Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[NoHolyCows]

Hamas’s theft of bread doesn’t absolve Israel of the duty to feed innocents. International law forbids collective starvation—Article 59 even says that if direct aid is blocked, the besieger must find alternate channels. Starvation-by-blockade is a crime, no matter who’s corrupting the convoys.

And once again you have no idea what Geneva says.

Article 59 - Non-defended localities​

Articles 59 -- Non-defended localities

1. It is prohibited for the Parties to the conflict to attack, by any means whatsoever, non-defended localities.

2. The appropriate authorities of a Party to the conflict may declare as a non-defended locality any inhabited place near or in a zone where armed forces are in contact which is open for occupation by an adverse Party. Such a locality shall fulfil the following conditions:

(a) all combatants, as well as mobile weapons and mobile military equipment must have been evacuated;
(b) no hostile use shall be made of fixed military installations or establishments;
(c) no acts of hostility shall be committed by the authorities or by the population; and
(d) no activities in support of military operations shall be undertaken.

3. The presence, in this locality, of persons specially protected under the Conventions and this Protocol, and of police forces retained for the sole purpose of maintaining law and order, is not contrary to the conditions laid down in paragraph 2.

4. The declaration made under paragraph 2 shall be addressed to the adverse Party and shall define and describe, as precisely as possible, the limits of the non-defended locality. The Party to the conflict to which the declaration is addressed shall acknowledge its receipt and shall treat the locality as a non-defended locality unless the conditions laid down in paragraph 2 are not in fact fulfilled, in which event it shall immediately so inform the Party making the declaration. Even if the conditions laid down in paragraph 2 are not fulfilled, the locality shall continue to enjoy the protection provided by the other provisions of this Protocol and the other rules of international law applicable in armed conflict.

5. The Parties to the conflict may agree on the establishment of non-defended localities even if such localities do not fulfil the conditions laid down in paragraph 2. The agreement should define and describe, as precisely as possible, the limits of the non-defended locality; if necessary, it may lay down the methods of supervision.

6. The Party which is in control of a locality governed by such an agreement shall mark it, so far as possible, by such signs as may be agreed upon with the other Party, which shall be displayed where they are clearly visible, especially on its perimeter and limits and on highways.

7. A locality loses its status as a non-defended locality when it ceases to fulfil the conditions laid down in paragraph 2 or in the agreement referred to in paragraph 5. In such an eventuality, the locality shall continue to enjoy the protection provided by the other provisions of this Protocol and the other rules of international law applicable in armed conflict.

Good-faith judgments aren’t public spreadsheets—it’s about whether commanders take civilian risk seriously, not scorekeeping. Trusting IDF self-reports while dismissing every other source as “secret” is willful blindness. “Better than you thought” isn’t a license to ignore the law in each strike.

I'm not trusting their reports. I am comparing the observed outcome vs the civilian casualties and seeing that in the big picture they must be doing it right.

You don’t get to turn the attacker’s burden on its head. Civilian housing leveled under the guise of “possible fighters” is itself a violation without clear military necessity. The default law protects homes—and those inside—until proven otherwise.

If there are any inside it's because Hamas trapped them there.

And you are presenting complete fabrications. "guise of "possible fighters""--that's somebody making things up, not any Israeli claim.

Demanding proof of bodies you won’t allow your eyes to see is not realism—it’s moral abdication. Realists build corridors, safe zones, humanitarian pauses. Fatalists shrug and say “there’s no choice.” That’s the gulf between confronting horror and surrendering to it.

Magic words once again. Anything to keep Israel from hunting Hamas, nothing about getting back the hostages.

Holding Hamas to account doesn’t require starving refugees. Sanctions, targeted strikes on leadership, international prosecutions—all real tools. You choose collective suffering because it’s easier than wielding precision justice. That choice perpetuates the cycle, no “myth” needed.

Hamas is the one starving them.

"Sanctions"--useful against minor evil, magic words against major evil.

Targeted strikes on leadership--but when a human shield goes up with the leader you blame Israel.

"International prosecutions"--what are you smoking? How do you propose to get them before a court?

You're playing magic words again.

Data corrections lag under bombardment—that’s not an argument to scrap the entire dataset. When mistakes emerge, credible organizations update their counts. IDF itself revises civilian figures months later. Dismissing every report because it isn’t instantly flawless is hypocrisy.

It's been more than a year. All those "independent observers" are not under fire, there is no reason for it to take more than a day or two.

Cross-checking in an active warzone isn’t trivial—it takes time, resources, and safe access. You brand every delayed correction a cover-up, then turn around and accept instantaneous IDF press releases as gospel. That’s not scrutiny, it’s prejudice.

I'm not objecting to reasonable delays--I am objecting to taking a year to figure out that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, V, 五, ۵, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 doesn't mean there are 13 numbers between 1 and 10. (No need to puzzle with Google: the extra languages are Roman, Chinese, and Farsi.)

Pointing to civilian deaths doesn’t create them—bombing them does. You weaponize doubt to shield policies that shred neighborhoods. If data terrified you into stopping, perhaps we’d see fewer corpses. Your refusal to let evidence guide your conscience is the real tragedy here.

It's not the pointing that creates them, it's the focusing on them. Civilian deaths get you to hate Israel, so Hamas creates more civilian deaths to make you hate Israel more.

Article 59 protects undefended zones from attack—but it doesn’t sanction starving a whole population. The obligation in Article 59 to declare a locality “non-defended” and mark it still sits alongside the duty in Articles 54 and 55 to allow relief to reach civilians. Suspending food and medicine at the border isn’t a legitimate “defensive” measure under any Geneva article—it’s collective punishment, plain and simple.

Judging “rightness” by raw casualty ratios ignores the requirement that each strike be justified, precise, and as safe as possible. You treat a lower civilian toll as proof of moral virtue, rather than evidence of restraint. But under international law it’s not enough to kill fewer innocents than someone else—you must plan every operation to minimize harm, announce warnings where feasible, and verify targets with more than just statistical hindsight.

Blaming Hamas for keeping people near military assets doesn’t erase Israel’s duty to distinguish combatants from civilians. The law demands an attacker assess where civilians are and give them a real chance to leave, not shrug “they chose to stay.” Labeling every civilian area as a “trap” turns every neighborhood into a free-fire zone. That’s not fact-finding—it’s willful dehumanization.

Precision targeting and humanitarian pauses aren’t “magic” excuses—they’re proven tactics that protect innocents without letting terrorists roam free. You act as if the only way to rescue hostages is blanket bombardment. In reality, focused operations, negotiated corridors, even international mediation have secured releases elsewhere. Dismissing them as fantasy abandons every hostage for the sake of punishing a population.

