Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[TV and credit cards]

But you automatically blame Israel and ignore what they are reacting to. And since it's not about blaming Israel we can be reasonably confident the images are true.

I question Israel's motivation for doing so. They have about as much business in Syria as Russia does in Ukraine.

As I said, you are automatically blaming Israel. The Druze are like the Jews, a persecuted minority. As such, they have been friendly with Israel.

Still doesn't justify their attacking another nation, a nation just trying to get their government running again. And beyond that is the speed in which Israel made the decision to attack indicates to me they used this Syrian internal conflict as a pretext to at a minimum further cement their illegal occupation of the buffer zone. Israel's only duty here was to keep their Druze population out of Syria and to support the Syrian government along with the international community. This would help Syria maintain control over their own forces. In telling Syria's government to get their forces out of the Suwayda region and executing air strikes, Israel is just exacerbating the problem.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say this is a proxy war between Israel and Iran, and you’re not going to fault Israel for making Gaza the battlefield. But Loren, Gaza isn’t a chessboard. It’s a strip of land packed with over 2 million civilians, half of them children. Saying “it’s Iran’s fault” doesn’t wash the blood off anyone’s hands — it just moves the blame downstream. If your strategy requires leveling neighborhoods and starving families to signal strength to Tehran, then you’ve turned an entire civilian population into cannon fodder for a message war. That’s not security. That’s dehumanization with regional branding.

I put the blood on the hands of those who intended to create the blood.

You argue that Egypt and Jordan enforced refugee camps while Israel integrated its refugees. Let’s be honest about what that glosses over. Israel’s “integration” came on land made vacant by expulsion and depopulation. The Palestinian refugees didn’t choose camp life — they were locked out by policy and walls. And no, they’re not “cities in all but name.” They’re densely packed zones of inherited limbo — no statehood, no passports, no mobility, no future. Your narrative rewrites their dispossession as an Arab betrayal to avoid facing Israel’s role in sustaining that limbo through siege and settlement.

How about some reality? I'm talking about the 1948-1967. No settlements.

And I never said they chose camp life. I'm saying Egypt and Jordan imposed it to keep them oppressed to use as a weapon against Israel.

And they are cities in all but name.

You say repeated misuse of medical symbols “makes them meaningless.” No, Loren — it makes them more urgent to protect. That’s the whole reason Geneva exists: because war corrupts symbols, and law is meant to preserve the last scraps of humanity in the fog. A single fighter using a hospital doesn’t erase the rights of every patient inside. You keep demanding I show you a hospital that didn’t “shoot back” — but that flips the burden. It’s the attacker who must prove military necessity, not the accused who must prove innocence under rubble. That’s how law works. That’s how decency works.

You can't protect that which doesn't exist. Blame the Red Crescent, not Israel. Note how the Red Cross objects to the misuse of said symbol even in movies. The Red Crescent specifically refused to object to the misuse in combat. And it's not a single fighter. Why do you keep having such an unrealistic estimate of what's going on?

You say I’m parroting Hamas because “basic restraint” isn’t what’s really happening. But you’re dodging again. This isn’t about what Hamas claims. It’s about what international law requires. I don’t cite Hamas. I cite the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC, Amnesty, and Human Rights Watch — institutions you reflexively dismiss because they don’t toe your line. When every call for restraint gets filtered through Hamas’s depravity, you’ve lost the ability to judge your own side. You’ve made Hamas the standard — and that’s moral collapse, not clarity.

And you have no understanding of what international law requires. Geneva affords civilians no protection from the actions of their own side--nobody even envisioned the kill your own people tactics that have become common these days. And it's not because they don't toe my line, it's because they have shown an utter disregard for the truth.

You say I haven’t proven cruelty — that the only unquestionable cruelty was by Hamas. So let’s get specific. Blocking food, fuel, and medicine for millions because of hundreds of fighters? That’s cruelty. Bombing known shelters because “senior leadership might be nearby”? That’s cruelty. Reducing aid deliveries and then blaming Hamas for the starvation? That’s not moral ambiguity — it’s a policy of forced suffering. If you can’t see that, it’s because you’ve decided the victims don’t count unless they can shoot back.

Hamas is using those supplies to maintain it's stranglehold on Gaza. It's not a minor thing.

And "senior leadership might be nearby"--Israel doesn't drop on a target unless they are pretty darn sure of it. But all the senior leadership has their own escape tunnels, sometimes they manage to get away when an incoming strike is spotted.

And we have absolutely zero evidence of Gaza being out of food. The supplies coming in are sufficient--at least if the UN actually cared to deliver them. They won't pay the drivers anything like market rate, close to 1,000 trucks are simply sitting there inside Gaza. And the UN only counts aid that actually reaches it's destination--meaning that anything left sitting at the border isn't counted, anything diverted by Hamas isn't counted. It lets them pretend there's a problem. That's the degree of evil you're supporting.

You try to erase “collective punishment” by wordplay. But let’s be clear: when your policies intentionally degrade the living conditions of an entire population to pressure their rulers, that’s the textbook definition of collective punishment — morally, politically, and legally. You don’t need to use the word “punishment” in the press release. You just need to enforce it through siege, denial, and indifference. Which is exactly what’s happening.

You first need to establish that that's the purpose, something you have utterly failed to do.

And finally, you say it’s not about protecting a flag — it’s about survival. That if the flag falls, “the people inside die.” Then why are so many already dying to keep it upright? If survival requires mass displacement, starvation, and the normalization of civilian death — what kind of survival is that? You’ve built a fortress around fear and called it realism. But a nation doesn’t preserve its soul by flattening everything in its path. It just forgets what it was trying to protect in the first place.

Iran chooses the plight of those in Gaza. It's not Israel's job to protect them from Iran.

Everyone around there knows that Israel is a porcupine--leave them alone, you're ok, poke them, you are likely to get hurt. Same as Syria used to not molest the IDF strikes on Hezbollah weapon shipments. Syria knew that trying to contest the skies would end up very badly for them, but that if they left the planes alone they planes would leave them alone.

What you don't realize is that Iran would be ecstatic to trade 10,000,000 Muslim children for the destruction of Israel.

 

[Tammuz]

But you automatically blame Israel and ignore what they are reacting to. And since it's not about blaming Israel we can be reasonably confident the images are true.

I question Israel's motivation for doing so. They have about as much business in Syria as Russia does in Ukraine.

As I said, you are automatically blaming Israel. The Druze are like the Jews, a persecuted minority. As such, they have been friendly with Israel.

I am not sure that is the whole story. The Israeli Druze are loyal to Israel, but the Druze in Syria and Lebanon tend not to be friendly of Israel. The inhabitants of the Golan Heights (mostly Druze) have largely rejected Israeli citizenship because they consider themselves to be Syrians.

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.doctorswithoutborders.c...palestinians-and-use-of-aid-as-a-tool-of-war/

I guess Doctors Without Borders, which is primarily made up of volunteer doctors who sometimes risk their lives to help people in dire situations don't know what their talking about either. /s

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) strongly condemns the Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza, which is depriving people of basic services and critical supplies, including access to water by cutting electricity supply on March 9.

Israeli authorities have instrumentalized humanitarian needs by using them as a bargaining chip, such as cutting the electricity supply to Gaza and preventing all aid from entering. This policy, which amounts to collective punishment, must be immediately stopped. MSF calls on Israeli authorities to respect international humanitarian law and uphold its responsibilities as an occupying power and to end this inhumane blockade of Gaza.

