Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Loren Pechtel]

Chris Hedges at Counterpunch tells the truth about Gaza and shames genocide supporters.

The problem is we've heard this wolf cry so many times already. He said "Weeks. At most." If he were telling the truth that would mean we should already be seeing mass death.

 

[NoHolyCows]

I'm not saying they are unfit for statehood. But rather that they want their state to be at war.

Then you’re not describing a people. You’re describing a caricature.

Saying “they want their state to be at war” flattens millions of individuals into a monolith of violence—as if every Palestinian wakes up thinking about armed struggle, rather than survival under occupation, displacement, and blockade. It ignores the decades of polling, protest, diplomacy, and negotiation where the majority have supported a two-state solution, even after repeated betrayals. It erases the people who’ve tried to build institutions, run schools, raise families, and vote for change—only to be punished when the results weren’t convenient for foreign powers.

Where have they ever actually supported a two-state solution? Hint: The poll actually showed they wanted two-state as a step towards conquering Israel, not as coexistence.

If war is all you see, maybe it’s because peace was never given room to grow. When elections are invalidated, borders are sealed, leadership is imprisoned or assassinated, and civil infrastructure is systematically undermined, what do you expect to remain? You can’t suffocate a people’s options and then fault them for gasping.

Yeah, the sponsors of the terror have ensured pace can't grow.

So? You calculate those things to ensure there's enough.

No—you calculate calories to limit them when your goal isn’t just security, but coercion. And that’s exactly what Israel did. In 2012, following a court petition, Israel was forced to release documents showing that its military planners had literally calculated the minimum caloric intake required to keep Gaza’s population just above malnutrition—about 2,279 calories per person per day—not to ensure health, but to “put the Palestinians on a diet,” as one official phrased it. This wasn’t about humanitarian management. It was about collective pressure.

2,279 calories/day is plenty for most people. I don't know the details to address it more specifically.

The blockade doesn’t just restrict weapons. It chokes fuel needed for hospitals, building materials for reconstruction, and permits for medical evacuations. It bars students from leaving to study, splits families, and prevents economic development. You’re pretending it’s a logistical tool. But every credible humanitarian organization—from the UN to the Red Cross—calls it what it is: collective punishment.

Fuel? Hamas had plenty. They weren't distributing it.
Building materials? You realize building materials can be used for military purposes? I expect a lot of trouble over this in the future as it has become very apparent that the safeguards meant to keep stuff from being diverted were seriously flawed.
Permits for medical evacuation? You mean for Hamas leaders to escape.

Hamas didn’t create the blockade. Israel did. Hamas didn’t restrict fuel, building supplies, or medical evacuations. Israel did. Hamas didn’t enforce a land, sea, and air closure that made it impossible for Gazans to leave even for cancer treatment. Israel did.

Hamas created the reason for the blockade.

Gaza’s suffering didn’t start on October 7th. The UN was calling it unlivable back in 2015. The economy, infrastructure, and public health system were already in collapse before this war. That didn’t happen because of rockets. It happened because of a systematic policy of isolation and control over 2 million people, half of whom are children.

Yeah, Gaza used to be prosperous. Until the Second Intifada. They threw it away.

There was no humanitarian catastrophe until 10/7. But Iran wanted to prevent Israel and Saudi Arabia from making up and Russia wanted a distraction from what they were doing in Ukraine.

That’s simply false—and historically indefensible. There was a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza long before October 7. The United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and countless humanitarian agencies had been sounding the alarm for over a decade. By 2012, the UN was already warning that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020 due to collapsing infrastructure, undrinkable water, failing sewage systems, and electricity blackouts. By 2015, over 80% of Gaza’s population depended on humanitarian aid just to survive. That crisis wasn’t the result of Iranian plots or Russian diversions. It was the direct outcome of a long-standing blockade, repeated military assaults, and a deliberate policy of restriction that targeted the civilian economy.

You realize all of that was Hamas? Everything went to weapons.

And it most certainly was due to Iran. Destroy the economy so people have no choice but to do what Hamas wants them to, even if it's extremely dangerous or even suicidal. (Hamas would send families into the no-go zone by the border so they would get shot and Israel would be pressured into not keeping people away from the border.) Hamas takes the aid, doles it out to those who do it's bidding.

And no, the period before October 7 wasn’t some calm, functioning society suddenly thrown into chaos by foreign meddling. In the years leading up to that date, Gaza’s economy had all but collapsed. Unemployment was among the highest in the world. Movement was tightly restricted, not just for goods but for people—students, patients, and workers alike. Medical care was crippled by permit denials and equipment shortages. Families went days without electricity. Homes destroyed in previous wars couldn’t be rebuilt because Israel blocked construction materials. None of that required Iran or Russia to fabricate. It was all happening in plain sight.

I didn't say it was functioning. Hamas has been destroying it for a long time.

So the idea that October 7 marked the beginning of humanitarian disaster is a convenient fiction. What changed after 10/7 wasn’t that suffering began—it was that the suffering stopped being slow and became cataclysmic. Blaming Iran or Russia for that spiral is not an explanation. It’s a distraction. The reality is simpler, and harder to stomach: a civilian population was pushed past its breaking point after years of siege, isolation, and despair. You don’t get to erase that suffering just because acknowledging it makes your narrative harder to defend.

It's not the beginning, it's just a big step worse.

I'm looking, I'm seeing what pretends to be.

Then maybe the issue isn’t your eyesight—it’s your filter.

Because satellite imagery doesn’t “pretend.” Entire neighborhoods in Gaza—Shujaiya, Jabalia, Khan Younis—have been leveled. That’s not activist spin; it’s confirmed by the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and independent analysts using open-source data and high-resolution satellite scans. Hospitals reduced to rubble. Schools turned to ash. Camps for the displaced struck multiple times. These aren’t stories whispered in the shadows—they’re documented with timestamps and GPS coordinates.

The problem is you think the evidence says things it doesn't.

As for starvation, multiple UN agencies and the World Food Programme have issued formal warnings of famine. Malnutrition rates among children have soared. Aid convoys have been blocked or attacked. When doctors are performing surgeries without anesthesia and children are dying of dehydration, that’s not “a few medical cases.” That’s systemic collapse.

Hamas has said. If they had been telling the truth the place would be pretty much dead by now.

And children dying of dehydration? Ever think that using the sewer pipes for rockets might have something to with that?

And, yes, it's systemic collapse--as Hamas intended.

So if you still claim you “see nothing,” then you’re not seeing reality. You’re clinging to a version of events where evidence is always suspect if it implicates your side. But facts don’t go away just because you choose not to believe them. What you’re seeing isn’t a lack of destruction—it’s your own refusal to let the facts in.

I see claims that if true would produce very different results than we are seeing.

I have yet to see a picture of an entire neighborhood reduced to rubble. The photos always follow the line of devastation caused by the tunnel collapses, there are always other buildings that didn't.

I do agree an awful lot of housing in Gaza has been destroyed. The fact that in some areas Hamas has booby-trapped basically everything has something to do with it. If Israel sees a booby trap they simply blow it up. No way they're going to try to defuse something that likely has an observer and command detonation. Blame the side that placed the booby traps.

Then let’s be honest about what you’re defending. Because what you’re describing isn’t precision—it’s devastation rationalized after the fact. “Following the tunnel line” doesn’t mean damage is limited. It means it’s concentrated and destructive, collapsing everything above and around it. Entire sections of Khan Younis, Gaza City, and Jabalia show mile-long stretches of pancaked buildings, many far beyond the tunnel line. That’s not a surgical strike. That’s urban collapse on a massive scale, confirmed by Maxar satellite imagery, UN OCHA assessments, and international humanitarian reports.

"the tunnel line"??? You realize the tunnel network under Gaza was about the most extensive tunnel network in the world?

And blaming booby traps as justification for razing blocks misses the legal and moral point: if a military objective—like a tunnel or a rigged structure—can only be neutralized by leveling an entire neighborhood, then the strike is not lawful. Proportionality is not suspended just because the enemy fights dirty. If it were, every war crime could be excused by the other side’s tactics.

No. A booby trap makes the building military and says it's reasonable to destroy the building. If each building is booby trapped then each building gets destroyed.

You say “blame the side that placed the booby traps”—fine. But that doesn’t absolve the side that knowingly bombs where civilians live. International law doesn’t allow you to declare urban centers free-fire zones because the enemy is ruthless. That’s the exact kind of spiral the Geneva Conventions were written to prevent. And ignoring that—like you’re doing here—isn’t realism. It’s complicity with impunity.

Nobody's bombing booby traps. That's ground troops inspecting with drones.

None of them have the ability to actually confirm it, therefore their words are garbage. And note how we have month after month after month of report of catastrophic food conditions--yet only 60 deaths that can be blamed on malnutrition and we don't see a gaunt population. Just look at pictures from areas of actual famine.

That’s not how evidence—or suffering—works.

Yes it is.

There are repeated claims that large numbers of people will die soon. Again and again and again. But the situation doesn't change, yet large number of people don't die, we don't see a population in famine. Thus the claims of famine are false.

You dismiss findings from UNICEF, WHO, and the World Food Programme as “garbage” because they don’t align with your worldview. But these are organizations that operate on the ground, with access to hospitals, aid networks, and field data. They’ve documented acute malnutrition, wasting in children, and collapsing food systems. You don’t get to hand-wave that away with internet image searches and anecdotal skepticism.

No, I dismiss them because they don't match observed reality.

And your fixation on “only 60 deaths” betrays a grotesque misunderstanding of what famine and starvation look like. Malnutrition doesn’t always kill immediately—it stunts growth, weakens immune systems, increases susceptibility to disease, and causes long-term damage. Children dying from infections because they’re too weak to fight back aren’t counted in your “malnutrition death” stat—but they’re victims of hunger all the same.

I've seen the effects of chronic shortage: anyone born in China before about 1980. The effect as those born in capitalism came of age was quite noticeable--I could see over the heads of virtually everyone born before 1980, now I'm simply taller but I can't see over the crowds anymore.

But that's not the situation in Gaza. The claim is large numbers will die. Will die. Will die. But strangely don't.

As for your claim about how people “should look” in famine: that logic failed in Yemen, it failed in Somalia, and it fails here. Starvation isn’t a Hollywood trope with skeletal figures lining the streets. It’s a creeping breakdown, made worse when aid is blocked, infrastructure is destroyed, and desperation becomes normalized. And pretending it’s not real because it doesn’t fit your chosen imagery isn’t just denial—it’s complicity in whitewashing a humanitarian disaster.

And lots of people die of it. Both of those countries had around 25k/yr deaths from it. Gaza somehow doesn't.

No, it's not denial. It's looking at the claims and finding they contradict reality.

And repeating my words back at me doesn’t make them less true—it just shows you’ve run out of your own.

You say you’re looking, but all your responses reveal is a refusal to see what the world has already documented. This isn’t about agreeing with every critic—it’s about recognizing reality when thousands of civilian deaths, collapsed neighborhoods, and credible famine warnings are staring you in the face.

You aren't coming up with any evidence. The only part of that that would be evidence at all is the famine warnings--but somehow they never materialize.

If your only defense is to mirror my argument without refuting it, then maybe it’s because deep down, you know the facts aren’t on your side. Denial isn’t a counterpoint. It’s just the last refuge when there’s nothing left to stand on.

NHC

You aren't making an argument. You are treating a lot of dead as proof, it's not.

You’ve spent this entire thread insisting you’re “looking at the facts,” but what you’ve actually done is reject every piece of documented, corroborated, internationally verified evidence that contradicts your narrative. You dismiss satellite images, ignore casualty reports, belittle humanitarian agencies, hand-wave famine warnings, and when backed into a corner, you fall back on the same hollow refrain: “It doesn’t match my reality.”

But your personal disbelief is not a rebuttal—it’s a filter. And it’s one you apply selectively. You believe Hamas is guilty without trial, but question every Palestinian death. You trust that Gaza brought this on itself, but discredit global institutions, medical workers, and humanitarian groups operating on the ground. You reduce starvation to calorie math and war crimes to tunnel logistics. When entire neighborhoods are razed, you ask for “more convincing photos.” When hundreds of children die, you question whether they looked malnourished enough.

You say “the facts contradict the claims.” No—they contradict your interpretation. The facts are that over 36,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, are dead. Gaza’s infrastructure is in ruins. UN agencies, the WHO, and the World Food Programme have raised alarm after alarm about famine. Every credible human rights body—including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and the UN’s own Special Rapporteurs—have documented the disproportionate use of force, the collective punishment, and the denial of humanitarian access. These aren’t vague rumors. They’re catalogued in public reports, legal filings, and field data that anyone can access—unless they choose not to.

You ask why more people haven’t died if there’s famine. That’s not a serious question. That’s cruelty pretending to be logic. Malnutrition weakens, disables, and scars children for life—whether or not they die in front of your camera. You want starvation to meet a visual standard before you’ll call it real. But real hunger isn’t measured in dramatic imagery—it’s measured in stunted growth, collapsed immune systems, and funeral after funeral of preventable death.

You claim that because Hamas is cruel, Israel’s actions are beyond scrutiny. That’s not justice. That’s moral outsourcing—an attempt to erase civilian suffering by pointing to the enemy and saying, “Well, they started it.” But international law doesn’t grant exceptions for vengeance. And morality doesn’t vanish just because your side owns the jets.


This debate has never been about whether Hamas is brutal. It is. The question is whether brutality justifies abandoning every principle we claim to stand for. And every time you treat atrocity as a tactic, every time you call systemic destruction a “reasonable response,” and every time you imply that only certain lives are worth counting, you answer that question—loudly.

So no—your denial doesn’t hold weight. It just proves what happens when ideology replaces empathy and excuses replace ethics. You can keep repeating “I don’t believe it,” but at some point, that’s not skepticism. That’s complicity.

And history has a long memory for those who chose comfort over conscience.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep accusing me of lacking nuance, but every time I introduce it, you retreat behind the same binary shield: “Hamas bad, Israel justified.” That’s not complexity. That’s moral outsourcing.

Let’s start with your claim that all the evidence traces back to Hamas. That’s flatly false. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Physicians for Human Rights have all conducted independent investigations—often using satellite data, open-source verification, eyewitness accounts, and corroboration with international agencies. None of these groups take marching orders from Hamas. And dismissing all of them as “not credible” because their findings make you uncomfortable is not skepticism—it’s deliberate blindness.

Nobody except Israel caught the bogus data. That could only happen because nobody else checked.