Hamas’s misdeeds compound the crisis, but they don’t erase Israel’s obligations. Sanctions under international law still require humanitarian carve-outs. Targeted strikes demand real-time verification, not post-strike excuses when civilians die. And yes—war crimes tribunals have prosecuted heads of state, rebel leaders, even child soldiers. Justice isn’t “magic,” it’s a process. Refusing to pursue it because you deem it impractical is surrender to impunity.

Even away from shells, thorough investigations of mass graves, displaced families, and satellite imagery demand interviews, forensic analysis, chain-of-custody checks and security clearances. Months-long projects aren’t proof of conspiracy—they’re proof of rigor. Meanwhile, IDF numbers are updated in real time to fuel briefings. Rejecting one timeline while embracing the other is not consistency—it’s partisanship.

Mistakes in data formats are embarrassing—but a typographical glitch isn’t equivalent to burying entire families. You equate clerical errors with frontline carnage to trivialize civilian suffering. If your standard demands perfect spreadsheets before you’ll acknowledge a single death, you’ve absolved yourself of empathy, not proven a larger point.

Calling out civilian deaths isn’t “hate,” it’s insisting on moral accountability. If highlighting the dead makes you uncomfortable, maybe that’s because you’ve divorced strategy from humanity. Blaming the messenger for revealing suffering doesn’t stop the bombs. It only buries the truth deeper beneath slogans and deflections.

NHC

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/23/middleeast/gaza-starving-killed-israel-while-seeking-aid-intl

There is overwhelming evidence that Israel is committing war crimes. Just because Hamas started this atrocity doesn't mean that Israel is free to purposely deprive people of basic food and water, medical help etc. I haven't seen the evidence that all of the many countries and organizations condemning Israel are misinformed. How much evidence does one need to understand that Israel's leaders are the biggest problem right now. Nobody is defending Hamas, but what Hamas has done doesn't excuse the leaders of Israel for their war crimes. Something like "two wrongs don't make a right".

Palestinians are starving or being killed by Israeli troops while seeking aid almost daily. How did we get here?​

By Nadeen Ebrahim, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Ibrahim Dahman, CNN
7 min read
Updated 6:51 AM EDT, Fri July 25, 2025

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1.5-year-old child, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade in Gaza City on Monday.
Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu/Getty Images
CNN —
Twenty-one months into Israel’s war in Gaza, the enclave is gripped by escalating scenes of death and hunger, with some killed while trying to reach aid, others dying of starvation, and growing condemnation of Israel’s conduct even among many of its closest allies.

Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from man-made “mass starvation” due to the aid blockade on the enclave, the chief of the World Health Organization warned reporters at a briefing on Wednesday.

“Parents tell us their children cry themselves to sleep from hunger,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Food distribution sites have become places of violence.”

The United Nations says more than a thousand people have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking food since late May, when a controversial new Israel- and US-backed aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, began operating.

Of those, hundreds have died near GHF sites, according to the UN. The GHF was created to replace the UN’s aid role in Gaza and has been widely criticized for failing to improve conditions.

All 2.1 million people in Gaza are now food insecure. On Tuesday, Gaza’s health ministry said 900,000 children are going hungry, and 70,000 already show signs of malnutrition.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This isn’t about punishment, it’s about moral clarity. When you accept Hamas’s labels as proof, you dispense with investigation. Imagine if any finger-pointing group could dictate who’s innocent or guilty—due process vanishes, and every civilian becomes a suspect.

I have no reason not to accept the Hamas label in this case as there is nothing to be gained by lying.

I’m not declaring guilt by default—I’m demanding accountability. When relief convoys, clearly painted hospitals, and UN shelters get hit despite coordinates shared in advance, the presumption of innocence flips: commanders must show why those strikes were unavoidable, not ask survivors to prove they weren’t fighters.

Hamas claims they were hit despite shared coordinates. Doesn't mean that's really what happened.

I have. Article 59 explicitly forbids using food as a weapon. If diversion is an issue, the Conventions require establishing alternative delivery routes or third-party monitors—even then, blanket starvation is illegal. Suspect one bakery, you don’t shut down the whole bakery district.

First, that's not what 59 says. Second, the only ones using food as a weapon are Hamas. Israel isn't using it as a weapon, they're denying Hamas the ability to use it as a weapon. And once again we see the Goodhart problem. Doing it through the GHF instead of the UN is a very serious blow to Hamas--Hamas reacts by killing supposedly hundreds (we don't have any actual count beyond what they've claimed Israel did) to try to regain control of the supplies. That blood is on your hands.

Doubting every neutral witness because some mistakes occur is a fast track to echo-chamber denial. MSF workers, UN relief staff and morgue teams risk their lives to document suffering—and yes, they correct errors when found. Accepting only one side’s version isn’t skepticism; it’s indoctrinated silence.

You keep claiming this, but as I have repeatedly pointed out they could have fixed the bad data. They couldn't even have documented it in the first place as there are neither bodies nor people--nothing to document.

Absentee or not, Palestinian tenant farmers were evicted en masse under British orders when sales went through—witness diaries, British military reports, and Zionist militia patrol logs confirm forced removals. The later Palestinian laws you mention arose after that dispossession, not before it.

I do agree they were evicted, what you haven't established is that it's anything more than not renewing a rental agreement. Was the city wrong in evicting the people next door? (I don't know all the details, but I did see they failed to water the landscaping (desert climate, it pretty much all died), then one day they were gone and there was an eviction notice on the door.)

True statehood isn’t earned by obedience— it’s built on sovereignty. No country grants border control as a “reward” after decades. A permanent occupier with veto power isn’t a guarantor of peace—it’s an indefinite status quo of conflict.

The problem is they have made it very clear they want to import weapons to attack Israel. Israel is not required to tolerate a belligerent neighbor.

Hospitals aren’t factories you pause at to clear combatants—they’re sanctuaries. The law requires warnings, safe corridors, and independent verification before any strike. “Look around” isn’t enough when your missiles can pulverize an entire ward.

<Thwack! with a clue-by-4>
There's no need of a pause. Look at what article 59 actually says. Hospitals should be non-defended areas.

And you're back to magic words again, "independent verification before any strike" is nonsense. Who can verify?

Guardrails aren’t surrender—they’re constraints that prevent power from running wild. If terror removes all limits, then “anything goes” becomes the rule. Upholding red lines doesn’t cower before evil—it preserves the difference between civilization and barbarism.

I'm not saying to remove all limits. The thing is Israel is already following reasonable limits so you can't find violations, but your faith says they must be wrong. I do not believe you intend Holocaust 2.0 but that's where your position leads.