Israel’s allies have purposefully ignored this grave violation of international humanitarian law and normalized this conduct. MSF also urges Israel’s allies, including the United States, to refrain from normalizing such actions and to act decisively to prevent Gaza from plunging further into devastation.

“Israeli authorities are yet again normalizing the use of aid as a negotiation tool. This is outrageous. Humanitarian aid should never be used as a bargaining chip in war,” says Myriam Laaroussi, MSF emergency coordinator. “The blockade on all supplies is inevitably hurting hundreds of thousands of people and is having potentially deadly consequences.”

At a moment in which the ceasefire should mean a scale-up of the humanitarian response, the Israeli authorities have brought the entry of all aid to a screeching halt. The last supplies our teams were able to get into Gaza were three trucks of mostly medical supplies on Feb. 27. MSF has several trucks that were planned to cross into Gaza before the blockade.

MSF teams are trying to scale up the response in Gaza, especially in the north where people have been deprived of basic needs for months.

“Gaza is now left without fuel coming in,” says Laaroussi. “Our hands are tied and with no supply pipeline it makes it even more difficult to assist people in Gaza once our stocks run out. A ceasefire without scaling up humanitarian aid is contradictory.”

At the same time, the Israeli government’s suspension of electricity supply to Gaza has already forced the main water desalination plant in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, to run on fuel. The plant has dropped its production from 17 million to 2.5 million litres per day. This decision to cut electricity will therefore gradually severely impact the public water supply.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say these aren’t war crimes because Geneva doesn’t mention them by name. That’s not a defense — that’s a loophole hunt. Law isn’t a checklist where omission equals permission. When the effect of a policy is mass civilian harm, legal language doesn’t sanitize it. It’s not about chanting “war crimes.” It’s about naming what happens when the laws of war become tools of convenience instead of limits on power.

It's not a loophole hunt. Fundamentally, Geneva doesn't protect civilians from their own nation.

You insist paying fighters’ salaries is “military use,” as if aid turning into money voids the right to eat. Geneva says aid diversion must directly support military action, not general governance or payroll. By your logic, any transaction that ends up in the wrong hands invalidates every meal. But international law doesn’t collapse into that kind of binary. That’s not law — that’s collective starvation dressed as semantics.

And again you manufacture things it does not say. It does not say "directly support military action", that's entirely your own creation.

You say it’s not punishment — just an attempt to stop Hamas from benefitting. But punishment by euphemism is still punishment. If you knowingly cut insulin, bread, and fuel to civilians with the goal of undermining enemy control, you are punishing the population because of their rulers. That’s collective punishment whether you call it “pressure” or “strategy.” Geneva doesn’t care about your phrasing — only your outcome.

Punishment is about intent.

You argue that aid doesn’t need to be delivered because Hamas won’t cooperate. But Loren, Geneva doesn’t operate on “tit for tat.” The besieging power doesn’t get to shrug and say, “they’re bad, so we can be cruel.” The law requires alternatives, safe corridors, third-party routes — not total blockade. You act like Hamas’s evil erases every Israeli obligation. That’s not how accountability works.

It's not "can be cruel", it's "not required to help". Geneva does not require any alternatives no matter how much you think it does.

You say Geneva “just says diversion,” so anything can be called diversion. No — it allows for action when diversion is likely and significant in a military sense. It doesn’t license a blanket denial of aid because you suspect some might get skimmed. You’re turning legal discretion into a veto on survival. That’s not defense — that’s siege as policy.

You keep manufacturing things to pretend it still applies. Geneva simply says "diversion", no requirement that it be significant. (And the reality is that it is significant.)

You claim Israel “pretty much” has full authority over aid distribution. Wrong. Geneva says the occupying or besieging power must facilitate humanitarian access — not dictate its terms to extinction. What you’re describing is a jailer who claims the right to starve prisoners if the kitchen staff is disloyal. That’s not legality — that’s control run amok.

Read it again. Must facilitate, but they get to set the terms.

You dismiss hope as naiveté and accuse me of grabbing at anything that “looks like a solution.” But what are you offering, Loren? Perpetual siege? Rotating devastation? A waiting room for the next war? You mock people for seeking ways out of this — but offer none yourself. If that’s realism, it’s indistinguishable from surrender.

That's not a rebuttal. This is a very standard manipulation tactic--point to something with no easy answers, pretend to have an easy answer, get people to support said answer. We just trashed our government this way.

You say Hamas was “using food to control the kid.” And your answer is to withhold the food entirely. So the child goes from being controlled by a faction to being punished by a blockade. That’s not liberation. That’s slow-motion retribution.

Except Israel is not. They are taking over distribution. And Hamas is making it very hard by going around shooting people trying to pick up the Israeli supplies.

You skip proportionality analysis because you’re “not a military planner.” Fair. But then you pivot to claiming Israel’s kill ratio proves ethical superiority. You can’t refuse to examine the details and still make broad moral claims. If you’re going to use body counts as proof of virtue, you can’t flinch from asking whose bodies and why.

Neither of us has any ability to evaluate the proportionality of any given action as that would require not only extensive skills but access to data that is almost certainly classified as Israel obviously does not want Hamas figuring out how they are being found. But we can see it in the big picture--Israel does better than anyone else.

You say you’ve never seen a hospital crater without “clear evidence of misuse.” Loren, what counts as clear? Satellite imagery? Confessions? You demand full proof for civilian death after it happens but require no proof before pulling the trigger. That inversion is why your standard of “clear evidence” is so hollow — it only ever applies posthumously.

I know that we do not have access to the information that leads to pulling the trigger. It's an impossible standard. I'm saying to look backwards--what is the outcome of their previous actions. We see the defenders, clearly the information that lead to the attack was correct.

Finally, you say extremism only flourishes where it’s “taught.” But that’s not how radicalization works. Trauma radicalizes. Grief radicalizes. Watching your sibling die in a drone strike radicalizes. You want to blame ink in textbooks while ignoring the ash in the air. Western Sahara? It’s a valid point. And yet the existence of other injustices doesn’t nullify this one. Don’t point to silence elsewhere to justify indifference here.

And you continue to ignore the elephant. Gaza is radicalization plus billions of dollars. Radicalization alone does not produce a Gaza. And oppression does not automatically lead to radicalization, either. Where are the insurgents in Western Sahara?

Can you point to a substantial insurgent force (terrorist or not) anywhere in the world without some major backers?

What you keep calling “realism” is just the normalization of cruelty. And what I’m doing isn’t fantasy. It’s the refusal to let the worst actors define the rules for everyone else. If that sounds radical, it’s only because we’ve let decency become the exception.

You don't like the reality so you keep proposing fantasy answers to solve it. Your words sound good but they are disconnected from reality, in the real world the worst actors are the ones that cause the rules.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say I’m reading the law wrong. No — I’m reading it as it was written: to restrain the very logic you keep defending. The Geneva Conventions weren’t drafted to legalize collective suffering. They were designed precisely to stop powerful actors from using “military necessity” as a blank check. You invoke the law like a shield, but you only respect it when it rubber-stamps destruction.

Apparently you do not realize that it's Hamas quite intentionally harming civilians for military purposes.

You argue the numbers don’t prove wrongdoing — only that Israel’s ratio is “better than anyone else.” But the laws of war don’t benchmark against the worst offender. They demand proportionality in each strike, restraint in each case, protection for civilians at every step. You want to turn that into a ledger sheet, as if the death toll is tolerable because someone else killed more. That’s not morality. That’s moral outsourcing.

I'm not benchmarking against the worst, I'm benchmarking against 2nd place.