You say Hamas is to blame for dressing like civilians, so we shouldn’t fault the IDF for killing civilians. But that’s a complete misreading of international law. The presence of unlawful behavior by one party doesn’t absolve the other of its obligations. If Hamas violates the laws of war by embedding among civilians, that’s a war crime. But that doesn’t mean Israel is then free to ignore its own obligations under Geneva. Civilians don’t lose protection because someone nearby broke the rules. That’s not law—it’s collective punishment.

I didn't say we shouldn't fault them. I'm saying we should understand there will be targeting errors.

You also claim the radicalization in Gaza is “driven by money.” That’s a cartoon version of reality. Yes, money plays a role. But so do trauma, displacement, political hopelessness, and years of siege and bombardment. Reducing it to a paycheck ignores decades of research by counterterrorism experts—including RAND, the Soufan Center, and multiple UN panels—that show radicalization is a complex process shaped by real-world grievances. So if you care about preventing terrorism, you can’t just drop bombs and cut off food and expect peace to sprout from the rubble.

I look at the world.

Nowhere do I see large scale violence deriving from grievances. Everywhere there's large scale violence there's a paymaster.

And I think you're misinterpreting what the counterterrorism people are saying. Grievances are part of the radicalization process, but they're a tool, not a cause. You can't eliminate grievances because they don't have to be real.

Then you say I’m making it sound like Hamas are “the good guys” because so many of their people die. That’s grotesque. No, mass death isn’t virtue. But it is a human tragedy—and it should be treated as such, regardless of who causes it or why. When children are buried under collapsed buildings, the response shouldn’t be, “Well, their leaders brought it on them.” That’s not moral clarity. That’s ethical surrender.

The point is their leaders engineered a situation it was bound to happen. Your magical answer doesn't exist.

And finally, you accuse me of rejecting uncomfortable facts. But I’m not the one dismissing every independent report, every legal principle, every historical precedent that complicates my side’s narrative. That’s you. You’ve made moral scrutiny synonymous with betrayal, and humanitarian concern synonymous with naivety.

No, you're rejecting everything that doesn't support the notion that bad things happened so Israel must be at fault.

So let’s not pretend you’re the voice of reason while you write off mass civilian death as “inevitable,” and erase the law every time it becomes inconvenient. If your argument can’t withstand international law, history, or basic human empathy—then maybe it’s not the rest of us who need to rethink our assumptions.

You keep chanting about this but you aren't addressing the ground truth that the law doesn't require what you think it does. Geneva specifically says that supplies do not need to be permitted entry if they are likely to be diverted. And they are unquestionably being diverted, not merely likely.

 

[pood]

Here is the Wall Street Journal report on how U.S. intel does not agree with Israel about Iran approaching having a bomb. Note the complexities of the details. Do you think an assclown like Trump understand the technicalities of any of this??

 

[NoHolyCows]

Collective targeting? The ratio of civilians and combatants makes it very clear that it is very precise targeting.

No, the ratio doesn’t make that clear—it obscures it. A statistic doesn’t prove precision. It just averages destruction. When you level entire city blocks to hit a tunnel or drop bombs knowing civilians are sheltering nearby, it’s not “surgical.” It’s calculated risk at best, collective punishment at worst.

This doesn't make sense.

Precision isn’t about the bomb’s coordinates—it’s about the decision to drop it knowing who’s likely to die. And if the result is tens of thousands of civilian deaths, decimated infrastructure, and a humanitarian system in collapse, then the math doesn’t exonerate you. It indicts the method behind it.

The math makes it very clear. The bombs were hitting things, not people.

Continuing to repeat claims that contradict reality doesn't make them true.

Then show me the reality you’re defending.

Because the one documented by satellite imagery, confirmed by UN agencies, and witnessed by thousands of journalists and aid workers includes bombed-out hospitals, collapsed schools, and children pulled from rubble. It includes a death toll where over half are women and children, and an aid blockade that leaves people starving and drinking contaminated water. That’s not propaganda. That’s data.

That is propaganda. You are taking Hamas' claims as automatically true.

Satellite imagery can show you collapsed buildings. It can't show why. It can't show the dead. And everything on the ground is controlled by Hamas.

If you want to call that “not reality,” then the burden is on you—not to scoff, but to disprove it. And unless you can refute the mountains of independent evidence with something more than denial, all you’re doing is burying facts beneath personal disbelief. That’s not truth-seeking. That’s shielding comfort with contempt.

We have basically zero independent evidence. Nobody is in a position to verify much of anything.

There are no international observers. There are no independent journalists. There are no humanitarian organizations. All of that is a sham, if you operate in Gaza you report what Hamas wants you to report. The only thing that's valid is satellite imagery and note that it's nowhere near as detailed as you think it is. The best of them are now at 15cm resolution. That's a bit better than what Google typically offers over urban areas--enough to see structures, not enough to see most details about those structures. Any good imagery is coming from drones and there's no way reporters are getting independent drone images over Gaza. There's no way to distinguish a reporter drone from a spy drone, they'll be targeted. (And that's even assuming there's a difference. Al Jazeera got kicked out of Israel because they refused to stop running realtime reporting that would be useful to Hamas. Hint: Armies anywhere do not like realtime reporting of their activities!)

So let me get this straight—every journalist is compromised, every humanitarian organization is a puppet, every UN agency is a fraud, and the only acceptable source of truth is…your personal skepticism?

Every source on the ground in Gaza is compromised. And bad data remains bad data no matter how many times you filter it through another mouthpiece. We have a fair amount of credible video but it usually doesn't show the dead and often doesn't show the way. (And when it does you ignore it. Why did you not see that rocket launcher in the middle of the frame??) And you can't hope to construct an overall picture from a sample set that is inherently highly biased (cameras aren't pointed randomly.)

That’s not critical thinking. That’s conspiracy logic.

Conspiracy? It's not hidden. We can all see what's happening--all the data is from Hamas. Who else has any ability to get data??

There are no grand conspiracies, but extremely bad stuff can operate behind a bit of confusion plus the natural bias towards it's normal. Look at what happened in the last election--there's no great MAGA conspiracy, they told us what they were going to do. But point it out and you got branded a chicken little.

When Human Rights Watch, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Médecins Sans Frontières, the World Food Programme, and dozens of independent journalists all report the same patterns of devastation, starvation, and civilian death—across months, locations, and languages—that’s not Hamas stage-managing the global narrative. That’s converging evidence from professionals risking their lives to document war.

They report what Hamas wants them to report. There's an awful lot of stage managing in the stuff we see out of Gaza and occasionally a reporter will tell the truth that they are told what to report.

You don’t get to wave all that away by claiming Gaza is a blackout zone of lies while insisting your version of events—untethered to fieldwork, firsthand testimony, or verified reporting—is the only truth. That’s not skepticism. That’s faith in your own bias masquerading as insight.

And if your standard is “I’ll only believe it if I see drone footage I personally approve of,” then no amount of evidence will ever be enough—because you’ve already decided the only valid reality is the one where Israel can’t be held responsible.

It's not that I must personally approve it. I want credible documentation, not just providing a bullhorn for Hamas.

Repeating misinformation doesn't make it true.

Then prove it’s misinformation—with something more than your personal disbelief.

Because what you call “misinformation” has been investigated, corroborated, and published by institutions with decades of experience documenting war crimes—often in conflicts where they’ve condemned both sides. You don’t get to dismiss all of that as fake just because it contradicts your preferred narrative. That’s not discernment. That’s denial.

You continue to claim this, yet not a hint about how they are actually supposed to ground truth anything.

You’ve offered no counter-evidence. No citations. No data. Just a reflexive rejection of anything that implicates Israel, no matter how widely reported or carefully documented. That’s not a defense of truth—it’s an escape from it.

If you want to challenge the facts, then bring something verifiable. Otherwise, what you’re really repeating isn’t truth or skepticism. It’s propaganda with a flag on it.

We have no evidence in either direction other than catching mistakes Hamas made in their stories. But we have a lot of negative evidence. Dead that don't exist. AI images of supposed Israeli misdeeds. Emotional appeals rather than reason. Damage inconsistent with the claimed actions. Look with a critical eye towards everything out of Gaza, look for inconsistencies. So far I'm not aware of video that is fake but the descriptions sometimes aren't accurate--just because something happened doesn't mean it's when claimed, where claimed, or even remotely of what is claimed. (Simple example: Al Jazeera showed a video of the hospital that got hit early on--except that the video cut off some seconds before the event happened. By light of day a critical eye would know what had happened. Big boom, superficial damage, no crater--that was an rocket that blew at or just after launch, not anything Israel threw. And then the claim it was an Iron Dome intercept--never mind that there's utterly no way Iron Dome could possibly hit a rocket going up because it takes time for the missile to get there. Even if they fired the moment the rocket lifted off the intercept point would be quite a ways downrange. Not that Iron Dome has the range to do that, nor would anyone fire a terminal defense missile at a rocket going up.)

And when you look back at events in the past you consistently find reality comes to pretty much agree with Israeli claims. (Obvious example, the Jenin "massacre". Hundreds dead, the world went nuts. Israel demanded that any inspection team be qualified in actually reconstructing what happened. Ended up with no inspection because the claims eroded down to the about 50 that Israeli claimed to have killed.)

You keep demanding “ground truth” as if no truth exists unless it’s filmed on your personal drone, vetted by your ideological filter, and hand-delivered by someone you already agree with. Meanwhile, the rest of the world operates on a different standard—one called evidence. That includes satellite imagery, forensic analysis, firsthand testimonies, and field reports from organizations that have spent decades documenting war zones, including ones where they’ve held every side—including Hamas—accountable.

But let’s be honest: this was never about the quality of the evidence. It’s about your refusal to accept any evidence that implicates Israel. You’ve said, outright, that any journalist in Gaza is compromised, every humanitarian report is “what Hamas wants,” and the only information you’ll accept must meet a level of skepticism so selective it borders on parody. That’s not critical thinking. That’s a closed loop where reality can’t get in.

You keep invoking past examples like Jenin, clinging to them as proof that any future report must also be wrong. But that’s not logic—that’s superstition with a political accent. You assume propaganda everywhere except in the claims that align with your narrative. When hospitals are hit, you blame booby traps. When children starve, you blame sewer pipes. When civilian death tolls skyrocket, you call it “precision.” And when global agencies warn of famine, you dismiss it all because people don’t “look” hungry enough in the images you’ve seen.

You say the numbers don’t add up? Then explain the 36,000 dead reported by Gaza’s health ministry—numbers echoed by the UN and backed by field hospitals that are still digging people from rubble. Explain why Israel bombed areas where their own evacuation orders sent civilians. Explain why more journalists have been killed in this war than in any other in modern history. Explain the starvation alerts, the destroyed infrastructure, the displacement of over a million people, and the complete decimation of northern Gaza. Not with speculation. Not with doubt. With facts. Because that’s what’s been offered. Over and over. From dozens of sources, across languages, across time.

You claim we don’t know what’s happening—but somehow, you do. You claim nobody can verify the data—but still insist it’s wrong. You demand citations, then deny every institution capable of providing them. That’s not skepticism. That’s ideological absolutism dressed up in the language of critical thought.

You’re not waiting for better evidence. You’re waiting for evidence that says what you want it to. And anything else—no matter how thorough, consistent, or corroborated—is dismissed as a conspiracy or a lie. That’s not inquiry. That’s dogma.

So let’s end this here. Because at some point, the debate stops being about facts and becomes about the refusal to face them. You’ve built a worldview that protects itself from contradiction, not because it’s strong, but because it’s afraid of what an honest reckoning would require.

And if you ever decide to step outside that loop—to read the reports you’ve dismissed, to see the images you’ve explained away, to hear the testimonies you’ve discredited before listening—you’ll find that the truth has been there the whole time.

But you’ll have to want to see it first.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Hamas chose the path of war. Israel is entitled to do what it takes to remove the threat.

Even genocide or ethnic cleansing?

Both of those terms are about intent, not action.

Very simple question: Has Israel recovered all of the hostages? If no, they are unquestionably permitted to continue to attack Hamas. I don't like what's happening to Gaza but it's by Hamas' intent, blame them. Hamas actually screwed the pooch on this one by their success--they were expecting a much lesser haul and that they could get the useful idiots to stop Israel. But they succeeded to a sufficient degree that the useful idiots aren't enough of a weapon. And to give up would destroy them personally. Thus they are very thoroughly painted into the corner.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Who is hoarding the food.

Then let’s answer that too: the same party that controls what comes in.

That's not an answer.

Yes, Hamas hoards. That’s a fact. But here’s the difference: Hamas doesn’t control the flow of aid into Gaza. Israel does. Hamas doesn’t bomb the crossings. Israel does. Hamas doesn’t decide how many trucks are allowed in. Israel does. Hamas doesn’t control the buffer zones, the border surveillance, or the conditions under which humanitarian agencies operate. Israel does.

Reality check time!

It's Hamas that hits the crossings. Israel has no reason to hit their own facilities!

And Hamas most certainly controls the conditions under which the humanitarian agencies operate.

So even if Hamas hoards some aid—and they do—that does not absolve Israel of its legal and moral responsibility as the power controlling access to essential goods. Under international law, the obligation to ensure civilian survival doesn’t vanish because the enemy is corrupt. In fact, it becomes more urgent—because innocent people are caught between two forces, and the one with control has the duty not to use it as leverage for starvation.

1) They take most.

2) Reread Geneva. They are under no obligation to permit it if it's being diverted.

3) Once again, your argument amounts to we must do what Hamas wants because anything else is terrible for those in Gaza.

So no—you don’t get to say “they’re hoarding” as a free pass to bomb bakeries, block fuel, or collapse hospitals. That’s not law. That’s not strategy. That’s just collective punishment, dressed up as moral arithmetic. And it fails the only test that matters: who suffers, and who had the power to prevent it.

Your argument amounts to 2 + 2 = purple.

You keep throwing out accusations about Israel that aren't relevant to what's being discussed.

The response is what we are seeing: Israel taking over direct distribution.

Then you’ve just confirmed the core problem.

If Israel can take over direct distribution now, that means it could have done so months ago—before malnutrition, disease, and hunger reached catastrophic levels. But it didn’t. Instead, it chose to restrict aid, bomb crossings, delay inspections, and block essentials under the excuse that Hamas might benefit. And only after mass suffering and global outrage did it attempt partial control of distribution—as damage control, not compassion.

