Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Arctish]

I am asking for your evidence that something you say happened really did happen, and that it happened often enough often enough to justify the killing of barefoot shirtless men trying to surrender to IDF soldiers in Gaza.

You have provided no evidence that supports your claims, despite repeated requests. So at this point I'm calling shenanigans.

Just look at the discussion of why the hostages got shot.

I am asking for your evidence that something you say happened really did happen.

I am also asking for your evidence that this thing you say happened, happened often enough to justify the killing of barefoot shirtless men trying to surrender to IDF soldiers.

Post your evidence.

Under normal conditions the actions of the soldier who fired would be in the insane category.

More than one soldier fired, you absolute ignoramus.

For someone who claims he cares about the hostages, you sure don't act like you give a shit when three of them are murdered.

But everyone on the Israeli side seems to regard it as an understandable mistake--which only makes sense if this was a rare real one amongst a sea of fakes. In other situations Israel has definitely condemned misdeeds, so it's not a coverup.

As with so much of the world, look for the answer that is the least surprising.

It is obvious you are still ignorant as to the facts, and you give every indication you are determined to remain so.

You say it happens so frequently it doesn't get reported. Is that your excuse for being unable to support your claim? No one reports the things you magically know by using your super senses?

Can you find a news report of "man gets speeding ticket"?

Yes. Google it. Or remain ignorant.

If you had any interest in getting your facts straight you could have done a bit or research, not just made up stories about what happened to Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samer Talalka. You would know it wasn't just one soldier who opened fire. You would know Haim's death is especially appalling.

You might not know it was a war crime. You don't seem to be able to identify those. But you at least would know how easy it is to spot your bullshit.

I'm saying it would be hard for Israel to do and they would have no reason to, it would be easy for Hamas to do and very beneficial. Which explanation makes more sense? Don't blindly decide it must be Israel because they're the bad guys, look at which scenario makes more sense.

You are saying it would be hard for Israeli snipers to kill Palestinians, or to set up video surveillance of the bombed out areas they control? Don't be ridiculous.

Pretty hard for snipers to be set up in hostile territory. Someone would note the shots and backtrack the snipers. You can snipe from the wilderness, sniping from within a hostile population is very difficult. Look at what actually happens when someone tries it--they're always promptly backtracked even by an unarmed population. (Although said unarmed population will not engage they can still point.) And we are to believe that Israel does it successfully over and over? And why are there no other kills attributed to said "snipers"?

Look for the answer that leaves the fewest things that don't fit.

Your rebuttal is that it's pretty hard for the IDF to set up snipers in Gaza?

I never said it was a cakewalk, but are you seriously claiming the IDF can't do something if it's "pretty hard"?

I agree there was nothing going on that made it necessary for a sniper to shoot. I disagree that there was nothing going on that would have caused one to shoot:

Israeli Soldiers Ordered to Shoot at Unarmed Palestinians Waiting for Aid

'No Civilians. Everyone's a Terrorist': IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Kilings and Rampant Lawlessness in Gaza's Netzarim Corridor

Both of these trace to Haaretz. They are not a credible source.

Haaretz is quite liberal in its editorial content, but that does not impact the accuracy of its factual reporting. It is far more credible than whatever source you use for the majority of your claims.

Note that other reporting on the situation said the soldiers were ordered to fire "towards" the crowd. Not "at" the crowd. That is a very important distinction--in a military context firing towards means warning shots into the air.

Is that really your argument? Hamas knows the Israelis will commit war crimes so it sets up cameras to catch IDF forces in the act?

The point is that without any contact with them we have no evidence that they're actually IDF. And it makes a hell of a lot more sense if they're Hamas.

We do have evidence. We have reporters and satellite images indicating who was in control of those parts of Gaza at the time of the killings, and we have responses from the IDF when questioned about the events.

It makes sense to you that it was Hamas' doing because Hamas is all powerful and the IDF their hapless dupes whenever it suits your argument.

The sniper claims all involve things where Israel didn't control the area.

Bullshit.

Post your evidence about the circumstances surrounding the killing of Hala Kheris and then we will talk about it.

I'm not going to waste my time if all you're going to do is make up stories and tell lies.

Where they were was never suggested--but if they don't know where how can they know who?? And the lines were far enough away that a sniper shot would have been extremely difficult even if they had a line of sight. The whole thing makes a hell of a lot more sense as Hamas. And some of the reports on it said a burst of fire. Snipers don't fire bursts.

Murdering ambulance drivers and paramedics attempting to reach injured civilians is not self defense.

Well, if the ambulance drivers would quit ferrying combatants around they would get the protections traditionally given ambulances.

You have no evidence the ambulance drivers are ferrying combatants around, especially the ones who coordinate their activities with the IDF.

Israel has published shots of them doing it long ago. The Red Crescent refused to condemn the behavior.

"Long ago"? As in, there is no evidence it has happened recently but maybe 5-10 years ago an ambulance transported a wounded man to a hospital and he might have been a member of Hamas?

Oh, yeah, you forgot about that, didn't you? That the ambulances are notifying the IDF of their planned route of travel and waiting for the IDF to greenlight the rescue attempt but are still being killed by IDF forces along with the injured civilians they are trying to reach.

Apparently you think Israel is committing this type of war crime is also predictable.

And why do you automatically assume it's true? Plenty of other claims have been proven false.

You have no evidence I automatically assume anything is true, and quite a bit of evidence I check my sources and don't use the ones that post lies and exaggerations.

Did you read either of the news stories I linked to? Care to discuss them? Or are you just going to bullshit, make vague references to events you say happened, fail to support your assertions, and lie about me?

Your "news" is from Hamas.

Did you follow the links? Did you do any supplemental research? Or are you simply refusing to learn anything and justifying your ignorance by scaring yourself with thoughts of being tricked by an all powerful Hamas public relations department?

 

[bilby]

Can you find a news report of "man gets speeding ticket"?

Took less than a second:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06...-for-driving-100kph-in-an-100kph-zone/6513868

Extreme speed, yes. I'm talking about the ordinary things.

That was not a case of "extreme speed". At all.

 

[bilby]

If Hamas actually were trying to feed the people why this:

Sada News - The Ministry of Interior in the Gaza Strip and the National Security warned on Thursday against dealing or cooperating, directly or indirectly, with the American organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) or with any of its local or foreign agents, under any name or circumstance

Lots of ominous words but the penalty isn't spelled out.

Well, you've got us there. There is absolutely no possible reason to warn against cooperating with a foreign agency from a nation that is allied to your enemy during wartime.

No such agency has ever, in the history of warfare, been used to infiltrate spies or saboteurs, and the very idea that anyone might try to do that under cover of humanitarian assistance is unthinkable.

Geneva says the IDF gets to dictate how aid distribution works. And most people involved are locals.

But if the aid goes through the GHF rather than Hamas then Hamas can't use it to control the people and to make payroll.

I answered your question.

You didn't even address my answer.

 

[DrZoidberg]

The entire narrative of Palestinians as poor oppressed victims is such bullshit. The culture of the Palestinians is so poisoned its now toxic. There's historical reasons for this. But an explanation is not an excuse. There's no excuse for how the Palestinians of Gaza and Lebanon have behaved towards Israel.

Due to how extreme Palestinian behaviour has been, Israel is limited in what they can do to live in peace next to them.

No, Israel isn't perfect. But at least they're behaving responsibly. We have yet to see any such behaviour from Palestinians.

The thing is they have been brainwashed from birth. They have no realistic chance to know what they are doing is evil.

I disagree. Its down to narratives.

The Palestinians, in general, see Israel as a colonial possession. A left over from British imperialism.

Since everyone today agrees that colonialism is wrong... then resistance is seen, by most Muslims and ex colonials, everywhere, as a loudably duty.

Islamism and Islamofascism isn't helping. But its not the whole story.

The Israeli narrative is that Israel is the home of Jews and they're, very much indigenous.

It is complicated. Israel is made up of Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenzi Jews and Sefardic Jews. Most Jews in Israel are Mizrahi Jews. The Jews that never left. They're culturally indistinguishable from Palestinians, and have all the same cultural problems. Ie, tribal, rediculously, self serving, short sighted, corrupt and nepotistic. The government of Israel has always been Ashkenazi. The state was founded by Ashkenazi. Business is dominated by Ashkenazi. Ashkenazi are culturally European. So is Israel a Mizrahi state or Ashkenazi state? By number Mizrahi. But in practice Ashkenazi. So does make it a colonial state of European expats or a home for the indigenous. There's no simple and obviously correct answer. You can spin the narrative either way and be correct.

Palestinian bad behaviour has triggered Israeli bad behaviour. Round and round. Both the Palestinians and Israelis have, at this point, buckets of, the other sides, atrocities to point to and insist that the other side is evil. Neither of them are wrong. Most Israeli atrocities were committed in the 60'ies. While a long time ago. Not long enough for Palestinians not to remember.

But that doesn't mean the world needs to tolerate it.

Agreed. An explanation is never an excuse

 

[DrZoidberg]

Israel was hit by 21 000 rockets over the past month.

These rockets don't make it into the news. Because it's not news. It just keeps going.. on and on and on. And has, with short breaks, for decades.

And this is what people keep ignoring.

News reports the unusual. Not the horrific normal.

Your news is IDF “news”.

Fabricating a rocket attack over a built up area is... let's call it... difficult.

They can, and are, tracked by a multitude of international satelites. Many are publicly funded and accessible through any university. These satellites track almost anything moving through the air.

Here's a privately funded app, using publicly available sources, tracking rocket attacks as if it is the weather. Why? Because this is a basic and necessary service in Israel. This is just the reality of living in Israel. And has been for decades. This service is a practical tool, and not propaganda.

Rocket Alerts in Israel

Real-time rocket alerts in Israel

rocketalert.live

Is that acceptable as a source?

 

[Swammerdami]

I'm saying any claim that events after 1948 are the cause of the conflict is inherently wrong.

Let's both calm down a bit. Forget for a moment, if you can, your hatreds; and let's just review logic, common-sense and English language.

(A) True or False: Most complex situations have multiple causes.
(I'll assume you succeed in answering this question correctly. If not, I give up.)

(B) True or False. It is usually wrong-headed to write "THE cause." More appropriate is "Some of the causes."

(C) We can now rewrite the above sentence to have the form

"It is wrong to claim that some of the causes of the XXX occurred after 1948."​

I've replaced "conflict" with "XXX" in the (vain?) hope that you can overlook your prejudices and hatreds long enough to treat this as purely a problem in English composition.