You say you dismiss field reports because they’re anonymous and “disconnected.” No, Loren — you dismiss them because they come from Gaza. You’ve made location your disqualifier. If a doctor testifies from a bombed hospital, you reject it. If an NGO counts bodies, you call it fake. But if the IDF releases a PowerPoint, it’s gospel. Your skepticism isn’t about evidence. It’s about who’s holding the microphone.

I dismiss them because we have a huge number of false allegations. Thus I'm going to treat everything that doesn't have a shred of evidence with equal credibility--that is, none. If there really were investigators they would have no reason not to identify themselves in some fashion. Look at what we have in Ukraine--lots of detail, independent confirmations and even then some pretty big gaps in the counts. We have nothing like that in Gaza.

You ask where the dead are — but deny the systems built to find them. You say no one can function under Hamas, then claim that no one functioning proves the data’s false. That’s circular denial. You pretend the absence of perfect proof means the absence of crime, when in reality, it’s just the predictable silence of warzone chaos — a silence you then weaponize.

I deny the systems that produce huge amounts of bad data. Science involves incorporating new data as it's discovered--but we don't see that in Gaza.

You argue that flattening buildings is justified because “Hamas uses everything.” But if that’s true, then Gaza has no civilians by your logic — just 2 million combatants waiting to be targeted. That’s not warfare. That’s depopulation masquerading as military strategy. If every structure is a threat, then no protection remains — and you’ve just rewritten the rules of war to suit your comfort.

No. Gaza has a whole bunch of civilians sitting on top of military targets. The targets are still valid, you do the best you can to get the civilians off the X before the bombs fall, but there's no obligation not to drop.

You ask why Hamas can’t produce bodies of the starving — as if starvation only counts when it’s photogenic (we already went over this). You set standards of evidence no warzone could meet. Then you use that impossibility as your alibi. Food insecurity warnings from UNICEF, blockade reports from the UN, children wasting away in overburdened hospitals — you call it theater. Because anything less than a corpse on camera doesn’t fit your storyline.

Do you even know the meaning of the word "photogenic"?? I'm not demanding nice pictures. I'm demanding pictures (much preferably video, it's much harder to fake--consider a few months ago I applied for a credit card. Photo of ID followed by moving the camera around my face so it was clear it was looking at a 3D face, not a picture) that can be identified as real, unique individuals. This should not be hard to do if they have actual victims. We saw plenty of pictures with the first one--acknowledged medical case. Since then, AI garbage.

You say the bombing is Hamas’s fault because they chose to militarize everything. But that erases the role of the attacker. You ignore the choices of the side with the drones, the missiles, the intelligence, and the capacity to act differently. You’ve absolved the strongest actor of accountability by blaming the weakest one for being in the way.

Hamas is the attacker.

And when you say the license to kill persists “as long as hostages exist,” you’re proving the core problem. You’ve set no limits, no red lines, no moral ceiling. You say the cost doesn’t matter because someone else is worse. But justice isn’t defined by your enemies. It’s defined by what you refuse to become.

If you set a red line you set a price for killing a Jew. Think Iran wouldn't be happy to pay that price in cannon fodder? You think you are solving something when in reality you're perpetuating it.

You keep accusing me of misreading war, misreading law, misreading the world. But the truth is, I see it too clearly for your comfort. You need the law to bend. I need it to hold. You want war to justify anything. I want it constrained by something. And that’s where we part ways — not on facts, but on whether human dignity still means anything when the missiles start falling.

You think you see. But clearly you do not as I have to keep correcting your perceptions.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep repeating that Hamas is exploiting decency as a loophole — and yet somehow, your solution is to shut the door on decency altogether. That’s not closing a loophole. That’s abandoning the foundation. If empathy can be “weaponized,” then your logic demands the extinction of empathy itself. That’s not strategy. That’s surrender — not to Hamas, but to despair.

I'm not trying to shut the door on decency. I agree with the GHF approach, although I will be surprised if it doesn't end up collapsing under Hamas attack.

But when you allow Hamas to use "decency" as a weapon you help nothing, because whatever you do they'll just adjust so the people are still suffering so they can get more "decency"--producing an overall worse result. You are taking the path of appeasement.

You say civilians can be both victims and weapons. And that sounds clever until you realize how quickly it becomes license for anything. Because once you frame civilians as dual-use — not by action, but by proximity — you’ve rewritten the rules of war so every baby becomes a potential asset, every doctor a human shield, every neighborhood a valid target. At that point, you’re not describing a battlefield. You’re describing a free-fire zone. And calling it moral.

Becomes a Hamas weapon. And the more attention you pay to it the more power you give Hamas.

You wave away malnutrition warnings with “Hamas propaganda,” but here’s the issue: the data isn’t coming from Hamas. It’s coming from UNICEF, the WHO, UNRWA, Médecins Sans Frontières, and countless humanitarian workers with nothing to gain from lying. If your framework automatically filters out every source except the IDF’s PR desk, then you’re not evaluating facts. You’re quarantining them.

I've already shown that all of those guys are simply parroting Hamas. Anyone who didn't fix their data when Israel exposed the bad data doesn't care about the truth. And, unfortunately, that appears to be everyone. I am not surprised at the press, they've been thoroughly corrupted by the need for access. and I've been aware that HRW and AI have long since been corrupted. I did not realize the others had been.

You keep citing Iran as the hand behind everything, as if invoking a regional puppet-master absolves Israel of all independent agency. Iran’s influence is real, but not omnipotent — and even if it were, it wouldn’t erase the obligations of a military superpower wielding overwhelming force. You say Hamas removes the red lines. I say: red lines matter most when the enemy crosses them. Because that’s what separates law from vengeance. Civilization from spiral.

The problem is you keep blaming Israel for situations Iran caused to happen.

I’m not parroting Hamas. I’m demanding accountability from the side claiming moral high ground. If your principle collapses the moment the other side behaves monstrously, then it was never a principle — just a preference. Hamas’s brutality doesn’t permit you to mirror it. And if your only metric is who lies more persuasively, then congratulations: you’ve reduced war ethics to a competition of storytellers while the bodies stack up.

You are setting an impossible standard of accountability. I am looking at the results: they're doing better than anyone else has. Neither of us are competent to challenge the world champions, but you seem to think you are.

You say Hamas “pretends” atrocity and I “believe it.” But you don’t examine the facts — you disqualify them based on origin. You assume fraud when the evidence challenges your comfort. That’s not critical thinking. That’s ideological reflex. Every atrocity becomes suspect. Every testimony, compromised. Every death, too convenient. And in the end, the only version of reality you accept is the one that demands no accountability from your side at all.

I assume fraud when there are allegations without evidence that should exist.

They made that AI picture of a starving baby, clearly they are capable of taking a picture inside a hospital room and publishing it. But it's an AI baby, why don't they have a picture of a real one? Clearly because there aren't real ones to take pictures of.

If that’s your realism, keep it. I’ll stick with the kind that still recognizes the humanity buried beneath the rubble.

Your "reality" is to be led around by pictures of horror into creating even more horror.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep insisting I misunderstand you, but I think what bothers you is that I don’t. I quote your words, reflect their consequences, and you call it misrepresentation — not because I changed their meaning, but because I won’t soften it. The problem isn’t confusion. It’s exposure. You’ve built a framework where massive civilian death is regrettable but never disqualifying. That’s not misreading. That’s you saying the quiet part out loud.

Your keep thinking you are correcting the meaning but you are not. You're filtering everything through an Israel-is-always-wrong filter before you try to comprehend it. Again and again I get you to understand for a moment, but you immediately forget, going right back to the false version painted by Hamas.