 

[NoHolyCows]

This isn’t about punishment, it’s about moral clarity. When you accept Hamas’s labels as proof, you dispense with investigation. Imagine if any finger-pointing group could dictate who’s innocent or guilty—due process vanishes, and every civilian becomes a suspect.

I have no reason not to accept the Hamas label in this case as there is nothing to be gained by lying.

I’m not declaring guilt by default—I’m demanding accountability. When relief convoys, clearly painted hospitals, and UN shelters get hit despite coordinates shared in advance, the presumption of innocence flips: commanders must show why those strikes were unavoidable, not ask survivors to prove they weren’t fighters.

Hamas claims they were hit despite shared coordinates. Doesn't mean that's really what happened.

I have. Article 59 explicitly forbids using food as a weapon. If diversion is an issue, the Conventions require establishing alternative delivery routes or third-party monitors—even then, blanket starvation is illegal. Suspect one bakery, you don’t shut down the whole bakery district.

First, that's not what 59 says. Second, the only ones using food as a weapon are Hamas. Israel isn't using it as a weapon, they're denying Hamas the ability to use it as a weapon. And once again we see the Goodhart problem. Doing it through the GHF instead of the UN is a very serious blow to Hamas--Hamas reacts by killing supposedly hundreds (we don't have any actual count beyond what they've claimed Israel did) to try to regain control of the supplies. That blood is on your hands.

Doubting every neutral witness because some mistakes occur is a fast track to echo-chamber denial. MSF workers, UN relief staff and morgue teams risk their lives to document suffering—and yes, they correct errors when found. Accepting only one side’s version isn’t skepticism; it’s indoctrinated silence.

You keep claiming this, but as I have repeatedly pointed out they could have fixed the bad data. They couldn't even have documented it in the first place as there are neither bodies nor people--nothing to document.

Absentee or not, Palestinian tenant farmers were evicted en masse under British orders when sales went through—witness diaries, British military reports, and Zionist militia patrol logs confirm forced removals. The later Palestinian laws you mention arose after that dispossession, not before it.

I do agree they were evicted, what you haven't established is that it's anything more than not renewing a rental agreement. Was the city wrong in evicting the people next door? (I don't know all the details, but I did see they failed to water the landscaping (desert climate, it pretty much all died), then one day they were gone and there was an eviction notice on the door.)

True statehood isn’t earned by obedience— it’s built on sovereignty. No country grants border control as a “reward” after decades. A permanent occupier with veto power isn’t a guarantor of peace—it’s an indefinite status quo of conflict.

The problem is they have made it very clear they want to import weapons to attack Israel. Israel is not required to tolerate a belligerent neighbor.

Hospitals aren’t factories you pause at to clear combatants—they’re sanctuaries. The law requires warnings, safe corridors, and independent verification before any strike. “Look around” isn’t enough when your missiles can pulverize an entire ward.

<Thwack! with a clue-by-4>
There's no need of a pause. Look at what article 59 actually says. Hospitals should be non-defended areas.

And you're back to magic words again, "independent verification before any strike" is nonsense. Who can verify?

Guardrails aren’t surrender—they’re constraints that prevent power from running wild. If terror removes all limits, then “anything goes” becomes the rule. Upholding red lines doesn’t cower before evil—it preserves the difference between civilization and barbarism.

I'm not saying to remove all limits. The thing is Israel is already following reasonable limits so you can't find violations, but your faith says they must be wrong. I do not believe you intend Holocaust 2.0 but that's where your position leads.

Trusting a terrorist’s press release without proof is the opposite of care—it’s abandoning every safeguard meant to protect innocents. Even in war, you don’t skip verification and simply bomb at a shout of “terrorist.”

If every disputed strike becomes a he-said she-said, accountability vanishes. Coordinates were provided for a reason—now commanders must explain why bombs still fell there, not hide behind “maybe it wasn’t us.”

Starving civilians to starve Hamas is collective punishment pure and simple—Article 59 doesn’t carve out “if we hate the enemy enough.” If you suspect one bakery, find an alternate route. You don’t seal the whole district and watch children die.

Under bombardment, rubble and chaos hide countless casualties. Field teams piece together burials, morgue logs, witness accounts. Dismissing every report for lack of cell-phone footage doesn’t erase suffering—it erases your conscience.

“Not renewing a contract” under military rule, with armed escorts and no place else to go, is deprivation of rights, not routine property law. When eviction comes with orders and fences, that’s forced displacement, not simple paperwork.

Defending your border doesn’t license flattening whole neighborhoods or starving hospitals. You can repel fighters without treating civilians as collateral damage—law demands precision, not wholesale ruin.

Verification isn’t magic—it’s NGOs, UN observers, medics, even local reporters risking their lives to document attacks. If you dismiss every eyewitness as biased, you erase any path to truth and justice.

Reasonable limits don’t excuse the predictable carnage you shrug off. Restraint means reviewing each strike for necessity and civilian risk. Mocking that as “faith” is how standards collapse—and how the innocent keep dying.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you blame a logistical hiccup on humanitarian law rather than the siege itself. The fact that trucks pile up at the border under Israeli control doesn’t erase who refused safe passage or alternative routes. You’re hiding behind UN funding gaps to excuse a policy that by design turns relief convoys into bargaining chips.

It's not a hiccup, it's intentional to make Israel look bad. The UN wants to distribute aid, yet they can't even move it at all. Nobody except Hamas is stopping them.

Reality is documented in survivor testimonies, IDF logs, even archived broadcasts admitting civilian executions at Deir Yassin. You dismiss every record that shatters your tidy story and call it “deception.” That’s not scrutiny—that’s self-fulfilling denial.

One family got executed. Most definitely wrong, but nothing like what was claimed.

They exist in hundreds of pages from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, UN fact-finding missions, and Israeli veterans’ testimonies—complete with corroborated satellite imagery, on-the-ground interviews, and chain-of-custody evidence. You ignore all of it until someone hands you a press release you like.

Hundreds of pages of nothing, that is. There are no fact-finding missions, they just repeat what Hamas says.

Protocol I and the Convention on the Rights of the Child treat anyone under 18 as entitled to “special respect and protection”—they may never be recruited or deliberately targeted. You’re free-fire justifies profiling boys as fighters; Geneva demands extra precautions, rescue, and rehabilitation.

And once again you don't understand.

Shouldn't be recruited--absolutely agree. War crime by Hamas.

Not deliberately targeted? Makes no sense, soldiers don't ask for enemy ID cards in combat.

Absence of a name tag doesn’t rewrite bullet trajectories or witness accounts. Forensics, angle of fire, type of ammunition, and multiple independent NGOs all point to uniformed IDF positions. You demand stamps on helmets but refuse to look at any other proof.

Except we have none of that in most cases.

