...
That's pure nonsense. I blame both sides for their actions, including Israel. They are two warring tribes that have been fighting a turf battle for decades. From my perspective, you are bending over backwards not to blame Israel for its own actions and for ignoring the difference between Gaza Palestinians and its terrorist government.
And what exactly do you propose Israel do differently? We have already seen that any attempt to make things better for the Palestinians ups the violence.
No, we haven't. Israel has actually been threatening and bombing Palestinians. Thousands have already been wounded and killed. There is no mercy for them. What Israel should do differently is turn water and power supplies back on for the civilian population, provide humanitarian aid, stop trying to drive them from their homes, and appeal to them to help locate hostages. In general, they should express the same concern for Palestinian lives that they do for Israeli lives and brand Hamas and its allies as the true enemy, not Palestinians.
Look at what's been going on for 75 years, not merely now. There is a long pattern of any positive move made by Israel making things worse for them.
There is no physical reason those people can't flee. Israel didn't tell them to go very far.
It doesn't matter, because Israel is also targeting the south and even locations they've designated as safe corridors. Those who could tried to flee, but Hamas is ordering them to stay. I've seen interviews with some who fled south but are now returning to the north, since they would rather die in their homes than elsewhere. Food, water, and supplies are scarce everywhere. Israel has agreed to allow a miniscule amount of humanitarian aid, but it has even delayed the 20-truck convoy that was supposed to be allowed until the bombed out road can be repaired.
They say what Hamas says to say. There is no honest reporting out of Gaza.
(Old, but still totally relevant.)
Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati said he was able to speak freely about witnessing a Hamas misfire that killed nine children at the Shati camp, confirming the Israel Defense Forces version of events, but only after leaving Gaza, "far from Hamas retaliation." On Twitter, Barbati, Jerusalem...
www.algemeiner.com
As for that bank--if a hostage dies in the assault the legal blame falls on the hostage taker, not the police. Yet you want to blame the police and say the bank robbers should simply be left free to rob again.
You don't seem to understand what the standard procedure is for hostage negotiations. The police don't order hostages to flee, since they obviously can't, and then charge in with guns blazing while the hostages are still there. They bring in professional hostage negotiators. The priority is to save lives, not take revenge on the criminals.
And if negotiations don't work they go in guns blazing. It often doesn't end well for the hostages.
The Palestinians are victims. What you refuse to accept is that they are victims of Arab and Iranian actions. They're a stick of wood being used to beat on the Israeli concrete. Blame the beater, not the concrete.
That is utterly false. I have been saying the opposite--that they are victims of Hamas/Iranian actions
and Israeli actions. You have refused to accept that they are also victims of Israeli actions. They are not a "stick of wood". They are human beings--the same as the Israeli hostages. But Israel often only sees them as a "stick of wood".
But your only answer is for Israel to do something different, you're searching for the keys under the streetlight.
My answer is to treat the Palestinians like human beings--the same as Israelis. Stop treating them like terrorists and people whose lives don't matter.
Tell Iran that. They're the one oppressing the Palestinians.
Paranoid assumption?? No, that's simply how it works over there.
But that does not give Israel the right to target such locations for bombing attacks. I hope you realize that. The Palestinians are claiming that that hospital had been briefly shelled and then ordered to evacuate the hospital or face bombing prior to the attack. That could be a fabricated claim, but I wouldn't expect Israel to admit that they had made such a threat. However, Israel did order everyone in northern Gaza to get out, the implication being that those who failed to flee had no one but themselves to blame if Israeli invaders saw them as threats and legitimate targets. If the hospital had been evacuated, it would likely have been blown up. What actually happened, according to Al Jazeera, was a lot of civilians were sheltering in hospitals and other locations (e.g. schools and churches), hoping that they would be spared bombs and shells. Hamas was telling everyone to stay put.
Geneva disagrees with you. If it's used for military purposes it's a valid target. It matters not if it also has a civilian purpose.
If there are civilians sheltering in those locations, they are not legitimate military targets. We are not seeing anything like conformance with the
basic principles of International Humanitarian Law from Israel. You don't cut off basic human needs--food, water, power, medical supplies--from civilian populations. That is clearly a war crime. Israel appears to be deliberately ignoring these principles now, although it did make efforts to comply in the past.
A major case of cart before the horse. They are treating it as if civilian trumps military when even Geneva says the opposite--military trumps civilian. The only part that's relevant is proportionality and that only requires prosecuting the war with an eye to minimizing civilian casualties. If the enemy ensures high civilian casualties that's their fault, not yours.
I do not believe the people would be sheltering in schools and churches (what churches? They've driven out most of the Christians!) because they know that's a dangerous place to be because Hamas uses protected buildings for weapon storage.
Were you not aware that Christians were living in Gaza City? The Church of Porphyrius was bombed, and Christians were sheltered with Muslims inside of it. They have video footage of a child being carried out of the rubble. The IDF admits that they damaged the church but claims they didn't target it. Reports say 16-18 Christians were killed, including children. The IDF claims they didn't target the church, that they are investigating the incident, and that there was a military command center somewhere near the church. It wasn't being used to store weapons.
There are a few, not many. You have an example of one church but you said "churches" as if they were numerous.
And if the church was full of people sheltering yet only 16-18 were killed then clearly Israel did not hit it. If they had it wouldn't be there and the death toll would be much higher.
Besides, Israel overheard Islamic Jihad admitting it was their oops.
Israel released an unverified audio tape that they allege is from Islamic Jihad. Palestinians are claiming that the Arab accents were not native to Gaza.
