Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Gospel]

You might want to start putting that ignore button to use, fake Israeli supporter.

 

[pood]

Saying that the Israeli government is encouraging settler violence is just good ole' antisemitic racism.

Oh, dear, there he goes again.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You’ve spent the entire debate insisting that Israel’s actions are justified because the enemy is lawless—only to pivot now and cite Iran’s missile strike on an Israeli hospital as if it somehow balances the scales. Let’s be crystal clear: what Iran did was a war crime. It targeted a civilian medical facility, with no pretense of military necessity, no warning, and no proportionality. That’s not just immoral—it’s explicitly illegal under the very Geneva standards you’ve tried to downplay.

I'm not talking about balancing scales! I was presenting the Iranian action as an example of an actual war crime. Note that there's no claim the hospital was military, no admission of even hitting it. That's very, very different from Israel taking fire from a hospital.

And here’s the difference: I condemn it. Unequivocally. I don’t try to redefine “civilian.” I don’t invent secret tunnels. I don’t say “the math suggests they weren’t really patients.” I don’t say “they should’ve evacuated.” I don’t excuse the bomb because of who funded the hospital or who might’ve visited it last week. I call it what it is: a violation. A crime. A stain on any claim to legitimacy.

I'm not trying to redefine civilian. I'm saying that someone or something that possesses an attribute of being civilian doesn't make it civilian.

And you talk of inventing secret tunnels--have you not paid attention to what's been happening?? Lots of video of bombs hitting and damage radiating out in a line. That's a tunnel being hit. And all this talk of tunnels and I'm not aware of Hamas ever denying there are tunnels. Why do you act like they're some fabrication when even Hamas doesn't say they are?

That’s what it looks like when you hold a standard—not just wave it like a flag when it suits you.

This isn't a game where there's always a path for the Paladin.

You, on the other hand, have built your argument on selective enforcement. When Israel strikes hospitals in Gaza, it’s “self-defense.” When Iran does the same to Israel, you shrug and say “Well, what did they hit?” That’s not legal reasoning. That’s moral collapse camouflaged as strategy.

Once again you appear not to have followed what I'm saying.

Take fire from a hospital, it's military. Period.

And your latest line—that my rebuttals sound like “blasphemy” because they offend your worldview—isn’t a defense. It’s a confession. You’re admitting this isn’t about law or evidence anymore. It’s about preserving a belief system that can’t survive contact with reality. A system that treats legal obligations as optional and civilian deaths as background noise—as long as they fall on the right side of the border.

You have it backwards. I'm saying you are treating my words as blasphemy and not understanding them. You continue to insist legal obligations have not been met, but nothing you present remotely shows this.

 

[Gospel]

Loren is basically proving NoHolyCows’ point in real time. NoHolyCow is presenting a coherent, law-based critique based in international standards, while Loren is sidestepping those frameworks and leaning on military logic to justify actions that otherwise meet the definition of war crimes. If you're now saying such actions are acceptable under certain conditions, then drop your previous arguments that war crimes aren't being committed. You don't give a shit about international laws and you don't give a shit about war crimes. Stop pretending.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Note too that he rise of the Mullahs in Iran is directly linked to the U.S instigating a coup in Iran in 1953. Somehow after World War II the U.Sl got the idea that we are the world’s police and the arbiter of all that is good and true, and it has all repeatedly ended in disaster for us, financially and in terms of lives. Who would have ever dreamed that the U.S. evacuation of Saigon in 1975 would have been repeated less than 50 years later by the U.S. evacuation of Kabul?

There is so much focus on the exact details as if derailing one of them would make any difference.

 

[Gospel]

Note too that he rise of the Mullahs in Iran is directly linked to the U.S instigating a coup in Iran in 1953. Somehow after World War II the U.Sl got the idea that we are the world’s police and the arbiter of all that is good and true, and it has all repeatedly ended in disaster for us, financially and in terms of lives. Who would have ever dreamed that the U.S. evacuation of Saigon in 1975 would have been repeated less than 50 years later by the U.S. evacuation of Kabul?

There is so much focus on the exact details as if derailing one of them would make any difference.

Brushing off the “details” is a convenient way to avoid confronting the uncomfortable pattern Pood laid out, namely, that U.S. interference planted the seed for future chaos. The 1953 coup wasn’t a footnote, it was the foundation. Ignoring this clear chain of cause and effect doesn’t erase it, it just reveals how unwilling you are to take account for the long-term consequences of your short-term penis erection over Palestinian deaths. GTFO

 

[laughing dog]

Muslims opressing Muslims is not a juicy story. Ie Hamas opressing Palestinians. But the Jews doing it is. Even though they have been bending over backwards to accomodate the Palestinians.

By slowly encroaching on their on land and encouraging settler violence in the West Bank, torturing detainees, and dealing death and destruction to civilians in Gaza? Or is that being “super nice”?