We have a detailed analysis of one incident--and it's nowhere near proof.

Forensics--the round was never matched to a weapon, zero evidence.
Angle of fire--not as precise as you think it is. We can deduce a rough location of where it came from--but that's useless as both sides were within the area. (Note, though, that the cameraman knew not to film the Palestinian forces.)
Type of ammunition--except for the little detail that Hamas also uses the same round.
Independent NGOs? We have one detailed sound analysis attempting to determine the range from the gun to the mic. Supposedly puts the shots right on the IDF patrol's distance--except the mic wasn't where the analyst though it was. Solidly excludes the IDF. (Not that I consider the analysis meaningful in either direction.)
The "evidence" is attempting to implicate an IDF patrol--but snipers do not patrol. Thus if it was an IDF round it definitely was not a sniper. Thus the Hamas report must be wrong.

So starvation and bombardment are your success metrics. Meanwhile hostages still languish, more are abducted, and civilians keep dying. If your strategy “reduces” terror by inflicting mass suffering, you’re measuring victory in misery.

They are not my metrics.

You demand lab-grade certainty in a warzone while accepting PR slides as fact. Yet field doctors, journalists, and medics testify under oath about sniper nests perfectly positioned for IDF overwatch—not random Hamas cells. You reject their credibility because you can’t brand it with a Hamas insignia.

I do not expect lab-grade certainty. I do expect those far from the battlefield to reject that which is clearly false. And you keep going down a chain of reasoning that if by whatever stretch of the imagination it could have been Israel that it must have been Israel.

Even if there were IDF sniper positions (note that snipers hide--it's unlikely the medics would see them if they were there) that doesn't prove they fired.

My only aim is to refuse the normalization of civilian death. Pointing at corpses doesn’t create them—it calls out the choices that did. If you’d rather pretend they don’t exist, you’ll never change a policy that ensures they keep piling up.

You keep baaing the Hamas line. And you keep rewarding Hamas fro creating corpses--of course they create more corpses. Modern dictator 101.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you dismiss every witness, every morgue record, every satellite image as “not real” because it conflicts with your comfort zone. That isn’t critical thinking—it’s willful blindness. The evidence piles up beyond your filtering, yet you insist nothing exists unless it’s packaged the way you expect.

No. I dismiss every source that calls obvious fraud verified.

Forged IDs buried in rubble don’t sprout by accident—they point to a system that can’t verify its own dead. You leap from “fake paperwork” to “all bodies are fake,” denying every other source even half a chance. And yes, when you refuse to secure a credible registry under bombardment, you share in that chaos—you can’t absolve the occupier of responsibility for a registry they broke.

<Thwack with a clue-by-4>
There are no forged IDs. There are forged records.
And I do not jump to "all bodies are fake", but to "we have no accurate count". And I conclude that anyone who fell for the bad data is not actually checking, just phoning it in at best. If they can't detect a page of ^c^v why should I believe them about anything else?

Proportionality isn’t a math quiz — it’s a moral test: was this strike the only way to achieve a concrete military aim without slaughtering innocents? You don’t need a spreadsheet for that, just the willingness to ask: did this target justify these deaths? Your refusal to even pose the question is the real magic trick.

You still use it as a magic word.

“Babeling” terms you refuse to learn doesn’t make them meaningless. “Human shields,” “perfidy,” “collective punishment” — these are labels for real crimes whose victims you insist on ignoring. Calling them jargon won’t erase the children crushed beneath those words.

I know the words, you just use them with no relevance to what you're talking about.

Pointing to one side’s crimes cannot erase the other’s. I refuse to trade moral clarity for your tunnel vision. You see every atrocity through a Hamas-shaped lens; I see them as warnings. If you can only see crimes when they suit your narrative, you’ve long since forgotten what justice looks like.

I'm not trying to erase the other. I'm trying to show that the vast majority of "Israeli" wrong is actually a frame by Hamas.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Every atrocity deserves attention, not just the loudest headlines. Dismissing Gaza as “small” amid other crises doesn’t lessen the children buried under its rubble—it just reveals which victims you’ve decided are unworthy of your outrage.

The point is why don't you care more about the bigger things?

Mocking ceasefires and monitors as “magic” won’t change the fact that real corridors and oversight have saved lives in countless conflicts. Calling humanitarian efforts naive is a cop-out—doing nothing is not realism, it’s abdication.

I mock them because of reality.
Ceasefire--that's the Hamas victory objective, it's not a solution.
Monitors--UNIFIL. Make that work before you propose more of the same.
Corridors--the problem is that Hamas is deliberately causing casualties.

How about the humanitarian move that is actually working: GHF. Explain why everyone hates it.

You don’t need every hostile actor present to open a ceasefire or deliver medicine. Humanitarian pauses and local truces aren’t surrender speeches—they’re lifelines. Rejecting them because Tehran isn’t dialing in is just another excuse to let civilians starve.

It's all about ending the fighting while keeping the hostages.

Blaming an entire faith for geopolitical violence is bigotry, not insight. Western Sahara’s stagnation springs from colonial realpolitik, not religious doctrine. If you insist on painting every conflict with the broad brush of Islam, you’ll never grasp the real forces—occupation, resource grabs, power imbalances—that drive people to fight.

I don't blame an entire faith. It's a tiny majority that make the trouble, but they use the religious angle to get mostly tolerated by the rest. Islam is not always going to cause trouble, but most modern trouble is due to Islam.

As for Western Sahara--as I expected, no understanding. That's not colonial realpolitik, it's occupation and brutal repression. But you almost never hear of it because the oppressor is Muslim. And my point is that decades of repression has not lead to fighting. Fighting happens when someone funds it.

Refusing to protect civilians because your enemy abuses them is the true surrender. Upholding red lines against targeting the wounded and the unarmed isn’t weakness—it’s the only thing that stops this war from becoming indistinguishable from the terror you claim to oppose.

Once again, claims without any evidence. Who is targeting the wounded?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Even one school strike shows how low the bar’s set—fighters using a school once doesn’t grant blanket permission to turn every classroom into rubble. International law demands attackers verify military use, issue warnings, and take precautions before bombing. Your “probably Hamas” after-the-fact excuse isn’t a shield for flattening civilian infrastructure.

The notification requirements have become meaningless.

And otherwise there wasn't any problem. Hamas ended up claiming about as many of theirs killed as Israel claimed killed overall. Within the normal fog of war, perfect shooting.

Pointing to who governed Gaza in decades past doesn’t absolve today’s siege or the settlements that followed—policies Israel chose. Shifting blame to Egypt and Jordan is distraction, not defense of starving and shelling millions. The real question is the power Israel wields now, and the choices it makes with it.

None are so blind as those who will not see.

