Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[laughing dog]

I think boycotting an invited address of an deomcratically leader of an ally is petty snd tacky on the part of the Democrats.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Can we split the criticism of Netanyahu's administration from the whole of Israel?

I’m sure Ted Cruz and his ilk can split their criticism of the Biden administration from the whole of the USA, right?

Are we seriously going to let Ted Cruz be the bar of what is considered acceptable and humane?

No. Just pointing out the hypocrisy of Cruz and the Republicans for conflating criticism of Netanyahu with criticism of the whole of Israel, as you are right to point out are two separate things.

They happily say the worst things about Biden and Harris without implying those things should also be criticisms of the whole of the USA.

Of course, hypocrisy is the foundation of the Republican viewpoint these days.

Indeed, Cruz is an asshole, as are the people claiming liberals hate Israel because they question the viability of the "ending Hamas" plan.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think boycotting an invited address of an deomcratically leader of an ally is petty snd tacky on the part of the Democrats.

Arguably, he isn't a democratically elected leader though. He is the head of a very loosely tied coalition that was put together in an emergency due to the October terror attack on Israel.

 

[lpetrich]

We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable. - POLITICO - 07/19/2024 05:00 AM EDT

American surgeons who witnessed the civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.

Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic and hand surgeon who practices in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon who practices in Northern California.

Like this:

In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.

We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”

The authors then mentioned their experience in war zones, then

The constant begging for money, the malnourished population, the open sewage — all of that was familiar to us as veteran war zone doctors. But add in the incredible population density, the overwhelming numbers of badly maimed children and amputees, the constant hum of drones, the smell of explosives and gunpowder — not to mention the constant earth-shaking explosions — and it’s no wonder UNICEF has declared the Gaza Strip as “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”

After describing how they got to Gaza,

As Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon noted on the Senate floor, the process for clearing aid with the Israeli authorities is opaque and inconsistent. “Items that are allowed in one day can be rejected the next….” For this reason, everyone simply brought whatever they could as personal luggage — even surgical equipment — paying exorbitant airline baggage fees instead of bulk shipping rates. Now that Rafah is closed, even this route for resupplying Gaza’s hospitals has been cut off. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shown no signs of backing off, is scheduled to address the U.S. Congress on Monday. He will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.)

Then getting to European Hospital at the southern edge of Khan Younis.

By the time we arrived, 59 percent of all the hospital beds in Gaza had been destroyed, while the remaining partially functioning hospitals operated at 359 percent of their actual bed capacity. The World Health Organization describes them as “partially operational.”

Then talking about preteens with gunshot wounds in their heads.

One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

But gunshot wounds in their heads seem like the bullets were carefully aimed.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)

 

[lpetrich]

As we met Palestinian physicians and nurses working at the hospital, it was clear that they, like their patients, were physically and mentally unwell. Giving anyone a pat on the back dropped your hand between two unpadded shoulder blades and onto an exposed spine. In any given room one found staff members with jaundiced eyes, a sure sign of acute hepatitis A infection in such overcrowded conditions.

Many staff had no sense of urgency and often no empathy, even for children. We were initially taken aback by this, But we quickly learned that our Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip.

...
Many of the staff were working at the Shifa and Indonesian Hospitals when they were destroyed. They were the lucky ones — they survived the attacks. Since October 7, at least 500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.

On October 31, in an interview with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!, the doctor talked about why he chose to stay: “If I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals. We have the right to receive proper health care. So we can’t just leave.” Eleven days later, Dr. Alloh was killed by an Israeli air strike on his home, along with three of his family members.

Among the medical staff who survived the assaults on the Shifa and Indonesian Hospitals, many were taken from those hospitals by the Israeli military. They all told us a slightly different version of the same horror story: In captivity, they were barely fed, continuously abused and ultimately dumped naked on the side of a road. Many said they were subjected to mock executions and other forms of mistreatment and torture.

The authors then went into detail about some more of the injuries of their patients and their attempts to treat those injuries.

 

[lpetrich]

Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential - The Lancet - Volume 404, ISSUE 10449, P237-238, July 20, 2024
About Us - The Lancet is 201-year-old medical journal.

By June 19, 2024, 37 396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Ministry's figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.

...
The non-governmental organisation Airwars undertakes detailed assessments of incidents in the Gaza Strip and often finds that not all names of identifiable victims are included in the Ministry's list. Furthermore, the UN estimates that, by Feb 29, 2024, 35% of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed, so the number of bodies still buried in the rubble is likely substantial, with estimates of more than 10 000.

Then discussing indirect deaths.

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lying for Israel can be a lucrative career.

​

While I can't address any of the numbers he's right. We have been funding Hamas and we have been to some extent funding Iran. Iran decides they are owed money about something, take hostages (arrest innocents for spying) and we end up negotiating to pay what was supposedly owed to get the release of the hostages. Rinse and repeat.

Just because Cruz is an absolute turd doesn't mean he can't be correct about something.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I think boycotting an invited address of an deomcratically leader of an ally is petty snd tacky on the part of the Democrats.

Arguably, he isn't a democratically elected leader though. He is the head of a very loosely tied coalition that was put together in an emergency due to the October terror attack on Israel.

You realize that's basically how parliamentary system work?? For one party to get an outright majority isn't common, a coalition is how it usually works.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential - The Lancet - Volume 404, ISSUE 10449, P237-238, July 20, 2024
About Us - The Lancet is 201-year-old medical journal.

By June 19, 2024, 37 396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The Ministry's figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.

...
The non-governmental organisation Airwars undertakes detailed assessments of incidents in the Gaza Strip and often finds that not all names of identifiable victims are included in the Ministry's list. Furthermore, the UN estimates that, by Feb 29, 2024, 35% of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed, so the number of bodies still buried in the rubble is likely substantial, with estimates of more than 10 000.