You ask if monitored corridors or third-party truces “return the hostages.” No — but flattening cities hasn’t returned them either. Mass starvation hasn’t. Sealing aid hasn’t. So let’s be honest: the point of these tactics isn’t just rescue. It’s retribution and leverage — dressed in the language of necessity. If the goal were only hostages, then you wouldn’t keep dismissing every non-lethal proposal as fantasy.

Flattening cities has helped. Your answer is to not try. War is too brutal, give Hamas what it wants so it will stop. But it won't stop, they'll just be back for more. The thing is the supply of horror is not based on Israeli actions, but on Hamas actions. They'll keep supplying it so long as you lap it up.

And yes, I’ve looked at Lebanon. Monitors report violations. Some go ignored. That’s a critique of enforcement, not of the principle. When a speed limit is broken, you don’t abolish traffic law. You enforce it better. You don’t replace oversight with drone strikes. Unless, of course, what you really want isn’t order — but permission to escalate without interruption.

All go ignored, it's 100% sham that actually causes problems. And look at your comparison to traffic law: Look at the spots with lots of traffic violations--in all probability the right answer is to do something about the law. Something is wrong with the speed limit or the light timings or the like. Most drivers drive reasonably but the laws aren't always reasonable. Consider what used to exist northeast of town--often there was a major speed trap up there, more police involved than I would have thought even served the area. Airplane overhead doing speed readings, cops on the ground stopping just about everybody. Then one day the government solved the problem: Put the speed limit back to the 75 that the road had been engineered for. It had almost zero effect on how fast people went. That's not the only spot I've seen that sort of thing--and it's always because somehow the law doesn't line up with observed reality. Speed cameras, red light cameras--purely about revenue. They actually increase accidents (and, surprisingly, increase injuries also--but note that red light cameras tend to move accidents from the intersection itself to the approach, this can be presented as "reducing" when it doesn't) and they keep the real problems from being fixed.

You treat law as an abstraction, disconnected from the bodies it’s meant to protect. “I care about the dead,” you say — but only after deciding their deaths tell you nothing. That’s the sleight of hand. You separate cause from consequence so you can keep the tactics while pretending the outcomes are unfortunate flukes. But if civilian death is predictable and repeated, it’s no longer a bug. It’s policy. And pretending otherwise is moral negligence.

Hamas ensures it happens. I don't like it but I don't see that as a reason to keep Israel from defending herself.

You say I’m “rewarding genocide” by demanding restraint. That’s backwards logic. By your standard, the only moral response to terrorism is overwhelming force — even if it guarantees children die. That’s not accountability. That’s a suicide pact with morality: either the enemy fights clean, or we stop caring. You don’t just hold Hamas hostage with that standard — you hold the very idea of decency hostage too.

Nothing backwards about it. You get more of that which you incentivize. And you are incentivizing Hamas getting Gazan civilians killed.

The problem here is that reality is sufficiently horrific that you are not actually thinking about it, just reacting on emotion.

I don’t want Israel to ignore Hamas. I want it to refuse becoming Hamas. That’s the choice: not fight or don’t fight — but how you fight. And you keep pretending that if the enemy plays dirty, the only valid response is to outmatch them in cruelty. That’s how cycles persist. That’s how law dies — not with defiance, but with applause from those who believe their side is too righteous to need restraint.

First you need to demonstrate cruelty in Israeli actions before you blame them for it.

You say I never ask what’s right for Israel. That’s false. I ask: what kind of future does Israel want to live in — one where survival requires siege, starvation, impunity, and shrinking sympathy? Or one where power is constrained by principle, not just convenience? You keep saying “whatever it takes.” I keep asking: what does it take from you?

So Israel should commit suicide if faced with enough guns to the head of Gazan babies.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Global outcry grows over Israel’s killing of starving civilians in Gaza

UN secretary general warns ‘last lifelines’ may soon collapse after Israeli forces attack WHO facilities in Deir al-Balah

www.theguardian.com

Israel is facing intensifying international condemnation for its killing of starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and its attacks on humanitarian efforts, as the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said the “last lifelines keeping people alive [in the strip] are collapsing”.

An angry chorus of senior figures, among them the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, and a senior Catholic cleric, expressed on Tuesday a growing sense of global horror over Israel’s actions.

“I spoke again with [the Israeli foreign minister] Gideon Saar to recall our understanding on aid flow and made clear that IDF [Israel Defense Forces] must stop killing people at distribution points,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, wrote on X. “The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible.

”She said “all options were on the table” if Israel does not deliver on aid pledges, but did not say what those options included.

According to UN officials on Tuesday, more than 1,000 desperate Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the end of May trying to reach food distributions run by the controversial US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) amid widening conditions of starvation in the Palestinian territory.

Same old wolf. Why should I believe it this time?

And once again we have dead with no proof of the shooters--so once again, your prime suspect should be Hamas. The GHF is choking Hamas' lifeline.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep pointing to Hamas’s corruption of aid (“they’re siphoning funds to pay their cadres” ) as if it magically clears every barbed-wire blockade and airstrike you defend. Yes, Hamas diverts resources to cement its grip — the Washington Post lays out how its financial crisis forces it to seize more civilian assets. But international law doesn’t say “because the enemy is criminal, you can collectively starve their population.” It demands you still find some way to get food, medicine, and water to those who didn’t vote for Hamas. Starvation-by-blockade is collective punishment, pure and simple.

So you do understand yet support it anyway. This is very clearly diversion for military use. It's not Israel starving the people, it's Hamas.

And where is this demand that you still find some way to get the aid in? There's no such obligation.

You claim we can’t evaluate proportionality without perfect knowledge of military gain. But the law never required “Excel-grade precision,” only a good-faith estimate of advantage versus harm. Every air force in history has done post-strike assessments via satellite imagery, signal intercepts, and on-the-ground reports to judge whether a target was worth the civilian risk. Refusing to even try because one variable is unknown is moral abdication, not realism.

You're still playing magic words. Yes, assessments no doubt exist. Doesn't mean we have any access to the details.

And what you fail to understand is that even if you believe Hamas entirely (other than in not counting combatant casualties) you still end up with Israel doing a very good job at proportionality.

You show footage of a collapsed apartment and say “that doesn’t prove Hamas wasn’t there.” True – absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But it is evidence that civilians died. And under international humanitarian law, civilian death requires proof of military necessity, not a presumption of guilt because “Hamas might have been there.” Every family wiped out under a home you could have avoided still counts as a civilian loss.

False--a collapsed apartment does not prove civilians died.

You argue two wrongs make a right: “Yes, Hamas shot people fleeing, so Israel’s hammerfall is justified.” No. Two wrongs never erase legal duties. Warnings before attacks are an obligation; mitigating civilian harm is an obligation; seeking alternatives is an obligation. Blaming Hamas for creating human shields doesn’t cancel Israel’s responsibility for turning those shields into coffins.

You seek, but if they don't exist they don't exist. You are coming at this from a position of faith, that there must be better answers. It's the same mistake just about all of you are making. That's what divides this debate--those of us who will face the horrors vs those who have faith that there must be a better answer. And you continue to fail to comprehend our blasphemy of your faith.

You assert, “Hamas does wrong, I blame Israel, therefore Hamas does more wrong.” That’s circular. Acknowledging one side’s atrocity isn’t an excuse to ignore the other’s. You can—and must—hold both accountable: Hamas for its terror, and Israel for its tactics that kill civilians en masse. Moral clarity demands both.

Yeah, it's circular--you're perpetuating the violence by rewarding it.