You correctly attributed the problem to how they were treated--but now your tune takes a 180 because I pointed out the actual instigators weren't Israel.

A refusal by the Red Crescent to call out misuse doesn’t strip hospitals and ambulances of their protected status. The law protects the vulnerable regardless of emblem politics. It’s on the attacker to prove military necessity, not on patients to prove innocence under wreckage.

The problem is that we have no magic way of determining protected status. We used symbols, but when they are misused there ceases to be any way to identify them short of looking at their behavior.

Hamas’s exploitation deepens the crisis, but it doesn’t justify collective starvation. International law prohibits punishing civilians for their rulers’ crimes. If you choke off food and medicine to pressurize a faction, you’ve chosen a policy of mass punishment, not self-defense.

And you have failed to establish "punishment".

Trucks idling in Gaza mean nothing if border controls and payment disputes leave drivers stranded. The besieger who sets the terms carries the duty to unblock passage. Blaming UN wages for operational failure lets the blockade off the hook—when relief stalls at checkpoints, the policy, not the NGO, is responsible.

<Thwack!>
The trucks are inside Gaza, there is no border to cross and thus border controls are irrelevant.
And the drivers aren't stranded, they just are refusing to work if not paid. Gazan drivers, UN pay, Israel isn't involved.

You continue to not see how this whole mess is engineered.

Pointing out Hamas propaganda isn’t the same as dismissing every field report. You weaponize one fake to discard hundreds of corroborated accounts—morgue logs, satellite imagery, NGO surveys—showing malnutrition and mass graves. Dismissing all evidence because some is manipulated is willful blindness.

More magic words.

This isn’t a tabletop game and there’s no all-powerful moderator to rescue hostages. Humanitarian pauses and truces aren’t fantasies—they’re tools that have saved lives in every conflict. Discarding them as magic tricks isn’t realism, it’s surrendering to the belief that only siege and bombardment are on the menu—and that you’re too afraid to ask for anything better.

NHC

You aren't proposing any solution to rescuing hostages.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The UN actually moved a truck. Hamas wouldn't let the people get the food:

 

[NoHolyCows]

So you blame a logistical hiccup on humanitarian law rather than the siege itself. The fact that trucks pile up at the border under Israeli control doesn’t erase who refused safe passage or alternative routes. You’re hiding behind UN funding gaps to excuse a policy that by design turns relief convoys into bargaining chips.

It's not a hiccup, it's intentional to make Israel look bad. The UN wants to distribute aid, yet they can't even move it at all. Nobody except Hamas is stopping them.

Reality is documented in survivor testimonies, IDF logs, even archived broadcasts admitting civilian executions at Deir Yassin. You dismiss every record that shatters your tidy story and call it “deception.” That’s not scrutiny—that’s self-fulfilling denial.

One family got executed. Most definitely wrong, but nothing like what was claimed.

They exist in hundreds of pages from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, UN fact-finding missions, and Israeli veterans’ testimonies—complete with corroborated satellite imagery, on-the-ground interviews, and chain-of-custody evidence. You ignore all of it until someone hands you a press release you like.

Hundreds of pages of nothing, that is. There are no fact-finding missions, they just repeat what Hamas says.

Protocol I and the Convention on the Rights of the Child treat anyone under 18 as entitled to “special respect and protection”—they may never be recruited or deliberately targeted. You’re free-fire justifies profiling boys as fighters; Geneva demands extra precautions, rescue, and rehabilitation.

And once again you don't understand.

Shouldn't be recruited--absolutely agree. War crime by Hamas.

Not deliberately targeted? Makes no sense, soldiers don't ask for enemy ID cards in combat.

Absence of a name tag doesn’t rewrite bullet trajectories or witness accounts. Forensics, angle of fire, type of ammunition, and multiple independent NGOs all point to uniformed IDF positions. You demand stamps on helmets but refuse to look at any other proof.

Except we have none of that in most cases.

We have a detailed analysis of one incident--and it's nowhere near proof.

Forensics--the round was never matched to a weapon, zero evidence.
Angle of fire--not as precise as you think it is. We can deduce a rough location of where it came from--but that's useless as both sides were within the area. (Note, though, that the cameraman knew not to film the Palestinian forces.)
Type of ammunition--except for the little detail that Hamas also uses the same round.
Independent NGOs? We have one detailed sound analysis attempting to determine the range from the gun to the mic. Supposedly puts the shots right on the IDF patrol's distance--except the mic wasn't where the analyst though it was. Solidly excludes the IDF. (Not that I consider the analysis meaningful in either direction.)
The "evidence" is attempting to implicate an IDF patrol--but snipers do not patrol. Thus if it was an IDF round it definitely was not a sniper. Thus the Hamas report must be wrong.

So starvation and bombardment are your success metrics. Meanwhile hostages still languish, more are abducted, and civilians keep dying. If your strategy “reduces” terror by inflicting mass suffering, you’re measuring victory in misery.

They are not my metrics.

You demand lab-grade certainty in a warzone while accepting PR slides as fact. Yet field doctors, journalists, and medics testify under oath about sniper nests perfectly positioned for IDF overwatch—not random Hamas cells. You reject their credibility because you can’t brand it with a Hamas insignia.

I do not expect lab-grade certainty. I do expect those far from the battlefield to reject that which is clearly false. And you keep going down a chain of reasoning that if by whatever stretch of the imagination it could have been Israel that it must have been Israel.

Even if there were IDF sniper positions (note that snipers hide--it's unlikely the medics would see them if they were there) that doesn't prove they fired.

My only aim is to refuse the normalization of civilian death. Pointing at corpses doesn’t create them—it calls out the choices that did. If you’d rather pretend they don’t exist, you’ll never change a policy that ensures they keep piling up.

You keep baaing the Hamas line. And you keep rewarding Hamas fro creating corpses--of course they create more corpses. Modern dictator 101.

Trucks waiting at Israeli checkpoints don’t unload themselves. You shift blame to UN funding gaps while ignoring the gates that remain closed. If aid convoys can’t move, the responsibility lies with the power controlling the border, not with the organization begging for passage.

Acknowledging one atrocity doesn’t erase the dozens more documented by survivors, archives, and military logs. Treating Deir Yassin as a one-off excuses an entire pattern of collective violence that even Israeli veterans and U.N. reports have confirmed.

Dismissing every human rights report as “Hamas propaganda” is cynicism, not analysis. These organizations cross‐reference interviews, satellite imagery, medical records and still you brand it “nothing” to protect your narrative from inconvenient truths.

The law doesn’t demand check-points at every alley—it demands extra precautions for minors, not treating them as free fire. Profiling every boy as a potential fighter abandons any claim to protect children; it simply codifies prejudice with a rifle.