I guess we'll agree to disagree on the truthiness of that statement, but at least it is more sensical now.

 

[laughing dog]

Israel was hit by 21 000 rockets over the past month.

These rockets don't make it into the news. Because it's not news. It just keeps going.. on and on and on. And has, with short breaks, for decades.

And this is what people keep ignoring.

News reports the unusual. Not the horrific normal.

Your news is IDF “news”.

Fabricating a rocket attack over a built up area is... let's call it... difficult.

They can, and are, tracked by a multitude of international satelites. Many are publicly funded and accessible through any university. These satellites track almost anything moving through the air.

Here's a privately funded app, using publicly available sources, tracking rocket attacks as if it is the weather. Why? Because this is a basic and necessary service in Israel. This is just the reality of living in Israel. And has been for decades. This service is a practical tool, and not propaganda.

Rocket Alerts in Israel

Real-time rocket alerts in Israel

rocketalert.live

Is that acceptable as a source?

Thank you for the information. An alert may represent more than one rocket. The data for the alerts is taken from the IDF.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Israel was hit by 21 000 rockets over the past month.

These rockets don't make it into the news. Because it's not news. It just keeps going.. on and on and on. And has, with short breaks, for decades.

And this is what people keep ignoring.

News reports the unusual. Not the horrific normal.

Your news is IDF “news”.

Fabricating a rocket attack over a built up area is... let's call it... difficult.

They can, and are, tracked by a multitude of international satelites. Many are publicly funded and accessible through any university. These satellites track almost anything moving through the air.

Here's a privately funded app, using publicly available sources, tracking rocket attacks as if it is the weather. Why? Because this is a basic and necessary service in Israel. This is just the reality of living in Israel. And has been for decades. This service is a practical tool, and not propaganda.

Rocket Alerts in Israel

Real-time rocket alerts in Israel

rocketalert.live

Is that acceptable as a source?

Thank you for the information. An alert may represent more than one rocket. The data for the alerts is taken from the IDF.

This app is for informing the public. If there's an alert, but no rocket, people will be angry for having their time wasted. Each business that has to shut down unecessarily loses money. Not to mention that the customers are locked up in shelters, unable to buy stuff.

These numbers are not faked. It would be tinfoil hat territory to believe that.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You’re not making an argument—you’re rehearsing a dodge. Over and over, you cling to the same circular shield: “Nobody caught this one anomaly, so everyone is lying.” That’s not a refutation of data. That’s a reflexive excuse to ignore it.

Yes, it is. Standard logic: if p then q. But q is false, therefore p is false.
q = the data is reasonably accurate
p = that the data has been carefully checked.

It doesn't matter that everyone continues to repeat the lie, that doesn't make it true. Hamas ensures the only numbers out there are their numbers.

Let’s be absolutely clear: finding some duplicate or sequential ID entries doesn’t mean the entire dataset is fabricated. Errors in wartime reporting are common—not because of conspiracy, but because hospitals are bombed, communications are down, and people are burying children before logging stats. If your standard for legitimacy is zero error, then no war zone reporting will ever pass your test, and that’s precisely the point: you’ve set the bar so impossibly high that the only truth left is the one that serves your narrative. That’s not investigative rigor. That’s engineered doubt.

I never said the whole dataset is fabricated. I said the whole data set is completely untrustworthy.

You seem to be dividing the world up into true and false. No, the real world is true, false, and unknown. I consider the Gaza death toll to be an unknown.

And of course errors happen in war. Initial reporting is going to be bad and probably a major overcount. But this is supposedly carefully verified data. Suppose I listed my social security number on my voter registration as 123-45-67890. Think that would go through??

And your point about “check digits” in ID systems is utterly beside the point. You’re treating an administrative formatting glitch like it invalidates 35,000 corpses. It doesn’t. And pretending it does is a grotesque deflection from the actual human toll.

We have no evidence of 35,000 corpses. You continue to treat this as if I'm nitpicking when I'm actually showing that your data is based on garbage.

And it's moot anyway as 35,000 corpses would prove nothing. Last I saw Israel claimed to have killed 20,000 combatants. If that produced only 15,000 dead civilians that's actually evidence of them doing a very good job.

Reuters picked up the 20,000 figure:

How many Palestinians has Israel's Gaza offensive killed?

This explainer examines how the Palestinian toll is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

www.reuters.com

And note that the "war" deaths are not all war:

Hamas fatality figures for Gaza war are ‘clear disinformation,’ according to new study

In contast to Hamas claims, paper finds female and child fatalities are underrepresented relative to their proportion of the Strip's general population, demonstrating IDF efforts to avoid civilian casualties

www.timesofisrael.com

Some of the natural causes deaths are leaking into the data.

As for ceasefires and humanitarian solutions: yes, I’ve offered them, and no, you haven’t seriously engaged with any of them. You dismiss ceasefires because “Hamas still has hostages,” as if military occupation has ever been an effective rescue strategy. You scoff at UN monitoring because of what happened in Lebanon, ignoring that monitoring works when backed by teeth—as it has in dozens of other conflicts. And you scoff at international diplomacy without acknowledging that your own logic ensures nothing else can be tried.

Ceasefire with the hostages still held is a big win for Hamas. That's why they're trying to promote it.

Where has the monitoring actually worked against terrorist forces???? It works against armies, not against those who fight from the shadows.

You complain no one proposes viable solutions—then reject anything short of total war as unworkable. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological paralysis. Your whole worldview is a self-sealing loop: Israel is always right, every critic is compromised, and every solution is a fantasy. But the real fantasy is believing that infinite bombs will somehow bring finite peace.

It's not my job to find viable solutions. There are a lot of military analysis in the world, many are hostile to Israel. Why in the world have they not presented anything? They would love to get egg on Israel's face, but they don't have any egg to throw.

You say past U.S. governments didn’t support better ideas. But that’s false: the Kerry peace framework, the Arab Peace Initiative, even internal Israeli proposals for demilitarized autonomy zones in Gaza were floated and shelved—not because they were too violent, but because they required restraint. You’re not interested in restraint. You’re interested in punishment with plausible deniability.

Let's see what that "peace" initiative says. While I do not trust Wikipedia on issues like this it's bias is against Israel so it's good enough here:

Arab Peace Initiative - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The initiative offers normalisation of relations by the Arab world with Israel, in return for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon), with the possibility of comparable and mutual agreed minor swaps of the land between Israel and Palestine, a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194,

Israel gives up every bargaining chip and evacuates tens of thousands of people in exchange for normalization of relations? That's ludicrously stupid.

And note the poison pill: resolution 194. Full right of return, the destruction of Israel.

So this amounts to Israel commits suicide.

Just because it contains the word "peace" doesn't mean it's about peace.

And let’s address the most telling line in your response: “Israel rejected our ideas as killing too many civilians.” That’s not a defense. That’s a confession. You just admitted that Israel chose the bloodier path. If that’s your gold standard, then stop pretending you care about minimizing harm. You care about victory, full stop. And your version of victory has no room for the civilians who happen to be in the way.

You really need to learn to read.

I said Israel rejected the US approach as too bloody. In other words, Israel chose the less bloody path!

So no—you haven’t exposed bias. You’ve exposed the playbook: discredit the witnesses, redefine the law, deny the bodies, and claim the moral high ground while standing on the rubble. That’s not justice. That’s whitewash. And history has seen it before.

Continuing to chant about supposed evidence doesn't prove anything.

Lauren,

You keep wrapping your evasions in philosophical language, but it’s just a shell game. You’re not clarifying the data; you’re dismissing it wholesale because it’s inconvenient to your position. You say you’re treating Gaza’s death toll as “unknown,” but you’re not treating it as unknown – you’re treating it as irrelevant. Every time the figures are raised, you pivot to claiming they’re fabricated or worthless, yet you never present an alternative accounting, only blanket dismissal. That’s not skepticism; it’s deliberate fog.

You argue “some errors = the whole dataset is untrustworthy,” but that’s not logic, it’s motivated reasoning. Wartime death counts are always imperfect, from Dresden to Aleppo to Mosul. Nobody requires zero error to establish human toll. Your demand for absolute certainty is just a backdoor to absolve Israel of any responsibility by insisting no number is high enough unless it’s been hand-counted under ideal lab conditions in a war zone. You’re setting a standard no conflict in human history could meet.

You then hide behind the idea that it’s “not your job to find solutions.” Fine. But if your entire posture is to reject every proposed ceasefire, diplomatic initiative, monitoring plan, or humanitarian corridor as unworkable, then admit it: you’re not interested in peace. You’re interested in justifying endless war. And you reveal that openly when you frame any ceasefire as a “big win for Hamas,” as though Gazan civilians are acceptable collateral to prevent Hamas from feeling emboldened. That’s not analysis. That’s moral surrender disguised as toughness.

Finally, you pivot to rejecting the Arab Peace Initiative because it demands withdrawal from occupied territories and refugee rights under UN resolutions. Call it suicidal if you wish, but don’t pretend it was never a real proposal. It’s only “ludicrously stupid” to those for whom permanent occupation is the baseline. And your dismissal of it as Israel’s “suicide” exposes everything: to you, peace itself is a mortal threat if it requires equality, dignity, and land rights for Palestinians.

So no, this isn’t standard logic. It’s standard avoidance: dismiss the data, dismiss the solutions, dismiss the humanity of the victims, and then claim the moral high ground. That’s not truth-seeking. That’s choosing comfort over reality.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You’re trying to rewrite the rules of war mid-conflict because reality has become inconvenient for your side. So let’s clear away the evasions and deal with what you’re actually defending.

You say: “Where exactly does it say that?”—referring to the illegality of killing civilians en masse during a hostage recovery. It says it in Geneva Convention IV, Article 33: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” It’s also embedded in Articles 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I, which demand that parties to a conflict distinguish at all times between civilians and combatants, and cancel or suspend attacks if civilian harm is expected to be excessive. These are not vague suggestions. They are binding treaty law.

Note the term "punished". What Geneva is talking about is things like "we were ambushed while driving through this town so we are going to shoot 100 of you". It is not talking about civilians caught in the crossfire.

And note "civilian harm is expected to be excessive." You're skipping over the last part.

And your “yardstick” of comparing Israel’s conduct to Western powers? That’s not a legal defense. That’s a race to the bottom. If you’re saying, “Well, others have done worse,” congratulations—you’ve joined the moral company of Iraq 2003, Vietnam, and My Lai. Those weren’t victories. They were crimes.