And how do you propose to hold Hamas accountable? We aren't looking for some mythical solution based on accountability, we are looking at what is actually happening.

You’ve “proven” Amnesty and HRW are incompetent because they missed some bad data. So every organization you don’t like is now disqualified? That’s selective skepticism. If one UN report errs on a registration field, must we discard every assessment of mass graves, displaced civilians, and famine warnings? No—accuracy isn’t perfection, it’s consistency across methods and sources.

It's not one field, it's thousands that were supposedly verified. And it's the refusal to fix the errors when they're pointed out.

You accuse me of “taking Hamas’s words as truth.” I don’t. I cross-check NGO reports, satellite imagery, IDF admissions, and independent journalists. True belief in nothing but Hamas would be easier. Instead, I’m wrestling with all the evidence, while you merely dismiss anything that upsets your narrative.

No, you don't cross-check. You trust those who have claimed to have cross-checked. But I'm pointing out that they failed to see obvious problems--they did not cross-check. And, even more damning, when shown the problems they didn't fix them.

Finally, you point to Hezbollah in Lebanon: 90% combatant casualties under Israeli fire versus Gaza’s higher civilian toll, and conclude that means 95% of Gaza’s deaths are Hamas’s fault. Statistical games don’t replace accountability. Every life lost in Gaza is still a life. You can’t wave away thousands of civilian deaths by blaming their very presence on Hamas’s tactics. Collateral damage is not an identity tag.

In other words, evidence doesn't matter. Israel is wrong regardless of the facts.

You blindly focus on bodies in Gaza and do not understand that that focus creates them.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say this is a proxy war between Israel and Iran, and you’re not going to fault Israel for making Gaza the battlefield. But Loren, Gaza isn’t a chessboard. It’s a strip of land packed with over 2 million civilians, half of them children. Saying “it’s Iran’s fault” doesn’t wash the blood off anyone’s hands — it just moves the blame downstream. If your strategy requires leveling neighborhoods and starving families to signal strength to Tehran, then you’ve turned an entire civilian population into cannon fodder for a message war. That’s not security. That’s dehumanization with regional branding.

I put the blood on the hands of those who intended to create the blood.

You argue that Egypt and Jordan enforced refugee camps while Israel integrated its refugees. Let’s be honest about what that glosses over. Israel’s “integration” came on land made vacant by expulsion and depopulation. The Palestinian refugees didn’t choose camp life — they were locked out by policy and walls. And no, they’re not “cities in all but name.” They’re densely packed zones of inherited limbo — no statehood, no passports, no mobility, no future. Your narrative rewrites their dispossession as an Arab betrayal to avoid facing Israel’s role in sustaining that limbo through siege and settlement.

How about some reality? I'm talking about the 1948-1967. No settlements.

And I never said they chose camp life. I'm saying Egypt and Jordan imposed it to keep them oppressed to use as a weapon against Israel.

And they are cities in all but name.

You say repeated misuse of medical symbols “makes them meaningless.” No, Loren — it makes them more urgent to protect. That’s the whole reason Geneva exists: because war corrupts symbols, and law is meant to preserve the last scraps of humanity in the fog. A single fighter using a hospital doesn’t erase the rights of every patient inside. You keep demanding I show you a hospital that didn’t “shoot back” — but that flips the burden. It’s the attacker who must prove military necessity, not the accused who must prove innocence under rubble. That’s how law works. That’s how decency works.

You can't protect that which doesn't exist. Blame the Red Crescent, not Israel. Note how the Red Cross objects to the misuse of said symbol even in movies. The Red Crescent specifically refused to object to the misuse in combat. And it's not a single fighter. Why do you keep having such an unrealistic estimate of what's going on?

You say I’m parroting Hamas because “basic restraint” isn’t what’s really happening. But you’re dodging again. This isn’t about what Hamas claims. It’s about what international law requires. I don’t cite Hamas. I cite the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC, Amnesty, and Human Rights Watch — institutions you reflexively dismiss because they don’t toe your line. When every call for restraint gets filtered through Hamas’s depravity, you’ve lost the ability to judge your own side. You’ve made Hamas the standard — and that’s moral collapse, not clarity.

And you have no understanding of what international law requires. Geneva affords civilians no protection from the actions of their own side--nobody even envisioned the kill your own people tactics that have become common these days. And it's not because they don't toe my line, it's because they have shown an utter disregard for the truth.

You say I haven’t proven cruelty — that the only unquestionable cruelty was by Hamas. So let’s get specific. Blocking food, fuel, and medicine for millions because of hundreds of fighters? That’s cruelty. Bombing known shelters because “senior leadership might be nearby”? That’s cruelty. Reducing aid deliveries and then blaming Hamas for the starvation? That’s not moral ambiguity — it’s a policy of forced suffering. If you can’t see that, it’s because you’ve decided the victims don’t count unless they can shoot back.

Hamas is using those supplies to maintain it's stranglehold on Gaza. It's not a minor thing.

And "senior leadership might be nearby"--Israel doesn't drop on a target unless they are pretty darn sure of it. But all the senior leadership has their own escape tunnels, sometimes they manage to get away when an incoming strike is spotted.

And we have absolutely zero evidence of Gaza being out of food. The supplies coming in are sufficient--at least if the UN actually cared to deliver them. They won't pay the drivers anything like market rate, close to 1,000 trucks are simply sitting there inside Gaza. And the UN only counts aid that actually reaches it's destination--meaning that anything left sitting at the border isn't counted, anything diverted by Hamas isn't counted. It lets them pretend there's a problem. That's the degree of evil you're supporting.

You try to erase “collective punishment” by wordplay. But let’s be clear: when your policies intentionally degrade the living conditions of an entire population to pressure their rulers, that’s the textbook definition of collective punishment — morally, politically, and legally. You don’t need to use the word “punishment” in the press release. You just need to enforce it through siege, denial, and indifference. Which is exactly what’s happening.

You first need to establish that that's the purpose, something you have utterly failed to do.

And finally, you say it’s not about protecting a flag — it’s about survival. That if the flag falls, “the people inside die.” Then why are so many already dying to keep it upright? If survival requires mass displacement, starvation, and the normalization of civilian death — what kind of survival is that? You’ve built a fortress around fear and called it realism. But a nation doesn’t preserve its soul by flattening everything in its path. It just forgets what it was trying to protect in the first place.

Iran chooses the plight of those in Gaza. It's not Israel's job to protect them from Iran.

Everyone around there knows that Israel is a porcupine--leave them alone, you're ok, poke them, you are likely to get hurt. Same as Syria used to not molest the IDF strikes on Hezbollah weapon shipments. Syria knew that trying to contest the skies would end up very badly for them, but that if they left the planes alone they planes would leave them alone.

What you don't realize is that Iran would be ecstatic to trade 10,000,000 Muslim children for the destruction of Israel.

So you blame only October 7th and wash your hands of every child buried in Gaza’s rubble. If pulling the trigger is the only act you hold accountable, then bombing schools and starving hospitals are suddenly innocent. Both bloods stain the same ground—one for who started it, the other for choosing to answer with siege and shelling.

Your timeline split ignores that between 1948 and ’67 Gaza was under military rule with no citizenship, no passports, no future. Those camps swelled into crowded urban enclaves because no nation integrated them—because walls and policies locked them in. Calling them “cities” doesn’t grant rights or hope. Blaming Egypt and Jordan for that status paper-over every subsequent power—yours included—that keeps them in limbo.

