Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Gospel]

Notice why we failed: We weren't facing Afghanistan. We were facing a Pakistani proxy force.

A little foresight might’ve gone a long way. We rolled in, flags flying, like we were still the young empire that ran the block, only to realize we’re old, out of breath, and stuck with a rusty Cold War playbook. We assumed allies were real allies, not just folks playing along because we’re the big nigga on the bike. Of course they smile when Debo rides through the neighborhood, but the second his back’s turned, Smokey and Craig are plotting. America: the ‘Bye Felicia’ of the Middle East.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You’ve built an argument so circular it guarantees permanent conflict. You claim Palestinians don’t want sovereignty—not because they’ve said so, but because declaring a state would supposedly force them to admit they either want all of Israel or none at all. But that’s not a fact. That’s a projection. And more importantly, it’s a trap. Because when Palestinians make overtures for peace, you call them insincere. When they negotiate, you say they’re buying time. When they resist, you call it terrorism. And when they’re silent, you accuse them of complicity. You’ve set the terms so that no matter what they do, you can say they’ve failed the test. But maybe the test was never honest to begin with.

Overtures for peace? None. The only peace agreement even proposed was back with Arafat and he walked. Since then it's been a matter of trying to cram bad deals down Israel's throat. Front-loaded agreement? Quickly failed, they refused to make any more such. Ok, next round it was concessions for engaging in peace talks. Also failed.

Let’s talk about reality. In Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli control, over 98% of Palestinian building permit applications are denied. That’s not urban planning—it’s engineered displacement. Settlements continue to expand in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while Palestinians are punished not just for building without permits, but for existing in a system that makes legal construction nearly impossible. Israeli settlers who build illegally see their outposts retroactively legalized. Palestinian families who build on their own land are met with bulldozers.

We have no idea what it means because we have no data on what those building permits entail. Are they real things to be built on Palestinian land? Or are they shams? Or are they on land they don't own? We've seen both, but you're taking it on faith that the applications are made in good faith.

Meanwhile, Gaza was sealed off not after rocket fire, but after the wrong political party won an election. The blockade that followed didn’t just isolate Hamas—it crushed hospitals, poisoned water supplies, and shattered the economy for two million people, half of them children. That wasn’t security. That was retribution against a population for voting the wrong way.

After the political party that ran on a platform of "we will go to war" won. Is there some reason Israel should not have believed the statements?

And the blockade did none of those things. The economy did get shattered, but not from the blockade. Rather, from Israel not allowing Palestinians to work in Israel.

You claim to value minimizing the death toll. But every policy you defend has raised it. The occupation hasn’t reduced violence—it has institutionalized it. Home demolitions, child detentions, sniper shootings at protests—this isn’t peacekeeping. It’s humiliation codified into daily life. And humiliation doesn’t bring stability. It breeds despair, resentment, and eventually explosion. If you think containing Gaza with bombs and fences is a “solution,” then your goal isn’t peace. It’s managed subjugation.

Home demolitions were an attempt to combat providing for your family by engaging in a suicide attack.

Child detentions--do you not realize that "child" and "combatant" are not mutually exclusive? The demographics of the dead make it very clear that they become combatants around 16, and even before then they're used in quasi-combat roles.

Sniper shootings at protests--let's look at what really happened:

Israel was trying to protect the border fence and declared a no-go zone around it. Hamas responded by forcing people into the zone to be killed. They eventually got enough killed that way that enforcement stopped, Israel only shot at people actually trying to climb the fence. Even then they weren't doing it by their free will, but because Hamas was making them.

You say Hamas doesn’t want equality. Fine. But equality was never on offer. Sovereignty was never on offer. A viable state with control over its borders, airspace, and economy was never on offer. And when Palestinians tried diplomacy—when they recognized Israel, signed Oslo, renounced terrorism—it was met with stalled negotiations, expanding settlements, and a process deliberately stretched until it broke.

Because they have made it clear that such a state would be at war.

They can have a demilitarized state, but that doesn't help them.

And continuing to repeat "renounced terrorism" doesn't make it so.

Fatah pretended to--but continued pay for slay. Did some Enron accounting to distance themselves from it but it's still PA money, still going to those who kill Jews. Hamas has slight watered down it's calls for genocide.

And yet when Israel walks away from talks, you call it caution. When Palestinians walk away, you call it proof of bad faith. You’ve created a standard where Palestinian legitimacy is always conditional, always just out of reach, while Israeli impunity is always assumed. That’s not a double standard. That’s the absence of a standard altogether.

Huh? When have I said anything about Israel walking away from talks? They've always been willing to talk, it's just they won't agree to anything that would destroy them. I said Israel won't make unfair agreements, not that they won't listen.

You say your measure of success is fewer deaths. Then start measuring the policies that manufacture them. Don’t blame oppression on the oppressed. Don’t call siege warfare “containment.” And don’t act like resistance to injustice only counts when it’s convenient for you.

The policy that makes them: Iran.

Look at the real world: situations like Gaza only happen because someone funds them. There are things out there much worse, but you barely hear about them and there is pretty much zero terrorism against the perpetrators because the money is on the side of the ones perpetrating the horror.

I’m not defending Hamas. I’m defending the principle that civilian life is not expendable—no matter who governs them, no matter what flag flies above their homes. You’ve asked me to look at what Hamas says. Fine. I have. But I’ve also listened to what the bombs say, what the checkpoints say, what the bulldozers say, and what the walls say. And all of them say the same thing: that Palestinian freedom is always a threat to be managed, never a right to be honored.

You can rationalize that if you want. But don’t confuse it for justice. And don’t pretend it leads anywhere but back here—again and again—because a people denied dignity will never stay quiet forever.