Then discussing indirect deaths.

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.

And we should infer a bunch of deaths that Hamas isn't claiming???

 

[laughing dog]

Lying for Israel can be a lucrative career.

​

While I can't address any of the numbers he's right. We have been funding Hamas and we have been to some extent funding Iran. Iran decides they are owed money about something, take hostages (arrest innocents for spying) and we end up negotiating to pay what was supposedly owed to get the release of the hostages. Rinse and repeat.

Just because Cruz is an absolute turd doesn't mean he can't be correct about something.

FFS, Netanhayu has been directly funding Hamas for years. Why shouldn’t Israel’s alky and friend follow their lead?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lying for Israel can be a lucrative career.

​

While I can't address any of the numbers he's right. We have been funding Hamas and we have been to some extent funding Iran. Iran decides they are owed money about something, take hostages (arrest innocents for spying) and we end up negotiating to pay what was supposedly owed to get the release of the hostages. Rinse and repeat.

Just because Cruz is an absolute turd doesn't mean he can't be correct about something.

FFS, Netanhayu has been directly funding Hamas for years. Why shouldn’t Israel’s alky and friend follow their lead?

They funded Hamas back when it wasn't a terrorist organization. It divided the Palestinians. Eventually Hamas basically replaced the PLO as the main organization that the Islamists funded. What face that funding has has very little to do with the results of said funding.

And you're not rebutting my point at all.

And to add more funding that I hadn't been aware of:

UNRWA is only indispensable to Hamas, not ordinary Palestinians

As a member of Israel’s peace movement, I have always believed that strangers can be turned into partners. That belief remains with me today. On October 7 last year, my 84-year-old mother Ditza was

www.thetimes.com

Paid in US$--and have to pay unreasonable currency conversion fees to actually use their money.

 

[laughing dog]

Lying for Israel can be a lucrative career.

​

While I can't address any of the numbers he's right. We have been funding Hamas and we have been to some extent funding Iran. Iran decides they are owed money about something, take hostages (arrest innocents for spying) and we end up negotiating to pay what was supposedly owed to get the release of the hostages. Rinse and repeat.

Just because Cruz is an absolute turd doesn't mean he can't be correct about something.

FFS, Netanhayu has been directly funding Hamas for years. Why shouldn’t Israel’s alky and friend follow their lead?

They funded Hamas back when it wasn't a terrorist organization. It divided the Palestinians. Eventually Hamas basically replaced the PLO as the main organization that the Islamists funded. What face that funding has has very little to do with the results of said funding.

As usual, you are "misinformed":For years, Netanahyu has propped up Hamas

Gazans celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the broken Israel-Gaza border fence, east of Khan Younis, October 7, 2023. (AP/Yousef Masoud)

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.......
Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza.


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Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.

And you're not rebutting my point at all.

No, I am pointing out the US was following Israeli policy.

 

[Derec]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

 

[jonatha]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

Kinda wonder why they didn't do this last October 8th and skip the deaths of multiple tens of thousands of noncombatants...

 

[Shadowy Man]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

Kinda wonder why they didn't do this last October 8th and skip the deaths of multiple tens of thousands of noncombatants...

Maybe getting an Israeli assassin into Iran isn’t easy.

 

[Gospel]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

Kinda wonder why they didn't do this last October 8th and skip the deaths of multiple tens of thousands of noncombatants...

Maybe getting an Israeli assassin into Iran isn’t easy.

Could be easier with a little diversity, equity, and Inclusion.

 

[jonatha]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

Kinda wonder why they didn't do this last October 8th and skip the deaths of multiple tens of thousands of noncombatants...

Maybe getting an Israeli assassin into Iran isn’t easy.

If I had to guess I'd say they've been there a long time, and there are more waiting.

 

[TomC]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

Kinda wonder why they didn't do this last October 8th and skip the deaths of multiple tens of thousands of noncombatants...

Maybe getting an Israeli assassin into Iran isn’t easy.

If I had to guess I'd say they've been there a long time, and there are more waiting.

What does "airstrike" mean in this context?

Back when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, my main fear for Humanity was the possibility of nuclear escalation.

It's not anymore. Now it's the dramatic "improvement" to drone technology.

I used to know a guy (he died a couple of years ago) who was a retired testing engineer for a global manufacturing company. He had a home workshop that would be the envy of many small countries and thought that drones were the coolest things ever.
I'm sure that guy could, with a few thousand dollars worth of online purchases of computerized drones, have made weapons that could bring down Western society. Delivery some weaponized anthrax or radioactive material to the precisely right place at the precisely correct moment.
Was this assassination a drone strike?

I'm glad I'm old.
Tom

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As usual, you are "misinformed":For years, Netanahyu has propped up Hamas

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.......
Additionally, since 2014, Netanyahu-led governments have practically turned a blind eye to the incendiary balloons and rocket fire from Gaza.


Advertisement


Meanwhile, Israel has allowed suitcases holding millions in Qatari cash to enter Gaza through its crossings since 2018, in order to maintain its fragile ceasefire with the Hamas rulers of the Strip.

Note: "Allowed". Israel wasn't funding it, they just didn't take action against Qatar. Doing so would have triggered another war.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Good news!

Ismail Haniyeh killed in Tehran!

Hamas says its leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran by an Israeli airstrike

He was in Tehran for new president's inauguration.

Kinda wonder why they didn't do this last October 8th and skip the deaths of multiple tens of thousands of noncombatants...

Assassination requires locating the target.

Besides, before 10/7 would such a strike have been acceptable?