They tried it before, Hamas shot up civilians to frame Israel. And note that Israel is still under no obligation to take any steps about the internal situation in Gaza.

No, you're demanding a perfect plan. I'm saying none exist.

I don't like what's happening but Hamas started it with the intent of causing such devastation. They continue to fight. They are responsible for what is happening. The devastation is a Hamas weapon.

Then you’ve abandoned the most basic moral distinction between cause and conduct.

Yes, Hamas started the war. No one disputes that. But who started a conflict does not give the other side carte blanche to wage it without restraint. That’s why we have laws of war—to stop exactly this kind of logic, where every atrocity is blamed on the enemy’s existence and every civilian death is shrugged off as part of the cost.

And continuing to claim that Israel is waging war without restraint doesn't make it so.

You say Hamas uses devastation as a weapon. But the moment you accept that logic—when you say, “Hamas wanted this,” so the people suffering are just collateral to their evil—you’re not condemning war crimes. You’re just explaining them away.

Because what you’re defending isn’t self-defense. It’s a strategy of overwhelming force aimed at a civilian population under siege. And if your entire ethical framework collapses the minute your enemy breaks the rules, then you never believed in ethics to begin with—you just believed in winning.

You continue to blame Israel for Hamas atrocities. And so long as you (plural) do this there will be more Hamas atrocities.

Once again, trolley problem. Both paths are horrible, do you intervene to choose the less horrible?

Then stop pretending you’re making a moral argument—you’re making a utilitarian gamble with other people’s lives, from the safety of your screen. The “trolley problem” is a thought experiment, not a license to abandon ethics in the real world. Because the difference here is critical: in Gaza, the people tied to the tracks didn’t choose this. They didn’t start it. And they have no way to get off.

The question isn’t whether all options are bad. It’s whether we’re willing to uphold principles even when they’re inconvenient. If your “less horrible” path involves thousands of civilian deaths, blocked aid, and the destruction of basic infrastructure, then your trolley isn’t avoiding the worst—it’s just running over different people, and calling it strategy.

What you’re defending isn’t a hard choice. It’s the normalization of atrocity disguised as realism. And if your answer to tragedy is to accept it as necessity, then history won’t call that wisdom. It’ll call it complicity.

Chanting your holy words over and over isn't an argument.

I do not expect the bombing to end it sooner. I expect the bombing to make it longer until the next 10/7.

And I consider "breeding extremism" to be Hamas water-carrying. It's the money, not the actions.

Then you’ve just admitted it’s not about ending the violence—it’s about managing its timing. You’re not defending deterrence. You’re defending delay. You’re saying mass death is acceptable if it buys a few years of quiet. That’s not counterterrorism. That’s cyclical bloodshed dressed up as strategy.

You still don't get it that any level of force needed to stop an attacker is permissible. You don't have to die just because they're throwing human waves at you.

And dismissing “breeding extremism” as “Hamas water-carrying” is a convenient way to ignore what every major counterterrorism agency has said for decades: that injustice, siege, and civilian suffering fuel recruitment far more effectively than ideology alone. RAND, MI5, the FBI—all have documented how grievance is the engine of radicalization. If you pretend it’s just “about the money,” you’re not being realistic. You’re being willfully blind.

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but it's irrelevant anyway as radicalization without the money results in a fairly low level of violence.

Note, also, that the standard approach to radicalization is:

1) You have problem X. (Generally true)
2) You have problem X because group Y did Z. (Note that there is no requirement for truth, only for sounding true.)
3) Therefore the solution to your problem is attacking Z. (Which is almost always false.)

Incels. Nazis. Jihadists. Same pattern, but why do you see the Jihadists very differently?

You don’t defuse extremism by bombing the conditions that foster it. You fuel it. And if your plan is to keep repeating that mistake while blaming everyone else for the fire, then don’t talk about security. You’re just managing the next explosion.

You clearly did not understand. You are blinded by the horrors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and are missing the fact that they saved a hell of a lot of lives. Despite the efforts of the revisionists the reality is that of the set <American soldiers, Chinese soldiers, Japanese soldiers, Chinese civilians, Japanese civilians>, every group ended up better off in the path where the bombs were dropped. The only groups that might have suffered net harm were <Hiroshima civilians, Nagasaki civilians>.

And, yes, I am considering the fantasyland scenario of simply stopping shooting. (Fantasy because it wouldn't have ended the Japanese atrocities in China.) Still worse than dropping the bombs.

Then let’s be precise—because what you’ve just done is lay out the exact moral trap I warned about: reducing catastrophe to calculus, as if the deliberate incineration of cities can be cleanly balanced against a theoretical body count.

You seem to think that morality can be independent of reality.

Even if we accept your claim that the bombings “saved more lives”—a claim hotly contested by historians like Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Gar Alperovitz, and even some former U.S. military officials—what you’re arguing isn’t moral justification. It’s consequentialism without limits. You’re saying: if the end looks better on paper, then the means—no matter how horrific—are vindicated.

There are some revisionists that pretend that Japan would have surrendered anyway. In time, perhaps, but not before an awful lot more people died. Japan knew it was defeated, their strategy lay in making final victory too bloody in the hopes we would give up and go home. Why would they have surrendered?? But along came about the biggest bluff in the world: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We spooked them into thinking we could destroy them without losing a bunch of people and threw their strategy totally out the window. (Bluff because we didn't have the production rate of bombs to actually do it.)

That logic doesn’t stop at Hiroshima. It justifies everything from firebombing Dresden to flattening Gaza. It’s how every mass killing becomes “strategic.” And it’s exactly why the Geneva Conventions were written: to put a legal and moral boundary where your cold math wants a blank check.

Once again, you're arguing irrelevancies. I was specifically pointing out that the bombs were a net benefit to the very group supposedly unjustly harmed: Japanese civilians. My point is that the real world is complex, trying to apply simple answers doesn't work.

If your principle is that atrocity is acceptable when it’s efficient, then your worldview has no place for human rights—only for victors writing the cost-benefit analysis after the fact.

Yes, you have. Your approach ensures many repeats of 10/7. This isn't a game where you are guaranteed there's a good path.

Then let’s be clear: refusing to embrace total war is not the same as doing nothing. It means refusing to torch the rules of war in the name of winning. It means believing that how we fight still matters—even when the enemy violates every standard of decency.

You keep invoking 10/7 as if it justifies anything done in response. But if the only lesson you draw from that horror is that we must now become indifferent to civilian life, then you’ve let Hamas set your moral compass. That’s not strength. That’s surrender—surrender to the logic of terror, where brutality begets brutality and the cycle becomes endless.

There may not be a perfect path. But abandoning all restraint isn’t realism—it’s a choice. A choice to believe that justice and cruelty are compatible so long as your side delivers the blow. And history shows where that path leads: not peace, not security—just newer ruins built on top of older ones.

NHC

Once again, chanting your mantras, not addressing reality.

You keep calling this “reality,” but all you’ve done is construct a worldview so insulated, so selectively skeptical, that it’s immune to evidence, indifferent to consequence, and divorced from any principle but brute force.

You demand moral seriousness, then mock the laws written to restrain war. You invoke history, then erase the very lessons it taught—lessons carved out of cities burned, civilians buried, and generations shattered by the belief that “greater good” justifies any evil.

You think repeating “Hamas is worse” is a blank check. It’s not. Yes, Hamas is guilty of atrocities. Yes, they exploit suffering. But that does not make indiscriminate bombing, mass starvation, or infrastructure collapse righteous. It just means both are criminal. That’s what moral consistency demands: that war crimes aren’t relativized based on who commits them—but judged by their impact on the innocent.

And let’s be honest—you’re not arguing for justice. You’re arguing for permission. Permission to bomb bakeries because a tunnel might be nearby. Permission to cut off water because fuel could be stolen. Permission to destroy entire neighborhoods because a warhead is cheaper than a drone. You’ve turned morality into accounting and justice into “acceptable ratios.”

You ask why I blame Israel for Gaza’s suffering. Because it controls the borders, the airspace, the crossings, the permits, the aid deliveries, the calorie counts, and the tanks. That’s not abstract. That’s power. And with power comes responsibility—not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s not. You don’t get to call the shots and then pretend your hands are clean when people bleed.

You accuse me of “chanting mantras,” but here’s the truth: you’ve repeated the same dodge for a hundred posts—blame Hamas, dismiss evidence, deny responsibility, move on. That’s not realism. That’s retreat. Retreat from ethics, retreat from accountability, retreat from anything that might require restraint.

Your argument ends where morality begins. And history will record what you tried to rationalize—not as hard choices, but as deliberate ones. Not as necessary evil, but as evil made routine. You can keep waving away facts and spinning strategy into justification. But you can’t bomb your way out of moral gravity.

This ends here—not because the facts have changed, but because you’ve run out of ways to deny them.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Hamas chose the path of war. Israel is entitled to do what it takes to remove the threat.

Even genocide or ethnic cleansing?

Hamas and their supporters are the ones trying desperately to use genocide and ethnic cleansing. It's a military tactic.
Another term for the tactic is "human shields".
Tom

In regards to the actual question, is that a "yes" or a "no" or just horseshit?

In regards to the actual question,
No. Neither is okay. But as long as Hamas and their supporters insist on continuing to do it, it's going to keep happening in Gaza.
Tom

Then you are contradicting yourself with the last sentence. Because Hamas is not engaging in ethnic cleansing or genocide in Gaza. They are giving the IDF and people like you the excuses to chose to do so.

The only side attempting genocide or ethnic cleansing is Hamas.

And so long as they keep attempting it shit is going to keep happening in Gaza.

 

[NoHolyCows]

And why do you insist 7 days is less than a week?

Because your analogy is just as dishonest. You’re pretending that when entire families are killed in their homes, refugee camps are bombed, and aid workers are incinerated in clearly marked convoys, it’s just some tragic arithmetic mistake—rather than the foreseeable result of tactics that treat densely populated areas as expendable.

You continue to utterly misrepresent what I'm saying.

You say I’m confusing civilians being hit with civilians being targeted. But when civilian death becomes routine, predictable, and accepted as the cost of military action, then the distinction collapses. Repeating “we didn’t mean to” doesn’t absolve you when the pattern shows otherwise. Intent isn’t a shield when the outcome screams negligence—or worse.

So no—I’m not confusing anything. I’m refusing to let you launder foreseeable carnage through euphemisms.

You are basically saying that everything is bad so we can't compare them.

You keep saying "might be". Israel has an extremely good record at hitting the right thing.

And your repeated assertion that they aren't taking feasible precautions doesn't make it so.

If Israel truly had an “extremely good record,” we wouldn’t be looking at over 35,000 dead—most of them women and children, in a population where over half are children. That’s not a record of precision. That’s a record of devastation. And saying they’re “hitting the right thing” while hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and entire families are obliterated doesn’t prove accuracy—it proves how low the threshold for “acceptable collateral” has become.

35k doesn't mean extremely good record? If we had been doing it you would expect at least 200,000 dead.

“Feasible precautions” isn’t some vague suggestion—it’s a binding legal standard under Article 57 of Additional Protocol I. And that standard doesn’t vanish because a strike hits a target. If a strike is likely to kill dozens or hundreds of civilians in the process, and no serious effort is made to avoid or minimize that harm, then it fails the test—no matter how good the intel, or how real the threat.

And you continue to fail to establish evidence of wrongdoing. Hamas makes sure a bunch of people die, you join up with the Israel is Bad chant. And Iran laughs.

But you need to establish that there is a violation in the first place for this to be relevant.

Then let’s establish it.

When residential blocks, hospitals, schools, UN shelters, and refugee camps are bombed repeatedly—despite warnings from aid agencies, coordinates being shared in advance, and visible signs of civilian presence—you’re not looking at isolated accidents. You’re looking at a pattern. And in international law, patterns matter.

And you continue your chant. Doesn't mean it proves your point.

The Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law are clear: proportionality is not about whether a strike hits a legitimate target. It’s about whether the civilian harm expected from that strike is excessive in relation to the direct military advantage anticipated. When entire families are buried under rubble for one suspected militant, or when humanitarian corridors and aid convoys are hit despite being clearly marked, the test fails.

So yes, Article 51(8) applies—because there have been violations. They’re not just claimed by adversaries, but documented by independent observers, legal scholars, and UN commissions. And brushing them aside as “unproven” isn’t skepticism. It’s moral insulation.

You continue to think that patterns are proof. They are being presented because there isn't proof!

Article 57 of Additional Protocol I does not say a warning absolves responsibility if civilians are still present. It says a warning must be effective and that all feasible precautions must still be taken to avoid civilian harm. Dropping leaflets or airing a message while bombing areas you know civilians cannot leave—whether due to closed borders, destroyed roads, or coercion—is not considered an effective warning under international law. Especially not when the result is the predictable death of families who had no real escape.

Even if Hamas prevents evacuation, the obligation doesn’t disappear. The law explicitly states that enemy violations—like using human shields—do not release the attacking party from its duty to distinguish and minimize harm. That’s Article 51(8) again: violations by one side do not cancel the obligations of the other.

And you fail to understand. The attacker is obligated to minimize harm. They are not required to prevent it!

So no—pointing to a camera or blaming Hamas does not transform foreseeable, mass civilian casualties into justified strikes. The legal standard is not: “Did you try something?” It’s: “Did you do everything feasible?” And when the answer is no, the law does not flinch. It calls that a violation

But you are not presenting one iota of evidence they didn't do everything feasible. You are simply taking it on faith.

So Hamas can protect anything by parking enough civilians on it and not let them leave.

No—and that’s exactly the legal and moral failure in your reasoning.

The law does not say “you can never strike if civilians are nearby.” It says you must weigh whether the anticipated military advantage justifies the foreseeable civilian harm. That’s a test of proportionality, not paralysis. But proportionality is not just a math problem—it’s a moral constraint. You can’t say “we needed to kill one militant, so we flattened a school,” and expect the law to shrug.

Last school strike I recall the number of dead that Israel asserted was almost exactly what Hamas ended up admitting to losing.

So no, Hamas cannot make a military site untouchable just by being near civilians—but Israel cannot make civilian deaths excusable just by pointing to Hamas. The rule isn’t “if they break the law, we get to ignore it.” It’s: “even if they violate it, you still have legal duties.”

You're not making sense. You're saying it doesn't make the target untouchable, but you forbid touching it.

You have not established that there were any civilians on the target. All movement we see in the scene is far enough away that the blast poses little hazard.

Then you’ve just conceded my point—because you’re relying on not seeing civilians to justify the strike, which means even you accept that their presence would have made it legally and morally problematic.

