This isn’t Hogwarts, Lauren. The Geneva Conventions aren’t incantations — they’re the legal boundaries between war and barbarism. You wave off starvation of civilians as if it’s just tough love. But when you justify cutting off aid because Hamas might use it somewhere, that’s not targeting — it’s siege warfare designed to grind civilians down. That’s what “collective punishment” means. If you have a better term for starving children to weaken a regime, by all means — let’s hear it.
You are treating them as incantations.
And it's not about Hamas might use it somewhere, it's about Hamas is using it to control Gaza.
That's what's going on.
First: yes, we do have the ability to evaluate proportionality. We do it all the time — post-strike assessments, satellite imagery, hospital and morgue reports, survivor testimony. You act like proportionality is unknowable unless we can pull up an Excel sheet with body counts and blast radii. But law doesn’t demand omniscience — it demands restraint based on foreseeable outcomes.
No. You have no way of evaluating military advantage. One number of an equation is an unknown, the answer is unknown.
And since you asked: yes. On multiple occasions, strikes on residential buildings killed entire families, including infants. Don’t play dumb. You’ve seen the footage. You just don’t count it unless Hamas delivers notarized proof of intent.
Showing a strike on a residential building is not showing that the strike was not on Hamas.
As for Hamas shooting people trying to flee — yes, they do that. It’s a war crime. But it doesn’t erase the obligation to avoid turning apartment blocks into coffins. Two wrongs don’t make a proportionality waiver.
Yes, it does. Israel is obligated to give warnings when possible. Israel is not obligated to prevent Hamas from getting Gazans killed. Those deaths are on Hamas, not on Israel--but you blame Israel anyway, so Hamas does it again. You (collectively) are responsible for the horrors in Gaza. You are Hamas' primary weapon.
No, Lauren — I’m referencing the standard. The one your side claims to follow. The one enshrined in international law, not dreamt up by me. You treat anything that makes Israel accountable as a foreign imposition, when it’s the legal baseline every military is expected to uphold. If your only response to accountability is “unfair standard,” maybe it’s not the standard that needs changing.
Hamas does wrong, you blame Israel. Therefore Hamas does more wrong.
You’ve “shown” nothing but distrust. UN agencies, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders — all dismissed by you because they’re inconvenient. Meanwhile, every IDF statement is taken as gospel unless they apologize, in which case you say they’re apologizing too easily. That’s not consistency. That’s a rhetorical bunker.
It's a simple test: Any organization that claimed to be verifying but missed the garbage wasn't verifying. And that's all of them.
As for Amnesty International:
And yes — “lack of proper verification” has meaning. It means bombing a known civilian site with weak or no evidence of military use. It means bombing after coordinates were shared to prevent exactly that. It means mistaking “Hamas might be nearby” for “fire away.” You call those people human shields. The law calls them civilians. You just don’t want to face what that means.
You continue to take Hamas' words as absolute truth.
You keep defending a framework where any moral restraint is a liability, any civilian death is either propaganda or someone else’s fault, and every legal standard is dismissed unless it exonerates your side.
Israel doesn't blame Hamas for all the civilian deaths. But an awful lot of them are because Hamas was using human shields. And the death of a human shield is on the side that used them.
That’s not realism. That’s moral insurance fraud — signing every airstrike with a shrug and calling it “the cost of war,” as long as the receipts don’t pile up on your doorstep.
The thing is Israel is doing a very good job of separating civilian from Hamas. The death toll tells us that. Look north: Israel went after Hezbollah. Hezbollah doesn't do much with human shields, Israel got around 90% combatants. Gaza, Hamas makes heavy use of human shields, let's figure Israel aims equally well (same army, same techniques, I would expect a similar performance), let's pretend the Hamas numbers are truth: That leaves us with 95% of the casualties being due to Hamas, not Israel.
You keep pointing to Hamas’s corruption of aid (“they’re siphoning funds to pay their cadres” ) as if it magically clears every barbed-wire blockade and airstrike you defend. Yes, Hamas diverts resources to cement its grip — the Washington Post lays out how its financial crisis forces it to seize more civilian assets. But international law doesn’t say “because the enemy is criminal, you can collectively starve their population.” It demands you still find some way to get food, medicine, and water to those who didn’t vote for Hamas. Starvation-by-blockade is collective punishment, pure and simple.
You claim we can’t evaluate proportionality without perfect knowledge of military gain. But the law never required “Excel-grade precision,” only a good-faith estimate of advantage versus harm. Every air force in history has done post-strike assessments via satellite imagery, signal intercepts, and on-the-ground reports to judge whether a target was worth the civilian risk. Refusing to even try because one variable is unknown is moral abdication, not realism.
You show footage of a collapsed apartment and say “that doesn’t prove Hamas wasn’t there.” True – absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But it is evidence that civilians died. And under international humanitarian law, civilian death requires proof of military necessity, not a presumption of guilt because “Hamas might have been there.” Every family wiped out under a home you could have avoided still counts as a civilian loss.
You argue two wrongs make a right: “Yes, Hamas shot people fleeing, so Israel’s hammerfall is justified.” No. Two wrongs never erase legal duties. Warnings before attacks are an obligation; mitigating civilian harm is an obligation; seeking alternatives is an obligation. Blaming Hamas for creating human shields doesn’t cancel Israel’s responsibility for turning those shields into coffins.
You assert, “Hamas does wrong, I blame Israel, therefore Hamas does more wrong.” That’s circular. Acknowledging one side’s atrocity isn’t an excuse to ignore the other’s. You can—and must—hold both accountable: Hamas for its terror, and Israel for its tactics that kill civilians en masse. Moral clarity demands both.
You’ve “proven” Amnesty and HRW are incompetent because they missed some bad data. So every organization you don’t like is now disqualified? That’s selective skepticism. If one UN report errs on a registration field, must we discard every assessment of mass graves, displaced civilians, and famine warnings? No—accuracy isn’t perfection, it’s consistency across methods and sources.
You accuse me of “taking Hamas’s words as truth.” I don’t. I cross-check NGO reports, satellite imagery, IDF admissions, and independent journalists. True belief in nothing but Hamas would be easier. Instead, I’m wrestling with all the evidence, while you merely dismiss anything that upsets your narrative.
Finally, you point to Hezbollah in Lebanon: 90% combatant casualties under Israeli fire versus Gaza’s higher civilian toll, and conclude that means 95% of Gaza’s deaths are Hamas’s fault. Statistical games don’t replace accountability. Every life lost in Gaza is still a life. You can’t wave away thousands of civilian deaths by blaming their very presence on Hamas’s tactics. Collateral damage is not an identity tag.
War may force terrible choices, but law and morality exist to restrain even necessary force. If “realism” means erasing every standard that protects civilians whenever the enemy hides among them, then we’ve already lost. And no ratio, no tweet, no battlefield spreadsheet can justify that surrender.
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You keep claiming protections that do not exist.