Almost nothing in a warzone arrives with a neatly stamped authenticity label—yet multiple independent teams have pieced together enough fragments, audio clues, geolocation data, and witness testimony to show a clear pattern: shots coming from positions only the IDF held. Dismissing every imperfect piece of evidence leaves you with zero insight—exactly what an unaccountable power wants.

Ballistic matching in active combat is rare, yes—but you can still analyze fragment shape, crater depth, and entry angles to exclude certain weapon types. When those exclusions consistently point away from homemade rifles and toward military‐grade sniper rifles, that counts as evidence, even if it isn’t a lab-perfect fingerprint.

“Rough” often still narrows suspects. Combine that with multiple camera angles, drone imagery, and signal intercepts, and you get a corridor of origin only the IDF occupied. Yes, it’s not pinpoint accuracy to the square meter—but it’s more than enough to show the shots didn’t come from scattered insurgents.

Identical calibers can come from wildly different barrels. Rifling marks, propellant residue, and cartridge dimensions vary by factory. Independent investigators routinely distinguish state‐issued ammo from trafficked batches. It’s never perfect, but pattern‐matching across dozens of incidents builds a credible case.

One flawed study doesn’t erase the dozens of others—by B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, UN fact-finders, even Israeli ex-soldiers in Breaking the Silence—all using different methods yet converging on the same conclusion. Tossing them one by one is a tactic to frustrate scrutiny, not a genuine critique of evidence.

Modern infantry often embeds sniper teams within patrols—small, covert units that move, fire, and vanish. The lack of big‐scoped “sniper towers” doesn’t contradict witness accounts of precision shots from positions manned by trained marksmen. Denying the possibility outright is refusing to grapple with battlefield reality.

If civilian deaths don’t factor into your moral ledger, whose do? Setting the bar at “better than someone else” means anything goes so long as the ratio looks decent. That’s not ethics—that’s arithmetic on graves.

Distance isn’t innocence. The people risking their lives to pull bodies from the rubble, bandage the wounded, log the dead—those are your battlefield witnesses. If you demand that only someone wearing a uniformed badge qualifies as evidence, you’ve already stacked the deck to vindicate your side.

Pointing to dead children isn’t cheering for terror—it’s refusing to normalize the carnage your preferred tactics leave behind. If your strategy breeds corpses and you blame the corpse-maker rather than the bomb-dropper, you’ve surrendered to the logic of violence—no matter who pulls the trigger.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

So you dismiss every witness, every morgue record, every satellite image as “not real” because it conflicts with your comfort zone. That isn’t critical thinking—it’s willful blindness. The evidence piles up beyond your filtering, yet you insist nothing exists unless it’s packaged the way you expect.

No. I dismiss every source that calls obvious fraud verified.

Forged IDs buried in rubble don’t sprout by accident—they point to a system that can’t verify its own dead. You leap from “fake paperwork” to “all bodies are fake,” denying every other source even half a chance. And yes, when you refuse to secure a credible registry under bombardment, you share in that chaos—you can’t absolve the occupier of responsibility for a registry they broke.

<Thwack with a clue-by-4>
There are no forged IDs. There are forged records.
And I do not jump to "all bodies are fake", but to "we have no accurate count". And I conclude that anyone who fell for the bad data is not actually checking, just phoning it in at best. If they can't detect a page of ^c^v why should I believe them about anything else?

Proportionality isn’t a math quiz — it’s a moral test: was this strike the only way to achieve a concrete military aim without slaughtering innocents? You don’t need a spreadsheet for that, just the willingness to ask: did this target justify these deaths? Your refusal to even pose the question is the real magic trick.

You still use it as a magic word.

“Babeling” terms you refuse to learn doesn’t make them meaningless. “Human shields,” “perfidy,” “collective punishment” — these are labels for real crimes whose victims you insist on ignoring. Calling them jargon won’t erase the children crushed beneath those words.

I know the words, you just use them with no relevance to what you're talking about.

Pointing to one side’s crimes cannot erase the other’s. I refuse to trade moral clarity for your tunnel vision. You see every atrocity through a Hamas-shaped lens; I see them as warnings. If you can only see crimes when they suit your narrative, you’ve long since forgotten what justice looks like.

I'm not trying to erase the other. I'm trying to show that the vast majority of "Israeli" wrong is actually a frame by Hamas.

If your filter rejects any testimony that doesn’t fit your preconceptions, you’re not seeking truth—you’re chasing a comfort zone. When dozens of independent organizations—from MSF to Israeli veterans—corroborate civilian harm, dismissing them wholesale because of a few flawed entries is intellectual cowardice. Real rigor demands you probe deeper, not slam the door on every inconvenient witness.

War destroys civil registries—that’s the predictable chaos of siege. One rotten page doesn’t spoil the whole ledger. The solution is third-party verification, not blanket rejection. If you refuse every record because some needed correction, you’re opting out of accuracy altogether and choosing ignorance as your standard.

Proportionality isn’t an incantation—it’s the heart of lawful force. It asks: did these bombs deliver a concrete military gain that justifies the civilian lives lost? Scoffing at that question isn’t skepticism, it’s moral evasion. You dodge the hard choice by pretending the principle itself is mystical jargon.

When terms like “perfidy” or “collective punishment” are tossed aside as irrelevant, they lose their power—and so do the people they’re meant to protect. These aren’t buzzwords; they’re legal shields for innocent lives. Ignoring their meaning doesn’t make the crimes disappear—it makes you complicit in them.

Claiming every atrocity is a Hamas setup doesn’t neutralize genuine evidence. If you have a specific strike fully debunked, lay out the proof. But endlessly repeating “it’s a frame” becomes a smokescreen for inaction. Real accountability demands you engage with the facts, not hide behind conspiracy.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Every atrocity deserves attention, not just the loudest headlines. Dismissing Gaza as “small” amid other crises doesn’t lessen the children buried under its rubble—it just reveals which victims you’ve decided are unworthy of your outrage.

The point is why don't you care more about the bigger things?

Mocking ceasefires and monitors as “magic” won’t change the fact that real corridors and oversight have saved lives in countless conflicts. Calling humanitarian efforts naive is a cop-out—doing nothing is not realism, it’s abdication.

I mock them because of reality.
Ceasefire--that's the Hamas victory objective, it's not a solution.
Monitors--UNIFIL. Make that work before you propose more of the same.
Corridors--the problem is that Hamas is deliberately causing casualties.

How about the humanitarian move that is actually working: GHF. Explain why everyone hates it.

You don’t need every hostile actor present to open a ceasefire or deliver medicine. Humanitarian pauses and local truces aren’t surrender speeches—they’re lifelines. Rejecting them because Tehran isn’t dialing in is just another excuse to let civilians starve.