NHC

They have always chosen the path of war. They knew where choosing the path of war would go, they voted for Hamas anyway.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Using B2 bombers to deliver GBU-57A/B MOPs to Iranian nuclear sites would be a very good idea. Iranian nuclear program needs to be dismantled, and if all this leads to a regime change, so much the better.

Yup. If we care about how the world turns out that enrichment plant should be destroyed. I haven't studied what it would take, that's something for the military planners.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A nuclear program we had full access to , until the “own the libs” movement decided sabotaging Obama was more important.

Not really true. The deal only lasted for 10 years, which means that it would have expired by now anyway.
And it made no provisions for Iranian missile development and stockpiles, nor did it address the funding and support for terrorist organizations by the Tehran regime. In return for conceding very little, Tehran got sanction relief, plus $400M in frozen funds that actually belong to the Shah government, not to the ayatollahs.

Yes, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA) did allow Iran to enrich uranium on its own soil. But the point of the deal wasn’t to stop enrichment entirely; it was to limit it to safe levels (3.67%, below weapons-grade) and impose tight restrictions on how much uranium Iran could stockpile and what kinds of centrifuges they could use. On top of that, the deal put in place the most intrusive inspections regime the IAEA has ever implemented. So no, it wasn’t Obama “giving in”, it was a calculated diplomatic trade-off to stop a nuclear bomb without starting another war.

Except it didn't. Iran took the money, simply set up some new operations elsewhere, denied they were nuclear and thus never permitted inspection.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As usual, bullshit. Trump’s own director of national intelligence said US intel shows Iran is NOT close to building a bomb. The orange monster’s response? “I don’t care what she says.”

You think there's any competence in his cabinet? I wouldn't trust any of them to know if the sun was shining.

But in this case we can actually see what's going on--that's a deliberate evasion. Yes, Iran is not "close" to "building" a bomb. Building a bomb is by far the easy part. By far the hardest part is getting the fissionables. Second is the engineering. The bomb itself is not that hard. Once they start building a bomb it's already way too late.

 

[laughing dog]

They have always chosen the path of war. They knew where choosing the path of war would go, they voted for Hamas anyway.

Over half of the current population if Gaza was ineligible to vote during the last election because they were either too young or not born. So your statement is incredibly ignorant. And that ignores that there is no way for you ir anyone else to know what issue(s) motivated the majority of Hamas voters.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You keep calling it “pay for slay” as if repeating a slogan turns it into fact. But what you’re describing isn’t justice—it’s guilt by category. You’re not assessing individual cases, you’re labeling all Palestinian prisoners as terrorists, and assuming any support for them equals blood money. That’s not law. That’s McCarthyism wrapped in nationalist packaging.

If support for prisoners automatically signals terrorism, then every country in history that’s endured occupation—France under the Nazis, Algeria under the French, South Africa under apartheid—was a terrorist state for honoring its political detainees. Nelson Mandela would’ve been branded a “welfare case for slaying whites” by your logic.

Once again, leaving out the important details.

The category isn't "prisoners". It's "prisoners who engaged in terrorism."

The common criminals get no such payments. Nobody's demanding their release.

As for comparison to those other cases--you also need to establish that the act was terrorism. (And Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.)

And let’s talk about your so-called “simple test”: “If they target civilians, they’re terrorists. If they target military, they’re freedom fighters.” You know who doesn’t pass that test? Israel. Over 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in this war, the majority civilians—including journalists, medics, children, aid workers, and thousands buried alive in collapsed homes. If you really believed in that metric, you wouldn’t be defending those numbers—you’d be investigating them.

You keep repeating that as if it's somehow evidence.

Two terms: "Target" and "Civilians".

Target: What is the weapon intended to destroy? Notably, not what else is within the blast zone, or what else is hit by secondary effects (such as buildings falling into the void left by a collapsed tunnel).

Civilians: You keep enumerating categories as if they are are exclusive with being combatants--but you are not giving any reason to for this.

As for "thousands buried alive". Hamas claimed 10,000 buried in the rubble. They claimed it for a long time. Nobody added to the list? Nobody dug out of the rubble and thus removed from the list? And Hamas didn't specify "collapsed homes", just buried. To the extent the claim makes sense the most logical explanation is that they are Hamas people who died in the tunnels. And we have no names--individuals without names are likely combatants. (Compare this to the Twin Towers. 10,000 missing in the collapse--but in the end 2,700 dead. That's the reality of mass disaster situations--without any malice the count is going to start out too high and drop over time as they sort out that multiple missing person reports are the same individual.)

You also say “there’s no cycle—just terrorists choosing violence.” That’s not analysis. That’s amnesia. The pattern of blockade, dispossession, settlement expansion, and statelessness isn’t theoretical. It’s documented. And when people resist that—violently or not—you label it barbarism and act shocked when the occupation doesn’t stay quiet.

If it were a cycle you would see a timing pattern. Instead you see mounting attacks followed by an Israeli hammering, then fairly quiet for a quite variable period of time. Why the relationship between attacks and hammering and no relationship between hammering and attacks?

And when I cite diplomacy—Oslo, recognition of Israel, renunciation of terror—you hand-wave it all away as a “sham.” Yet somehow, every broken promise by Israel—the settlements, the home demolitions, the indefinite delay of final status talks—is never a problem. The only “peace” you seem to recognize is one where the other side surrenders unconditionally and then thanks you for it.

We have one key bit from the talks: Arafat walked when faced with an offer good enough that a counter-offer might be accepted. Nothing else was mean to be more than temporary. And they have specifically spoken of diplomacy being a sham.