No, the treaty simply says "excessive" without providing a yardstick. I'm selecting the only yardstick around: the actions of those who try to comply with Geneva.

Then you argue that the rules “don’t work against someone who’s trying to subvert them.” That’s the oldest authoritarian justification in the book: suspend law because your enemy ignores it. But that is precisely why the rules matter. You don’t need the Geneva Conventions for battles between equals. You need them when one side believes the rules are an obstacle, not a guide. Because if your morality disappears the moment it’s tested, it was never morality to begin with—it was convenience.

I'm saying the rule is designed to avoid mistakes, not designed to prevent subversion. And you do need the Geneva convention for battles between equals.

Next, you defend the IDF’s targeting doctrine by claiming their “track record is excellent.” Let’s unpack that. Over 35,000 killed, nearly half of them women and children. Thousands of videos showing collapsed buildings, shredded bodies, aid workers killed in marked convoys, journalists bombed in their homes. Are you seriously claiming this is the gold standard of precision warfare? That the carnage is a sign of success? No amount of smug anecdotes about civilians standing nearby proves anything—except that humans get used to hell when there’s no escape.

Look at any urban war, you'll find pretty much the same thing. Here we see a multitude of "press" that have a tremendous amount of overlap with Hamas. Hamas is 1-2% of the population. Yet a large majority of the "press" are Hamas. And note that this doesn't even need to be duplicity--the cameramen recording the atrocities are in one sense "press", yet are unquestionably combatants as they are working on a military objective: propaganda video. Legitimate embedded reporters are never taken to the front lines and while they very well might be told "don't film X" they aren't told what to film.

Israel has put together a video showing scenes that Hamas posted. They don't release it out of respect for the families, but they have screened it for some reporters. It is much, much worse than the video they have released:

Spoiler: Warning: Video is not safe for humanity, let alone work

Screams Before Silence Film

Never-before-heard eyewitness accounts from released hostages, survivors, and first responders. In Screams Before Silence, a 60-minute, presenter-led documentary film, Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta and founder of LeanIn.org, interviews multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first...

www.screamsbeforesilence.com

Then you accuse me of parroting Hamas deception because I refuse to whitewash civilian death. That’s not just dishonest—it’s lazy. I’ve condemned Hamas repeatedly, directly, and without qualification. What I refuse to do is adopt the cowardly moral equation that says: because Hamas is evil, anything done to destroy them is automatically just. That is not law. That is not ethics. That is vengeance dressed up in the language of justice.

You "condemn" Hamas but demand perfection in dealing with them.

Finally, your parting claim is that “we don’t see an entire civilian population torched.” Maybe you don’t. But the UN does. The WHO does. Doctors Without Borders does. The satellite images, the field reports, the starvation data, the mass graves, the shattered shelters—all of it tells a different story. One that you’re either ignoring or justifying.

And I've already pointed out that they aren't seeing anything, just parroting Hamas. If they were seeing they would realize the data is bad.

And starvation data? Very few cases--the first was known to be medical, since then they wised up and didn't admit it but when you see one person that's skin and bones while everyone else looks ok the likely explanation is medical.

Mass graves? Yeah, I recall one such story--claims of a mass grave with people executed while bound. Israel's response: a photo of the open grave taken well before the IDF captured the area. I do not recall any substantiated claims of mass graves made by Israel. (Israel does admit to digging up the grave--they were looking to see if there were any of the hostages buried there. Judaism attaches great importance to proper burial. Found none, put things back as they were.)

So don’t talk to me about hypotheticals when the morgues are full. Don’t talk about restraint when the war zone looks like an earthquake hit it. And don’t talk about legality while sidestepping the law itself.

First, show the morgues are full.

This isn’t about perfect answers. It’s about not turning away from the ones we already know. And if your argument collapses the moment we apply the standards we’ve already agreed on—then the problem isn’t me.

You think we know. You continue to fail to do anything to establish the wrongs actually happened. (Yeah, I realize you can't. The data doesn't exist.)

You keep calling out “evasions” when the only one evading here is you. You cite Geneva Convention IV Article 33 as though it’s some open license to declare everything Israel does illegal. But you’re twisting its meaning beyond recognition. Collective punishment, as you know, refers to deliberately punishing civilians for acts they did not commit — executing them in retaliation, bulldozing entire towns as retribution. It does not prohibit military action against combatants just because civilians are tragically in harm’s way. Pretending otherwise isn’t moral clarity; it’s moral grandstanding.

You also cherry-pick Protocol I’s “excessive harm” clause but ignore proportionality analysis entirely. “Excessive” is measured relative to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. That is the law you keep citing but refuse to grapple with, because acknowledging it undermines your entire posture of legal absolutism.

Your next move is the tired moral relativism accusation: “You’re racing to the bottom by comparing Israel to other Western armies.” No, Lauren, that’s exactly how proportionality has always been judged. You’re the one erasing legal nuance to moralise from your perch, while ignoring that your preferred standard would criminalise every single NATO or US operation in modern urban warfare. You just don’t care, because consistency isn’t your goal — condemnation is.

You then trot out the “rules only matter when your enemy ignores them” platitude, which sounds poetic but collapses under reality. You think Hamas following no laws while using hospitals and schools as shields creates no legal complexity for Israel? That the Conventions were designed for two uniformed state armies facing off on an open field? You’re moralising in a vacuum. And you know it.

Your indignation over the IDF’s “track record” misses the point entirely. Urban warfare against an entrenched terror group that uses human shields inevitably produces civilian deaths — it is horrific, but it is not the same as intentional massacre. You can keep repeating “35,000 dead” like it’s a magic spell that ends debate, but without differentiating combatant from civilian, without acknowledging Hamas embeds itself deliberately within civilian populations to inflate those tolls, your outrage is performative rather than analytic.

And let’s not pretend your condemnation of Hamas is meaningful when every practical solution you demand would leave Hamas intact, rearmed, and emboldened. You talk about ceasefires as if they are a moral default without grappling with their strategic implications — namely, that Hamas uses them to regroup and prepare the next slaughter. That’s not a strawman; that’s documented history.

Finally, your blind faith in unverified casualty reports is telling. You accept Hamas numbers, filtered through NGOs that themselves rely on Hamas-controlled health ministries, as if they are carved in stone. You dismiss counter-evidence about mass graves, starvation reports, and orchestrated propaganda as if Israel has no right to investigate or question — because your narrative depends on them being true.

Here’s the bottom line, Lauren: You’re not holding Israel to a higher moral standard. You’re holding it to an impossible standard — one you would never apply to any other Western army, nor to Hamas itself. That’s not human rights advocacy. That’s ideological prosecution.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You’re not defending facts. You’re defending power. And every line you’ve written proves it.

You say, “It’s not all prisoners, just terrorist ones.” But that’s exactly the problem: the word “terrorist” is doing all the work, with none of the scrutiny. In practice, it’s a blanket label stamped on virtually any Palestinian detainee—from stone-throwing teenagers to administrative detainees held without trial. The bar isn’t “committed terrorism.” It’s “Israel said so.” And when that accusation is used to justify indefinite detention, destroyed homes, or cutting off aid to families, you’re not punishing terrorism. You’re criminalizing identity. That’s collective punishment—and it’s illegal.

We hear about the terrorist ones. The regular criminals are not controversial, we don't hear about them. Doesn't mean they don't exist.

You dismiss Mandela’s example by calling him a terrorist. That’s how every occupying power describes its dissidents until they’re forced to reckon with history. You don’t get to call violent resistance “terrorism” while erasing the decades of violence that led to it. Because if your side gets a monopoly on force, and the other side gets criminalized for resisting it, then you haven’t built a system of justice. You’ve built a hierarchy of who’s allowed to fight back.

You aim at civilians, you're a terrorist. Note the "aim" part--if you aim at a military target that has civilians on it that doesn't make you a terrorist. Nor does it make us a terrorist when we bombed a Chinese consulate, aiming for the prior occupant of the space.

Your “simple test” of targeting sounds nice until it crashes into reality. Israel’s record isn’t clean. Aid convoys struck. Medical workers killed. Journalists bombed in marked press gear. Thousands of children dead. If you truly cared about whether a strike intended to kill civilians, you’d demand an investigation—not offer excuses. But you don’t want accountability. You want plausible deniability in bulk.

I'm not going to demand an investigation because I know there's no way to conduct one.

In times past thorough investigations generally have been done and they come out pretty close to what Israel admitted and denied.

And your claim that “civilians” might not be civilians unless proven otherwise is grotesque. Under international law, the burden is on you to show a person was a combatant—not on the corpse to prove its innocence. That’s the whole point of the Geneva Conventions: to restrain militaries from assuming every brown body near rubble is a valid target. When you flip that standard, you haven’t just ignored the law—you’ve reversed it.

The point is you look at any hint that they might be civilian and decree them to be civilian if you find such a hint. I'm looking for what is most likely.

You say the death toll must be inflated because Hamas listed “buried” people without names. First of all, you’re wrong—many have been identified, and third-party agencies like OCHA and WHO have verified the overwhelming number of casualties as civilians. But even if there’s uncertainty, the answer isn’t to throw out the data. It’s to investigate it. You don’t get to shrug off mass graves as “likely Hamas fighters” because the paperwork didn’t survive an airstrike.

You continue to insist there has been third party checking when there clearly has not.

You also claim “there’s no cycle, just terrorists choosing violence.” That’s not just lazy—it’s ahistorical. The occupation didn’t begin with rockets. It began with military rule, land seizure, home demolitions, and decades of statelessness. The rockets are a symptom. You can condemn them without pretending they came from a vacuum.

It began with the 1948 attack by the various Arab nations. In response to Israel declaring it's existence. A state can't act until it exists, therefore it's impossible for them to have taken an action that caused the attack.

Then you say diplomacy was fake because “Arafat walked.” So let me get this straight: Israel expands settlements, delays talks, ignores UN resolutions, but the peace process collapsed because one man walked away 25 years ago? That’s not an argument. That’s a scapegoat with a long expiration date.

Arafat was offered almost everything he was asking for. He walked rather than making a counteroffer. Anyone who had actually been seeking a resolution would have either accepted or counteroffered. Doing neither means he didn't want an agreement.