I'm saying your "evidence" of civilians doesn't add up--they weren't in danger. We don't have the strike video from above that would be much more informative.

<Thwack with a clue-by-4>
We are not saying the camera in any way alters the morality of the action! Rather, we are saying that the presence of the camera proves that advance warning was given--people don't point video cameras at static scenes unless they are expecting the scene not to remain static. It's proof that Israel followed the rules.

Then let’s talk about what “following the rules” actually means—because filming a bombing doesn’t prove legality. It proves expectation, not justification.

What are you smoking??

The camera is Palestinian. It's not the Palestinians that dropped the bomb. Thus you are comparing apples and oranges.

The point is not that Hamas wanted it but that Hamas engineered it. They seek the destruction as a weapon to pressure Israel with. Israel has no way of preventing this as failing to take action will just mean more atrocities until a government that will take action comes to power.

Then let’s be honest about what you’re defending: that Hamas engineered a trap, and Israel is walking into it anyway—knowing full well that the cost will be civilian lives. That’s not moral high ground. That’s strategic surrender disguised as strength.

It's not a trap because the result is not unexpected.

Hamas deliberately engineered a situation that would cause civilian deaths. The fault lies with who set the situation up even if they're not the one that pulled the trigger.

Scenario:
I put a baby at the end of an alley. I put a mirror in the alley at a 45 degree angle. When you're passing the alley I make a noise so you'll look, then I shoot your reflection in the mirror. You return fire, your shot passes through the mirror and hits the baby. Who gets charged with killing the baby?

If Hamas’s aim is to provoke indiscriminate retaliation, then every child buried, every hospital leveled, every aid truck blocked is not just a tragedy—it’s a win for them. So ask yourself: if your response looks exactly like the outcome your enemy wants, are you stopping atrocities—or perpetuating them?

Continuing to chant "indiscriminate" doesn't make it so.

Because justice doesn’t mean doing whatever you want in the name of righteousness. It means refusing to become what you claim to oppose. And if that standard is too high, then the war isn’t just being lost on the ground. It’s being lost morally.

You still are fixated on punishment. No, this is about making it harder for Hamas to repeat 10/7.

Then stop pretending this isn’t punishment just because it’s wrapped in strategic language. You say it’s about “making it harder” for Hamas—but you’re doing it by destroying the very infrastructure civilians rely on to survive. You’re not just weakening Hamas’s ability to fight; you’re wrecking Gaza’s ability to live.

Yeah, they suffer. The usual fate of civilians of a warlike nation.

If Hamas controls much of the economy, that’s a failure of political and humanitarian policy—not a green light to dismantle the civilian population alongside it. If a mafia controls a city’s garbage trucks, you don’t bomb the city and call it law enforcement. You target with precision, you isolate power, and you uphold the distinction between civilians and combatants—even if it’s hard. That’s what separates a military operation from collective reprisal.

Except there's no way to.

None of them are independently on the ground, if they say they are they're full of shit. Anyone reporting from Gaza says what Hamas tells them to say.

In the past we have had pretty "accurate" lists of all the dead and the circumstances. (I use quotes because while the identities appear accurate the circumstances are often deceptive, blaming Israel for explosions caused by rockets falling short, treating people as non-combatants when they were right next to a combatant that got hit etc.)

Then you’ve built a perfect shield against reality—one where no data counts unless it confirms your priors. You say every source inside Gaza is compromised by Hamas. Every international agency is “full of shit.” Every photo, every witness, every report—tainted. But here’s the problem: that’s not skepticism. That’s epistemic nihilism. If nothing can be trusted unless it vindicates one side, you’re not evaluating evidence—you’re filtering it for convenience.

No. Not everything. Everything they say to the world or permit to be said to the world should be assumed to be staged. But we get a lot from internal social media posts.

Organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières, the ICRC, WHO, and UN OCHA don’t take marching orders from Hamas. They’ve condemned abuses on all sides, in conflicts from Syria to Sudan to Ukraine. They use multiple, corroborating methods: field hospitals, body counts, satellite imagery, and direct interviews—not blind deference to Hamas press offices. And when they say the civilian toll is catastrophic, it’s not because they’ve been duped. It’s because they’re documenting what no one else can—or will.

Your refusal to acknowledge any independent reporting from Gaza only proves one thing: you’ve decided in advance that all suffering on one side is either fake, deserved, or irrelevant. That’s not critical thinking. That’s tribal loyalty overriding basic human decency.

The problem is they never establish how they are actually doing any sort of independent investigation. Basic science: how did you gather your data?

Sure they are high. You persist in using that as proof of wrongness. And proof that Israel did it--we have plenty of situations where Hamas is the primary suspect.

Then let’s clarify: acknowledging that civilian casualties are high is not the same as absolving the cause. When even the IDF admits large numbers of civilian deaths, the conversation shifts from “if” it’s happening to why—and whether it could have been avoided. That’s where accountability begins.

You continuing to assert it can be avoided doesn't make it so.

You say “Hamas is the primary suspect” in many cases. Fine—then show the evidence. Not assumption. Not political talking points. Evidence. Because if the burden of proof for Israeli strikes is always deflected onto Hamas, then you’ve built a system where no strike is ever unjustified, no child’s death ever counts against your side, and no amount of destruction ever warrants restraint. That’s not strategy. That’s moral impunity.

I'm not saying it always is. Most of the time it's clear what happened. I'm saying when there's a question mark it usually ends up looking much more likely that it's Hamas and not Israel. Whenever something happens consider who gains from it and who was in a position to do it. And when both answers come back "Hamas" and not "Israel" then consider who might actually have done it.

And let’s not pretend it’s just “Hamas propaganda.” The casualties are confirmed by satellite imagery, field reports from UN agencies, footage from war correspondents, and statements from Israeli officials themselves. Dismissing that as meaningless just signals one thing: you’re not looking for truth. You’re looking for a loophole.

No, I'm not taking it on blind faith.

Let’s cut through the fog.

You’ve spent this entire exchange building a worldview where no proof is ever enough, no atrocity ever meets the threshold of accountability, and no death ever counts unless it fits your narrative. You dismiss independent agencies, war correspondents, satellite imagery, and even Israeli admissions—not because they’ve all failed the burden of proof, but because you’ve already decided the outcome. That’s not skepticism. That’s a closed system of denial.

You say Hamas engineered the devastation. And yes, they’re guilty of horrific crimes. But the fact that one side uses civilians doesn’t absolve the other for killing them. That’s not just international law—it’s basic morality. And the Geneva Conventions weren’t written for conflicts between equals. They were written precisely for asymmetrical wars like this one, where the stronger side is tempted to trade ethics for efficiency.

Your “mirror and baby” analogy is cute, but it fails because it pretends complexity erases responsibility. In war, unlike in riddles, both the shooter and the one who set the trap can be culpable. That’s what law recognizes. You don’t get a moral free pass because the enemy is vile. If your response makes civilian death routine—predictable, and avoidable but unavoided—then the law doesn’t flinch. It calls that a violation.

You’ve admitted Israel controls the flow of aid, demolishes infrastructure, and rains bombs on densely populated areas because Hamas is “hiding.” But that’s not a defense. That’s the textbook definition of collective punishment. And you’ve done everything possible to obscure that—invoking blurry drone footage, questioning every death report, and reducing 35,000 bodies to a math problem that “could have been worse.”

You call this realism. I call it moral retreat. Because if your standard is “the alternative might have been bloodier,” then you’ll justify anything: from Hiroshima to Gaza, from firebombing to starvation. And in doing so, you don’t just enable atrocity. You normalize it.

So no, this isn’t just about what Hamas did on October 7. It’s about what you’re willing to excuse in response. And if the answer is “anything,” then you’ve stopped defending justice—you’re just managing optics for power.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Just reported that Israel has struck Iran.

I have mixed feelings.

They're hammering an enrichment plant.

And Iran is talking about pulling out of the NPT. That clearly adds up to they are about to join the nuclear club.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Hamas doesn’t bomb the crossings. Israel does.

Patently false.

Hamas Terrorists Attack Kerem Shalom Aid Crossing for Fourth Time in May

If your source is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, let’s be honest about what it is: a hawkish, pro-Israel think tank—not an impartial outlet. But even setting that aside, attacks on the Kerem Shalom crossing don’t erase the far larger reality: Israel controls every crossing, every convoy, every inspection, and has repeatedly closed or bombed them—including during aid deliveries. The World Food Programme, UNRWA, and OCHA have all documented Israeli airstrikes hitting aid convoys, UN shelters, and supply routes—not once or twice, but repeatedly.

Yes, Hamas has also attacked crossings. That’s part of the chaos they thrive in. But if you’re trying to argue that Hamas attacking a crossing somehow justifies Israel bombing aid trucks, blocking convoys, or shutting gates for days or weeks, then you’re doing exactly what you accuse others of: excusing the suffering of civilians for military optics.

Let’s be clear: both sides have acted recklessly. But only one side controls when food enters, how much, and whether it gets bombed en route. If you want to cite one incident, I’ll raise you a hundred documented by humanitarian agencies. That’s the real ratio.

NHC

The reality is that almost all the honest reporting about the situation comes from Israel. And the rest of your post is basically a collection of disconnected references that don't add up to anything.

“Almost all the honest reporting comes from Israel” is not an argument, it’s a declaration of faith.


The hard evidence says otherwise.

Every single aid-coordinating body that has ever worked in Gaza—the World Food Programme, UN OCHA, WHO, UNICEF, the ICRC, Médecins Sans Frontières and, yes, multiple Israeli NGOs such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—records the same sequence: a crossing opens only when Israel authorises it; a convoy moves only when Israel clears it; and a convoy halts the moment Israel closes airspace or a gate, no matter who fired the last shot.

Kerem Shalom is the perfect illustration. On 5 May Hamas mortars hit the area; Israel shut the gate for four days, aid piled up on the Egyptian side, and the UN’s daily situation report logged zero food deliveries into Gaza during that period. The identical pattern followed the 8 May and 13 May attacks. A non-state group lobs a half-dozen shells; a state retaliates by choking off food for two million civilians. Control is demonstrated by who can turn the spigot on and off—not by who can fire a homemade rocket.

The World Central Kitchen strike on 1 April exposed the same one-sided leverage. The convoy’s route, vehicle numbers and GPS trackers were pre-cleared with the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF drone circled for forty minutes, then hit the lead, middle and tail vehicles sequentially, killing seven aid workers. Within twenty-four hours the IDF admitted responsibility and produced no evidence of Hamas interference. That was not Hamas “thriving on chaos”; it was a state military deciding a sealed road was worth three missile passes.

So when you dismiss UN or NGO documentation as “disconnected references,” you are not rebutting them—you are declaring them inadmissible because they are not typed on Israeli letterhead. That is a litmus test for loyalty, not for truth.

Humanitarian access is not a courtesy; under Articles 55 and 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention it is an occupying power’s legal duty. If Hamas sabotages a crossing, Hamas commits a war crime. When Israel shuts the same crossing for days, bombs a pre-cleared convoy, or withholds fuel and medical supplies under a policy literally titled “economic pressure,” Israel commits a war crime. One violation does not cancel the other; it compounds it.

You asked for reality. Reality is the body count at the famine wards in northern Gaza that Médecins Sans Frontières filmed while their own clinic was running on generator fumes. Reality is the 240,000 tonnes of food that WFP says it has ready in Egypt but cannot move because COGAT’s gate schedule changes by the hour. Reality is the IDF’s own after-action report that called the World Central Kitchen strike “a grave mistake” and still went on to bomb another aid convoy six weeks later.

If your position is that none of this “adds up,” the problem is not the arithmetic; it is the filter that deletes every datum not stamped “official Israeli spokesperson.” Remove the filter and the pattern is obvious: whoever controls the gate controls the famine. And on every gate, every day, the lock is in Israeli hands.

NHC

 

[laughing dog]

Hamas chose the path of war. Israel is entitled to do what it takes to remove the threat.

Even genocide or ethnic cleansing?

Hamas and their supporters are the ones trying desperately to use genocide and ethnic cleansing. It's a military tactic.
Another term for the tactic is "human shields".
Tom

In regards to the actual question, is that a "yes" or a "no" or just horseshit?

In regards to the actual question,
No. Neither is okay. But as long as Hamas and their supporters insist on continuing to do it, it's going to keep happening in Gaza.
Tom

Then you are contradicting yourself with the last sentence. Because Hamas is not engaging in ethnic cleansing or genocide in Gaza. They are giving the IDF and people like you the excuses to chose to do so.

The only side attempting genocide or ethnic cleansing is Hamas.

Nope. Both Gaza and the West Bank are examples of ethnic cleansing by Israel: displacement of locals.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You're not responding to what I said. Hamas has a group devoted to propaganda videos. Doesn't make them not Hamas.

And no one said otherwise. But what you’re doing is something very different: using the fact that someone may be affiliated with Hamas, or involved in propaganda, or even just present in Gaza, to justify strikes that kill dozens—sometimes hundreds—of civilians at once. That’s not accountability. That’s associative guilt turned into a targeting policy.

A propaganda video team is not the same as an armed combatant force. Under international law, only those directly participating in hostilities can be targeted. Producing a video, writing a statement, or being ideologically aligned isn’t enough. Otherwise, every political or media actor becomes fair game—which is exactly the legal and moral slope you’re sliding down.

Sorry, but a military propaganda team is military.

And the rest of this is simply you repeating accusations that aren't relevant.

So yes, Hamas has propaganda units. But unless they’re taking direct part in combat, blowing up the building they’re in—especially when it’s surrounded by civilians—isn’t lawful targeting. It’s a euphemism for collective punishment, and law doesn’t make exceptions for convenient enemies.

That's not how the world works.

They should be protected to the extent feasible. Where I see you going wrong is you are taking it on faith that the high number of dead is proof they aren't taking due care. Hamas runs up the death toll specifically to make you think that.

Then let’s be clear: “feasible” doesn’t mean “whatever the attacker decides is good enough.” Under international law, it means all practicable precautions must be taken to avoid civilian harm—including cancelling or suspending an attack if the risk is excessive. That’s not aspirational—it’s binding law, grounded in Articles 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I.

"Feasible" is "not practical to do better".

Yes. Same as in WWII the presence of a German uniform and the absence of signs of surrender was enough to warrant pulling the trigger. Besides, he used that in a symbolic fashion, putting on the <military> uniform. He wasn't actually referring to wearing a green band.