You say I’ve offered “no solution.” But what you really mean is: “I’ve offered no solution where one side keeps all the land, all the power, and none of the accountability.” That’s not peace. That’s conquest in slow motion.

You have offered no solution, period.

And your argument that Palestinians are violent because they get paid is a cartoon. People don’t crawl through rubble, risk assassination, or bury their children for a paycheck. That’s not how oppression works. That’s not how resistance works. That’s how propaganda works—when you need to explain away rage without acknowledging its cause.

Calling it a cartoon doesn't make it so. You want to survive in Gaza, you do what Hamas wants. Even if that puts you at risk.

You say “I look at actions.” Fine. Then look. At the blockaded borders. The bulldozed homes. The checkpoints. The targeted medics. The murdered children. The refusal to define borders or allow a state. Look at the imbalance of power, weapons, and rights—and then ask yourself: who’s more afraid, and who’s more in control?

Blockaded borders--what do you expect in war?

Bulldozed homes--you realize why Israel bulldozed homes? Because the family got a big payout because a family member engaged in a suicide attack. A direct effort to counter the people engaging in suicide attacks to provide for their family.

Checkpoints--how is that illegal? I've been through quite a few "checkpoints". One even officially named a checkpoint. And of all the checkpoints I've been through the only times I've felt anything was bad about how it was handled was here in the US. Once when were directed through the foreigner line at immigration (bunch of people in citizen/resident line, nobody in the foreigner line, they grabbed a bunch of us and directed us to the empty stations) and a few times from TSA. (And whatever mystery leads to my wife's haraSSSSment on flights heading to the US.) (And I'm not counting the number of times officials basically phoned it in--mostly cases where they already had enough to go on to put us in the very low threat category.)

Targeted medics--you haven't established that they weren't targets.

Murdered children--once again, you need to establish the facts.

Define borders--agreed, but understandable. The real issue is the very existence of Israel, not it's borders. To define borders would cause internal discontent without providing any benefit. Nor are there truly any borders to refer to as we simply have armistice lines.

Allow a state--they'll allow a demilitarized state.

Imbalance--now we get to the problem. You think that the side with the power is automatically the side in the wrong.

You’re not defending facts. You’re defending power. And every line you’ve written proves it.

You say, “It’s not all prisoners, just terrorist ones.” But that’s exactly the problem: the word “terrorist” is doing all the work, with none of the scrutiny. In practice, it’s a blanket label stamped on virtually any Palestinian detainee—from stone-throwing teenagers to administrative detainees held without trial. The bar isn’t “committed terrorism.” It’s “Israel said so.” And when that accusation is used to justify indefinite detention, destroyed homes, or cutting off aid to families, you’re not punishing terrorism. You’re criminalizing identity. That’s collective punishment—and it’s illegal.

You dismiss Mandela’s example by calling him a terrorist. That’s how every occupying power describes its dissidents until they’re forced to reckon with history. You don’t get to call violent resistance “terrorism” while erasing the decades of violence that led to it. Because if your side gets a monopoly on force, and the other side gets criminalized for resisting it, then you haven’t built a system of justice. You’ve built a hierarchy of who’s allowed to fight back.

Your “simple test” of targeting sounds nice until it crashes into reality. Israel’s record isn’t clean. Aid convoys struck. Medical workers killed. Journalists bombed in marked press gear. Thousands of children dead. If you truly cared about whether a strike intended to kill civilians, you’d demand an investigation—not offer excuses. But you don’t want accountability. You want plausible deniability in bulk.

And your claim that “civilians” might not be civilians unless proven otherwise is grotesque. Under international law, the burden is on you to show a person was a combatant—not on the corpse to prove its innocence. That’s the whole point of the Geneva Conventions: to restrain militaries from assuming every brown body near rubble is a valid target. When you flip that standard, you haven’t just ignored the law—you’ve reversed it.

You say the death toll must be inflated because Hamas listed “buried” people without names. First of all, you’re wrong—many have been identified, and third-party agencies like OCHA and WHO have verified the overwhelming number of casualties as civilians. But even if there’s uncertainty, the answer isn’t to throw out the data. It’s to investigate it. You don’t get to shrug off mass graves as “likely Hamas fighters” because the paperwork didn’t survive an airstrike.

You also claim “there’s no cycle, just terrorists choosing violence.” That’s not just lazy—it’s ahistorical. The occupation didn’t begin with rockets. It began with military rule, land seizure, home demolitions, and decades of statelessness. The rockets are a symptom. You can condemn them without pretending they came from a vacuum.

Then you say diplomacy was fake because “Arafat walked.” So let me get this straight: Israel expands settlements, delays talks, ignores UN resolutions, but the peace process collapsed because one man walked away 25 years ago? That’s not an argument. That’s a scapegoat with a long expiration date.

You also repeat the fantasy that Palestinians are “violent for a paycheck.” That’s cartoon logic. No one risks their life in a war zone so their aunt gets a monthly stipend. That’s not how humans work. People resist—rightly or wrongly—because they’re pushed to the wall, stripped of rights, and robbed of hope. Saying “they just want cash” is the kind of thing you say when you don’t want to look at what’s really fueling the rage.

And your attempt to hand-wave away Israeli actions—checkpoints, home demolitions, border blockades—makes it crystal clear: you only see violence when it’s directed at Israel. You call bulldozing homes a rational deterrent. You say checkpoints are no big deal because TSA was rude to you once. You say children might have deserved it unless proven otherwise. That’s not nuance. That’s apologia wrapped in anecdotes.