You need to separate what the government does and what the settler (cunts) do.

Its also important to understand that the Palestinians are also violent towards the settlers

The method is that the settlers buy land from impoverished Palestinians. This is using private American money.

Its very hard for the Israeli government to stop. If they want a modern state where people are equal under the law.

Saying that the Israeli government is encouraging settler violence is just good ole' antisemitic racism. They don't. And that’s a silly accusation.

The Israeli gov't does little to nothing to either prevent settler violence or arrest violent settlers. That is a fact.
Educate yourself - Settler Violence

Israel doesn't torture detainees. I think you have them confused with Hamas?

There have been long standing multiple reports of the Israeli torture of detainees.
Educate yoursefl - Welcome to Hell is a sample of one such report. And before you trot out your kneejerk anti-semitic slur, the report is from an Israeli NG0.

 

[Gospel]

Get ready for the trademark

& surface-level response.

 

[pood]

Israel doesn't torture detainees. I think you have them confused with Hamas?

There have been long standing multiple reports of the Israeli torture of detainees.
Educate yoursefl - Welcome to Hell is a sample of one such report. And before you trot out your kneejerk anti-semitic slur, the report is from an Israeli NG0.

But you see, Zoidberg will dismiss this because the Palestinian victims of torture are lying because they are Palestinians.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lauren, you keep retreating to the same tired dodge: that if any part of the dataset is flawed, none of it can be trusted—and that if independent monitors didn’t catch every error, they must be in on the fraud. That’s not skepticism. That’s intellectual cowardice dressed up as rigor.

And once again you fail to understand.

It's not that the dataset is flawed. It is that glaring flaws were not detected by supposedly careful review. A careful review that fails to detect an obvious problem clearly isn't a careful review.

You’re not vetting information. You’re filtering it—through politics, through fear, through the desperate need to keep calling this a war when it has long since become a massacre.

I am not attempting to verify information. I am rejecting information that is clearly false.

Let’s talk numbers. You admit the 4,000 bad entries don’t prove the other 30,000 are fake—but then immediately say no conclusions can be drawn from any of it. That’s not logic. That’s retreat. That’s the intellectual equivalent of plugging your ears and yelling “Hamas propaganda” every time a child’s corpse is pulled from rubble.

It's not that the 4k entries say the others are fake. It's the 4k entries say the others are completely untrustworthy. We don't know how many have died.

This isn’t about “solving the larger problem.” It’s about stopping mass death in real time, not hiding behind abstract resolutions while hospitals are bombed and journalists are killed. You invoke “the larger problem” like a magician reaching for a trapdoor—because you know the moment we look directly at the carnage, the excuses fall apart.

You think that the small problem can be solved apart from the big one. No, you'll just get another 10/7 and you can pretend you didn't realize it would happen.

If you truly believed oversight was impossible, you’d call for new oversight. If you really thought the numbers were flawed, you’d demand better accounting. But you don’t. You just discredit, deflect, and deny.

You are making the fundamental error of believing there must be an answer. This is the standard mistake of the left.

Because the truth isn’t that it’s unknowable.

It’s that you already know.

And you’re just not willing to say it out loud.

You have repeatedly demonstrated that you don't know the truth. You keep repeating old Hamas propaganda.

 

[Gospel]

You are making the fundamental error of believing there must be an answer. This is the standard mistake of the left.

The standard mistake of the right is never following their own advice, insisting there’s no solution while still pretending to have all the answers. But if you truly believe there are no answers, then you can’t turn around and claim to support Israel’s answer either. And for the record, I do agree with Israel’s goal: dismantling Hamas, defending its people, and preserving itself as a Jewish-majority democratic state. What I question, and rightfully so, is how they’re going about it. Because if the execution ignores humanitarian law, breeds more extremism, and fuels endless cycles of violence, then maybe the ‘how’ is just as important as the ‘why. Fake supporters of Israel never stop to consider this. They just sit in their armchairs, spewing hateful rhetoric that ends up feeding Hamas propaganda.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

and that no one here is an apologist for Hamas or the Iranian government. No one here likes or supports either.

Whatever you say.

Whatever I say? Are you calling me a liar? Everyone here has repeatedly condemned Hamas and terror in general, including Israeli terror, and I am quite confident in saying that no one here supports the Iranian government.

It comes down to intent.

I do not believe you intend to be an apologist for Hamas. My impression is that Derec doesn't, either.

But when you let Hamas dictate the "facts" to you you end up being an apologist even though you don't support them.

 

[Gospel]

You have repeatedly demonstrated that you don't know the truth.

And you've repeatedly shown that the truth means nothing to you every time it's put right in front of you.

 

[Gospel]

and that no one here is an apologist for Hamas or the Iranian government. No one here likes or supports either.