It's all about ending the fighting while keeping the hostages.

Blaming an entire faith for geopolitical violence is bigotry, not insight. Western Sahara’s stagnation springs from colonial realpolitik, not religious doctrine. If you insist on painting every conflict with the broad brush of Islam, you’ll never grasp the real forces—occupation, resource grabs, power imbalances—that drive people to fight.

I don't blame an entire faith. It's a tiny majority that make the trouble, but they use the religious angle to get mostly tolerated by the rest. Islam is not always going to cause trouble, but most modern trouble is due to Islam.

As for Western Sahara--as I expected, no understanding. That's not colonial realpolitik, it's occupation and brutal repression. But you almost never hear of it because the oppressor is Muslim. And my point is that decades of repression has not lead to fighting. Fighting happens when someone funds it.

Refusing to protect civilians because your enemy abuses them is the true surrender. Upholding red lines against targeting the wounded and the unarmed isn’t weakness—it’s the only thing that stops this war from becoming indistinguishable from the terror you claim to oppose.

Once again, claims without any evidence. Who is targeting the wounded?

I care just as much. Every child buried in rubble matters, whether their tragedy makes page one or page ten. Saying I “care less” about Gaza because other crises loom only excuses turning your back. True solidarity doesn’t pick and choose victims—it demands every life be worth our outrage and action, no matter the ZIP code.

Ceasefires and monitored corridors aren’t trophies for Hamas—they’re lifelines for civilians too weak to dig themselves out from under collapsed homes. Dismissing them as “Hamas wins” confuses short-term military posturing with saving lives. As for GHF, money in a bank account can’t build safe routes or stop bombs—it can’t undo sieges or guarantee aid trucks pass unmolested. Grants don’t protect hospitals; escorts and agreements do. Fueling bureaucracy without securing passage leaves children starving under rubble, regardless of which ledger gets credited.

Of course hostages matter—every captive deserves rescue. But treating civilian protection and hostage returns as mutually exclusive is a false choice. You don’t halt shelling only when every detainee is freed; you pause strikes where innocents gather so they survive long enough to see negotiations bear fruit. Refusing to press for pauses until hostages are home simply guarantees more people buried before the deal is struck.

Pinning global violence on “Islam” as a monolith is as lazy as blaming all wars on “Christianity.” Western Sahara’s repression may be under-reported, but that silence doesn’t justify starving Gaza’s civilians. Funding matters, yes, but so do local grievances, broken states, and everyday despair. You’re eager to highlight one proxy but blind to the politics that keep Gaza under siege. Poverty plus blockade—not simply outside cash—fuels desperation here.

When ambulances bearing bright Red Crescent emblems are struck; when medics are gunned down treating the wounded on open streets; when marked hospitals collapse under bunker-buster bombs—these aren’t ghost stories. Médecins Sans Frontières, UNRWA staff, and Israeli NGO investigators all document these hits. Denying that anyone’s targeting stretchers or triage tents because you haven’t liked the slide deck is refusing to see the blood-soaked facts staring you in the face.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Even one school strike shows how low the bar’s set—fighters using a school once doesn’t grant blanket permission to turn every classroom into rubble. International law demands attackers verify military use, issue warnings, and take precautions before bombing. Your “probably Hamas” after-the-fact excuse isn’t a shield for flattening civilian infrastructure.

The notification requirements have become meaningless.

And otherwise there wasn't any problem. Hamas ended up claiming about as many of theirs killed as Israel claimed killed overall. Within the normal fog of war, perfect shooting.

Pointing to who governed Gaza in decades past doesn’t absolve today’s siege or the settlements that followed—policies Israel chose. Shifting blame to Egypt and Jordan is distraction, not defense of starving and shelling millions. The real question is the power Israel wields now, and the choices it makes with it.

None are so blind as those who will not see.

You correctly attributed the problem to how they were treated--but now your tune takes a 180 because I pointed out the actual instigators weren't Israel.

A refusal by the Red Crescent to call out misuse doesn’t strip hospitals and ambulances of their protected status. The law protects the vulnerable regardless of emblem politics. It’s on the attacker to prove military necessity, not on patients to prove innocence under wreckage.

The problem is that we have no magic way of determining protected status. We used symbols, but when they are misused there ceases to be any way to identify them short of looking at their behavior.

Hamas’s exploitation deepens the crisis, but it doesn’t justify collective starvation. International law prohibits punishing civilians for their rulers’ crimes. If you choke off food and medicine to pressurize a faction, you’ve chosen a policy of mass punishment, not self-defense.

And you have failed to establish "punishment".

Trucks idling in Gaza mean nothing if border controls and payment disputes leave drivers stranded. The besieger who sets the terms carries the duty to unblock passage. Blaming UN wages for operational failure lets the blockade off the hook—when relief stalls at checkpoints, the policy, not the NGO, is responsible.

<Thwack!>
The trucks are inside Gaza, there is no border to cross and thus border controls are irrelevant.
And the drivers aren't stranded, they just are refusing to work if not paid. Gazan drivers, UN pay, Israel isn't involved.

You continue to not see how this whole mess is engineered.

Pointing out Hamas propaganda isn’t the same as dismissing every field report. You weaponize one fake to discard hundreds of corroborated accounts—morgue logs, satellite imagery, NGO surveys—showing malnutrition and mass graves. Dismissing all evidence because some is manipulated is willful blindness.

More magic words.

This isn’t a tabletop game and there’s no all-powerful moderator to rescue hostages. Humanitarian pauses and truces aren’t fantasies—they’re tools that have saved lives in every conflict. Discarding them as magic tricks isn’t realism, it’s surrendering to the belief that only siege and bombardment are on the menu—and that you’re too afraid to ask for anything better.

NHC

You aren't proposing any solution to rescuing hostages.

Dismissing every school strike as “fog of war” doesn’t erase the fact that classrooms fell silent and children died. International law isn’t paper perfection—it’s a set of minimum duties: verify military use before bombing, warn civilians, take precautions. Claiming a symmetrical body‐count with Hamas makes no difference when those bodies lie in ruined schoolyards. You can’t erase the law by calling it outdated.

Pointing at past rulers doesn’t absolve today’s occupier of choices it makes now. Israel wields airpower, enforces the blockade, expands settlements—those are present actions, not historical footnotes. Shifting blame to someone else is a classic dodge: the people starving under your watch aren’t responsible for writing your rules.

International law anticipates exactly this kind of abuse. Even when symbols are compromised, attackers still must verify targets, provide warnings, and err on the side of civilian life. “Behavior” always cuts two ways—patients begging in corridors aren’t combatants. You can’t flip the burden onto the wounded to prove their innocence.