You end by accusing me of siding with the weak because they’re weak. No—I side with the law because it’s law. I side with restraint because unrestrained force ends with mass graves. And I side with human dignity because if we can’t uphold that—even when it’s hard, even when it’s unpopular—then we have no right to talk about peace at all.

So here it is, one last time: resistance isn’t always righteous. But occupation is never neutral. And when you excuse decades of domination as “security,” while blaming its victims for the chaos it creates, you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve become part of it.

NHC

 

[ZiprHead]

If that were so then why do you insist on keeping Gazan civilians locked up with the violent terrorists to use as human sheilds?

Nobody is insisting on that except the violent Muslim terrorists.
The one's you can't bring yourself to blame for the disaster going on in Gaza.
Tom

No, that's Israel. Have you never run across a history book you didn't piss on?

Show me a reason to think that the reason why GWDM are suffering so much couldn't have been prevented by the GWM making different choices.
Like not choosing to use the rest of Gaza as so many human shields.
Tom

I have no idea WTF you are talking about in relation to my question:

If that were so then why do you insist on keeping Gazan civilians locked up with the violent terrorists to use as human shields?

 

[NoHolyCows]

You’ve built an argument so circular it guarantees permanent conflict. You claim Palestinians don’t want sovereignty—not because they’ve said so, but because declaring a state would supposedly force them to admit they either want all of Israel or none at all. But that’s not a fact. That’s a projection. And more importantly, it’s a trap. Because when Palestinians make overtures for peace, you call them insincere. When they negotiate, you say they’re buying time. When they resist, you call it terrorism. And when they’re silent, you accuse them of complicity. You’ve set the terms so that no matter what they do, you can say they’ve failed the test. But maybe the test was never honest to begin with.

Overtures for peace? None. The only peace agreement even proposed was back with Arafat and he walked. Since then it's been a matter of trying to cram bad deals down Israel's throat. Front-loaded agreement? Quickly failed, they refused to make any more such. Ok, next round it was concessions for engaging in peace talks. Also failed.

Let’s talk about reality. In Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli control, over 98% of Palestinian building permit applications are denied. That’s not urban planning—it’s engineered displacement. Settlements continue to expand in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while Palestinians are punished not just for building without permits, but for existing in a system that makes legal construction nearly impossible. Israeli settlers who build illegally see their outposts retroactively legalized. Palestinian families who build on their own land are met with bulldozers.

We have no idea what it means because we have no data on what those building permits entail. Are they real things to be built on Palestinian land? Or are they shams? Or are they on land they don't own? We've seen both, but you're taking it on faith that the applications are made in good faith.

Meanwhile, Gaza was sealed off not after rocket fire, but after the wrong political party won an election. The blockade that followed didn’t just isolate Hamas—it crushed hospitals, poisoned water supplies, and shattered the economy for two million people, half of them children. That wasn’t security. That was retribution against a population for voting the wrong way.

After the political party that ran on a platform of "we will go to war" won. Is there some reason Israel should not have believed the statements?

And the blockade did none of those things. The economy did get shattered, but not from the blockade. Rather, from Israel not allowing Palestinians to work in Israel.

You claim to value minimizing the death toll. But every policy you defend has raised it. The occupation hasn’t reduced violence—it has institutionalized it. Home demolitions, child detentions, sniper shootings at protests—this isn’t peacekeeping. It’s humiliation codified into daily life. And humiliation doesn’t bring stability. It breeds despair, resentment, and eventually explosion. If you think containing Gaza with bombs and fences is a “solution,” then your goal isn’t peace. It’s managed subjugation.

Home demolitions were an attempt to combat providing for your family by engaging in a suicide attack.

Child detentions--do you not realize that "child" and "combatant" are not mutually exclusive? The demographics of the dead make it very clear that they become combatants around 16, and even before then they're used in quasi-combat roles.

Sniper shootings at protests--let's look at what really happened:

Israel was trying to protect the border fence and declared a no-go zone around it. Hamas responded by forcing people into the zone to be killed. They eventually got enough killed that way that enforcement stopped, Israel only shot at people actually trying to climb the fence. Even then they weren't doing it by their free will, but because Hamas was making them.

You say Hamas doesn’t want equality. Fine. But equality was never on offer. Sovereignty was never on offer. A viable state with control over its borders, airspace, and economy was never on offer. And when Palestinians tried diplomacy—when they recognized Israel, signed Oslo, renounced terrorism—it was met with stalled negotiations, expanding settlements, and a process deliberately stretched until it broke.

Because they have made it clear that such a state would be at war.

They can have a demilitarized state, but that doesn't help them.

And continuing to repeat "renounced terrorism" doesn't make it so.

Fatah pretended to--but continued pay for slay. Did some Enron accounting to distance themselves from it but it's still PA money, still going to those who kill Jews. Hamas has slight watered down it's calls for genocide.

And yet when Israel walks away from talks, you call it caution. When Palestinians walk away, you call it proof of bad faith. You’ve created a standard where Palestinian legitimacy is always conditional, always just out of reach, while Israeli impunity is always assumed. That’s not a double standard. That’s the absence of a standard altogether.

Huh? When have I said anything about Israel walking away from talks? They've always been willing to talk, it's just they won't agree to anything that would destroy them. I said Israel won't make unfair agreements, not that they won't listen.

You say your measure of success is fewer deaths. Then start measuring the policies that manufacture them. Don’t blame oppression on the oppressed. Don’t call siege warfare “containment.” And don’t act like resistance to injustice only counts when it’s convenient for you.

The policy that makes them: Iran.

Look at the real world: situations like Gaza only happen because someone funds them. There are things out there much worse, but you barely hear about them and there is pretty much zero terrorism against the perpetrators because the money is on the side of the ones perpetrating the horror.