Non-native accents prove nothing.
...
I honestly don't know what Israel is using, but I've read that they are also firing artillery shells, which are not guided bombs. In any case, you must believe then that Israel deliberately
targeted the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, where hundreds of Christians and Muslims were sheltering. Let's not forget that the terrorists position their missile launchers and ammo dumps in and around such locations. The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has called it a war crime.
You realize guided artillery exists??
Anyway, note that your article says the church was damaged by a strike on a nearby target, not that the church was targeted. And, yes, positioning the launchers by the church is a war crime. Hitting the launcher is
not a war crime even if they are by a church.
There were civilians everywhere in the area. No, the article says the IDF claims it was a military command center, not a launcher. And, if they use such precision targeting, why did they hit a major church? That's a location where civilians flock to take shelter, hoping that Israel will not bomb it. The IDF doesn't really know what happened, because they admit that they are investigating it.
They are investigating to make sure their initial evaluation was correct--which is what they should do if it's called into question.
However, if it's a command center instead of ammo that doesn't change anything, it's still a valid target.
...I think that Israel is quite capable lying about something like that, given the outrage across the Muslim world. That's why there are such fierce disputes over who is responsible for the Al-Ahli hospital tragedy.
History shows that in the end the Israeli claims are normally pretty close to the truth and the Palestinian claims are wildly inaccurate. And all of those killed by rockets falling short or the like are reported as Israeli deaths.
This is about what is happening now, not the past. History also shows that Israel provided humanitarian aid in past conflicts. Now, it is deliberately cutting that aid off. And we already have video footage that shows victims who are clearly civilians--children, women, old people. These are not terrorists. And they need water, food, and medial supplies that Israel is deliberately denying them.
They wouldn't be getting the supplies anyway. Hamas takes what they want, the civilians only get what's left. It's another thing Hamas doesn't let be talked about. (And it's a general problem with aid to war-torn areas, most of it is diverted. Gaza is only different in the degree of press control.)
...No, I don't take their word on anything. Israel itself used their footage as evidence. The Al Jazeera report also used Israeli footage to rebut their claim. Their news reports don't actually read like propaganda. They want to claim that their story shows Israel targeted the hospital. Having watched their report, I can say that I saw no evidence to support that claim. I think that the most likely scenario is debris from a launched terrorist rocket hit by Iron Dome or else a misfired rocket on the ground. It is also possible that the terrorists themselves deliberately blew up the hospital as a false flag operation, but that is paranoid speculation. I wouldn't dismiss such a possibility out of hand. The fact is that there is no way that hospital could be blown up and Israel not get blamed. It did end up torpedoing Biden's attempt at shuttle diplomacy.
You admit that whoever did it Israel will be blamed--and then you go fall for that and blame Israel.
That's just false. I blame both Israel and the terrorist attackers for their own actions, and I'm actually reserving judgment on which side caused the hospital destruction. In the case of other civilian targets such as churches and schools, it is clear that Israeli ordnance is to blame. What Israel doesn't seem to get is that it needs to show more restraint than the terrorists who attacked on October 6. Hamas deliberately planned this, and Israel appears to be doing everything they expected. They use Palestinian civilians as human shields for a reason. The IDF can blow them to bits, but that is what precisely what the terrorists are intentionally goading them to do. Israel is making itself look no better than the terrorists who attacked it. They took the bait.
Showing restraint would just get more attacks. In one day Israel took more casualties than since the end of the 1973 war. I would expect them to hit back at least as hard as everything they have done since 1973.
And I don't think Israel is doing much about blowing Hamas to bits. They're blowing Hamas stuff to bits so it can't be used against Israel.
All they are showing is that Israel shot down some rockets. This doesn't even address what hit the hospital. I don't know how this is supposed to prove that it was a failed launch, all it proves is that rockets were being launched from near the hospital. And whatever the initial trigger the lag before the big boom shows that the big boom was stuff on the ground going up, not whatever caused it.
I thought I had said as much, but I certainly agree with what you say here.
Note that that means that if Israel did it they hit a valid target.
It only means that that is one possible scenario. We don't actually know what caused the explosion, so the best we can do now is suspend judgment.
No. There's nothing that legitimately should be there that could cause that kind of boom. And the boom was caused by the initial boom, it didn't fall from the sky. (A plane can drop from above MANPAD range and there are no bigger threats. Thus there is zero risk to the plane and thus they will only drop one bomb per target unless they see the first one failed to do the job.) Thus it's clear that the second boom was ordnance (presumably rockets) going up--which inherently makes it a valid target. Military trumps civilian!
Update: Just ran into something I would have realized if I had thought about it: The claim that the initial boom was due to a rocket being intercepted is certainly false. The problem is that Iron Dome is a terminal intercept system--it engages rockets coming back down (predictable targets that are much easier to hit), not rockets in boost phase. Anything Iron Dome shoots down will fall in Israel, not Gaza. (They only engage high-threat inbounds in the first place--a round going into Gaza isn't a threat at all.)
"
on X: "Excerpted remarks from @IlhanMN at yesterday's anti-war, ceasefire now press conference. Rep. Omar spoke at length about her own experience of being a survivor of war. (pix link)" / X
@Ilhan Omar, asked about her colleague @RitchieTorres, one of the most outspoken, unconditional supporters of Israel’s war, responds: “How many more killings is enough for you? Is it a thousand more? Two thousand more? Three thousand more?” (vid link)" / X
on X: "We are so relieved to learn that — as a result of diplomatic negotiation — two American hostages were just released by Hamas and will be returning home." / X