So because the Red Crescent hesitated doesn’t mean hospitals and ambulances lose their protected status. Law protects the vulnerable when symbols are defiled—that’s why those emblems exist. You demand perfect purity of the shield before arguing the attacker must prove every strike, not the victim. That flips the burden of proof onto the innocent under wreckage.

Geneva’s whole point is that civilians retain rights regardless of their government or which side they’re on. It didn’t need specific clauses for “modern siege tactics”—the principle applies: starving a population and bombing its shelters violates humane treatment. Claiming the law offers no recourse against these policies is choosing cruelty over the very protections you pretend don’t exist.

If thousands of trucks sit idle at the border, not delivering because of bureaucratic choke-points or unpaid drivers, civilians starve. Aid agencies themselves warn of malnutrition and collapsed medical services. Denying that reality because Hamas also exploits deliveries isn’t criticism—it’s choosing to let people die rather than fix the pipeline.

When every bakery lies in ruins, every power plant dark, every grocery empty, the effect speaks louder than press releases. If a policy consistently crushes civilian life to pressure rulers, the purpose is written in the hunger of children. Claiming “we didn’t intend this” rings hollow when suffering is the only outcome.

Excusing your own actions because someone else is worse just hands Iran the victory you claim to deny it. Blaming Tehran for Gaza’s agony while endorsing a strategy that levels neighborhoods makes you a willing participant in collective suffering. No message to Iran can justify making children cannon fodder—morality doesn’t bow to proxy wars.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You treat Hamas’s hostage list as if it alone settles guilt—and that isn’t neutrality, it’s abdication. Guilt requires evidence, trial and due process, not a public relations demand from a terrorist organization.

You seem to have lost the context entirely. There's no proposed punishment, thus no reason for any false accusation.

You insist Israel never deliberately targets civilians, yet marked ambulances, schools and apartment blocks have been struck again and again without adequate warning or independent verification. International law doesn’t let an attacker presume every casualty was a combatant; it demands the attacker prove military necessity.

And we are back to you treating any hit of civilian nature as proof of being civilian.

Yes, Hamas cadres have siphoned off UN food convoys to fund their payroll. But criminal diversion by one party doesn’t give Israel license to seal bakeries and block all relief. Treating every aid truck as suspect and starving an entire population is siege warfare—collective punishment, not self-defense.

Read Geneva again.

Dismissal of Doctors Without Borders, UN relief teams and other NGOs as “just parroting Hamas” ignores how these organizations operate under neutrality mandates and field-verified mandates. Rejecting all humanitarian reports because a few errors slipped through is willful ignorance, not critical thinking.

They claim to, but they clearly do not.

Buying land under the British Mandate wasn’t akin to modern real-estate deals. It depended on colonial courts backed by armed enforcement and disenfranchised local owners. Foreclosure by armed sheriff isn’t neutral—it weaponizes the law against the vulnerable.

And you have some evidence of this? It wasn't local landowners in the first place. They were absentee landlords who were happy to sell.

If it were being forced why does Palestinian law make selling land to a Jew a life at hard labor offense?

Camp David and Taba offered fragmented cantons under Israeli veto, permanent settlements and no genuine border control. That wasn’t a viable basis for statehood but a gilded cage. Walking away from that phantom “state” was refusing to surrender, not evidence of sabotaging peace.

Israel is not going to relinquish border control until there has been a long demonstration of peaceful behavior.

Calling for the protection of civilians after hospitals, markets and refugee camps are struck isn’t sympathy for terrorists; it’s insisting that the laws of war apply even to the side with the bigger guns. Humanity doesn’t become a “Hamas talking point” simply because the other side would rather ignore it.

The civilians wouldn't need protecting if Hamas wasn't putting them in the way. How every hospital fight should have gone: IDF shows up, looks around, finds nothing Hamas and leaves. No restrictions beyond active operating rooms, MRI zone 4 (assuming the system is energized--something that's probably not the case) etc.

You argue Hamas lacks real agency and claim it’s all Iran’s proxy—but whether external actors fund or arm them, the decision to bomb, besiege and blockade remains Israel’s policy. Blaming someone else for your own choices surrenders both moral and political agency—and lets cruelty become the default.

These aren’t loopholes you can pick and choose; they’re guardrails meant to stop war from devouring its own justification. If every atrocity can be excused as “the enemy started it,” you’ve already lost the moral ground you claim to defend.

Your "guardrails" amount to submit to anyone sufficiently evil.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Really? You think the article is antisemitic?

And you think it's not???

In which way do you think it is antisemitic? It criticizes the Israeli government and the Israeli state. It does not bash Jews.

At first I just thought they were bonkers. Then I realized it was a false flag from the start. It's not arguing for a one-state, it's trying to mislead you.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why do you think a secular, liberal single state is possible?

A secular, liberal single state is always possible, as long as its constitution contains strong protections for secularism that cannot be changed without a supermajority.

Your idea that a simple majority can and will always impose their religion on the rest of any democratic nation is particularly absurd given that you live in the USA, which provides a flawed but obvious counterexample.

A single, secular, liberal state can be designed to withstand concerted efforts to turn it into a theocracy by anyone. The US has done so (mostly) despite the monomania and enthusiasm typical of religious extremists. Why couldn't Israel?

You think we have succeeded??? Have you not paid attention to the last half year???

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I guess you haven't been following closely enough.

Quite some time ago Israel pointed out about 4k of already-dead people and obviously false people. Nobody removed them from their lists of the dead. Therefore, it's clear that nobody gives a hoot if the data is accurate, they just parrot Hamas. Hamas eventually removed a bunch of them from their lists--but the death toll didn't drop one iota because of that. Clearly they just made up better fakes.

The UN reported the proprition of children in Gaza that they screened was almost double the proportion of malnourished Gazan children in March. Malnourished children aren’t dead not dead. The UN is not Hamas. So why are you babbling about fake dead tolls?

Have you not being reading at all?

The UN is reporting nothing. They're just parroting Hamas. We supposedly have a bunch of kids dying--and no photos??? Of course they don't need them because the left keeps baaing for Hamas anyway.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say I’m throwing around “collective punishment” like a magic spell—but when bakeries collapse under tank fire and flour convoys sit at checkpoints without baby formula, that isn’t semantics. It’s a siege policy that starves infants to punish a government.

And you keep throwing your magic spells that don't work.

Do you not realize that the food is sitting on the Gaza side of the border? Israel isn't stopping it, the UN won't pay drivers to move it.

You dismiss claims of executions at Deir Yassin as “only one bad actor,” but even Israeli archives and survivor testimony confirm mass killings of women and children. Hiding behind “but they weren’t in uniform” ignores the fact that Geneva bans slaughtering noncombatants full stop.

Except they don't. You continue to look at the deception, not the reality.

You shrug off settlement expansion during talks as mere political theater. But building homes while negotiating sovereignty is annexation in motion, not bargaining. Saying “they weren’t serious” doesn’t erase the bulldozers rolling through occupied land.

You keep focusing on the propaganda.

Bulldozers were about the houses of those who did suicide missions against Israel.

You call documenting bodyguards as civilians “deliberate deception,” yet international investigators use cross-checked manifests and witness interviews—far more reliable than your gut instinct. Picking and choosing who counts as “civilian” to justify a bombing campaign isn’t truth-seeking. It’s moral cherry-picking.

You keep claiming investigations that do not exist. If they existed why didn't they catch the obvious fraud?

You insist kids fighting under arms aren’t children you need to protect. But the law treats every juvenile combatant as a special case—coerced or not—not as free fire. Ignoring that is profiling with a rifle, not defending your people.