Punishment isn’t defined by a label you choose—it’s the outcome you impose. When you choke off food, water, medicine and tell two million people their survival hangs on surrender, that is collective punishment under any moral or legal definition. You don’t get to demand a secret memo of intent—children starving in the streets are proof enough.

Whether trucks stall at a checkpoint or park inside Rafah, every inch of Gaza’s supply chain runs on permits Israel grants, routes it secures, and fees it dictates. If drivers refuse to move without UN wages, that friction exists only because the siege made aid a bargaining chip. Excusing NGO budgets as the culprit is ignoring the siege architecture that creates the logjam.

Mocking my language won’t make UNICEF reports, WHO alerts, and on‐the‐ground NGO surveys vanish. If you filter every source that shows malnutrition or mass graves, you’re not practicing skepticism—you’re wearing blinders. Real scrutiny weighs all evidence, not just the PowerPoint that flatters your worldview.

I’ve called for humanitarian pauses, protected corridors, international monitors and third‐party guarantors—all tools proven in past conflicts to secure civilian safety and open space for negotiations. Starvation and bombing haven’t freed a single hostage; they only bury more children. If you measure success in misery, you’ll never find a path that returns the captives alive.

NHC

 

[ZiprHead]

None are so blind as those who will not see.

 

[Derec]

I'm not objecting to reasonable delays--I am objecting to taking a year to figure out that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, V, 五, ۵, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 doesn't mean there are 13 numbers between 1 and 10. (No need to puzzle with Google: the extra languages are Roman, Chinese, and Farsi.)

Of course there aren't only 13 numbers between 1 and 10. There are more numbers between 1 and 10 than there are natural numbers.

 

[Derec]

By Nadeen Ebrahim, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Ibrahim Dahman, CNN

All the authors sound Arab/Muslim. I suspect a biased article.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1.5-year-old child, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade in Gaza City on Monday."

I find it curious that there are apparently some very malnourished small children in Gaza. And yet, when adults are shown, they look well-fed. Like, look at those plump cheeks! Bisan doesn't look like she missed too many means recently.

Maybe she should have given that apple to that Starvin' Marvin from the CNN photo.
Or this from earlier this month:

The guy in the blue polo looks downright chunky.

Are these Gazan adults keeping the food for themselves? Or maybe these kids have health conditions unrelated to food availability? Gaza (and Palestinians in general) have a high rate of consanguinity, and therefore genetic conditions are not exactly rare. Some genetic conditions affect how food is absorbed or metabolized.

 

[NoHolyCows]

By Nadeen Ebrahim, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Ibrahim Dahman, CNN

All the authors sound Arab/Muslim. I suspect a biased article.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1.5-year-old child, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade in Gaza City on Monday."

I find it curious that there are apparently some very malnourished small children in Gaza. And yet, when adults are shown, they look well-fed. Like, look at those plump cheeks! Bisan doesn't look like she missed too many means recently.

Maybe she should have given that apple to that Starvin' Marvin from the CNN photo.
Or this from earlier this month:

The guy in the blue polo looks downright chunky.

Are these Gazan adults keeping the food for themselves? Or maybe these kids have health conditions unrelated to food availability? Gaza (and Palestinians in general) have a high rate of consanguinity, and therefore genetic conditions are not exactly rare. Some genetic conditions affect how food is absorbed or metabolized.

It’s tempting to dismiss widespread hunger in Gaza because you see one adult with full cheeks, but that reaction betrays a profound misunderstanding of how starvation actually works. Young children, with their tiny fat and muscle reserves, can fall into life-threatening wasting within days of insufficient food, while adults draw on longer-term stores and often don’t look “skeletal” even as their bodies break down. Worse still, severe protein deficiency can trigger kwashiorkor, where fluid accumulates under the skin and makes faces appear deceptively swollen rather than nourished.

On the ground, the facts are grim and unambiguous: UNRWA screening finds that roughly ten percent of Gaza’s children under five are clinically malnourished, and Médecins Sans Frontières has documented a three-fold spike in acute malnutrition among toddlers, with many tens of thousands in urgent need of therapeutic feeding. Hospitals have opened malnutrition wards; life-saving peanut-paste sachets are running perilously low; and at least a hundred people—including infants—have already starved to death this year. Even more chilling, well over a thousand Palestinians have been shot or killed simply for trying to reach the few aid distribution points that still open under crippling access restrictions.

These aren’t anecdotal snapshots but the outcome of door-to-door surveys, mid-upper-arm measurements, hospital admission logs and NGO field reports compiled over months. To reject this reality because of a misread photograph is to turn your back on standardized clinical data and the testimony of aid workers bearing witness to one of the gravest humanitarian disasters of our time. That is the iron truth in Gaza—one that no amount of “plump cheeks” can erase.

NHC

 

[laughing dog]

By Nadeen Ebrahim, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Ibrahim Dahman, CNN

All the authors sound Arab/Muslim. I suspect a biased article….

How very open-minded of you.

And the reasoning of using a snapshot of a “chunky” adult to dismiss the reports based on 1000s of screened children by NGOs and the UN of a marked increase in malnutrition rates is impeccable logic. Truly brilliant.

After all, why would anyone expect a blockade of food and medical supplies to affect the health of a population, especially the most vulnerable? Makes one wonder what the gov’t of Israel was thinking when it came up with that plan to force Hamas to agree with their terms.

 

[TomC]

After all, why would anyone expect a blockade of food and medical supplies to affect the health of a population, especially the most vulnerable? Makes one wonder what the Hamas was thinking when it came up with that plan to force the Israeli government to agree with their terms.

Fixed that for you.
Gazans are suffering horribly because Gaza is run by violent Islamic supremacists. Gazans are used as cannon fodder and human shields by the Islamic supremacists, from Iran to the UN to Western media and culture warriors.
That's why they are in such bad shape.

Because nobody important thinks that the health and safety of the Gazan children is worth releasing the Israeli civilians that were kidnapped by Gazans back in 2023. They'd consistently prefer to set up another few generations of violent conflicts, rather than have the peace and prosperity that could come from cooperation with Israel.

Looks like they will get their wish.
Tom

 

[laughing dog]

After all, why would anyone expect a blockade of food and medical supplies to affect the health of a population, especially the most vulnerable? Makes one wonder what the Hamas was thinking when it came up with that plan to force the Israeli government to agree with their terms.

Fixed that for you.

If by “fix”, you mean transgorm it into regurgitated israeli apologia, you most certainly did. Because no one gorced Israel to engage in a blockade. It is ridiculously silly to claim otherwise.

It is true Hamas seems unconcerned with the suffering of its citizens but that does not fice Israel to indulge Hamas on that matter.