You also repeat the fantasy that Palestinians are “violent for a paycheck.” That’s cartoon logic. No one risks their life in a war zone so their aunt gets a monthly stipend. That’s not how humans work. People resist—rightly or wrongly—because they’re pushed to the wall, stripped of rights, and robbed of hope. Saying “they just want cash” is the kind of thing you say when you don’t want to look at what’s really fueling the rage.

Sure they do, when they don't have other options.

Just look at what was recently found in Ukraine:

(To save the reading: Offered $1k to deface a building. He looked--bomb with cell phone detonator, not paint.)

Russia pays young Ukrainians to be unwitting suicide bombers in shadow war

Oleh, 19, was offered $1,000 for a paint attack on a police station – but the bag he was given contained a crude bomb

www.theguardian.com

Lauren,

You keep calling this a moral argument, but it’s just another scaffold for excusing violence from power. Let’s break it down.

You say “We only hear about the terrorist prisoners.” That’s precisely the issue. You’re relying on what you’re told by the party doing the imprisoning, ignoring that “terrorist” is a label they can slap on anyone—kids with rocks, activists posting online, journalists exposing corruption. In your framework, accusation becomes guilt. That isn’t justice. That’s authoritarianism rebranded as security.

Then you dismiss Mandela by calling him a terrorist. That’s not an argument. That’s rote historical amnesia. The powerful always call the powerless who resist them terrorists until they’re forced to rewrite the narrative decades later. You’re just reciting the party line of every regime that ever faced an independence movement.

Your targeting “test” collapses under its own hypocrisy. Israel’s record isn’t theoretical—it’s visible in burned-out aid convoys, medics in body bags, and children dug out of rubble. You say you won’t demand investigations because you “know there’s no way to conduct one.” That’s convenient. If you refuse to examine evidence, of course you’ll find none. Your approach isn’t truth-seeking. It’s a preemptive excuse to absolve your side no matter what.

Then you flip international law on its head. You argue it’s fair to assume people are combatants unless proven innocent. No. That is exactly what the Geneva Conventions exist to prohibit. The burden of proof is on the attacker to establish a military target—not on the corpse to prove it didn’t deserve to die. Your inversion of this standard isn’t just grotesque; it’s legally and morally bankrupt.

You scoff at mass grave data because “paperwork didn’t survive an airstrike.” The coldness of that logic is staggering. Entire families are being buried under collapsed homes, and your first instinct is to dismiss their deaths because Hamas didn’t submit notarized casualty forms to meet your selective standard of proof. That’s not skepticism. That’s deliberate blindness.

You rewrite history by claiming the occupation began with Arab armies attacking Israel in 1948. You ignore what preceded that: land purchases riddled with evictions, British colonial partitioning against local wishes, decades of Zionist militias driving Palestinians from their homes. History didn’t start the day you choose. Violence didn’t appear in a vacuum.

You blame Arafat for peace collapsing, ignoring the context of settlements expanding, borders tightening, and negotiations designed to produce surrender, not sovereignty. One man walking away doesn’t erase decades of structural injustice.

And your final cartoon claim that Palestinians are violent for a paycheck betrays the emptiness of your worldview. You reduce an entire people’s rage, grief, and desperation to mercenary greed. No one straps themselves into hopelessness for cash. They do it because they’ve been cornered, generation after generation, until death becomes cheaper than life.

Lauren, you’re not defending morality. You’re defending power’s right to do whatever it wants and blaming the victims for not dying quietly enough to suit your narrative.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say “they voted for Hamas, so they chose war.” Let’s strip that logic down. You’re claiming that a single election—under siege, with the more conciliatory party discredited and corrupt—justifies 18 years of blockade, mass civilian punishment, and treating 2 million people as enemy combatants. That’s not democracy. That’s collective sentencing.

By Hamas.

You continue to not recognize that Hamas is deliberately running up the death toll to get sympathy.

I'm reminded of one of the horrors of the world I have become aware of: Parents in India deliberately crippling their child so he could beg more successfully.

You frame everything through “they brought it on themselves”—but that’s a dodge. It assumes the only relevant facts begin with Hamas and end with rockets. That’s like watching a building collapse and blaming the final brick. You erase the decades of military occupation, land dispossession, statelessness, and legal limbo that preceded it—as if injustice only starts counting once someone fights back.

If you want to go back you need to go back to the start: The Arab invasion in response to the creation of Israel.

You dismiss peace overtures as fake—but then ignore the obvious double standard: when Palestinians walk away from talks, they’re saboteurs. When Israel builds settlements through them, delays final status indefinitely, and then claims “security” requires permanent domination, you call it “caution.” If you were serious about negotiations, you’d hold both sides accountable. But your definition of “dialogue” is Palestinians accepting whatever terms Israel dictates.

Apples and oranges.

Where has Israel walked from peace talks??

Then there’s Area C. You claim there’s no data on permit denials—as if 98% rejection rates published by B’Tselem and the UN are unknowable. You wave it off with “maybe the applications are fake.” That’s not evidence. That’s conjecture. And it’s telling that you don’t apply the same skepticism to Israeli retroactive legalization of illegal settler outposts.

I wouldn't trust B'Tselem to tell me if it's raining outside. I have looked at some of their "data" that bent over backwards to hide the combatant nature of some of the dead.

As for Gaza—no, the blockade didn’t begin as a surgical response to terrorism. It began when the wrong party won an election. Israel and the U.S. openly backed a failed coup to remove Hamas, then sealed the Strip when it backfired. The blockade didn’t just restrict weapons. It crippled water, medicine, fuel, and food. UN reports have long described it as “collective punishment”—a term you ignore because it doesn’t fit your narrative.

The UN is effectively worthless.

You say child detentions are justified because some teens are used in conflict. But do you hear yourself? You’re justifying military incarceration of minors on demographic averages. That’s not law—it’s profiling. Geneva doesn’t say “it’s okay to jail kids if some of them fight.” It says you protect children from the effects of war. You’ve reversed that principle entirely.

No, I'm saying you are assuming non-combatant status based on poor data. You're saying Under 18 = not combatant, the demographics make it clear that's not the case. Doesn't say anything about any given case, just that you can't use it to declare them not a combatant.

You claim “sniper shootings at protests” are the fault of Hamas—because they “forced people” to march. That’s not a defense. That’s not even believable. You’re trying to rationalize the deaths of journalists, medics, children, and wheelchair-bound demonstrators as acts of self-defense—when every credible rights group, including Israeli ones, have documented them as unjustified.

Read.

No. I'm saying that the "sniper" deaths appear to be Hamas. We keep having examples of "IDF snipers" that somehow manage to only hit clearly civilian targets, often in front of cameras, despite not having IDF forces within range. I have yet to see one of these claimed "sniper" deaths that makes any sense as a sniper. (There was that one reporter that got hit--but there were no IDF snipers around. At first it appeared that she was hit by a stray round from combat some distance away, but the "proof" turned out to actually exonerate the IDF. I see no reason to believe the proof in the first place so I consider that one definitely not an IDF sniper but overall unproven.)

And yes, you keep calling it “pay for slay.” But then admit Israel bulldozes homes even if the suspect is dead—because it deters others. That’s not justice. That’s state vengeance. Families aren’t being punished for crimes they committed. They’re being punished as examples. That’s the textbook definition of collective punishment.

It's the family that would get the pay.

Your explanation for Israel refusing to define borders is that it would upset people. You know what else upsets people? Permanent occupation without rights. Endless checkpoints. Demolished homes. That’s what’s driving the cycle—not just Iranian cash, but the daily reality of people living in cages built to look like negotiations.

Whataboutism.

And finally, you say, “they’ve always chosen war.” No. They’ve chosen elections, diplomacy, armed resistance, international appeals, and mass nonviolent protest—and every time, they were met with either rejection or repression. What you call a “choice” is actually a narrowing corridor where every option leads back to subjugation. That’s not agency. That’s entrapment.

That's not a rebuttal.

And where's the "nonviolent protest"?? Beware that when applied to Palestinian actions anything below firearms is declared "nonviolent". And protests were used to try to infiltrate people into Israel.

You keep trying to anchor this debate in moral clarity, but your clarity only works when it conveniently erases half the story.

You say “they voted for Hamas, so they chose war” is justified. That’s collective punishment by definition. You’re holding two million people responsible for a single election under siege, where the alternative was a corrupt Fatah government propped up by the occupier. Imagine applying that standard anywhere else in the world: punishing an entire civilian population for the ballot they cast under duress. That isn’t justice. It’s retribution with a bureaucratic veneer.

You pivot to your anecdote about parents in India crippling their children to beg, as though this horror justifies treating Palestinians as complicit in their own slaughter. It’s a grotesque analogy that reveals more about your contempt for their humanity than it does about Hamas’s cruelty. You’re essentially saying: because Hamas is evil, every child under its rule forfeits their right to life. That’s not logic. That’s collective damnation.

You insist “history starts in 1948 with Arab invasions.” Convenient. You erase the dispossession, the expulsions, the massacres like Deir Yassin that preceded the declaration. You erase the British colonial engineering that set this up. Your history starts where it suits your narrative and ends wherever Israeli accountability might begin.

You claim Palestinians never offer real peace. Yet Israel’s own archives confirm it walked away from negotiations while expanding settlements, moving goalposts endlessly. And when Arafat walked, you froze history there forever to avoid asking why the “peace process” was structured to preserve domination, not end it.

Your contempt for B’Tselem and UN data is telling. You dismiss them not because they’re wrong but because their findings inconvenience you. You never apply the same scrutiny to IDF statements or settler organizations. Your skepticism is selective, weaponized, and fundamentally dishonest.

You argue that minors aren’t necessarily civilians because demographics show Hamas uses teens. That’s an admission that you’re comfortable treating all youth as potential combatants. International law says children are protected. You say demographics override that. That is not the law. That is profiling. You’ve inverted Geneva to suit your security dogma.

You rationalize sniping medics, journalists, and wheelchair users by conjuring conspiracies that Hamas fakes it all. It’s the same rhetorical move as every power that kills civilians and then calls them enemy actors. You demand impossible proof for their innocence, but accept rumor and insinuation as enough for their guilt.

And then your final claim: “They’ve always chosen war.” That’s not analysis. That’s your refusal to see their choices beyond violence. They’ve tried elections—Israel blockaded them. They tried diplomacy—Israel stalled and expanded settlements. They tried international appeals—ignored. They tried mass nonviolent protest—snipers met them at the fence. You call it a choice when it’s a corridor with every exit sealed.

