the Palestinian Authority, which was in charge of the West Bank.


Derec said:
Israel has the perfect excuse to kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Gaza--"Godwin made us do it."
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Civilian casualties are a sad reality of war. How about you blame those who started this war. How about you blame those who place military infrastructure in civilian areas.
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How about you stop crying crocodile tears over the slaughter of Palestinians trying to find shelter from Israeli shells and bombs? Israel's responsibility is to do everything in its power to protect noncombatant civilians, but that seems to be the last thing on its mind. Right now, roughly half the population of Gaza has been sheltering in one of the safest locations left for shelter in that devastated region--Rafah. Israel is openly planning to turn it into a killing ground, and those starving civilians have nowhere else to go for shelter, safety, and a chance of survival. Hamas may have started this war, but that does not give the IDF license to bomb the hell out of innocent families of Palestinians under the pretense of going after Hamas. The IDF cannot tell the difference between combatants and noncombatants, so they are either terrorists or expendable "human shields". Either way, they are dead for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
bilby said:
Derec said:
Note again that "children" here means everybody under 18, not just actual children.
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Everybody under 18 IS AN ACTUAL CHILD.

Have you had a recent blow to the head? Your English language skills used to be pretty good.
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Your semantic quibble looks like quote mining
Derec said:
Note again that "children" here means everybody under 18, not just actual children. And Hamas et al like to recruit younger teenagers, so many of these "children" are really combatants.
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Technically, a 16y/o with 2 kills under his belt is a child. Which would make the actual war crime his recruitment.
Tom
 
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