Then you’ve just made my point more clearly than I could have.

Because equating Hamas insignia with a WWII uniform isn’t just a false analogy—it exposes the heart of the problem. In WWII, combatants were part of a declared state, identifiable under the Geneva Conventions, and covered by rules of war. But Gaza isn’t a battlefield of uniformed armies. It’s a densely populated civilian enclave, where symbols, clothing, and even buildings get conflated with military targets. That’s exactly why international humanitarian law demands more than assumption or symbolism before authorizing lethal force.

Doesn't matter if it's a declared state. The standard recognition signal of an armed force is a valid target.

Under the Geneva Conventions, a person must be directly participating in hostilities to lose civilian protections—not merely affiliated, sympathetic, or dressed a certain way. Using “he wore the wrong symbol” as justification for killing isn’t warfare. It’s profiling. And when you treat symbolism as sufficient grounds for execution in a war zone crowded with civilians, you erase the line between combatant and non-combatant entirely.

So yes—thank you for confirming the danger. Because once you treat implication as evidence and attire as guilt, you haven’t just bent the law. You’ve abandoned it.

No, the law doesn't say what you think it does.

But Geneva doesn't require you to figure out if the person in an enemy uniform is actually an enemy. You walk down the street in Kiev in a Russian army uniform, you expect to live??

Then you’re misapplying a battlefield rule to an occupied civilian population—two entirely different legal and ethical contexts.

Nope, you have a very unrealistic picture of what's a valid target.

In an active theater of war between two uniformed armies, yes, combatant status is often presumed based on uniform. But Gaza is not that. Gaza is not a battlefield filled with regular soldiers; it’s a civilian territory under siege, with no formal army, where the lines between governance, resistance, and survival are already dangerously blurred. And that’s exactly why international humanitarian law does require careful distinction.

Waddles and quacks. Military symbol = valid.

Wearing a green band, a T-shirt, or walking in the wrong place doesn’t make someone a lawful target. The Geneva Conventions require that civilians be presumed innocent unless they are actively participating in hostilities. That’s not a loophole. That’s the core safeguard that prevents war from collapsing into indiscriminate killing.

So no, you don’t get to apply battlefield logic to occupied territory full of civilians—most of whom are children—and pretend that’s legal, let alone moral. If you don’t see the difference between a Russian soldier in Kyiv and a Palestinian teenager in Rafah, you’re not arguing law. You’re just rationalizing bloodshed.

It's not a green band in general, it's the green band with the Hamas symbol on it.

And you're going off on a total tangent because he was using it symbolically (where with a regular army you would say "put on the uniform" as in enlisting in the military), not that anyone's actually targeting based on green bands.

You say the green band with the Hamas symbol makes someone a valid military target. But international law doesn’t work on logos—it works on conduct. A symbol, a shirt, even a political allegiance isn’t what strips someone of civilian protections. Only direct participation in hostilities does that. That’s not a loophole—it’s a legal safeguard against exactly the kind of lazy justification you’re offering: targeting by association.

And no, invoking WWII doesn’t help you—it exposes how far you’re stretching. In a conventional war between uniformed armies, clear insignia can establish combatant status. But Gaza isn’t a battlefield between states. It’s an occupied, densely populated strip where half the population are children, and most of the “uniforms” you’re referencing are symbols worn at protests, funerals, or political rallies—not during combat.

So when you say “military symbol = valid,” you’re gutting the entire civilian-combatant distinction. That’s not just legally wrong—it’s morally catastrophic. Because under your logic, any teenager wearing a Hamas headband at a protest is now a legitimate target. Any cameraman at a rally. Any medic in a hospital that once treated a militant. That’s not precision. That’s collective punishment painted over with legalese.

You keep insisting that I’m misunderstanding the Geneva Conventions. Fine—then show me the clause that says symbolism alone justifies deadly force. Show me the article that says presumed affiliation overrides the requirement to distinguish. Because unless you can do that, all you’re offering is a loophole big enough to bomb neighborhoods through—and that’s not a legal argument. It’s an alibi in search of a conscience.

We either uphold the principle that civilians are protected unless actively engaged in combat—or we admit we’ve abandoned that principle entirely. But spare me the talk about legality if your threshold for guilt is a green band and your threshold for due process is a drone strike.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

No. It's "enemy uniform" = "enemy". Perfectly normal standard everywhere.

That might be a reasonable standard in a conventional war between uniformed armies—but Gaza is not that. And you know it.

Doesn't change the standard.

And that’s how massacres happen—how entire neighborhoods become “valid” targets in hindsight because someone nearby might have matched a profile. What you’re defending isn’t the law. It’s a rationale for abandoning it.

No, massacres happen because the people match the appearance of those who were shooting at the soldiers.

It's the marking of the enemy, that's all you need. Geneva requires soldiers to fight in readily distinguishable attire to prevent targeting mistakes, it says nothing about not shooting people in said attire. (It's not specifically uniforms, merely that they match. "Militia, we are expecting infiltrators. The uniform of the day is green over orange brassards.")

Then you’ve just proven the point—by flattening the legal standard into a visual cue, you’re erasing the entire foundation of civilian protection in asymmetric conflict.

Yes, combatants are required to distinguish themselves. But Geneva does not say that anyone who resembles a fighter—or wears something “green and orange”—can legally be shot. That’s a misapplication. The distinction goes both ways: if someone is not taking direct part in hostilities, then they retain full civilian protection—even if they’re dressed in a way you find suspicious.

Read more carefully. I said "green over orange brassards". Not merely green and orange. It's a sufficiently uncommon word that my spell checker is flagging it.

That's relevant how??

The words you failed to quote: "because they live in Gaza, express political opinions, or wear a color associated with a group"

You are providing no evidence that they were targeted for any of these reasons. And you are providing no evidence one way or the other about those who were hit. Your argument simply amounts to "you didn't prove they were Hamas". You think Israel is going to reveal how it identifies people?! It's just their track record is very good--an awful lot of the "civilians" they kill later get Hamas funerals.

It’s relevant because it demonstrates a fundamental failure of the principle you’re defending—the requirement to distinguish between civilians and combatants, especially in pre-designated civilian safe zones. You can’t champion Israel’s “track record” while ignoring documented incidents where that track record collapses under scrutiny.

Documented incidents do not show probability. Tracking all the dead "civilians" and seeing who gets a military funeral does.

The Al-Mawasi strike isn’t just a tragic accident—it’s a case study in the failure of precautionary obligations under Article 57 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. Israel instructed civilians to move to Al-Mawasi, designated it a humanitarian zone, then conducted lethal strikes within it. Whether or not Hamas fighters were present does not absolve the legal burden. Under international law, the presence of combatants among a civilian population does not negate civilian protections. The obligation is on the attacking party to either avoid the strike or delay it if the collateral damage would be disproportionate to the expected military advantage.

And you once again fail to understand.

Israel was saying there wasn't any infrastructure in the zone they were going to target. That doesn't mean they're going to ignore Hamas operating in the zone.

Furthermore, your assertion that many of those killed “later get Hamas funerals” is not a reliable legal or evidentiary standard. Funerary affiliation is not a legal test for combatant status. Under customary IHL and ICC jurisprudence, the definition of a combatant includes those directly participating in hostilities, not those whose bodies are later draped in flags or given symbolic honors. The ICRC and legal scholars have repeatedly emphasized that posthumous political framing does not retroactively convert a civilian into a lawful military target.

And you fail to understand Geneva.

The military funeral shows the person was in the military. And being in the military in times of war makes one a valid target.

And no—states are not required to reveal operational intelligence, but that doesn’t exempt them from providing credible evidence that their strikes are lawful. Merely asserting “we believe a militant was there” without substantiation, particularly after civilians were directed to that location by the military itself, does not satisfy the legal threshold of distinction, proportionality, or precaution.

By itself, no. But given their track record I'm not going to figure the guy really was a civilian when Israel identifies him as a combatant.

In short, your argument hinges on presumed legitimacy and post-hoc rationalizations rather than adherence to legal principles. The laws of war were created precisely to avoid this kind of ambiguity—where civilians are killed, responsibility is denied, and every corpse is presumed guilty by association. That’s not a defense. It’s the breakdown of lawful conduct in armed conflict.

You continue to assume and then base your argument on your assumption.

Of course no real time evidence is offered before the strike. What are you smoking to think that they would do that??

And you realize that when an entire family is pulled from the rubble that almost always one of their senior commanders was in said rubble? There are typically fewer civilians around when someone is at home than when they are out somewhere.

And that’s precisely the danger of the logic you’re defending.

You’re saying that because Israel doesn’t want to disclose evidence in real time, we should take its word on trust—while simultaneously dismissing all independent reporting from humanitarian organizations, UN bodies, or even allied governments as unreliable if it contradicts that narrative. That’s not just selective skepticism—it’s a double standard that places one side above verification and the other beneath credibility by default.

I'm saying their track record is good enough I'll take a wait and see approach. And it's usually not even needed--while Hamas always pretends the grunts are civilian they promise revenge when Israel gets someone of high rank. And Israel isn't going to intend civilian casualties for lesser people. Thus in practice when Israel hits an occupied house the terrorists typically call for avenging the fallen comrade and you know they were on target.

The law doesn’t say you can’t strike high-value targets. It says you must not do so in a way that knowingly causes disproportionate harm to civilians. And when strike after strike results in that exact outcome, it ceases to be “unfortunate.” It becomes policy.

Reality is 10 to 1. Except even if you accept the Hamas death toll it's still 1.5 to 1. I have a very hard time with the notion that a 6-fold decrease is an unacceptable increase.

I expect them to do what they feasibly can. I do not expect them to do the impossible. And I see them consistently being the world's best at avoiding civilian casualties. I also see the stuff with Hezbollah--human shield tactics aren't used much there, and we see 85-90% of deaths being combatants. Look at the beeper bombs--one death that was certainly civilian, but immediate family of the target. The other "civilian" deaths we get no details--nope, they weren't civilians.

Then what you’re defending isn’t law—it’s a moving target of excuses, defined by trust in one side’s claims and total skepticism toward any opposing evidence.

You “expect them to do what they feasibly can,” but ignore the legal definition of that standard. Feasibility isn’t whatever a military says it tried. It means taking all practicable precautions to verify the nature of the target, to choose means and methods that minimize civilian harm, and to refrain from the attack if that harm is excessive in relation to the anticipated military gain. That’s not opinion—it’s Article 57 of Additional Protocol I. And it’s binding.

You praise Israel as “the world’s best” at avoiding civilian casualties. But that’s not how legal accountability works. International law doesn’t say “do better than most,” it says follow the rules—always, and without exception. “We’re better than Russia or Syria” is not a defense under the Geneva Conventions.

I'm comparing them to the western powers, not to Syria.

As for Hezbollah: cherry-picking one front and one set of casualty ratios doesn’t prove anything about the legality of operations in Gaza. The terrain, density, and conditions are radically different—and so is the scale. Civilian death rates in Gaza aren’t some mystery. Over 70% of the reported dead are women and children, a claim now broadly accepted even by Israeli analysts. If you think that can be waved off by labeling them “immediate family of the target,” then you’re not applying international law. You’re dismantling it with euphemism.

It's not that it's widely accepted, it's that there's no competing data. We know the data is bogus, but we don't know how bogus.

And your dismissal of deaths where “we get no details” as not civilians is exactly the problem. Unknown is not guilt. Proximity is not guilt. Family is not guilt. If you reverse that burden—assuming civilian deaths are justified unless proven otherwise—you’ve erased the entire foundation of the law of armed conflict. That’s not justice. That’s rationalized brutality.

No. It's the dog that didn't bark. They'll jump on proving the civilians are civilians--thus when they don't give details figure they're most likely combatants or otherwise valid. (The beeper bombs got some in the Lebanese hierarchy that were working with Hezbollah.) They don't want to provide "details" that can be shown false, so they don't provide them.

This is completely unrealistic.

Unrealistic doesn’t mean unlawful.

The laws of armed conflict aren’t designed around what’s most convenient for a military. They exist precisely because in war, the temptation to cut corners and justify assumptions is overwhelming. If the only standard is what a military thinks is reasonable in the moment, then there is no law—only discretion. And discretion without external accountability is how atrocities happen.

Saying “we can’t wait for certainty” doesn’t grant permission to act on guesses. The legal requirement is not perfect knowledge—it’s due diligence. That means real efforts to distinguish combatants from civilians before using lethal force. It means avoiding strikes where the expected civilian harm is excessive compared to the military gain. That’s the legal bar. Calling it unrealistic is just another way of saying you don’t want to be bound by it.

If law only applies when it’s easy, then it isn’t law. It’s theater.

There is no certainty.

Read it again. "Civilians". Not members of the group. Identifying group membership is enough to pull the trigger.

(And there's a reason we didn't ratify that part of Geneva. That piece you are referring to is protecting two of the 10/7 butchers because they simply joined the attack without being members of a terrorist organization. The words "and for such a time as" are an abomination that does not belong.)

Your interpretation dangerously rewrites the law to suit a rationale that strips civilians of protection by association—not by action. That’s not how international humanitarian law works, and it’s not a loophole the U.S. or any other state can simply invent by fiat.

Apparently you did not understand. Israel knows where two of the butchers of 10/7 are. But since they simply joined in the attack without being part of the terrorist organizations they are protected under that abomination and haven't been hit.

First, Article 51(3) protects all civilians, regardless of affiliation or ideology. The only condition under which that protection is suspended is direct participation in hostilities—not mere identification, group membership, or political sympathy. That includes members of non-state armed groups, unless they are actively engaged in a military function at the time. This isn’t controversial—it’s the consensus view of the ICRC, the International Criminal Court, and military manuals around the world.

Second, saying the U.S. didn’t ratify Additional Protocol I doesn’t erase the principle. Much of it, including Article 51, has been recognized as customary international law—binding on all states regardless of ratification. The U.S. Department of Defense even follows the “direct participation” standard in its own Law of War Manual.

Third, your framing turns suspicion into a death sentence. If “group membership” is enough, then anyone in Gaza who looks the part—teenagers, political supporters, aid workers accused by proxy—becomes a lawful target. That collapses the entire foundation of distinction, which is what separates combat from slaughter.

No. I'm not saying the people on the edges are valid targets. I'm saying two 10/7 murderers should be.

The law doesn’t exist to make war easy. It exists to prevent it from becoming total. You don’t get to declare that because some parts are inconvenient, the civilians cease being civilians. If that’s the argument, then you’re not upholding international law. You’re erasing it.