Whatever you say.

Whatever I say? Are you calling me a liar? Everyone here has repeatedly condemned Hamas and terror in general, including Israeli terror, and I am quite confident in saying that no one here supports the Iranian government.

It comes down to intent.

I do not believe you intend to be an apologist for Hamas. My impression is that Derec doesn't, either.

But when you let Hamas dictate the "facts" to you you end up being an apologist even though you don't support them.

By that same logic, Loren, I could say you don’t intend to be a white supremacist, but when you parrot propaganda that dehumanizes Palestinians and reduces their suffering to talking points, that’s exactly what you sound like. I don’t believe you mean to come off that way, but hey, it’s not about intent, right? It’s about the message you’re reinforcing.

 

[Gospel]

Muslims opressing Muslims is not a juicy story. Ie Hamas opressing Palestinians. But the Jews doing it is. Even though they have been bending over backwards to accomodate the Palestinians.

By slowly encroaching on their on land and encouraging settler violence in the West Bank, torturing detainees, and dealing death and destruction to civilians in Gaza? Or is that being “super nice”?

You need to separate what the government does and what the settler (cunts) do.

Its also important to understand that the Palestinians are also violent towards the settlers

The method is that the settlers buy land from impoverished Palestinians. This is using private American money.

Its very hard for the Israeli government to stop. If they want a modern state where people are equal under the law.

Saying that the Israeli government is encouraging settler violence is just good ole' antisemitic racism. They don't. And that’s a silly accusation.

What settlers do is that they stir up trouble and then come running to the IDF when the Palestinians retaliate. I do not envy the IDF's mission. It must be an impossible situation to police

Israel doesn't torture detainees. I think you have them confused with Hamas?

What Israel does is mass arrests of (allegedly) violent Palestinians who are kept locked up without trials or oversight. That is genuinely bad and something Israel should stop. The reason they do it is the scale of attacks. The Palestinians are very violent. It just goes on and on. They also fight eachother.

The sheer scale of Palestinian violence makes this a challenge to manage in accordance with the rule of law. But they of course should. Its fundamental for a modern democratic state.

I also understand this from the Israeli perspective. The average Israeli is just so fucking sick of the pervasive Palestinian violence. Just going out at night for drinks in Israeli proper is an adventure. I understand if they have had enough of it and just want them locked up.

While I understand it I don't condone it.

BTW, Palestinians also think Palestinian violence is a problem

Which can be contrasted with Egypt. Also Muslim. Has so little violence sociologists struggle with explaining why

I don’t believe you intend to sound like a colonial apologist, DrZoidberg. But when you justify mass detentions without trial, describe a population as inherently violent, and frame settler aggression as an unavoidable nuisance while painting Palestinians as the core problem, well, that’s the exact same framework white supremacists used to justify Jim Crow, apartheid, and British colonialism.

You're not calling for mass oppression directly, but you're reinforcing every narrative that historically leads to it. And like Loren said: it’s not about intent. It’s about the message you’re repeating. So, by your own standard, you sound like an apologist for settler-colonial abuse. Whether you mean to or not.

 

[pood]

You think that the small problem can be solved apart from the big one. No, you'll just get another 10/7 and you can pretend you didn't realize it would happen.

You’ll get many more 10/7s because of what Israel is doing, and you can pretend you didn’t realize they would happen.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lauren, at this point you’re not arguing law or fact. You’re arguing for impunity—hiding behind selective readings and bad-faith interpretations.

You asked, “Where does it say they have to lift a finger?” Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention says exactly that. It mandates that relief supplies must be allowed through, even if there are concerns about diversion. Yes, a party can restrict aid if there is solid reason to believe it will be commandeered by the enemy—but even then, the obligation does not disappear. The law requires efforts be made to ensure aid reaches civilians by other means. That’s not some optional moral bonus—that’s the core of the Convention: protect civilians, even in the fog of war. What you’re defending isn’t lawful wartime conduct. It’s starvation as leverage.

Try actually reading it!

Each High Contracting Party shall allow the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores and objects necessary for religious worship intended only for civilians of another High Contracting Party, even if the latter is its adversary. It shall likewise permit the free passage of all consignments of essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under fifteen, expectant mothers and maternity cases.

The obligation of a High Contracting Party to allow the free passage of the consignments indicated in the preceding paragraph is subject to the condition that this Party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing:

(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,
(b) that the control may not be effective, or
(c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods.

The Power which allows the passage of the consignments indicated in the first paragraph of this Article may make permission conditional on the distribution to the persons benefited thereby being made under the local supervision of the Protecting Powers.

Such consignments shall be forwarded as rapidly as possible, and the Power which permits their free passage shall have the right to prescribe the technical arrangements under which such passage is allowed.