Lauren, you’re not defending law. You’re defending a structure that strips agency, dignity, and humanity from an entire people, while calling it security. That’s why your worldview isn’t moral clarity. It’s moral anesthesia.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You keep repeating that your math disproves war crimes, that your skepticism overrides every global agency, and that because you didn’t personally see bodies, the famine must be fake. That’s not reason. That’s denial with a calculator.

I made no such claim. I'm certainly in no position to look for bodies, but I can look at Hamas not finding the bodies as evidence they don't exist.

Let’s start with your central crutch: “They missed bad data, so everything is invalid.” No, they didn’t “miss” anything—they published what they could verify under active bombardment, where ID systems, morgues, and hospitals were obliterated. You cite technical anomalies in ID sequences like they’re smoking guns, but ignore the conditions on the ground: no power, no fuel, no connectivity, and mass death. You treat the fog of war as proof of fraud. That’s not analysis—it’s a bad faith loophole to dismiss all evidence you find inconvenient.

They claimed it was carefully verified. There should be no obviously bad data. The presence of any obviously bad data says it clearly was not checked.

And your famine dodge? It’s grotesque. You ask “where are the bodies” like children dying quietly of dysentery, dehydration, or untreated wounds don’t count unless they collapse on live television. But famine isn’t just death. It’s wasting. It’s irreversible developmental damage. It’s watching your child’s immune system fail while trucks full of food are kept at a checkpoint because the right agency logo wasn’t on the paperwork.

I ask "where are the bodies" because there have been repeated claims of mass death expected soon. The situation hasn't changed. If the claims had any connection to reality there should be a lot of people dead of starvation. But there aren't, thus the prediction must have been wrong.

It's like the end-of-the-world-on-day-X kooks. X comes and goes, nothing happens. Believe them the 10th time around???? But you believe the famine guys the 10th time around.

This is the cruelty of your logic: unless every warning results in immediate mass graves, you say it was false. But what you’re really doing is arguing that the prevention of catastrophe proves it was never real. If people survive despite the siege, you call it proof the siege was fine. That’s not logic—it’s retroactive absolution for deliberate strangulation.

I said nothing about graves. I'm simply testing how well the prediction matches up with reality. And the answer is abysmally.

Then you pull the classic evasion: “I’m not excusing Israel—just questioning your scrutiny.” Except you’re not scrutinizing. You’re dismantling the very idea of scrutiny. You reject Amnesty, HRW, UN rapporteurs, and dozens of independent journalists, and then claim there’s no evidence. That’s not reasoned doubt. That’s scorched-earth epistemology: if a fact can’t be traced directly to the IDF press office, you pretend it doesn’t exist.

I reject sources that have shown themselves to be highly inaccurate.

You even try to reduce the entire destruction of Gaza to a math equation—“most buildings were probably empty.” As if that’s a defense. As if the legality of bombing neighborhoods hinges on your speculative occupancy rates rather than the laws of proportionality and distinction. Newsflash: You don’t get to obliterate civilian infrastructure and then retroactively declare everyone inside a combatant by absence of proof.

Saying it's not math doesn't make it not.

Military objective: tunnel.

Geneva obligation: minimize civilian casualties.

Geneva says nothing about civilian buildings falling into the collapsed tunnel.

And your final move? The same rhetorical rinse-and-repeat: “Nobody likes this, but it doesn’t prove atrocity.” Actually, it does—when it’s systemic, foreseeable, and preventable. That’s exactly what defines atrocity under international law. But instead of engaging that, you redefine war crimes as “undesirable outcomes.” As if it’s just a shame, not a choice.

Where are you getting this definition? Because "systemic" is not part of it at all. And foreseeable is only relevant if it's a wrong. Yes, a bunch of buildings collapsed into tunnel voids. But Geneva doesn't care.

You are approaching this as if civilian trumps military, but reality, and Geneva, are the other way around. Pretty much, military use = valid target.

So here’s what it comes down to: You don’t want scrutiny. You want veto power over accountability. You’ve confused your moral fatigue for clarity and your disbelief for righteousness. But history doesn’t remember the people who justified inaction by demanding perfect data. It remembers the ones who looked at a slow-motion atrocity and said, “Not until I see the bodies stacked just right.”

I have no problem with honest scrutiny. I have a big problem with a whole bunch of "human rights" (they've lost their purpose and have become political) organizations making dishonest scrutiny.

You’ve made your position clear: if the numbers are too high, they’re fake. If they’re too low, they don’t matter. If civilians die, they were probably Hamas. If aid is blocked, it must be justified. If war crimes are alleged, the real crime is saying so.

You continue to repeat your base claims as givens, preaching the word of Iran over and over.

You keep framing this as moral precision when it’s just denial dressed up in logic. Let’s cut through it.

You claim “I didn’t say famine is fake, just that bodies prove it.” That’s exactly the cruelty of your reasoning. You’re treating famine as real only when it becomes mass graves you can count. But famine isn’t just corpses. It’s immune collapse, organ failure, permanent cognitive damage in children. It’s parents skipping food for days so their kids get a single meal. You dismiss all of that because it doesn’t fit your cinematic standard of proof. That’s not skepticism. That’s moral anesthesia.

You keep saying, “If the prediction was wrong, then it was always wrong.” No. That’s like saying if a dam is about to break and engineers shore it up in time, the dam was never at risk. You confuse prevention with fabrication, then call it logic. What you’re really doing is absolving the siege by blaming those warning about its effects.

You insist “bad data proves everything is invalid.” No, it proves data is messy under bombardment, with no power, bombed-out hospitals, and destroyed ID systems. Your obsession with formatting anomalies ignores the basic fact: tens of thousands of human beings have been killed or maimed, and your first instinct is to discredit them rather than investigate. That isn’t analytical rigor. It’s engineered doubt.

You dismiss all famine warnings as apocalyptic hoaxes because “X date passed with no mass death.” But Gaza is not a doomsday cult prophecy. It’s a population under deliberate strangulation. Food insecurity is catastrophic. Malnutrition is endemic. Medical care is collapsing. And your response is: “Well, where are the bodies?” as if only visible corpses prove structural violence. That’s moral rot disguised as reason.

You say “I reject Amnesty, HRW, UN rapporteurs, independent journalists—because they’re inaccurate.” But you accept IDF statements at face value, no scrutiny required. Your skepticism is selective and political. It’s not about truth. It’s about defending power from accountability.

You reduce entire apartment blocks bombed into dust to “math equations” about probable occupancy. You treat civilians as Schrödinger’s bodies: if you don’t see them, they weren’t there, so legality is restored. But proportionality isn’t just about numbers. It’s about foreseeability, precaution, and intent. Geneva doesn’t say “no civilians visible, fire at will.”

And your final move: redefining war crimes as mere “undesirable outcomes.” Under international law, systematic, foreseeable, and preventable harm to civilians—even incidental—crosses the line when precautions are ignored or military gain is outweighed by human cost. You wave this away with “Pretty much, military use = valid target.” That’s not what Geneva says. That’s what every violator of it claims.

Lauren, what it comes down to is this: You don’t want accountability. You want veto power over the very idea of accountability. You’ve confused your moral exhaustion with moral clarity, and your disbelief with righteousness. But disbelief is not a virtue. It’s just a shield you hold up so you never have to see what’s happening.

Because in the end, your standard is simple: if the death toll is too high, it’s fake. If it’s low, it doesn’t matter. If children starve, they’re Hamas human shields. If journalists are shot, they’re probably terrorists. If the world cries out, it’s just propaganda. That’s not logic, Lauren. That’s choosing blindness—and calling it wisdom.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say I didn’t address your “mirror and baby” analogy—so let me be crystal clear and finish that thought for good. If a terrorist hides behind a baby, and you knowingly take a shot that kills the baby, then both parties are responsible. One is guilty of using a shield. But the other is guilty of choosing to shoot anyway. That’s what international law says. That’s what any ethical framework with a spine says. Your decision to pull the trigger isn’t erased just because your enemy is vile. If you choose to end a child’s life knowing that outcome was likely, you own that decision—fully. There is no immunity clause for “but the other guy was worse.”

You still didn't address it, you substituted a totally different scenario that doesn't even contain a mirror.

And my question was who gets convicted, not who is morally responsible.

You also tried to twist the definition of collective punishment by saying, “to be punishment, it has to be punishment,” as if using the word in a circle absolves the reality on the ground. But international law doesn’t ask about intentions—it judges consequences. If you blockade food, restrict fuel, cut off water, and bomb neighborhoods, then the people suffering are being punished, whether or not you call it that. You don’t get to cut off incubators and flatten bakeries and pretend it’s all just unfortunate security fallout. That’s the exact kind of linguistic shell game international law was written to stop.

No, Geneva is all about intentions. And I'm not the one making the circle--I'm pointing out you failed to prove either part of your assertion.

You insist Gaza doesn’t show “worse conduct than what’s expected of a good guy in war,” but look around. Civilians are dying by the tens of thousands. Hospitals, schools, aid convoys, refugee camps—all have been hit repeatedly. These aren’t isolated incidents. And they aren’t rumors. Even the U.S. State Department—Israel’s closest ally—has publicly said Israel likely violated international humanitarian law by obstructing aid. The UN, WHO, and nearly every major humanitarian body agrees. If that still fits your definition of the “good guy,” then you’ve erased the meaning of the term altogether. At that point, “good” becomes a flag you wave, not a standard you uphold.

Hamas misuses things, they get hit. You fall for it, blame Israel, so they do it again.

And let’s not pretend this is about real scrutiny. You dismissed a mountain of casualty reports because one ID number looked off to you. One document that didn’t pass your personal smell test is enough, in your view, to invalidate the entire death toll. That’s not rational skepticism—it’s deliberate denial. It’s like watching a city on fire and saying, “Well, one spark looks suspicious, so maybe the whole thing isn’t burning.” You’re not searching for the truth. You’re working backward from the answer you already decided on.

No. I'm not remotely claiming authorship. I'm saying that the fraud is so obvious that I can see it (tweets were posted) despite not knowing the language. Let's consider a chunk of the main streets here in town, reading north to south: Lake Mead, Charleston, Sahara, Desert Inn, Desert In, Dessert Inn, Flamingo, Tropicana, Durango, Russell.

Clearly, at least two of these are fakes. You don't need to know my city to figure that out.

