Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[laughing dog]

Hamas manipulates the media for their benefit? No. Never.

Oh well. Kill them all then.

I think that is what Israel is doing. And not to belabour the point, I think it is necessary. If Hamas isn't destroyed they're going to take the rest of the Palestinians with them. I'd rather as few Palestinians as possible died. And the only way to achieve that, I think, is to exterminate Hamas. Sooner is better

Let me get this straight, when you express concern for Palestinian civilians, it's compassion. But when I do it, it's falling for Hamas propaganda? That is precisely what I've been saying all along!!

You don’t endorse the avoidable slaughter of civilians, so its not precisely what you’ve been saying.

 

[Gospel]

But you are point to Hamas evils and blaming Israel. Exactly as they intended you to.

Another weak mischaracterization. My issue is with your trash arguments, not Israel, so stop acting like you're the damn State of Israel every time someone criticizes your nonsense. You say some wild, genocidal-sounding shit to justify mass slaughter, I call it out, and suddenly you’re crying, “He’s attacking Israel!” Nah bruh. I’m attacking your ass-backwards arguments because your posts read like war crime fanfiction. Stop using the State of Israel as a shield.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This week’s Economist reports that the gov’t of Israel admits arming a criminal gang in Gaza in the hope it will fight Hamas.

As Netanhsyu of all people should kniw how well the “enemy of my enemy” plays out.

Didn't they originally arm Hamas as well?

Funnelled cash to them.

Hamas used to not be the violent beast it is now. Israel encouraged a split in the Palestinians--and got it, Hamas and Fatah are now enemies. That keeps the violence down. But it does nothing about the flow of terror money, somebody would have taken it. Better to have Gaza being hammered than Gaza and the West Bank being hammered.

Wow. You really can come up with any excuse. Did it occur to you that without that money, Hamas may have never evolved to its current state?

You are failing to see the forest for the trees.

The identity of Israel's opponent really is "Iranian puppet". Exactly what group it is doesn't matter, remove one and the money would simply go to another.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I was pleased when Trump pulled away from the Ukraine conflict, I'm not pleased as he seems committed to conflict in the Mid-East.

I'm never pleased when the US President does something at the behest of Putin. Trump appeased Putin because of personal interest, that is bad.

Oh good grief. "Peace is good except when done by evil orange man, then peace is bad."

What peace do you see Trump bringing about?

The peace of the dead.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No I’m not. And there is no defence for terrorism of any kind from anyone for any reason.

The inability to distinguish between calls for moderation in Israel’s prosecution of its war on Hamas and apologia for Hamas or antisemitism is what is truly pathetic. I’d ask that it stop, but to paraphrase King Crimson
“I talk to the wind. My words are all carried away, The wind does not hear, the wind cannot hear”.

You call it a call for moderation--but you have never given a sensible answer for what would be acceptable. Nor has anyone else.

That is a falsehood. Not only have numerous posters done that, the IDF debated moderation.
I understand you disagree with those proposals but that does not make insensible, just less murderous.

You proposed going after them like they went after the Munich terrorists--and didn't reply when I pointed out that required countries where they wouldn't simply be killed for being Jewish.

And we see blind acceptance of all Hamas claims about the situation. You do not believe you support Hamas but in letting them feed you "reality" you end up doing what they want.

Coming from an inveterate swallower of Israeli propaganda, that is richly ironic on its own. Add that according to you and your ilk, the IDF policy you endorse is doing what Hamas wants, snd it is meta ironic.

Which does not address the issue at all.

We keep seeing the Hamas death toll treated as accurate. Despite 4k clearly bogus entries being discovered by the only ones to even try to check. And despite the two slips where Hamas people admitted most of the deaths were males.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Subjecting someone to a punishment for an act done by someone else is by definition collective punishment.

But you've already accepted the Hamas narrative of "punishment".

You’ve swallowed the Israeli narrative of “self defense “.

You're unaware of October 7th, 2023?
Yeah, bottom line is that there's blame to spread around, the fundamental crisis for the Gazans is their leadership and it's international supporters.
Tom

Another wholesale swallower of the Isrseli narrative of “self defense” spouts off.

And you still do not present the slightest evidence that it is not self defense.