I’m not defending Hamas. I’m defending the principle that civilian life is not expendable—no matter who governs them, no matter what flag flies above their homes. You’ve asked me to look at what Hamas says. Fine. I have. But I’ve also listened to what the bombs say, what the checkpoints say, what the bulldozers say, and what the walls say. And all of them say the same thing: that Palestinian freedom is always a threat to be managed, never a right to be honored.

You can rationalize that if you want. But don’t confuse it for justice. And don’t pretend it leads anywhere but back here—again and again—because a people denied dignity will never stay quiet forever.

NHC

They have always chosen the path of war. They knew where choosing the path of war would go, they voted for Hamas anyway.

You say “they voted for Hamas, so they chose war.” Let’s strip that logic down. You’re claiming that a single election—under siege, with the more conciliatory party discredited and corrupt—justifies 18 years of blockade, mass civilian punishment, and treating 2 million people as enemy combatants. That’s not democracy. That’s collective sentencing.

You frame everything through “they brought it on themselves”—but that’s a dodge. It assumes the only relevant facts begin with Hamas and end with rockets. That’s like watching a building collapse and blaming the final brick. You erase the decades of military occupation, land dispossession, statelessness, and legal limbo that preceded it—as if injustice only starts counting once someone fights back.

You dismiss peace overtures as fake—but then ignore the obvious double standard: when Palestinians walk away from talks, they’re saboteurs. When Israel builds settlements through them, delays final status indefinitely, and then claims “security” requires permanent domination, you call it “caution.” If you were serious about negotiations, you’d hold both sides accountable. But your definition of “dialogue” is Palestinians accepting whatever terms Israel dictates.

Then there’s Area C. You claim there’s no data on permit denials—as if 98% rejection rates published by B’Tselem and the UN are unknowable. You wave it off with “maybe the applications are fake.” That’s not evidence. That’s conjecture. And it’s telling that you don’t apply the same skepticism to Israeli retroactive legalization of illegal settler outposts.

As for Gaza—no, the blockade didn’t begin as a surgical response to terrorism. It began when the wrong party won an election. Israel and the U.S. openly backed a failed coup to remove Hamas, then sealed the Strip when it backfired. The blockade didn’t just restrict weapons. It crippled water, medicine, fuel, and food. UN reports have long described it as “collective punishment”—a term you ignore because it doesn’t fit your narrative.

You say child detentions are justified because some teens are used in conflict. But do you hear yourself? You’re justifying military incarceration of minors on demographic averages. That’s not law—it’s profiling. Geneva doesn’t say “it’s okay to jail kids if some of them fight.” It says you protect children from the effects of war. You’ve reversed that principle entirely.

You claim “sniper shootings at protests” are the fault of Hamas—because they “forced people” to march. That’s not a defense. That’s not even believable. You’re trying to rationalize the deaths of journalists, medics, children, and wheelchair-bound demonstrators as acts of self-defense—when every credible rights group, including Israeli ones, have documented them as unjustified.

And yes, you keep calling it “pay for slay.” But then admit Israel bulldozes homes even if the suspect is dead—because it deters others. That’s not justice. That’s state vengeance. Families aren’t being punished for crimes they committed. They’re being punished as examples. That’s the textbook definition of collective punishment.

Your explanation for Israel refusing to define borders is that it would upset people. You know what else upsets people? Permanent occupation without rights. Endless checkpoints. Demolished homes. That’s what’s driving the cycle—not just Iranian cash, but the daily reality of people living in cages built to look like negotiations.

And finally, you say, “they’ve always chosen war.” No. They’ve chosen elections, diplomacy, armed resistance, international appeals, and mass nonviolent protest—and every time, they were met with either rejection or repression. What you call a “choice” is actually a narrowing corridor where every option leads back to subjugation. That’s not agency. That’s entrapment.

If your entire argument rests on stripping a people of humanity because of who governs them, you haven’t solved anything. You’ve just renamed apartheid and called it self-defense.

So no—I won’t accept that “this is just how it has to be.” That’s not truth. That’s moral cowardice dressed up as inevitability.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.”

You're still not understanding.

Look at the facts: the people who are "verifying" the facts missed a whole bunch of obviously bad data. Thus there is no verification.

And I ignore famine warnings because they've been made so many times. If they were true where are the bodies?

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.

How did they miss the bad data? In the cases we can check they are batting 0.000.

Instead you repeat the same litany of claims, even when one of them is below apparent reality.

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.

It is a serious question. We keep seeing dire death tolls predicted. The situation on which those predictions was made has not changed. But we don't see those dire death tolls.

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.

No. I'm not saying that Israel's actions are beyond scrutiny. I'm saying that your "scrutiny" is not. You claim buildings were full of people--despite the math saying that most of them had to be empty.

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.

No, you continue to blindly jump from undesirable outcome to atrocity. Nobody likes what's happening--but that doesn't prove atrocity.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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??

Paywalled, but I saw enough to see it's the same thing we are seeing elsewhere.

I do not believe The Felon for one second. And I believe the intelligence agencies are telling "the truth", but that it's a deceptive truth. The question is not whether they are building a bomb, but whether they are in a position to build a bomb.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

No. The problem is you are claiming atrocities that do not exist.

And I'm not demanding an unreasonable standard of proof, I'm demanding data that stands up to basic scrutiny. I'm picturing one of the example of the problem--I don't know Arabic, I can still look at it and say "that's fake". That's how bad it is.

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.

And you didn't address it. Who is guilty of killing the baby?

And war makes civilian deaths routine. There's nothing magical about Gaza that changes that. What you are utterly failing to show is that Gaza shows worse conduct than what is expected of a good guy.