You keep saying the numbers don’t match “your reality,” but that’s the problem. You’re not engaging with evidence. You’re rejecting anything that threatens your preferred narrative. When the Red Cross warns of famine, you say, “Where are the bodies?” When the UN says the majority of deaths are women and children, you reply with vague speculation about who might be buried in rubble. When Israel itself confirms civilian deaths, you don’t pause—you pivot.

They say that a bunch of people are going to die if nothing is done--and their predictions never come true.

And I'm not speculating about those in the rubble, just using it as an indication of bad data because it doesn't change. That's not how reality works. The 10,000 showed up early on, never increased with additional bombing, never meaningfully decreased despite people doing things. That doesn't make sense.

And if the dead are mostly women and children, why do we have a Hamas person saying that far more kids lost their father than their mother?? Consistency check failure.

So don’t talk about “the facts” when you’ve spent this entire thread running from them. Don’t ask “who killed the baby” and then shoot while blaming the mirror. You’re not upholding principle—you’re dodging accountability. And deep down, I think you know it.

I don't regard your preaching as facts. You continue to dismiss problems with the data and jump right back to your faith, never truly comprehending my blasphemy.

Let me lay it out clearly:

In the analogy, there’s a terrorist holding a baby with a mirror behind them. You shoot at the terrorist, but the bullet hits the mirror and kills the baby. The question isn’t about moral blame alone. It’s about criminal liability. Who gets convicted?

Your version erases the mirror entirely and reframes it as a direct choice to shoot the baby. That’s not the analogy. In my scenario, the shooter intended to hit the terrorist. The terrorist intended to use the baby as a shield. The mirror created an unintended, tragic consequence.

Under international law, intent and foreseeability matter. You can call both parties morally responsible. But legally, the terrorist’s use of the baby as a shield is a direct war crime. The shooter’s liability depends on whether precautions were feasible and proportionality was maintained. You keep flattening everything into “if a child dies, the shooter is guilty.” That’s not how law works. That’s moral absolutism that collapses under real-world complexity.

Your argument about collective punishment again ignores the actual legal standard. Geneva doesn’t define collective punishment purely by consequences. It focuses on intentional punishment of civilians for acts they didn’t commit. If civilian suffering results from military operations targeting combatants, it falls under proportionality analysis, not automatic classification as collective punishment. You blur these lines deliberately to moralize rather than analyze.

You cite tens of thousands of civilian deaths, UN and WHO statements, and the US State Department critique as proof that Israel is “worse than a good guy.” You miss the point: moral outrage is justified by tragedy, but legal culpability is assessed by intent, targeting decisions, precautions taken, and proportionality. You’re collapsing moral horror into legal guilt without examining those criteria. That isn’t clarity. It’s rhetorical shortcut.

Finally, your last swipe about me “running from facts” is projection. You call data anomalies irrelevant because conditions are hard. But sloppy data under bombardment isn’t surprising. Claiming it’s still carefully verified is the problem. And no, my skepticism isn’t faith-based rejection. It’s refusal to accept casualty numbers as gospel when they remain static, unadjusted, and are published by parties with known propaganda incentives—especially when even Hamas spokespeople contradict the ratios your narrative demands.

Lauren, your preaching isn’t fact. It’s moral condemnation repackaged as argument. You dismiss every challenge as blasphemy and call that integrity. But real integrity tests its beliefs against inconvenient truths. You haven’t done that here. You’ve just built a moral fortress to keep your certainty unchallenged.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say Israel isn’t pulling the trigger indiscriminately—that they’re “evaluating based on actions.” But when every marked ambulance becomes a potential threat, every journalist a suspect, and every child a maybe-fighter, what you’re describing isn’t careful targeting. It’s a policy of systemic doubt that strips civilians of their legal protections unless proven otherwise. That’s not how the Geneva Conventions work. The burden of proof in war doesn’t rest on the dead to prove they were innocent—it rests on the military to ensure they weren’t targeted without cause.

All things which should be protected have been rampantly misused by Hamas. Thus combat decisions are going to be based on behavior, not symbols.

You reference a “list of terrorist journalists” and a hostage held by a rogue Al Jazeera freelancer as if that justifies the dozens of reporters killed in clearly marked gear, sometimes live on camera, with no evidence of wrongdoing. Even the Committee to Protect Journalists, which tracks deaths across all conflicts globally, has said Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history—and they’ve found no proof that the majority were engaged in combat. Unless you’re claiming CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, and the UN are all compromised too, that argument doesn’t hold.

UN certainly is compromised. And none have rebutted the list of "journalists" that were Hamas.

And invoking Hamas’ abuses to justify Israel’s suspicions isn’t a defense—it’s a concession. If you admit that Hamas violates humanitarian law, then the legal and moral obligation is on Israel not to follow them down that hole. That’s what separates a military that upholds law from one that collapses into tit-for-tat impunity. The whole foundation of IHL is that protection isn’t conditional on the enemy’s behavior—it exists to restrain the powerful even when provoked.

As I said before, you are setting an impossible standard.

If Israel believes a hospital or an ambulance is being used improperly, it must have clear, individualized evidence and still minimize harm—not treat every instance as potentially hostile by default. Otherwise, you’re not applying law. You’re rewriting it.

That's not how it works. Let's take that ambulance as that's the most clear cut case. Israel demanded that they stop using them as combat transports. The Red Crescent (Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross) refused to condemn the behavior. At that point the symbol becomes absolutely meaningless as an indication of non-combatant status.

You keep framing this as if I’m defending indiscriminate killing. I’m not. I’m describing the reality created by Hamas’s systematic abuse of protected symbols. When ambulances are used to transport fighters and weapons, when press vests are worn by combatants for cover, the symbols themselves become unreliable indicators of noncombatant status. That isn’t moral endorsement. That’s operational reality.

You argue that “the burden of proof in war doesn’t rest on the dead to prove innocence.” That’s true in principle. But in practice, when protected symbols are exploited repeatedly, militaries are forced to evaluate based on behavior and intelligence, not just symbols. Otherwise, the laws designed to protect civilians become loopholes for combatants to exploit without consequence.

You cite the Committee to Protect Journalists’ data as though it’s definitive. But CPJ’s methodology counts every journalist killed in a conflict zone, regardless of whether they were embedded with combatants, dual-role operatives, or producing propaganda for militant groups. That doesn’t invalidate the tragedy of their deaths, but it does complicate the moral framing. And yes, the UN has shown bias on this conflict repeatedly—its credibility on these issues isn’t above scrutiny just because it carries institutional weight.

You say “If Hamas abuses humanitarian law, Israel has a higher duty to uphold it.” That’s a moral principle I agree with. But what you’re proposing isn’t just higher duty. It’s unilateral disarmament of practical intelligence analysis. You want Israel to treat every marked asset as noncombatant regardless of intelligence suggesting otherwise. That’s not upholding law. That’s refusing to adapt to an enemy who systematically weaponizes your compliance.

You argue Israel must have “clear, individualized evidence” before acting against misused protected assets. In theory, yes. But in reality, actionable intelligence is rarely packaged as courtroom-ready dossiers. When the Red Crescent refuses to condemn ambulance misuse, when hospitals are used as command centers, these are not hypotheticals. They’re documented tactics. At some point, continued blanket trust becomes negligence.

You call my position an impossible standard. But your standard is just as impossible: to treat every protected symbol as unassailable regardless of enemy abuse. That isn’t law. That’s idealism so rigid it collapses the moment it meets asymmetric warfare.

Lauren, the real question is this: how do you uphold humanitarian law when an enemy deliberately embeds itself within its protections? Your answers so far amount to moral absolutes untethered from operational reality. Law only works if it accounts for the battlefield it seeks to govern. Otherwise, it becomes a suicide pact for those who follow it—and a shield for those who exploit it.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Lauren, your entire response rests on the illusion that acknowledging complexity is an excuse to abandon principle. You keep insisting the situation is ugly, as if that ugliness justifies stripping away every norm of law, proportionality, or accountability. But atrocity isn’t self-justifying. It’s not evidence that “nothing better is possible”—it’s proof that what we’re doing is wrong.

No. I'm saying that you are oversimplifying it to the point you have no understanding of what's going on. And you are repeatedly throwing out basically random answers from your prayer book. Look at your paragraph above.

You make reference to "atrocity"--but there has been only one action in this war that would reasonably be describe as an atrocity: 10/7.

And of course it's not evidence that nothing better is possible, this isn't even a strawman. The reason I say nothing better is possible is that nobody has made any serious proposal of a better answer. I'm not talking about random voices on the internet (although most of what you have suggested falls into the random answers category), but the professionals. There are a lot of them out there, many are hostile to Israel. Why have they said nothing?

Consider the two most recent air crashes. Washington--within hours I saw a post that had a picture of the helicopter's flight path, pointed to a little zig and said "there's your problem right there." And laying out what is now the accepted answer for what happened: the helicopter pilot avoided the wrong airplane, never saw the one he hit because two objects heading to a collision see each other in a static position--thus, just another light amongst the gazillion lights of a city at night. India: again, within hours we had people pointing out the deployed RAT and the sound it makes, thus showing the plane had no thrust. More than a week before the press started saying that. Yet the Gaza war, nothing.

You say there’s no evidence that a better path exists. The burden isn’t to prove utopia—it’s to stop pretending that bulldozers, sieges, and collective punishment are a substitute for policy. You want to call it realism, but the only thing you’re “realistic” about is continuing to kill civilians.

Once again, faith based answer. And the Hamas playbook: "collective punishment". No, what we see in Gaza is simply war. Particularly horrible for the people because Hamas chooses to fight on in a situation any reasonable army would have surrendered. Very similar to the Japanese strategy at the end of WWII.

You cite Hamas tunnels like a budget spreadsheet justifies bombing neighborhoods. But even your math concedes the point: Gaza is a garrison state—yes. But that didn’t happen in a vacuum. You don’t spend decades isolating, blockading, and humiliating a people without producing the militant infrastructure you claim to be shocked by.

Hamas playbook once again.

Everything you describe happens because of Iranian money.

Look at Africa. Multiple places worse than Gaza--but no meaningful combat because nobody's funding combat. Do you even know where Western Sahara is? And do you know who their oppressor is? Both are Muslim, nothing to use as a weapon before the press, I have yet to stumble on any mention of it on the Internet. (Once you know what to look for you can find it, it's not secret, just not being paraded before the press.)

You say diplomacy won’t work because “one side won’t agree.” But the side you’re referring to—the side with no army, no state, no airspace, no freedom of movement—isn’t the one dictating terms. And pretending that Iran is the only relevant factor is just geopolitical reductionism designed to dodge responsibility.