Where does it impose any alternative obligation if 23a is violated?? And note that Hamas is also violating the 4th and 5th paragraphs.

You don’t quote the full provision because you know what it says. You pretend the moment there’s any risk of diversion, a state can simply choke an entire population. But international law isn’t written to comfort strongmen. It’s written to restrain them.

Quoting the part that negates it is enough. This time around I posted the whole thing.

You continue to make the standard error of assuming there must be a good answer, and it's corollary that it's the side with the power that's responsible for finding it.

You try to shift the blame to Tehran. That’s not a legal argument; it’s a distraction. International law does not assign guilt in zero-sum equations. One party’s violation does not erase the obligations of the other. That’s why Geneva exists in the first place—to prevent war from becoming a moral free-for-all. You invoke Iran to avoid looking at Israel’s actions. But Israel is the one enforcing the blockade. Israel is the one bombing convoys, targeting civilian infrastructure, and obstructing international aid. That’s not a matter of opinion. It’s documented by every major humanitarian body, international press outlet, and yes, even U.S. intelligence.

And you still don't understand. Geneva is about protecting purely civilian things, but is specifically written to exclude situations where the defender would gain military benefit from the Geneva requirements.

If Hamas is actually interested in feeding the people why are they going around shooting people trying to pick up aid? And torturing/killing locals who are assisting in it's distribution??

12 Gaza Humanitarian Fund workers murdered in Gaza by Hamas, bounties placed on crew | The Jerusalem Post

GHF announced that 12 of its local staff have been murdered, and others have been tortured.

www.jpost.com

You accuse me of chanting instead of proving guilt. But that’s because you refuse to recognize evidence that doesn’t wear your team colors. The bombing of hospitals, refugee camps, schools—these aren’t just allegations. They’re confirmed through satellite footage, eyewitness accounts, and official Israeli statements. The death toll isn’t a rumor. It’s been corroborated not just by the Gaza Health Ministry, but by the WHO, the U.N., and even the U.S. State Department. The targeting of aid workers is confirmed by the very organizations they belonged to. The facts are there. You just don’t like what they prove.

Nobody's denying they happened. The question is what was under those bombs, something that satellite footage can't answer. And we know answers from the ground are heavily tainted by Hamas.

Then you take your cynicism a step further. You claim radicalization isn’t about trauma, but perception. As if decades of occupation, displacement, and siege are just footnotes to a psychological trick. But you can’t have it both ways. If radicalization happens when people believe they’re under attack, and you’re the one dropping bombs, bulldozing homes, and cutting off food and water, then you’re the one validating that belief. Whether or not you accept their suffering as legitimate, your policies are what give the extremists their material. You can’t bomb grievances out of existence.

Once again, half the story. The point about radicalization being about perception is that it doesn't need any actual oppression. Simple example: the Incel movement. Men who can't find a romantic partner + radicalization. There's no oppressor. (Observations: Lots of observations that a lot of Incels look like they're on the autism spectrum. And the reality is that an awful lot of people on the spectrum simply can't play the social game and will be left out.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

They either prefer to stay or they can not leave because they are not allowed to, by Egypt and Hamas and Hamas' supporters.

I honestly believe that a bunch of them would rather escape Hamas. Israel would rather that they did. So, why is there not a big bunch of Gazans fleeing Gaza?

Because the GWM and their international supporters don't want to lose them. Those people need human shields to use for the media.
Tom

Yeah, remember that stupid floating pier?

One of the objections to it was that people might escape via it. Hamas objection, not Israel.

 

[pood]

Once again, half the story. The point about radicalization being about perception is that it doesn't need any actual oppression. Simple example: the Incel movement. Men who can't find a romantic partner + radicalization. There's no oppressor.

So now Palestinians whose land has been stolen, who have been blockaded and bombed, who have been kept in an open-air prison in Gaza, aren’t being oppressed at all — they’re just like incels! And just like incels who have the temerity to think they are entitled to have sex, the Palestinians have the temerity to feel they are entitled to food, water, and secure living conditions. Imagine the gall!

 

[laughing dog]

They either prefer to stay or they can not leave because they are not allowed to, by Egypt and Hamas and Hamas' supporters.

I honestly believe that a bunch of them would rather escape Hamas. Israel would rather that they did. So, why is there not a big bunch of Gazans fleeing Gaza?

Because the GWM and their international supporters don't want to lose them. Those people need human shields to use for the media.
Tom

Yeah, remember that stupid floating pier?

One of the objections to it was that people might escape via it. Hamas objection, not Israel.

If you are talking about this floating pier - The rise and fall of the US aid pier for Gaza -

The pier was dismantled last week after delivering less aid than hoped due to fire, weather and distribution struggles​

No mention in the article of Hamas at all.

So, do you have a source that indicates the pier was removed at Hamas's request?