Explain how Geneva specifies any different battlefield treatment of underage combatants.

You argue “no ID, no proof,” so let’s play that game: who benefits most from medics, journalists, and unarmed protesters being gunned down hundreds of feet from any fighting? Every credible human-rights group says the shooters weren’t Hamas. Dismissing them all because you can’t read the insignia is willful blindness.

We have no ID on the shooters. Therefore anyone who says they aren't Hamas is lying.

Yes, hostage releases have begun—but dozens remain. Your siege hasn’t ended the threat; it’s fortified the resolve on both sides. If starving civilians were a hostage rescue plan, it’s a catastrophic failure.

It hasn't ended it but it has reduced it.

You demand video proof of snipers hitting people with flags. If every death needed high-def footage, every war would go uninvestigated. Eyewitnesses, bullet casings, impact wounds—all of that constitutes evidence by every standard you claim to trust.

I want some proof of the identity of the shooters. We have none. No witnesses, no bullet casings, wounds mean nothing as many Hamas weapons use the same round as the IDF uses. Thus anyone claiming to have such evidence is making it up.

Finally, blaming Hamas for every civilian death lets you avoid accountability for the bombs you authorize. If your answer to horror is “but look who started it,” you’ve already surrendered the moral ground. I’m fighting for a standard that spares innocents even amid atrocity. You’re fighting to justify that sacrifice—and calling it realism.

NHC

Except you are trying to increase the death toll.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You point to selective video drops and say, “They can post anything—so if there’s no famine footage, it must not exist.” But starving children aren’t a movie trailer. Journalists have been killed, cell networks cut, power blacked out—trauma doesn’t upload itself on demand. Demanding a pristine feed before you’ll believe a disaster isn’t rigor, it’s denial.

Just as easily, you're the one in denial, defending evidence that isn't real.

You chalk up thousands of duplicate IDs to “measurement error, not lies,” yet expect a calculus-level critique of every airstrike. Tiny margin-of-error in war is one thing; systemic anomalies screaming “unverified” are another. If the vetting process misses obvious fraud, who trusts its finer points?

What are you talking about?

1) It's not thousands of duplicate IDs. It's thousands of clearly fake IDs. That's not measurement error.

2) You are blaming Israel for Hamas fraud. That makes no sense.

Sure, Israeli figures wobble too—every military does. But when your “10× rule” becomes gospel for Hamas data, you’re inventing your own statistics to dodge the worst carnage. And then declaring every un-filmed death “imaginary”? That’s not evidence-based skepticism; it’s emotional anesthesia.

In the long run we usually figure out how many actually died. I'll wait for that.

You sneer that NGOs “just repeat Hamas,” yet swallow IDF press releases like sacraments. Médecins Sans Frontières, U.N. specialists and even Israeli veterans risk life and limb to document these horrors. Brushing them off because a few mistakes slipped through isn’t critical thinking—it’s selective blindfolding.

I trust those whose claims stand up over time.

Calling proportionality a “magic word” won’t erase its legal heft. It’s the test every army uses to plan strikes, weighing tunnel shafts against the lives trapped above. Mocking it as unmeasurable doesn’t invalidate the principle—it exposes your unwillingness to face the human cost you’ve declared irrelevant.

I call it a magic word because you keep calling on it on completely invalid grounds. You measure harm (and at that, Hamas claimed harm) but do not look at benefit. You can't figure a ratio without knowing both numbers.

Yes, Hamas booby-traps homes and stores explosives in civilian zones, but international law forbids using children as shields. You can’t justify leveling whole families by blaming the victim. Guilt by association is vengeance, not justice.

And now you're just babbling random terms from the war.

When you invoke Goebbels to smear anyone pointing out these truths, you reveal more about your tactics than mine. And blaming Hamas for every corpse doesn’t free Israel from accountability when it drops the bombs. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Both horrors matter, and refusing to hold both sides to the same standard is moral collapse, not “realism.”

NHC

I'm pointing out Hamas tactics. They keep peddling their lie, you keep falling for it even when I momentarily get you to realize the truth.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I’m not trying to compare wars like sports teams—I’m saying pointing at other horrors doesn’t make this one any less real or any less in need of moral clarity. Every dead child, every flattened home, deserves its own reckoning.

The point is you are putting your effort behind what's fairly small in terms of ongoing horrors.

I’m not pretending for peace to arrive by magic—I’m insisting we actually try ceasefires, humanitarian corridors, third-party monitors, even imperfect talks. Rejecting every proposal as “naïve” isn’t realism, it’s giving up on every path that isn’t collective punishment.

Putting terms on your magic doesn't make it not magic.

If your only “realism” is a self-fulfilling prophecy of endless bloodshed, then you’ve already built the future you fear. The moment you close off every door to diplomacy or relief, you guarantee more suffering—and more 10/7-style horrors.

I'm not opposed to true diplomacy. But I have yet to see Iran at the table, let alone a sane peace proposal from them. I don't care about supposed "peace" with Hamas as they have no ability to offer it.

Clinging to siege, saturation bombing, and starvation fuels the cycle—it doesn’t break it. Real strategy isn’t counting on endless retribution; it’s finding ways to starve conflict of its fuel: despair, siege, and impunity.

The fuel is the Iranian money. You still haven't addressed the horror spots of the world. Why is there no major insurgency in Western Sahara? Do you even know where it is without a map, or who the oppressor is?

Large parts of the world are becoming much more hostile than they used to be. And the vast majority of that is due to Islam.

I’m not asking Israel to surrender its right to defend itself—I’m asking it to refuse the surrender of its humanity. Defining “realistic” as total impunity for mass suffering isn’t courage; it’s the cowardice of abandoning every principle you claim to fight for.

NHC

You are asking them to cave to human shield tactics--which is tantamount to surrender.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But you automatically blame Israel and ignore what they are reacting to. And since it's not about blaming Israel we can be reasonably confident the images are true.

I question Israel's motivation for doing so. They have about as much business in Syria as Russia does in Ukraine.

As I said, you are automatically blaming Israel. The Druze are like the Jews, a persecuted minority. As such, they have been friendly with Israel.

Still doesn't justify their attacking another nation, a nation just trying to get their government running again. And beyond that is the speed in which Israel made the decision to attack indicates to me they used this Syrian internal conflict as a pretext to at a minimum further cement their illegal occupation of the buffer zone. Israel's only duty here was to keep their Druze population out of Syria and to support the Syrian government along with the international community. This would help Syria maintain control over their own forces. In telling Syria's government to get their forces out of the Suwayda region and executing air strikes, Israel is just exacerbating the problem.

Have you not read the article I posted about Syrian massacres of the Druze?

Israel is a country used to actually understanding what needs to be done and being prepared to do it rather than the endless political nonsense most of the world engages in. The speed of their reaction is simply because they are competent.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say these aren’t war crimes because Geneva doesn’t mention them by name. That’s not a defense — that’s a loophole hunt. Law isn’t a checklist where omission equals permission. When the effect of a policy is mass civilian harm, legal language doesn’t sanitize it. It’s not about chanting “war crimes.” It’s about naming what happens when the laws of war become tools of convenience instead of limits on power.

It's not a loophole hunt. Fundamentally, Geneva doesn't protect civilians from their own nation.

You insist paying fighters’ salaries is “military use,” as if aid turning into money voids the right to eat. Geneva says aid diversion must directly support military action, not general governance or payroll. By your logic, any transaction that ends up in the wrong hands invalidates every meal. But international law doesn’t collapse into that kind of binary. That’s not law — that’s collective starvation dressed as semantics.