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.”

To be collective punishment it would have to be punishment in the first place.

And where have I referenced blurry drone footage anywhere?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

Not a rebuttal.

Israel isn't simply pulling the trigger on them. Rather, they are evaluating based on actions. A car behaves like an attacker, it gets targeted. Whether is has ambulance or press or whatever markings doesn't change that.

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.

Israel published a long list of "journalists" that were terrorists. And Al Jazeera had to scramble when one of it's correspondents turned out be holding one of the hostages.

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.

Yeah, that's what Hamas has done. But you blame Israel.

 

[NoHolyCows]

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.”

You're still not understanding.

Look at the facts: the people who are "verifying" the facts missed a whole bunch of obviously bad data. Thus there is no verification.

And I ignore famine warnings because they've been made so many times. If they were true where are the bodies?

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.

How did they miss the bad data? In the cases we can check they are batting 0.000.

Instead you repeat the same litany of claims, even when one of them is below apparent reality.

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.

It is a serious question. We keep seeing dire death tolls predicted. The situation on which those predictions was made has not changed. But we don't see those dire death tolls.

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.

No. I'm not saying that Israel's actions are beyond scrutiny. I'm saying that your "scrutiny" is not. You claim buildings were full of people--despite the math saying that most of them had to be empty.

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.

No, you continue to blindly jump from undesirable outcome to atrocity. Nobody likes what's happening--but that doesn't prove atrocity.

You keep repeating that your math disproves war crimes, that your skepticism overrides every global agency, and that because you didn’t personally see bodies, the famine must be fake. That’s not reason. That’s denial with a calculator.

Let’s start with your central crutch: “They missed bad data, so everything is invalid.” No, they didn’t “miss” anything—they published what they could verify under active bombardment, where ID systems, morgues, and hospitals were obliterated. You cite technical anomalies in ID sequences like they’re smoking guns, but ignore the conditions on the ground: no power, no fuel, no connectivity, and mass death. You treat the fog of war as proof of fraud. That’s not analysis—it’s a bad faith loophole to dismiss all evidence you find inconvenient.

And your famine dodge? It’s grotesque. You ask “where are the bodies” like children dying quietly of dysentery, dehydration, or untreated wounds don’t count unless they collapse on live television. But famine isn’t just death. It’s wasting. It’s irreversible developmental damage. It’s watching your child’s immune system fail while trucks full of food are kept at a checkpoint because the right agency logo wasn’t on the paperwork.

This is the cruelty of your logic: unless every warning results in immediate mass graves, you say it was false. But what you’re really doing is arguing that the prevention of catastrophe proves it was never real. If people survive despite the siege, you call it proof the siege was fine. That’s not logic—it’s retroactive absolution for deliberate strangulation.

Then you pull the classic evasion: “I’m not excusing Israel—just questioning your scrutiny.” Except you’re not scrutinizing. You’re dismantling the very idea of scrutiny. You reject Amnesty, HRW, UN rapporteurs, and dozens of independent journalists, and then claim there’s no evidence. That’s not reasoned doubt. That’s scorched-earth epistemology: if a fact can’t be traced directly to the IDF press office, you pretend it doesn’t exist.

You even try to reduce the entire destruction of Gaza to a math equation—“most buildings were probably empty.” As if that’s a defense. As if the legality of bombing neighborhoods hinges on your speculative occupancy rates rather than the laws of proportionality and distinction. Newsflash: You don’t get to obliterate civilian infrastructure and then retroactively declare everyone inside a combatant by absence of proof.

And your final move? The same rhetorical rinse-and-repeat: “Nobody likes this, but it doesn’t prove atrocity.” Actually, it does—when it’s systemic, foreseeable, and preventable. That’s exactly what defines atrocity under international law. But instead of engaging that, you redefine war crimes as “undesirable outcomes.” As if it’s just a shame, not a choice.

So here’s what it comes down to: You don’t want scrutiny. You want veto power over accountability. You’ve confused your moral fatigue for clarity and your disbelief for righteousness. But history doesn’t remember the people who justified inaction by demanding perfect data. It remembers the ones who looked at a slow-motion atrocity and said, “Not until I see the bodies stacked just right.”

You’ve made your position clear: if the numbers are too high, they’re fake. If they’re too low, they don’t matter. If civilians die, they were probably Hamas. If aid is blocked, it must be justified. If war crimes are alleged, the real crime is saying so.

And if that’s your standard, don’t pretend you care about facts. You’re just building a cage out of doubt so no evidence can ever get in.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

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.

No. The problem is you are claiming atrocities that do not exist.

And I'm not demanding an unreasonable standard of proof, I'm demanding data that stands up to basic scrutiny. I'm picturing one of the example of the problem--I don't know Arabic, I can still look at it and say "that's fake". That's how bad it is.

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.

And you didn't address it. Who is guilty of killing the baby?

And war makes civilian deaths routine. There's nothing magical about Gaza that changes that. What you are utterly failing to show is that Gaza shows worse conduct than what is expected of a good guy.

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.”

To be collective punishment it would have to be punishment in the first place.

And where have I referenced blurry drone footage anywhere?

You say I didn’t address your “mirror and baby” analogy—so let me be crystal clear and finish that thought for good. If a terrorist hides behind a baby, and you knowingly take a shot that kills the baby, then both parties are responsible. One is guilty of using a shield. But the other is guilty of choosing to shoot anyway. That’s what international law says. That’s what any ethical framework with a spine says. Your decision to pull the trigger isn’t erased just because your enemy is vile. If you choose to end a child’s life knowing that outcome was likely, you own that decision—fully. There is no immunity clause for “but the other guy was worse.”