Where??

The ICRC’s Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities makes clear that civilians remain protected unless and only while they directly participate in hostilities. Simply identifying someone with a group—through clothing, symbolism, or political alignment—is not sufficient grounds for targeting. The standard is conduct, not affiliation.

This principle has been reinforced by international tribunals. In Prosecutor v. Tadić, the ICTY affirmed that individuals must be targeted based on their active role in hostilities—not assumptions based on group membership or demographics. The law requires a functional assessment, not a symbolic one.

But you still don't get that membership in a military organization is enough.

The issue was whether it's possible for a "civilian" to be a combatant. It's relevant in that establishing that someone is a "civilian" isn't proof they are not a combatant. Multiple hostages were rescued that were being held by "civilians".

Then you’ve just illustrated the very principle you’re trying to sidestep.

Yes—some civilians may secretly engage in hostilities. That’s exactly why the law sets a high bar before lethal force can be used: it requires proof of direct participation, not assumption based on possibility. International humanitarian law accounts for the fact that conflict is murky—but it errs on the side of protection, not preemption.

Once again, you fail to understand. You continue to use "proof" that someone is a civilian as evidence they can't be a combatant. Nope. It's no data, not a proof.

The presence of a few civilians who violate their protected status does not justify treating all civilians as potential threats. That logic flips the burden of proof—turning a presumption of innocence into a presumption of guilt by proximity or suspicion. That’s not how law works. It’s how massacres are rationalized.

So yes, a “civilian” can forfeit protection by taking up arms—but only for as long as they are actively doing so. You don’t get to rewrite that rule just because some hostages were guarded by people in plain clothes. That fact proves the need for care, not its abandonment.

People with civilian lives.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

Any symbol of noncombatant status that is repeatedly misused ceases to be an indication of noncombatant status. And all of them have been widely misused in Gaza.

Then what you’re advocating is the erosion of the very system that distinguishes war from massacre.

“Fool me twice” may work in personal grudges—but international humanitarian law is not built on vengeance or trust. It’s built on standards—precisely because war is chaotic, manipulated, and filled with bad actors. The moment you say that a vest, a symbol, a hospital, or a designation “no longer counts” because it’s sometimes abused, you make every protected status conditional. And once protection becomes conditional, it becomes meaningless.

If a press vest no longer shields a journalist because others lied while wearing one—then journalists become targets. If a hospital loses protection because an enemy used one—then patients become targets. That’s not accountability. That’s collective suspicion turned into lethal policy.

International law doesn’t require you to be naïve. It requires you to distinguish. You hold individuals accountable when evidence supports it. But you don’t erase protections for everyone because of the actions of some. That’s not “shame on me”—it’s shame on the world if we allow it.

It's not that it was misused once. It's that it's misused again and again. And it's not used for targeting, just not used to consider someone a noncombatant. Is that car a threat? In a proper world you would see the medical markings and figure it wasn't. In Gaza you ignore the markings and focus on behavior.

You say humanitarian symbols have been “misused again and again,” so they can’t be trusted. But that’s not how the law works—and it’s not how morality works either.

The Geneva Conventions don’t say, “If bad actors exploit protected symbols, you can ignore them entirely.” They say those protections remain unless you have clear, specific evidence that a particular person or object is being used for hostile purposes. That’s the whole point of the distinction principle: you don’t get to wipe out protections wholesale just because your enemy doesn’t play fair. You still have a duty to investigate, to distinguish, and to avoid lethal force unless the target is clearly legitimate.

You claim you’re not targeting based on those suspicions—just that you’re not treating people or places as protected anymore. But when the result is that a journalist in a vest, a doctor in a hospital, or a family in a marked safe zone ends up dead, that’s not a passive omission. That’s an active failure of obligation. You don’t get to wash your hands of that and say, “We just didn’t consider them noncombatants.” That’s how legality collapses into impunity.

And let’s be clear—there’s a vast difference between some misuse and systematic abuse. If every civilian object is treated as potentially hostile, every child as potentially complicit, and every symbol as potentially fake, then you’ve destroyed the entire legal framework that separates combatants from civilians. That’s not caution. That’s blanket suspicion turned into policy.

International humanitarian law wasn’t written to make war easy—it was written to make war humane, even when the enemy refuses to be. The burden doesn’t vanish because Hamas violates the rules. It doubles. Because if you meet lawlessness with lawlessness, you’re not resisting terror. You’re replicating it.

And when you say, “In Gaza, we ignore the markings and watch behavior,” what you’re really saying is: “We act first, justify later.” But that’s not what law demands. And it’s not what justice looks like.

If the rules only apply when it’s convenient—then they’re not rules. They’re excuses.

And that’s not accountability. That’s the death of it.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

No one is saying defense is impossible. What I’m saying is that not all forms of defense are defensible. You can protect your population without inflicting collective punishment. You can pursue security without flattening refugee camps or starving children. That’s not weakness—it’s the difference between legitimate self-defense and disproportionate retribution.

But you aren't establishing that it happens.

The real binary isn’t between action and inaction. It’s between restraint and impunity. If your standard is “whatever it takes,” then you’ve already conceded that any atrocity can be justified if fear is high enough. That’s not how you preserve life. That’s how you lose your moral compass—and with it, any claim to be different from what you’re fighting.

No, you pretend there's permissible action.

Security without justice isn’t peace. It’s domination. And history has never mistaken the two.

A real solution does not exist. Yeah, I know, that's blasphemy to the left. Before I would have said taking down Iran would likely do it, but given how they have gotten into bed with Russia I no longer consider that a possibility.

You’re saying there’s no solution, only punishment. No diplomacy, only force. No endgame, only endurance. But if your strategy admits there’s no way out except perpetual war and civilian suffering, then you haven’t solved anything. You’ve institutionalized despair.

I said nothing about punishment. Otherwise, yes, that's the reality. I don't like it one bit but I won't pretend there must be an answer.

And no, calling that out isn’t “blasphemy to the left”—it’s a demand for moral clarity across the board. It’s entirely possible to condemn Hamas, reject Iranian influence, and still insist that a response rooted in legality and humanity matters. That’s not weakness. It’s the only path that doesn’t just repeat the cycle indefinitely.

The first step to clarity needs to be to understand what's happened--something you clearly do not.

And it comes back to the standard faith of the left, that there must be an answer. And the blame for not finding it always is with the side with the apparent power.

Because if the only thing left is to escalate pain until someone breaks, then you’re not fighting for peace—you’re fighting for dominance. And nothing sustainable has ever been built on that.

Peace requires both sides to want peace.

Iran has no interest in peace.

You seem to think alternatives must exist.

No—I recognize that some situations have no easy alternatives. But that’s not the same as having no alternatives.

In other words no, but not no. The faith that there's an answer somewhere.

Yes, I dismiss out of hand all of those who kept proclaiming imminent disaster that never

Then you’re not engaging in skepticism. You’re engaging in selective disbelief—where no amount of evidence will ever be enough unless it confirms your prior assumptions.

You say “imminent disaster never materialized,” while malnutrition rates among children have doubled, hospitals report starvation deaths, and aid organizations have lost staff trying to reach people trapped in bombed-out areas. Do you think these groups—often risking their lives—fabricate data for fun? Do you think every image of a starving infant, every intercepted convoy, every destroyed bakery is a global conspiracy?

You're not making your point at all. They keep claiming that outcomes far, far worse than anything we've seen are imminent. And you continue to think there are observers on the ground. I look at their track record--wrong, wrong, wrong. Why should I continue to pay attention to them?

The fact that you dismiss all of it out of hand tells me you’re not interested in data. You’re interested in protecting a narrative.

Disasters don’t stop being real just because you’re tired of hearing about them. And disbelief, repeated loudly enough, has never saved a single life.

But proclaiming them often enough doesn't make them real, either.

You don't have to be skeletal to look underweight. To have a few starving children in a society that looks like it has enough to eat either means they can't eat or they aren't being permitted food.

And that’s exactly the issue—they aren’t being permitted food.

You’ve finally hit on the right conclusion but pointed the blame in the wrong direction. When trucks are delayed, when aid is blocked at crossings, when fuel is withheld so bakeries shut down, when safe zones are bombed and warehouses destroyed—that’s what cuts off food. That’s what turns acute food insecurity into child malnutrition. The World Food Programme and UNICEF don’t invent these outcomes—they track them. Clinically. Statistically. Repeatedly.

Faith, repeated as fact.

And yes, some children in Gaza are visibly underweight. Others are not yet—because starvation isn’t instant. It’s a progression, and right now, that progression is happening across a trapped population while the world argues over semantics.

It's an incredibly slow progression. If the wolf-criers had been right the place would be mostly depopulated by now.

If you’re willing to admit children are starving, then the next question isn’t, “Are they being permitted food?” It’s who is in charge of permitting it. And when the borders, airspace, and supply lines are all controlled by one side, the responsibility isn’t hard to trace.

And you think Hamas can't prohibit it???

Cite?

Why would an inspection delay keep it from entering Gaza?

And what's being denied? I think you're mixing it up with events of long ago, there was a period where Israel was not permitting Hamas to import anything. The result was "arbitrary" denials to a lot of Hamas puppets.

Border crossings? Yeah, it happens. Hamas shells a border crossing, Israel closes it for a while. Quit shelling it, end of problem. Same as they shelled that stupid pier we tried to build.

Then let’s be clear.

The claim that Israel isn’t obstructing aid doesn’t hold up—not when U.S. officials themselves have said otherwise. Samantha Power, head of USAID, testified that trucks loaded with food and medicine were sitting for days or being turned away without explanation at Israeli-controlled crossings. Secretary of State Blinken echoed the same, stating that Israel must do more to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza and that delays were “unacceptable.” These are not fringe opinions—they’re statements from Israel’s closest ally.

A lot of trucks have sat for days in Gaza. Because that makes things look worse.

As for the idea that “inspection delays shouldn’t matter,” it ignores how aid works. Perishable goods expire. Bottlenecks mean fewer convoys make it in per day. Some shipments are rejected outright for including batteries, solar panels, water filters, or even medical kits—items that inspectors label “dual-use” with no real evidence that they’re a threat. Meanwhile, humanitarian agencies—WFP, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders—have consistently documented that only a fraction of the necessary aid has been allowed through. And it’s not just them. UN logistics reports track daily entry rates and confirm the same.

But how much perishable stuff is being shipped?

And you are listing a couple of power sources there--Hamas' tunnels are useless without power. That's definitely dual use.

And you realize the UN is failing to arrange pickup of stuff that enters Gaza to make the numbers look bad?

You say Hamas shelled crossings and therefore Israel closed them. But that’s not the full picture. Closures often happen in the absence of active shelling, and in some cases, after Israeli airstrikes damaged the access roads themselves. Kerem Shalom and Rafah have been closed for extended periods—not hours, but weeks. The result isn’t hypothetical: babies in incubators without power, people drinking contaminated water, breadlines that stretch for hours.

Yes, Hamas bears responsibility for diverting aid and exploiting suffering. But when the power to open the gate lies with one party, the primary responsibility to allow food, water, and medicine through lies there too. That’s not politics. That’s humanitarian law. The Geneva Conventions don’t say “unless your enemy is terrible.” They say civilian survival is not negotiable.

I see mythical starvation. If it were real it wouldn't be a few cases.

No. There is no requirement of exclusively. And remember Israel has actually taken some hospitals--and found weapons all over the place. And that's only the stuff the defenders didn't manage to get out.

Then let’s actually look at what the law says—not the version shaped to justify any strike, but the actual legal text.

Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that civilian hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack” and retain their protections unless they are used to commit acts harmful to the enemy. Even then, an attack is only permitted after due warning has been given, and a reasonable time has passed without cessation of those acts. The ICRC’s Commentary makes it clear: presence of armed individuals alone is not enough—there must be hostile acts, and even then, the principle of proportionality still applies.

So no, you don’t lose legal protection just because combatants passed through or because weapons were allegedly found afterward. And even if a hospital is used for dual purposes, the law doesn’t simply give a green light to bomb it—it demands careful assessment, feasible alternatives, and advance warning to protect the wounded and medical staff.

As for “Israel found weapons”—even if taken at face value, that’s not a blanket justification for every strike on every hospital. You don’t get to retroactively justify an attack by saying, “We found something later.” That’s not law. That’s post-hoc rationalization.

The point is it shows they're right. We aren't in a position to evaluate their targeting intel. To a fair degree we can see the results.

And note that if the hospital was not being actively used for military purposes there would be no siege or the like. The army would simply walk in.

If we accept your standard—where mere suspicion, partial use, or a vague Hamas “presence” voids all civilian protection—then we have abandoned not just the Geneva Conventions, but the very idea of civilian immunity in war. And that’s not just legally wrong. It’s historically dangerous.

It's not "they might be hijacked". It's "they have been taken".

Then let’s be honest: “they have been taken” is still not a lawful justification for striking aid convoys.

Even if Hamas has seized aid in the past, that does not give carte blanche to target future convoys unless you have specific, verified intelligence that a given shipment is being used for military operations—not merely that it might be diverted later. The standard under international humanitarian law—as laid out in Article 52 of Additional Protocol I and reinforced by the ICRC and Rome Statute—is concrete and direct military advantage. That means current, actionable evidence of military use.

Pay attention.

I said "have been taken." You're throwing out hypotheticals with no connection to the facts. Once the gunmen join the convoy and it deviates from it's intended destination it ceases to be aid and becomes Hamas supplies.

You keep repeating that international law demands restraint, not impunity. I agree. But what you consistently fail to do is prove that what you’re calling “collective punishment” is actually happening in the legal sense—not rhetorically, not emotionally, but demonstrably.

There’s a difference between a tragic outcome and a war crime. And if you want to make the latter charge, you need more than repeated language about suffering. You need evidence that shows a deliberate disregard for distinction, proportionality, and necessity. You haven’t shown that. You’ve implied it. You’ve assumed it. But you haven’t proven it.

You say there’s a binary between restraint and impunity, and yet offer zero acknowledgment of what restraint looks like in the face of human shields, tunnel networks under civilian areas, or the weaponization of aid. When Hamas stores rockets under schools or fires from hospitals, what exactly do you propose—surrender? Because “restraint” becomes empty moral theater if it demands sacrificing every feasible military objective on the altar of hypothetical civilian harm. That’s not humanitarian law. That’s paralysis.