This war is Islam (currently under the mantle of Iran) vs Israel. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PLO, Hezbollah, all are just masks.

You scoff at elections, ceasefires, or regional cooperation as naïve, but what’s more naïve than thinking endless force will produce anything but more resistance? If someone like you had written off diplomacy in Northern Ireland or apartheid South Africa, those conflicts would still be burning.

The problem is your answers assume the Palestinians are after peace.

Northern Ireland--ended when we got serious about stopping the money.

South Africa--worse than it ever was under the Apartheid regime. They most clearly stepped from the frying pan to the fire. They threw off a small white boot in favor of a giant black boot. Same thing happened in Zimbabwe. When we were there it wasn't unsafe (so long as you stayed away from the minefields), but the fact it was heading into the shitter was apparent without even leaving the airport. And around the world in general the most prized currency was the US$--but in Africa it was the South African Rand (whose symbol I do not recall.)

And your moral compass—frankly—is broken. You claim to “see the facts,” but you’ve erased the distinction between combatants and children, hospitals and bunkers, resistance and terrorism. You’ve turned casualty counts into accounting errors. That’s not clarity. That’s desensitization disguised as strategy.

I see the distinction, you do not. You consistently cite things which suggest a civilian nature as proof something is civilian. But reality is the other way around, the grey areas are military. You take fire from a building, it doesn't matter what the sign says, it's military.

Let’s be clear: the difference between us isn’t idealism versus realism. It’s conscience versus collapse. You’re defending the normalization of cruelty. I’m defending the principle that being attacked by monsters doesn’t turn you into one unless you let it.

No. I recognize the manipulation, you do not.

It's same as the MAGA sheep who keep bleating about the deficit--and don't say a peep about the fact The Felon intends to run it way up.

You’ve chosen a future where domination replaces peace, suspicion replaces evidence, and morality is conditional on whether a missile can find its target. I haven’t. That’s the real difference.

No. You have chosen a "world" where the problems magically disappear. You know you can't solve Iran so you pretend Gaza can be solved without solving Iran. I understand that Gaza is simply one of the horrors Iran has created.

Lauren,

You keep accusing me of abandoning principle when what I’m actually doing is refusing to replace principle with moral theater. You talk about “atrocity” as if merely naming it proves its source, intent, and solution. But atrocity isn’t self-explanatory. It demands forensic clarity, not just rhetorical outrage.

Your analogy to WWII is telling. You say Hamas is like Japan refusing surrender, implying that maximum civilian suffering is simply the natural endpoint of their defiance. But that’s not an argument for necessity—it’s an admission that your strategy is based on crushing resistance through collective punishment, just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were. You’re not describing inevitability. You’re justifying it.

You dismiss structural violence as “faith-based answers” while calling the blockade mere “war.” But blockades that cut off food, fuel, and medicine to civilians are by definition collective punishment under international law, regardless of whether you find that inconvenient. Repeating “it’s just war” is not moral realism—it’s moral surrender to cruelty.

You say there are no viable solutions because “professionals haven’t proposed them.” That’s historically false. The Kerry Framework, the Arab Peace Initiative, unilateral ceasefires, UN-administered demilitarized zones—these have all been tabled and shelved because Israel’s leadership deemed them too politically costly. You dismiss them not because they don’t exist, but because accepting them requires giving up domination as a policy tool.

Your fixation on Iran as the singular puppet master is geopolitical reductionism. Yes, Iran funds and arms militant groups. But Palestinians aren’t drones programmed by Tehran. Their rage didn’t begin with Iranian wire transfers. It began with dispossession, blockade, statelessness, and daily humiliation. Iran exploits that rage, but it didn’t invent it.

You invoke Northern Ireland to argue diplomacy only worked after funding was cut off, ignoring that what ended The Troubles was power-sharing and political inclusion. You cite South Africa to argue they moved from one boot to another, ignoring that dismantling apartheid remains a historic moral necessity despite post-transition failures. You’re using flawed aftermaths to argue against just struggle itself.

You insist you see distinctions between combatants and civilians, but your definitions dissolve under scrutiny. You treat children as potential fighters, hospitals as default bunkers, ambulances as likely combat transports. That’s not discernment. That’s institutionalized suspicion. Geneva exists precisely to restrain that reflex.

And your final swipe that I live in a world of magical solutions betrays your defeatism. You think acknowledging Iran’s role absolves Israel of moral agency in Gaza. It doesn’t. States are accountable for what they choose to do, even under external pressure. Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe not because “Iran made it so,” but because decades of policies—occupation, blockade, de-development—engineered it into one. Iran is a malign actor, yes. But you invoke it like an incantation to shut down responsibility for everything else.

Lauren, the difference between us isn’t realism versus idealism. It’s your moral fatalism versus my refusal to accept that human decency is optional when enemies are vile. You keep saying “there are no solutions.” That’s because you’ve pre-emptively rejected every path that doesn’t involve domination, displacement, or indefinite siege. That isn’t realism. That’s a worldview where cruelty becomes strategy and tragedy becomes proof of its own necessity.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

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.

You keep accusing me of moral collapse when what’s collapsing here is your framing under its own weight. Let’s clarify:

You say “I pivoted to Iran’s hospital strike to balance the scales.” No—I cited it as an unambiguous example of an actual war crime: a deliberate attack on a civilian hospital with no claimed military purpose, no warning, and no acknowledgment. That’s categorically different from Israel striking a hospital being used to launch attacks, whether you like that distinction or not.

You accuse me of “inventing tunnels to excuse bombing hospitals.” That’s absurd. The existence of Hamas’s tunnel networks under civilian infrastructure isn’t speculative propaganda—it’s documented, filmed, mapped, and even acknowledged by Hamas itself. You can condemn Israel’s strategic choices while still acknowledging the operational reality it faces. But you don’t. You erase complexity to preserve your moral binary.

You claim “I redefine civilian.” No. I recognize that civilian status under Geneva conventions is based on function and use in the context of targeting decisions. A hospital being used to house combatants or store weapons forfeits protected status under Article 19 of Geneva Convention IV. That isn’t moral relativism. That’s codified law.

You say “This isn’t a game with a Paladin path.” Exactly. Warfare is tragic, morally fraught, and always ugly. But law exists to regulate that ugliness—not to pretend perfect options exist. You wave Geneva like an absolutist shield while ignoring that its own text recognizes military necessity, proportionality, and the loss of protections when shields are abused.

You accuse me of “selective enforcement” because I distinguish between Iran’s deliberate targeting of a purely civilian hospital and Israel’s strikes on dual-use or abused civilian facilities. That’s not moral collapse. That’s moral reasoning based on context, evidence, and intent—the foundations of any legal analysis.

Finally, you claim “I treat your words as blasphemy because they offend my worldview.” No. I reject them because they collapse law, nuance, and moral agency into a single blanket absolution for Hamas’s tactics while stripping Israel of any right to respond within the fog of war. Your worldview treats every Israeli strike as presumptive criminality, every Palestinian death as evidence of murder, and every Hamas abuse as irrelevant to the legal calculus. That isn’t moral clarity. That’s moral absolutism weaponized as a rhetorical bludgeon.

Lauren, the difference between us isn’t that you hold a standard and I don’t. It’s that your standard ignores enemy culpability entirely and treats Israel’s moral dilemmas as pre-determined crimes. That isn’t international law. That’s ideological prosecution masquerading as principle.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

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.

Lauren,

You say, “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.”

No – I understand perfectly. You’re arguing that if war zone data isn’t perfectly vetted, it’s worthless. That’s not critical thinking. That’s a refusal to engage with reality unless it arrives pristine and unchallenging.

You say, “I am not attempting to verify information. I am rejecting information that is clearly false.”

Which is precisely the problem. You’re not checking or investigating – you’re filtering out anything that forces you to confront mass death. That isn’t discernment. That’s intellectual cowardice hiding behind the word “false.”

You say, “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.”

By that logic, no mass casualty count is ever trustworthy. War, famine, earthquakes – they all produce flawed data under crisis. Your standard conveniently ensures you never have to acknowledge any death toll that makes you uncomfortable.

You say, “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.”

This isn’t a “small problem,” Lauren. Preventing children from being crushed under concrete is the bare minimum of moral decency. Invoking October 7th doesn’t erase the humanity of those killed since. It just shows how willing you are to use one atrocity to justify another.

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

No, the real mistake is believing there isn’t an answer – that slaughter is inevitable, peace is naive, and endless killing is the only reality left. That isn’t realism. That’s moral collapse rationalized as pragmatism.

Calling everything you don’t want to face “Hamas propaganda” doesn’t make it vanish. The bodies remain under the rubble. The truth isn’t unknowable. It’s unbearable. And you’re just not willing to face it.

NHC

 

[DrZoidberg]

You’re not making an argument—you’re rehearsing a dodge. Over and over, you cling to the same circular shield: “Nobody caught this one anomaly, so everyone is lying.” That’s not a refutation of data. That’s a reflexive excuse to ignore it.

Yes, it is. Standard logic: if p then q. But q is false, therefore p is false.
q = the data is reasonably accurate
p = that the data has been carefully checked.

It doesn't matter that everyone continues to repeat the lie, that doesn't make it true. Hamas ensures the only numbers out there are their numbers.

Let’s be absolutely clear: finding some duplicate or sequential ID entries doesn’t mean the entire dataset is fabricated. Errors in wartime reporting are common—not because of conspiracy, but because hospitals are bombed, communications are down, and people are burying children before logging stats. If your standard for legitimacy is zero error, then no war zone reporting will ever pass your test, and that’s precisely the point: you’ve set the bar so impossibly high that the only truth left is the one that serves your narrative. That’s not investigative rigor. That’s engineered doubt.

I never said the whole dataset is fabricated. I said the whole data set is completely untrustworthy.

You seem to be dividing the world up into true and false. No, the real world is true, false, and unknown. I consider the Gaza death toll to be an unknown.

And of course errors happen in war. Initial reporting is going to be bad and probably a major overcount. But this is supposedly carefully verified data. Suppose I listed my social security number on my voter registration as 123-45-67890. Think that would go through??

And your point about “check digits” in ID systems is utterly beside the point. You’re treating an administrative formatting glitch like it invalidates 35,000 corpses. It doesn’t. And pretending it does is a grotesque deflection from the actual human toll.

We have no evidence of 35,000 corpses. You continue to treat this as if I'm nitpicking when I'm actually showing that your data is based on garbage.