And again you manufacture things it does not say. It does not say "directly support military action", that's entirely your own creation.

You say it’s not punishment — just an attempt to stop Hamas from benefitting. But punishment by euphemism is still punishment. If you knowingly cut insulin, bread, and fuel to civilians with the goal of undermining enemy control, you are punishing the population because of their rulers. That’s collective punishment whether you call it “pressure” or “strategy.” Geneva doesn’t care about your phrasing — only your outcome.

Punishment is about intent.

You argue that aid doesn’t need to be delivered because Hamas won’t cooperate. But Loren, Geneva doesn’t operate on “tit for tat.” The besieging power doesn’t get to shrug and say, “they’re bad, so we can be cruel.” The law requires alternatives, safe corridors, third-party routes — not total blockade. You act like Hamas’s evil erases every Israeli obligation. That’s not how accountability works.

It's not "can be cruel", it's "not required to help". Geneva does not require any alternatives no matter how much you think it does.

You say Geneva “just says diversion,” so anything can be called diversion. No — it allows for action when diversion is likely and significant in a military sense. It doesn’t license a blanket denial of aid because you suspect some might get skimmed. You’re turning legal discretion into a veto on survival. That’s not defense — that’s siege as policy.

You keep manufacturing things to pretend it still applies. Geneva simply says "diversion", no requirement that it be significant. (And the reality is that it is significant.)

You claim Israel “pretty much” has full authority over aid distribution. Wrong. Geneva says the occupying or besieging power must facilitate humanitarian access — not dictate its terms to extinction. What you’re describing is a jailer who claims the right to starve prisoners if the kitchen staff is disloyal. That’s not legality — that’s control run amok.

Read it again. Must facilitate, but they get to set the terms.

You dismiss hope as naiveté and accuse me of grabbing at anything that “looks like a solution.” But what are you offering, Loren? Perpetual siege? Rotating devastation? A waiting room for the next war? You mock people for seeking ways out of this — but offer none yourself. If that’s realism, it’s indistinguishable from surrender.

That's not a rebuttal. This is a very standard manipulation tactic--point to something with no easy answers, pretend to have an easy answer, get people to support said answer. We just trashed our government this way.

You say Hamas was “using food to control the kid.” And your answer is to withhold the food entirely. So the child goes from being controlled by a faction to being punished by a blockade. That’s not liberation. That’s slow-motion retribution.

Except Israel is not. They are taking over distribution. And Hamas is making it very hard by going around shooting people trying to pick up the Israeli supplies.

You skip proportionality analysis because you’re “not a military planner.” Fair. But then you pivot to claiming Israel’s kill ratio proves ethical superiority. You can’t refuse to examine the details and still make broad moral claims. If you’re going to use body counts as proof of virtue, you can’t flinch from asking whose bodies and why.

Neither of us has any ability to evaluate the proportionality of any given action as that would require not only extensive skills but access to data that is almost certainly classified as Israel obviously does not want Hamas figuring out how they are being found. But we can see it in the big picture--Israel does better than anyone else.

You say you’ve never seen a hospital crater without “clear evidence of misuse.” Loren, what counts as clear? Satellite imagery? Confessions? You demand full proof for civilian death after it happens but require no proof before pulling the trigger. That inversion is why your standard of “clear evidence” is so hollow — it only ever applies posthumously.

I know that we do not have access to the information that leads to pulling the trigger. It's an impossible standard. I'm saying to look backwards--what is the outcome of their previous actions. We see the defenders, clearly the information that lead to the attack was correct.

Finally, you say extremism only flourishes where it’s “taught.” But that’s not how radicalization works. Trauma radicalizes. Grief radicalizes. Watching your sibling die in a drone strike radicalizes. You want to blame ink in textbooks while ignoring the ash in the air. Western Sahara? It’s a valid point. And yet the existence of other injustices doesn’t nullify this one. Don’t point to silence elsewhere to justify indifference here.

And you continue to ignore the elephant. Gaza is radicalization plus billions of dollars. Radicalization alone does not produce a Gaza. And oppression does not automatically lead to radicalization, either. Where are the insurgents in Western Sahara?

Can you point to a substantial insurgent force (terrorist or not) anywhere in the world without some major backers?

What you keep calling “realism” is just the normalization of cruelty. And what I’m doing isn’t fantasy. It’s the refusal to let the worst actors define the rules for everyone else. If that sounds radical, it’s only because we’ve let decency become the exception.

You don't like the reality so you keep proposing fantasy answers to solve it. Your words sound good but they are disconnected from reality, in the real world the worst actors are the ones that cause the rules.

Geneva applies to any party that besieges or occupies. Whether it’s your neighbor’s tank or your own government’s blockade, civilians retain their rights. Saying “it only covers enemies” doesn’t change the text—it just lets power become the judge of its own crimes.

ICRC commentaries and decades of state practice interpret “diversion” as aid channelled to fighters or weapons. This isn’t my invention—it’s how “diversion” became a legal trigger for safe‐passage obligations. If bread ends up on a firing line, that counts. You can’t pretend the law meant “any imaginable misuse” and then reject the established interpretation when it hurts your case.

Intent can be inferred from a policy’s design and outcome. A blockade aimed at “weakening Hamas” that starves hospitals and schools plainly intends civilian suffering. You don’t need a signed confession—refusing to deliver lifesaving aid when you control the gates is punishment by policy.

Customary IHL and Articles 23 & 59 of GC IV mandate that if aid can’t flow normally, parties must agree alternative routes or neutral intermediaries. You’re free to make it hard, but you can’t make it impossible. Claiming “no requirement” flips the law on its head—turning relief obligations into optional trivia.

If “diversion” were a free pass to starve millions, why did states ever negotiate screening procedures? Because diversion carries weight only when it materially affects military operations. You can’t invoke a word and then ignore the context that courts and armies worldwide rely on to differentiate “some trickle” from “strategic theft.”

There’s a world of difference between reasonable security measures and an ironclad veto on all aid. “Setting terms” cannot mean “no relief unless we say so.” When every clause you impose chokes off food and medicine, you’ve weaponized “terms” into starvation.

I’m not selling quick fixes—I’m pointing to existing law that any state pledges to uphold. No magic wand, just the commitment not to starve your neighbors. If you call adherence to humanitarian norms “manipulation,” you reveal that your true tactic is moral abdication.

Centralizing aid under military control doesn’t end the blockade—it perpetuates it. Civilians still wait days for trucks to clear checkpoints. Blaming Hamas for occasional gunfire ignores the fact that no aid can move freely. If distribution under your thumb fails, it’s still a siege.

True field‐by‐field analysis needs classified data, but broad patterns emerge from independent monitors, survivor testimony, and open‐source geolocation. Militaries are judged on those patterns all the time. Refusing even a macro‐assessment is opting out of accountability.

Post‐strike reviews by the IDF itself, plus UN investigations, have acknowledged strikes on civilian sites later deemed unjustified. Your “we know it was correct” rests on trust in press releases over documented corrections. That’s not realism—it’s willful credulity.

External funding and ideology fuel conflict, yes—but siege, statelessness, and daily shelling create the crucible for armed resistance. Western Sahara’s situation is distinct: no full‐scale aerial bombardment, no forced displacement on Gaza’s scale. You can’t erase local conditions by waving at other crises.

If reality means “might makes right,” then you’ve already surrendered moral agency. Laws were written so the worst actors couldn’t set the rules. Insisting rule‐books don’t matter because villains break them is the true fantasy—one where power defines justice, not principle.

NHC