You say there’s “no solution but punishment”? That’s not what your opponent said. He stated that no good solution exists right now. And that’s a hard truth you refuse to face. You talk about diplomacy and legality as if they’ve been absent for lack of trying, not because every ceasefire has been met with rearmament, every peace plan with rejection. Even Arab leaders now admit Hamas operates with impunity in spite of any plausible political settlement. This isn’t idealism. It’s denial disguised as moral clarity.

You invoke Samantha Power and Blinken—fine. But cherry-picking selective criticisms from allies doesn’t change the bigger picture: those same allies also acknowledge Hamas sabotages aid, that Egypt restricts the Rafah crossing, and that trucks sit inside Gaza, undelivered, because UNRWA can’t distribute them securely. Delays and obstruction exist on both sides. But you assign 100% of the blame to one. That’s not clarity. That’s partisanship.

You ask, “Who permits food?” The answer is: both. Hamas steals it. Israel inspects it. Egypt blocks it. The full picture is messy, not binary. Pretending otherwise isn’t advocacy—it’s distortion.

You call starvation “mythical” because “it’s not widespread enough.” Then immediately cite WFP and UNICEF to say it is happening. Pick one. You can’t ridicule the suffering as “mythical” one moment, then use it as moral leverage the next. Either the humanitarian data matters—or it doesn’t. But if it does, then it must also include the part where UN officials admit they’ve been unable to deliver food even after entry—due to logistics, theft, and lack of local cooperation, not just Israeli oversight.

As for dual-use items like batteries and solar panels: yes, they power water filters—and tunnels, launch sites, and encrypted comms. That’s not speculation. That’s documented precedent. No military on Earth allows unrestricted import of potential weapon components during an active conflict. To demand otherwise is to ask Israel to make itself more vulnerable for the sake of optics.

You invoke Article 18 of the Geneva Conventions to say hospitals can’t be targeted—unless they’re used to commit hostile acts. But that’s precisely the clause you gloss over. When Israel does strike a hospital, they do so only after surveillance, intelligence, and—often—warnings. You wave this away as “post-hoc rationalization,” yet ignore that many of these buildings have been occupied by gunmen, launch pads, or command centers. You can’t hide behind the Conventions while ignoring the very exceptions they include.

You ask for real-time proof that a site was used for military purposes. But that standard does not exist under IHL. What exists is the obligation to verify a military objective to the extent feasible, using available intelligence. Israel does that. You may not like how, but disliking it isn’t the same as disproving it.

As for Hamas stealing aid: your opponent never said “maybe they might.” He said they have. Because they have. Truck convoys have been hijacked. Warehouses have been looted. Aid has been resold. There are videos, eyewitnesses, and confirmations from UN staff themselves. When armed men seize shipments and redirect them, it ceases to be humanitarian aid and becomes a tactical asset. That is a legally valid basis to reassess its protection—not a moral hypothetical.

Finally, your entire framework depends on one dangerous inversion: assuming Israel must prove beyond doubt the legitimacy of every strike, while Hamas bears no burden of proof at all. That is not law. That is moral asymmetry, weaponized.

You’ve asked repeatedly: What about civilian protections?


Here’s the answer: they matter—which is why they must be protected from abuse.

Because when you treat every tragedy as a war crime, and every war crime as inevitable unless Israel lays down its arms, you’re not upholding humanitarian law. You’re eroding it—until it becomes a tool for the very impunity you claim to oppose.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

'm not saying that.

I'm saying that if you function in Gaza you have to do what Hamas tells you to. Not that that means membership in Hamas. (Although there's quite an overlap between UN and Hamas.) There are no independent journalists there. Journalists either are actually Hamas, or are reporting what Hamas tells them to report. Not obeying is liable to get you killed.

Then you’re still making the same fundamental error—just with a softer label.

Saying that journalists or UN workers “have to do what Hamas tells them to” is not a rebuttal. It’s an assumption dressed up as analysis. You’re asserting that every report, every photo, every statement from Gaza is compromised unless it comes from Israeli sources or aligns with your narrative. That’s not discernment. That’s blanket dismissal.

We have several reports from reporters who told the truth. And they all tell very similar stories of the tactics used. Why in the world should we assume they're all making it up?

Yes, Hamas exerts control. No one is denying that the environment is dangerous and restrictive. But that’s precisely why multiple independent agencies—including those with no ties to Gaza or Hamas—use verification mechanisms: satellite imagery, eyewitness triangulation, cross-border interviews, third-party audits. These aren’t just “Hamas press releases.” They’re vetted, cross-referenced reports by international bodies whose credibility doesn’t vanish just because the context is complex.

You continue to assert vetting that shows no evidence of existence. How did none of them catch the 4k obviously bad entries?? Nobody who was vetting would have overlooked the fact that more than 10% of the data was wrong. Why should I assume they are vetting any better now?

This comes down to credibility. I favor that which has a track record of being right. I do not trust that which has a track record of being wrong.

If Hamas truly controls all information, then the moral burden falls even heavier on those with access, resources, and power to verify and report—because they have the tools to act transparently. But instead, you’re using the fog of war to dismiss every inconvenient truth as “propaganda,” while treating every unverified assertion of military success as gospel.

That’s not a double standard. It’s the abandonment of standards entirely.

You assume the inconvenient stuff is truth.

And I don't treat unverified assertion of military success as gospel.

Hamas names the dead commander, that was a successful operation.

Substantial secondaries from hitting something, that was a successful operation.

A line of collapse radiating out from a ground penetrating bomb, that was a successful strike on a tunnel.

Or look at that video of supposedly bombing tents. You notice those of us who looked at it with a critical eye saw the rocket launcher center frame?

Thousands??

Yes—thousands.

According to the World Health Organization, as of spring 2024, over 400 health workers in Gaza had been confirmed killed. But that’s just confirmed staff—many more unregistered volunteers, paramedics, and support staff are included in broader counts. The Gaza Health Ministry (whose raw casualty numbers have often been corroborated by UN agencies and independent human rights monitors) reported that well over 1,000 healthcare workers had been killed by that point. And that number has since grown.

Ok, not confirmed. The Ministry of Health is reporting Hamas numbers. There was a period where Hamas was claiming 10,000 buried in the rubble that the MoH was not counting, but it stayed 10,000 for ages. Nobody found?!

Moreover, dozens of hospitals and clinics have been bombed, raided, or rendered inoperable due to direct strikes, siege conditions, or lack of fuel. These are not just buildings—they’re protected medical zones under international law. Their destruction, and the killing of doctors and nurses, cannot simply be brushed aside unless you believe medical personnel lose their protected status by default just for being in Gaza.

So yes—thousands, when you include doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, paramedics, technicians, and all medical staff killed in or around hospitals and ambulances, many of which were targeted or hit repeatedly. And if you’re surprised by that number, it only shows how effective the minimization effort has been.

None of that proves your point.

I'm saying duress, not guilt.

Then you’ve admitted something crucial—because duress doesn’t undermine the legitimacy of a role. It underscores the urgency of protecting it.

If journalists, aid workers, and medical staff are operating under duress, that doesn’t invalidate their status—it makes it even more important that they not be treated as combatants by default. You don’t solve coercion by removing protections; you reinforce them to prevent exactly the abuse you’re describing.

I'm saying the independent ones are under duress. And you're not establishing that they have been hit.

And if duress is the norm in Gaza—as you suggest—then you’re not just arguing against Hamas. You’re implicitly acknowledging that civilians are trapped in a system they didn’t choose, with no safe exit, no real autonomy, and no way to meet your standards of innocence. That doesn’t absolve Hamas. But it also doesn’t justify treating every civilian and civil servant as expendable collateral. That’s not justice. That’s surrendering to the logic of siege warfare—where everyone becomes a target because no one can escape.

Yeah, they're trapped. I can't fix that. Blame Hamas for setting up the situation with the intent of getting them killed.

And you have still not established that they failed in those precautions.

But that’s not how the burden works under international law. The obligation to demonstrate that all feasible precautions were taken—and that the anticipated military gain justified the foreseeable harm—rests with the actor conducting the strike, not the observer questioning it.

And when thousands of civilians are killed in densely populated areas, including in designated safe zones, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals, the question isn’t whether I can “prove” they failed. The scale and recurrence of harm demand justification—not blind trust. Repeated patterns of high civilian death, lack of transparency in target assessment, and post-strike silence don’t suggest due care. They raise serious red flags.

You’re treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence. That’s not a legal standard. That’s a loophole for impunity.

You are setting an impossible burden of proof, no way Israel is going to reveal the details.

You were critical of my pointing out that it's less than one dead per bomb, yet that makes it very clear that warning and evacuation was happening.

No, it doesn’t. A statistic like “less than one dead per bomb” is not a substitute for evidence of effective warnings or lawful precautions. It’s an average—an abstraction—pulled from a battlefield where reality plays out in specific, devastating incidents. You can drop a bomb that kills no one and another that kills 50, and still have your average look clean. That doesn’t prove compliance with the law. It hides what the law is designed to examine: proportionality, distinction, and foreseeability on a case-by-case basis.

Of course it's an average. That doesn't mean it doesn't reflect the care that is being taken.

If you want to prove legal and ethical conduct, cite evidence of the precautions taken before the bomb was dropped—not the body count after.

We showed the notice was given with that rocket launcher. Didn't change your position.

And if my aunt had balls she would be my uncle.

And that response is exactly the problem—it dismisses serious legal obligations and humanitarian consequences with a joke. But war crimes aren’t hypothetical. They’re documented, investigated, and prosecuted based on patterns of conduct, not witty deflections.

The point is you keep demanding the impossible.

You don’t get to brush aside civilian deaths, hospital bombings, and refugee camp strikes as rhetorical fluff. These aren’t punchlines—they’re matters of international law, human suffering, and moral responsibility. If the argument you’re making can’t be defended without mockery, maybe it’s not the civilians who should be questioned.

It was fabricated--by Saddam's people, not by us. There was some stuff we managed to capture early on and beyond that we had report after report after report from commanders who managed to keep the stuff away from the inspectors. We didn't realize the stuff had never existed in the first place other than on paper.

And that doesn't change the fact that had Iran not been able to subvert the country the end result of our invasion would be better for the people overall after only a year.

Then let’s take your framing seriously: if Saddam’s regime fabricated WMD capabilities, and the U.S. acted on that disinformation, the conclusion doesn’t shift from “fabricated justification” to “justified war.” It only changes who crafted the fiction. And it still indicts the decision to launch a full-scale invasion based on unverified intelligence, without a functioning international consensus, and despite massive civilian risk.

That’s not hindsight bias—it’s what weapons inspectors on the ground, like Hans Blix, were saying in real time. And if the argument becomes “we thought it was true,” then the threshold for war has been lowered to suspicion—something international law was specifically designed to prevent.

He said nothing had been found. False--stuff had been found and destroyed.

As for the claim that the invasion would have worked “but for Iran,” that collapses under the weight of history. The U.S. dismantled the Iraqi state apparatus, disbanded the army, and imposed a sectarian interim government—inviting the very instability that Iran later exploited. Blaming Iran for chaos after the U.S. created a vacuum isn’t accountability. It’s deflection.

If we want to learn anything from Iraq, it’s not that better post-war management would have saved it—it’s that wars launched on shaky intelligence, with no clear exit strategy and no local legitimacy, do not lead to peace. They lead to exactly what we saw: death, displacement, and the birth of new extremisms.

None of your factors are relevant. We royally screwed the pooch in pretending that Iraq could become a functioning democracy.

Part of the requirement of the cease fire of the first round of the turkey shoot would be that he would hand over all WMD. Failure to comply with the terms of a cease fire means the shooting can resume. And Saddam sure waddled and quacked non-compliance--because he believed he still had WMD. Threaten a cop with an empty gun and see how it goes.

That analogy fails for one key reason: international law is not governed by the same logic as a cop responding to a perceived threat. The ceasefire terms after the Gulf War required Iraq to disarm and submit to inspections—terms that, while repeatedly contentious, were being enforced through the UN inspection regime. By 2003, those inspectors were active, and Hans Blix was publicly requesting more time because they had found no evidence of active WMD programs. The process was working.

It was impossible for the process to work, thus a claim that it was working is garbage.

The stuff existed only in reports to Saddam. We can't find what doesn't exist. Nobody's going to admit it because that would get them killed.

Yes, Saddam bluffed. But bluffing is not the same as violating in a way that justifies war. That’s why the U.S. didn’t get UN Security Council authorization for the invasion. The legal threshold for resuming hostilities wasn’t met. You can’t claim legal justification while bypassing the very mechanisms designed to determine compliance.

No, Saddam didn't bluff. He knew we couldn't stay at a ready-to-invade position for a long time. Thus he would behave when we were in a ready to invade position and go back to defiance as soon as we weren't.

Saddam’s own misunderstanding of his arsenal doesn’t retroactively create a legitimate casus belli. That’s not how ceasefire enforcement—or just war theory—works. The standard isn’t “he looked suspicious” or “he acted guilty.” It’s verified breach. And when the inspectors on the ground were saying the opposite, the U.S. chose war anyway.

It's not that he looked suspicious. It's that his commanders kept reporting having successfully evaded the inspectors.

The inspectors were saying they didn't find anything. True, but that in no way rebuts the notion that Saddam's people were successful in shuffling things around. You keep presenting arguments that do not rebut what you are addressing!

You keep saying the burden is on Israel to prove compliance. That’s true—in a courtroom. But what you’re doing isn’t legal scrutiny. It’s trial by narrative, where anything short of full disclosure is treated as guilt, and any tragic outcome is deemed intent. That’s not due process. That’s loaded presumption.

You claim journalists and aid workers are “independent,” and that triangulation somehow overrides coercion. But when you admit that they operate under duress—under threat of retaliation or worse—you’ve conceded the very point you’re trying to deny. Coercion doesn’t just affect what gets reported. It affects what doesn’t. It distorts silences just as much as distortions. If UN officials couldn’t catch 4,000 fake entries in the casualty database, then their process is either broken or biased. Neither one proves your point.

And yes, you cite satellite images, field reports, UN statistics. But the organizations doing that reporting have long been criticized for opacity, politicization, and structural dependence on the same local actors you just admitted are under Hamas control. So don’t call it “independent” when it’s functionally entangled with the very regime accused of staging, manipulating, and obstructing.