And it's moot anyway as 35,000 corpses would prove nothing. Last I saw Israel claimed to have killed 20,000 combatants. If that produced only 15,000 dead civilians that's actually evidence of them doing a very good job.

Reuters picked up the 20,000 figure:

How many Palestinians has Israel's Gaza offensive killed?

This explainer examines how the Palestinian toll is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

www.reuters.com

And note that the "war" deaths are not all war:

Hamas fatality figures for Gaza war are ‘clear disinformation,’ according to new study

In contast to Hamas claims, paper finds female and child fatalities are underrepresented relative to their proportion of the Strip's general population, demonstrating IDF efforts to avoid civilian casualties

www.timesofisrael.com

Some of the natural causes deaths are leaking into the data.

As for ceasefires and humanitarian solutions: yes, I’ve offered them, and no, you haven’t seriously engaged with any of them. You dismiss ceasefires because “Hamas still has hostages,” as if military occupation has ever been an effective rescue strategy. You scoff at UN monitoring because of what happened in Lebanon, ignoring that monitoring works when backed by teeth—as it has in dozens of other conflicts. And you scoff at international diplomacy without acknowledging that your own logic ensures nothing else can be tried.

Ceasefire with the hostages still held is a big win for Hamas. That's why they're trying to promote it.

Where has the monitoring actually worked against terrorist forces???? It works against armies, not against those who fight from the shadows.

You complain no one proposes viable solutions—then reject anything short of total war as unworkable. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological paralysis. Your whole worldview is a self-sealing loop: Israel is always right, every critic is compromised, and every solution is a fantasy. But the real fantasy is believing that infinite bombs will somehow bring finite peace.

It's not my job to find viable solutions. There are a lot of military analysis in the world, many are hostile to Israel. Why in the world have they not presented anything? They would love to get egg on Israel's face, but they don't have any egg to throw.

You say past U.S. governments didn’t support better ideas. But that’s false: the Kerry peace framework, the Arab Peace Initiative, even internal Israeli proposals for demilitarized autonomy zones in Gaza were floated and shelved—not because they were too violent, but because they required restraint. You’re not interested in restraint. You’re interested in punishment with plausible deniability.

Let's see what that "peace" initiative says. While I do not trust Wikipedia on issues like this it's bias is against Israel so it's good enough here:

Arab Peace Initiative - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The initiative offers normalisation of relations by the Arab world with Israel, in return for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon), with the possibility of comparable and mutual agreed minor swaps of the land between Israel and Palestine, a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194,

Israel gives up every bargaining chip and evacuates tens of thousands of people in exchange for normalization of relations? That's ludicrously stupid.

And note the poison pill: resolution 194. Full right of return, the destruction of Israel.

So this amounts to Israel commits suicide.

Just because it contains the word "peace" doesn't mean it's about peace.

And let’s address the most telling line in your response: “Israel rejected our ideas as killing too many civilians.” That’s not a defense. That’s a confession. You just admitted that Israel chose the bloodier path. If that’s your gold standard, then stop pretending you care about minimizing harm. You care about victory, full stop. And your version of victory has no room for the civilians who happen to be in the way.

You really need to learn to read.

I said Israel rejected the US approach as too bloody. In other words, Israel chose the less bloody path!

So no—you haven’t exposed bias. You’ve exposed the playbook: discredit the witnesses, redefine the law, deny the bodies, and claim the moral high ground while standing on the rubble. That’s not justice. That’s whitewash. And history has seen it before.

Continuing to chant about supposed evidence doesn't prove anything.

Lauren,

You keep wrapping your evasions in philosophical language, but it’s just a shell game. You’re not clarifying the data; you’re dismissing it wholesale because it’s inconvenient to your position. You say you’re treating Gaza’s death toll as “unknown,” but you’re not treating it as unknown – you’re treating it as irrelevant. Every time the figures are raised, you pivot to claiming they’re fabricated or worthless, yet you never present an alternative accounting, only blanket dismissal. That’s not skepticism; it’s deliberate fog.

You argue “some errors = the whole dataset is untrustworthy,” but that’s not logic, it’s motivated reasoning. Wartime death counts are always imperfect, from Dresden to Aleppo to Mosul. Nobody requires zero error to establish human toll. Your demand for absolute certainty is just a backdoor to absolve Israel of any responsibility by insisting no number is high enough unless it’s been hand-counted under ideal lab conditions in a war zone. You’re setting a standard no conflict in human history could meet.

You then hide behind the idea that it’s “not your job to find solutions.” Fine. But if your entire posture is to reject every proposed ceasefire, diplomatic initiative, monitoring plan, or humanitarian corridor as unworkable, then admit it: you’re not interested in peace. You’re interested in justifying endless war. And you reveal that openly when you frame any ceasefire as a “big win for Hamas,” as though Gazan civilians are acceptable collateral to prevent Hamas from feeling emboldened. That’s not analysis. That’s moral surrender disguised as toughness.

Finally, you pivot to rejecting the Arab Peace Initiative because it demands withdrawal from occupied territories and refugee rights under UN resolutions. Call it suicidal if you wish, but don’t pretend it was never a real proposal. It’s only “ludicrously stupid” to those for whom permanent occupation is the baseline. And your dismissal of it as Israel’s “suicide” exposes everything: to you, peace itself is a mortal threat if it requires equality, dignity, and land rights for Palestinians.

So no, this isn’t standard logic. It’s standard avoidance: dismiss the data, dismiss the solutions, dismiss the humanity of the victims, and then claim the moral high ground. That’s not truth-seeking. That’s choosing comfort over reality.

NHC

Gaza has, since PA and then Hamas, took over been a dysfunctional shit show.

If the Gaza administration is a dysfunctional shit show during peace time, why would they now during a war, have any hope of accurately calculating who died.

Gaza is now overrun by the IDF. Making admin harder.

There's plenty of evidence that Hamas has been manipulating numbers.

There's been evidence that Hamas has been aquiring journalist accreditation for fighters just to manipulate the data of dead journalists.

Any Hamas official, is also a Hamas fighter.

The UNRWA aid administrators are Hamas fighters, some of which took part of the 7/10 attacks.

Any Hamas fighter, the moment they hit the ground, is made into a civilian casualty statistic.

And finally, independent reviews have suggested that Hamas has both low balled and overshot the numbers dead. The reason is that it's virtually impossible to know the true civilian casualty rate in Gaza. I don't think Hamas knows how many Palestinian civilians have died. I think their numbers are just made up.

I also don't think Israel knows either. It'll take years of peace, if ever, before we have the correct number.

Another factor is that Gaza has no legal entry or exit point. They haven't had that for many years. Any entry or exit will therefore be undocumented. Making it impossible to know who lives there.

I have a Palestinian friend who told me how their family did. This was in 2015. They'd go to Egypt, go overland in a smuggler car, bribe border guards, and enter. They had to do this every time. In or out. They said it was safe. But just incredibly annoying.

My point is that there was no way, before 7/10 for Hamas to ever know who is actually living in Gaza. All they ever could do was guesstimate.

The medical system is not working now. There's no medical infrastructure with this information

 

[NoHolyCows]

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.)

Lauren,

You keep quoting Geneva as if it’s a loophole manual rather than a humanitarian treaty. The purpose of Article 23 is clear: to protect civilians from starvation and deprivation during conflict. Yes, it lists conditions – but those conditions are not a blank check to block aid indefinitely. They’re safeguards to ensure aid reaches civilians while addressing legitimate security concerns. Nowhere does it say that if there’s any risk of diversion, you can let an entire population starve.

And yes, Geneva imposes alternative obligations. If direct passage isn’t feasible, parties must seek arrangements to ensure civilians still receive aid. That’s the principle of proportionality and necessity woven throughout the Conventions and customary IHL. The law isn’t silent on mass suffering just because direct delivery is complicated.

You keep repeating, “There isn’t always a good answer. The side with the power isn’t always responsible.” But there is an answer in international law: the party with control over the territory bears obligations toward its civilian population, whether it likes it or not. Israel controls the crossings, the airspace, and the sea. That comes with legal and moral duties no matter what Hamas does.

You pivot to Hamas shooting people picking up aid. Do you think that negates Israel’s obligations? It doesn’t. Both can commit violations. That’s how law works. Hamas blocking aid doesn’t absolve Israel of its duty to let aid in. Israel’s blockade doesn’t absolve Hamas of its abuses. You keep acting like international law is a scoreboard where one violation cancels the other. It isn’t. It’s a set of minimum rules designed to stop war from descending into total moral collapse.

And that’s what this is about. You want so badly to believe there is no answer because admitting there is would force you to confront what’s being done here. This isn’t about loopholes in Geneva. This is about the deliberate starvation of a trapped population. And no amount of legalistic parsing will cleanse that.

Because in the end, law aside, this is simple:

When a child dies of hunger with trucks of food waiting at the gate, no moral theory or legal citation justifies it.

You say, “Nobody’s denying they happened. The question is what was under those bombs, something that satellite footage can’t answer.”

That’s the eternal dodge. Yes, satellites can’t see inside buildings, but when hospitals, refugee camps, and schools are repeatedly hit, when coordinates are shared with the IDF precisely to avoid strikes, and when aid convoys are targeted despite clear markings and pre-approved routes, your “what was under the bombs” defense collapses. You’re not asking an honest question. You’re grasping for any possibility that will let you look away from what those bombs did.

And your fallback – that reports are “tainted by Hamas” – is just as empty. When the U.N., WHO, U.S. intelligence, and Israel’s own statements converge, the claim that it’s all one big Hamas propaganda show is nothing more than denial dressed as skepticism.

You then pivot to radicalization, claiming oppression isn’t necessary, only perception – like with Incels. But here’s the difference you conveniently ignore: Palestinians aren’t isolated young men angry about dating rejection. They are a people living under occupation, blockade, bombardment, and daily humiliation. That’s not “perception.” That’s structural reality.

And if, as you say, perception radicalizes, what do you think happens when the perception is reinforced by bombs falling on schools and children pulled from rubble? You can’t reduce this to a psychological quirk when every day’s lived experience validates their rage. Comparing a besieged population to Incels isn’t just ignorant. It’s dehumanizing.

Because at the end of the day, Lauren, the truth remains:

You can’t bomb grievances out of existence.

You can’t blockade desperation out of existence.

And no amount of intellectual gymnastics will turn starvation, siege, and mass death into a viable strategy for peace.

NHC