You also tried to twist the definition of collective punishment by saying, “to be punishment, it has to be punishment,” as if using the word in a circle absolves the reality on the ground. But international law doesn’t ask about intentions—it judges consequences. If you blockade food, restrict fuel, cut off water, and bomb neighborhoods, then the people suffering are being punished, whether or not you call it that. You don’t get to cut off incubators and flatten bakeries and pretend it’s all just unfortunate security fallout. That’s the exact kind of linguistic shell game international law was written to stop.

You insist Gaza doesn’t show “worse conduct than what’s expected of a good guy in war,” but look around. Civilians are dying by the tens of thousands. Hospitals, schools, aid convoys, refugee camps—all have been hit repeatedly. These aren’t isolated incidents. And they aren’t rumors. Even the U.S. State Department—Israel’s closest ally—has publicly said Israel likely violated international humanitarian law by obstructing aid. The UN, WHO, and nearly every major humanitarian body agrees. If that still fits your definition of the “good guy,” then you’ve erased the meaning of the term altogether. At that point, “good” becomes a flag you wave, not a standard you uphold.

And let’s not pretend this is about real scrutiny. You dismissed a mountain of casualty reports because one ID number looked off to you. One document that didn’t pass your personal smell test is enough, in your view, to invalidate the entire death toll. That’s not rational skepticism—it’s deliberate denial. It’s like watching a city on fire and saying, “Well, one spark looks suspicious, so maybe the whole thing isn’t burning.” You’re not searching for the truth. You’re working backward from the answer you already decided on.

You keep saying the numbers don’t match “your reality,” but that’s the problem. You’re not engaging with evidence. You’re rejecting anything that threatens your preferred narrative. When the Red Cross warns of famine, you say, “Where are the bodies?” When the UN says the majority of deaths are women and children, you reply with vague speculation about who might be buried in rubble. When Israel itself confirms civilian deaths, you don’t pause—you pivot.

This isn’t skepticism. It’s moral insulation. You’ve built a worldview so circular that no amount of death, no degree of suffering, and no body count will ever move you—because you’ve set the terms so that they can’t. You demand perfection from those documenting the suffering, and none from those causing it.

So don’t talk about “the facts” when you’ve spent this entire thread running from them. Don’t ask “who killed the baby” and then shoot while blaming the mirror. You’re not upholding principle—you’re dodging accountability. And deep down, I think you know it.

NHC

 

[Gospel]

A nuclear program we had full access to , until the “own the libs” movement decided sabotaging Obama was more important.

Not really true. The deal only lasted for 10 years, which means that it would have expired by now anyway.
And it made no provisions for Iranian missile development and stockpiles, nor did it address the funding and support for terrorist organizations by the Tehran regime. In return for conceding very little, Tehran got sanction relief, plus $400M in frozen funds that actually belong to the Shah government, not to the ayatollahs.

Yes, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA) did allow Iran to enrich uranium on its own soil. But the point of the deal wasn’t to stop enrichment entirely; it was to limit it to safe levels (3.67%, below weapons-grade) and impose tight restrictions on how much uranium Iran could stockpile and what kinds of centrifuges they could use. On top of that, the deal put in place the most intrusive inspections regime the IAEA has ever implemented. So no, it wasn’t Obama “giving in”, it was a calculated diplomatic trade-off to stop a nuclear bomb without starting another war.

Except it didn't. Iran took the money, simply set up some new operations elsewhere, denied they were nuclear and thus never permitted inspection.

Our own intelligence community currently confirms that Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Yet you choose to believe Netanyahu, the same man who’s been claiming Iran is just 'weeks away' from a bomb for nearly 30 years.

 

[NoHolyCows]

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.

Not a rebuttal.

Israel isn't simply pulling the trigger on them. Rather, they are evaluating based on actions. A car behaves like an attacker, it gets targeted. Whether is has ambulance or press or whatever markings doesn't change that.

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.

Israel published a long list of "journalists" that were terrorists. And Al Jazeera had to scramble when one of it's correspondents turned out be holding one of the hostages.

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.

Yeah, that's what Hamas has done. But you blame Israel.

You say Israel isn’t pulling the trigger indiscriminately—that they’re “evaluating based on actions.” But when every marked ambulance becomes a potential threat, every journalist a suspect, and every child a maybe-fighter, what you’re describing isn’t careful targeting. It’s a policy of systemic doubt that strips civilians of their legal protections unless proven otherwise. That’s not how the Geneva Conventions work. The burden of proof in war doesn’t rest on the dead to prove they were innocent—it rests on the military to ensure they weren’t targeted without cause.

You reference a “list of terrorist journalists” and a hostage held by a rogue Al Jazeera freelancer as if that justifies the dozens of reporters killed in clearly marked gear, sometimes live on camera, with no evidence of wrongdoing. Even the Committee to Protect Journalists, which tracks deaths across all conflicts globally, has said Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists in modern history—and they’ve found no proof that the majority were engaged in combat. Unless you’re claiming CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, and the UN are all compromised too, that argument doesn’t hold.

And invoking Hamas’ abuses to justify Israel’s suspicions isn’t a defense—it’s a concession. If you admit that Hamas violates humanitarian law, then the legal and moral obligation is on Israel not to follow them down that hole. That’s what separates a military that upholds law from one that collapses into tit-for-tat impunity. The whole foundation of IHL is that protection isn’t conditional on the enemy’s behavior—it exists to restrain the powerful even when provoked.