You say “thousands of health workers” have been killed. What you mean is that Hamas’ Health Ministry says that, and UN agencies accept those numbers with minimal vetting. That same Ministry once publicly admitted it couldn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians—because Hamas doesn’t allow it. Even now, Hamas itself acknowledges hundreds of fighters killed. That alone should disqualify its casualty reporting as uncritically reliable.

As for hospitals and protected sites: you quote Article 18 but ignore its second half—protection is lost when hospitals are used to commit hostile acts, which Israel has provided ample evidence for: weapons caches, tunnel entrances, and gunmen actively firing from or storing munitions inside hospitals. That doesn’t retroactively justify every strike—but it does destroy your claim that no justification exists. The law doesn’t require certainty. It requires reasonable, verified military necessity. You’ve shown no reason to doubt that standard has been met other than “we weren’t shown the intel.” That’s not a legal argument. That’s performative incredulity.

When Israel shows tunnel footage or gunmen embedded in civilian zones, you call it “post hoc.” But when Hamas releases statements, or the UN passes on unverified data, you treat it as gospel. That’s not a critique of double standards. It is a double standard.

And let’s address your WMD claims. The fact that Saddam’s regime fabricated weapons reports internally is not exculpatory. It’s damning—to him. His own command structure believed they were hiding banned materials, and that led to exactly the misinterpretations you now decry. He created a fiction so convincing even his own officers bought it. That’s not the U.S. lying. That’s Saddam bluffing so hard it triggered a global chain reaction. Inspectors didn’t find anything—true. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when deception is the strategy.

The fact that Hans Blix found no “active programs” does not override the findings of undeclared warheads, anthrax precursors, or long-range missile parts. All of those were discovered during inspections. Were they enough for war? Reasonable people can debate that. But to act like the U.S. acted without basis is simply false. Intelligence can be wrong. That doesn’t make it fabricated.

You say Saddam’s army was dismantled too fast. True. That was a policy error. But blaming Iran’s rise in Iraq solely on American decisions is like blaming the fire department for the arsonist’s second strike. Iran filled a vacuum because it wanted to—not because it was invited. Pretending that better “post-war management” would’ve kept Tehran out is wishful hindsight, not history.

Finally, you keep returning to this idea that because war produces suffering, that suffering must be unjust. But that’s not law. That’s sentiment. International law acknowledges civilian suffering in war—it does not prohibit it entirely. It limits it. Regulates it. Balances it. You’ve blurred that distinction so thoroughly that your entire argument collapses into one flawed principle: that harm = guilt.

You’ve had every chance to demonstrate systematic illegality, reckless policy, or disproportionate force. What you’ve shown is that war is ugly, civilians die, and trust is hard. But that’s not a legal indictment. That’s a tragedy. And mistaking the two doesn’t elevate your argument. It disqualifies it.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Let’s take your points one at a time:

You say, “The hospital strike got a commander.” Fine—show the evidence. Because even if true, it still doesn’t justify bombing a medical facility under international law unless it was being used exclusively for military operations. Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention protects hospitals, and Article 19 only removes that protection if misuse is sustained, not speculative. One alleged commander and “secondaries” don’t cut it—especially when Israel offers no public proof.

Hamas usually admits it when someone senior dies. I haven't checked if they have in this case, but I haven't heard any claims of no you didn't so I would assume it's true. And you've got the rules wrong--military use, not exclusive military use. And there's no question it's sustained. Got any case of Israel walking into a Gaza hospital unopposed??

On malnourished children, you dodge again. UNICEF, WHO, and the World Food Programme aren’t relying on press releases. They’re reporting clinical malnutrition. You hand-wave it as “medical cases” without evidence—then demand evidence from everyone else. That’s not skepticism. That’s selective denial.

They're reporting what Hamas says.

I do recall one of the early ones was explicitly medical--they wanted to fly him out for treatment elsewhere. Since then they haven't said, but there are medical cases and we never see a starving population, only one starving kid.

As for blocked aid, you ask “where?” Try Kerem Shalom. Try Erez. Try the northern checkpoints that were closed for weeks. Try the World Central Kitchen convoy that was bombed. You want to pretend these are all Hamas operations too? The IDF controls the crossings. It controls the airspace. If aid can’t reach people, you don’t get to point fingers only at the besieged.

Israel isn't required to keep all crossings open, showing one closed proves nothing. And it's not that they are all Hamas operations, but that they are operating under the thumb of Hamas. WCK had to fire 62 people Israel had identified as Hamas.

You dismiss “most documented” war because “Sudan is worse.” That’s moral misdirection. Yes, Sudan is horrific—and should be addressed. But bringing up another crisis doesn’t negate this one. That’s like arguing you can’t care about murder in your city because genocide exists somewhere else.

No. I said that "most documented" in no way proves "worse". And Gaza certainly isn't documented, anyway.

Next, your claim that “patterns aren’t war crimes” is legally false. Read Article 8 of the Rome Statute: systematic or widespread attacks against civilians are crimes against humanity. Repeatedly bombing hospitals, shelters, and schools is evidence—not just of error, but of policy.

And once again you don't understand. It's talking about targeting civilians, not about civilians on military objectives.

You keep invoking Iran as the real culprit. But Iran isn’t the one pulling the trigger in Rafah. Iran doesn’t decide to bomb a refugee camp. Saying “Iran’s influence is the problem” is like blaming fire for the arsonist’s match.

Not at all. A better comparison would be blaming the person who offered the arsonist a million dollars and a box of matches to go light fires.

Then you say the buildings collapse because of tunnels. Sure, that may happen once, even a few times. But you’re talking about entire blocks, hit by dozens of airstrikes. That’s not a chain-reaction from underground. That’s saturation bombing. And when a tunnel runs under civilian infrastructure, the burden of caution increases—not disappears.

This makes no sense.

Either the collapse of a tunnel is not sufficient to bring down a building on it and you wouldn't see buildings collapsing into the tunnels, or the collapse of a tunnel can bring down a building on top at which point you would see widespread building collapses. In neither case would you see few collapsing into tunnels.

The reality is standard masonry is incredibly vulnerable to forces from below. Our house is built on a post-tensioned slab because otherwise it would be damaged because the local soil is expansive. It gets wet, it swells. Concrete is incredibly vulnerable in tension, a concrete slab would fail. The only reason it doesn't is there's a bunch of steel cables embedded in the concrete that were under a lot of tension when the slab was poured. The tension was removed, now the cables are squeezing the concrete together.

Your next argument is telling: “Most of those structures were empty.” Then where are the 15,000+ reported child deaths coming from? You can’t have it both ways. Either buildings were populated and the strikes killed people, or they weren’t and the death toll is fabricated. But you never prove fabrication. You just assert it.

A lot more than 15,000 bombs were dropped. Do the math.

And when I bring up that strikes often hit known shelter zones, your answer is “the commanders were there.” Great—then where was the proportionality? The legal standard isn’t “did the bomb hit the guy we wanted,” it’s “did the expected civilian harm outweigh the military advantage.” You don’t get to incinerate a tent camp and call it lawful because someone important might have been nearby.

And you have no concept of what is permitted.

Then there’s the deflection about aid. You insist Hamas steals it. Fine—condemn that. But that doesn’t absolve the party controlling the ports, the checkpoints, and the airstrikes. Israel is the gatekeeper. If it blocks aid preemptively, destroys convoys, or limits access arbitrarily, that is its responsibility under international law.

And here you are flat out wrong. I've already cited the relevant part of Geneva. There is no obligation to provide or permit supplies to enter if they are being diverted to military purposes.

You say independent media isn’t real, that photos don’t make sense, that wreckage doesn’t look right—yet offer no forensic rebuttal, no qualified analysis, no alternative data. Just vague appeals to intuition and “AI failure.” That’s not argument. That’s conspiracy.

No. There is a vast amount of disinformation, no way to debunk it all. But when they publish supposed evidence of damage that doesn't make sense (I'm currently thinking of a truck Israel supposedly hit--figure there was a boom at some location on the truck. A boom that somehow damages some very hard stuff, but leaves a tarp intact??? A boom should radiate energy in all directions, why does the debris field not reflect this? Typical AI failure--it has no concept of making things consistent.) Always look at what does the data actually show and how do we know the data to be true.

You repeat, “You can’t count the dead.” And yet you also claim the civilian-to-combatant ratio is 1:10 worldwide, and that Israel’s is better—based on what data, if you think all the death tolls are fake? You want the numbers when they suit you, and you dismiss them when they don’t.

I'm getting the 1.5:1 by looking at the only data we have: Hamas claimed dead vs Israel claimed combatants dead. Historically Israel is within 10%, I see no reason to think this is different. Hamas we know is lying but when have they ever been low?? I consider their numbers an upper bound.

Finally, your whole argument rests on an inversion of burden: unless a dead civilian can be proven innocent, they’re presumed guilty—or Hamas-affiliated, or miscounted. That is not law. That is not ethics. That is a framework built to justify whatever happens, no matter the outcome.

I'm saying they are indeterminate, not that they are guilty.

You keep insisting that Israel’s actions amount to war crimes while downplaying or outright ignoring the reality that Hamas has deliberately engineered this war to maximize civilian suffering. That’s not conjecture—it’s the explicit strategy Hamas has used for years: embed fighters in hospitals, hide command centers under schools, launch rockets from dense residential zones, and then cry genocide when the enemy returns fire. That’s not international law—it’s human shielding. And it’s not controversial. It’s documented in UN reports, satellite imagery, and even Hamas’ own admissions.

You claim hospitals are unlawfully targeted. But the law is clear: if a hospital is used for military purposes, protections are suspended under Article 19 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That doesn’t mean Israel can bomb indiscriminately—it means it must take precautions, issue warnings, and verify military use. And in many cases, it has—down to dropping leaflets, making phone calls, and even risking soldiers’ lives in door-to-door raids instead of just leveling the building. That’s not impunity. That’s restraint in the face of impossible battlefield conditions.

On the topic of starvation, you repeat figures from agencies that rely on data from a Hamas-controlled health ministry that refuses to distinguish civilians from fighters. You cite one malnourished child and extrapolate a famine. But malnutrition is a spectrum, and it’s not caused solely by airstrikes—it’s also caused by Hamas stealing fuel, diverting flour, and hoarding aid. When Israel allows in hundreds of trucks and convoys get hijacked, that’s not a siege—it’s exploitation by the group you refuse to hold accountable.

You ask why buildings collapse if strikes are precise. The answer is simple: Gaza is honeycombed with underground tunnels. Hamas built its command infrastructure under civilians. That means when tunnels are hit, the structures above them—flimsy, overcrowded, poorly reinforced—collapse. It’s tragic. But the blame starts with the party that put civilians on top of military assets.

You bring up child death tolls but ignore the simple math: if Hamas admits thousands of fighters killed, and the same total death number is reported, then even by their inflated stats, the combatant-to-civilian ratio is far from indiscriminate. In fact, by global conflict standards, it’s lower than the NATO average in Afghanistan. That’s not exoneration—but it destroys the genocide narrative you’re pushing.

You say Israel controls the borders, so it bears responsibility for aid. But no nation is legally obligated to allow goods in that may be used for enemy purposes. And when Hamas steals water filters, solar panels, and fuel from hospitals for tunnel operations, that’s not theoretical—it’s diversion in real time. Israel has the right under international law to inspect, restrict, and delay aid to prevent abuse. The Geneva Conventions don’t require suicide by humanitarian corridor.

You dismiss questions about media integrity, yet say nothing when obviously staged videos or AI-generated debris photos are circulated as proof. You don’t need to believe every Israeli report—but pretending that every image from a war zone under totalitarian rule is gospel is not skepticism. It’s credulity wrapped in moral pretense.

You keep saying “prove the civilians are guilty.” But that’s not the standard. The law requires reasonable belief of military necessity, not courtroom-level evidence before every strike. Your framework assumes that every body is an innocent, every building is a home, and every delay is malice. That’s not international law. That’s narrative warfare—and it’s exactly what Hamas counts on.

So no—this isn’t about denial. It’s about distinction. Between war and war crimes. Between evidence and assertion. Between protecting civilians and using them as shields. And if you refuse to hold both sides accountable, especially the one that started this war from behind its own people, then you’re not standing for justice. You’re standing for impunity—just not the kind you think.

NHC

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Israel vows to prevent an aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg and other activists from reaching Gaza

Israel’s government has vowed to prevent an aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg and other activists from reaching the Gaza Strip.

apnews.com

Well, duh!

Either they stop it or next time it's full of weapons.

Another one of your favorite fallacies of the excluded middle,. The IDF can check the vessel and let it through if there are no weapons.

The IDF is its own worst PR nightmare.

Check it how??

You realize they're using great x-ray machines that image a whole truck? Such things aren't exactly portable. Nor is it practical to either move the x-rays to the ship, nor the goods to a vessel with the x-ray. Ship to ship transfers of large amounts of material pretty much do not happen outside military operations and even then it's limited. (Which has been in the news occasionally--all of our VLS-equipped ships can only rearm in port.)

When people exit the ship, they are their goods can be checked. The ship itself can be quarantined during the operation and returned later, IF it is really true that Israel doesn't know how to check a ship.

 

[laughing dog]

Hamas chose the path of war. Israel is entitled to do what it takes to remove the threat.

Even genocide or ethnic cleansing?

Both of those terms are about intent, not action.

Nonsense. Both terms are about actions. So stop evading and answer the question.

 

[ZiprHead]

What's important is why it exists. If that reason went away there'd be no reason for the defense against the reason.

The excessive "defense" is a big part of the reason the problem exists.

The reason why the Gazans Who Don't Matter are being held hostage for use as human shields?
Tom

I have no idea what that means since it doesn't seem to address the statement before it.

It was a question.
Because your assertion didn't address the post you responded to at all.
Tom

Of course it did. Gazans, just like anyone else would, hate being treated as violent terrorists when the violent terrorists are a very small minority. It does nothing but breed more hostility.

Don't you realize why Israel exists?

Centuries of vicious anti-Jewish bigotry resulted in some Jewish refugees moving into "The Holy Land". Then the horrors of the anti-Jewish bigotry of the mid 1900s resulted in a flood more refugees. Then the demand for a state where Jews would be safe from their government. Where the Jews would not be prosecuted for the crime of being Jewish. And they got one.

And they will defend their refuge by whatever means necessary. Huge amounts of blood and treasure have been invested in a refuge from the rest of the Abrahamic world, and I don't think that the Zionists are going to give that up because a bunch of western liberals and Islamic terrorists demand it.
Fuck that.
Tom

Wow! That gives them the right to do the same to others as was done to them by Germany???