If Israel believes a hospital or an ambulance is being used improperly, it must have clear, individualized evidence and still minimize harm—not treat every instance as potentially hostile by default. Otherwise, you’re not applying law. You’re rewriting it.

So yes, I blame Israel—for the same reason I’d blame any state that turns suspicion into standard operating procedure and calls the civilian death toll an unfortunate side effect. That’s not warfare with restraint. That’s war with the brakes removed.

You can’t defend civilization by dismantling its rules.

NHC

 

[Arctish]

Murdering barefoot shirtless men who are attempting to surrender is not self defense.

The problem is they faced many false surrenders. One soldier failed to recognize the real one amongst all the fakes.

You have claimed there were false surrenders but you have failed to provide evidence of a single one.

Utterly failed, despite multiple requests from multiple posters.

I think you are bullshitting. I think you are doing it because evidence has been posted in this thread of Israeli forces committing a war crime by killing barefoot, shirtless men who posed no danger and were waving a white flag. Additional evidence, in the form of testimony of IDF soldiers, has also been posted that the killing was due to IDF policy in force at that time, which is evidence the war crimes were planned and intentional. I think you are trying to justify an unjustifiable act and you can't find factual support, so you are utilizing your ability to make shit up to hand wave away a war crime.

Murdering a women holding the hand of a preschooler who is waving a white flag as they try to leave a dangerous area on foot is not self defense.

Agreed--but that one was so convenient. Right in front of the cameras, absolutely nothing going on that would have caused a sniper to shoot.

You are suggesting that the Israelis were baited into committing a war crime. That does not exonerate the Israelis. It indicates the commission of war crimes by IDF forces is predictable.

Is that really your argument? Hamas knows the Israelis will commit war crimes so it sets up cameras to catch IDF forces in the act?

Where they were was never suggested--but if they don't know where how can they know who?? And the lines were far enough away that a sniper shot would have been extremely difficult even if they had a line of sight. The whole thing makes a hell of a lot more sense as Hamas. And some of the reports on it said a burst of fire. Snipers don't fire bursts.

Murdering ambulance drivers and paramedics attempting to reach injured civilians is not self defense.

Well, if the ambulance drivers would quit ferrying combatants around they would get the protections traditionally given ambulances.

You have no evidence the ambulance drivers are ferrying combatants around, especially the ones who coordinate their activities with the IDF.

Oh, yeah, you forgot about that, didn't you? That the ambulances are notifying the IDF of their planned route of travel and waiting for the IDF to greenlight the rescue attempt but are still being killed by IDF forces along with the injured civilians they are trying to reach.

Apparently you think Israel is committing this type of war crime is also predictable.

But Israel has plenty of video of ambulances being used for military purposes and the Red Crescent has refused to condemn such actions. Geneva protections do not apply.

Kidnapping doctors and nurses from clinics and confining them in prisons that even the guards say routinely subject prisoners to torture is not self defense.

"Doctor" and "Hamas" are not mutually exclusive.

And I'm not aware of any verified claims of "routinely".

This claim of yours is one I believe. You do appear to skip over links other people provide so IMO you very likely are unaware of the reports.

Nor would it even matter--Geneva doesn't care.

And this claim I don't believe.

I think you're bullshitting about the Geneva Conventions. I think you've never read them, never read anything about their application, and don't have any interest in finding out what they say or do.

I think you prefer to believe that the Geneva Conventions say Israel can do whatever the fuck it wants to whomever it pleases, but no one is allowed to do the same things to Israelis.

If you're fighting out of uniform (other than due to circumstances--somebody who has stripped for some reason and ends up in a combat situation without an opportunity to get dressed isn't considered out of uniform. I'm thinking of a picture from WWII--the guy stripped for a water rescue, then immediately manned a gun when back aborard) you are classed as "spies and saboteurs" and get no protections whatsoever.

Grabbing a wounded man off the street, tying him to the front of your vehicle and driving around worsening his injuries and inflicting new ones, is not self defense.

Nice framing. No, no war crime involved. He had been injured in combat.

It was a violation of the Geneva Conventions regardless of his status as a combatant, which btw, is disputed.

You don't get to do that to P.O.W.s even if you personally witnessed them shooting at your fellow soldiers.

They weren't going to just let him go, they couldn't safely have him in the vehicle so they tied him to the vehicle.

He'd been lying wounded in the street for hours, Loren. And even if he was trying to crawl away when they caught him, even the Israeli military says the actions of those soldiers was in violation of policy.

You are making bullshit excuses for something even the IDF wouldn't try to excuse.

War crimes are not self defense. But some folks try to use self defense as an excuse for them.

But you are taking Hamas' word for what are war crimes.

Hamas didn't write the Geneva Conventions and Hamas isn't the only governmental entity that ratified them.

Ffs, learn a little history, willya?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Show me a reason to think that the reason why GWDM are suffering so much couldn't have been prevented by the GWM making different choices.
Like not choosing to use the rest of Gaza as so many human shields.

Sure. Here’s a reason: because the people suffering aren’t the ones making the decisions. The average Gazan doesn’t get to choose where Hamas puts a tunnel, or whether an IDF airstrike flattens their apartment. They’re not voting on military strategy, they’re trying to survive. You’re blaming an entire population for the actions of an armed group that rules without consent. That’s not logic, it’s collective punishment with an adorable PR spin. If your argument is “Hamas did bad things, so now anyone near them deserves what they get,” then just say that. At least be honest about the cruelty you’re defending.

Whu is it so important to you that Hamas stays in power?

With a regime like Hamas removing them will inevitability lead to suffering for the Palestinian people. Isn't sooner better?

Start by explaining that. Or the rest in your post is just nonsense

 

[DrZoidberg]

Good point