You have presented fantasy answers for how to deal with Hamas but even if they were 100% true it does not matter because none of them would save the hostages. This is war, not a sporting event, an incredibly lopsided death toll proves absolutely nothing about right or wrong. Hamas has the option to surrender. They could even simply release the hostages and stop shooting and probably would rapidly get peace even without a surrender. But they continue to fight on, thus Israel is completely justified in continuing to smash them. That is not a war crime.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No one here is a violent terrorist apologist, so you can knock off the slurs and slander right now.

Many on here claim that Hamas' actions are due to Israel's actions. Let's reframe that a bit: rape is due to women being immodest. (The Israeli action that's behind everything: existence.)

Instead of reframing things with an extremely stupid analogy, how about you support the end of the slurs and slander on this discussion board like a moderator should?

Calling it stupid does not refute it.

And you're the one that said "violent terrorist apologist". I simply pointed out an example of apologist behavior without naming anyone, you decided the shoe fit.

If you think someone here is a violent terrorist apologist, provide quotes with links to their post that support the allegation. Then we'll talk about what it means to be an apologist for a political party that kills people for their perceived religious affiliations and ethnicity, and/or an ethos that judges the rightness or wrongness of bombing gatherings of civilians based on what's in it for them, and who is doing it to whom.

Very few would dispute that Hamas will kill you for being Jewish. I see no examples of Israel killing someone for being Muslim.

And "bombing" is completely irrelevant, that's a means, not a result. Look at the results. 10/7--atrocities that Hamas crows about. The Gaza war--Israel bending over backwards to evacuate targets when they were aiming at things rather than people. The crowing about part is extremely damning.

The Gazans are suffering because of an ongoing war in which war crimes are being committed.

Eternally insisting there are war crimes doesn't make it so. I've already pointed out how Geneva is being misapplied.

No, you didn't.

You've already demonstrated you know even less about the Geneva Conventions than you do about UN conventions on the Rights of Refugees and the Rights of Indigenous people.

What I've shown is that Geneva keeps being used as some sort of magic spell.

Targeting civilian food? Prohibited--but there is no such prohibition on targeting enemy supplies. At the point Hamas takes it it's a valid target.

Permitting aid to enter? Only if it's not going to be diverted. And there's a very high diversion rate.

Dead civilians? Geneva doesn't prohibit that. It says they should do as good as they can--and since they're doing far better than anyone else I consider that obligation met.

Hitting hospitals etc? They forfeit their protection if they are used by the enemy. Just look at the news: Israel has captured various hospitals--but capture implies resistance. Look up "open city"--that's how they should be behaving, there should be no defense.

We do have one clear Geneva violation but it's irrelevant: giving notice about misuse. It would be an exercise in stupidity.

 

[Arctish]

Subjecting someone to a punishment for an act done by someone else is by definition collective punishment.

But you've already accepted the Hamas narrative of "punishment".

You’ve swallowed the Israeli narrative of “self defense “.

You're unaware of October 7th, 2023?
Yeah, bottom line is that there's blame to spread around, the fundamental crisis for the Gazans is their leadership and it's international supporters.
Tom

Another wholesale swallower of the Isrseli narrative of “self defense” spouts off.

And you still do not present the slightest evidence that it is not self defense.

The inability of a poster to prove a negative claim is not evidence that a positive claim has merit.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You’re not making an argument—you’re rehearsing a dodge. Over and over, you cling to the same circular shield: “Nobody caught this one anomaly, so everyone is lying.” That’s not a refutation of data. That’s a reflexive excuse to ignore it.

Yes, it is. Standard logic: if p then q. But q is false, therefore p is false.
q = the data is reasonably accurate
p = that the data has been carefully checked.

It doesn't matter that everyone continues to repeat the lie, that doesn't make it true. Hamas ensures the only numbers out there are their numbers.

Let’s be absolutely clear: finding some duplicate or sequential ID entries doesn’t mean the entire dataset is fabricated. Errors in wartime reporting are common—not because of conspiracy, but because hospitals are bombed, communications are down, and people are burying children before logging stats. If your standard for legitimacy is zero error, then no war zone reporting will ever pass your test, and that’s precisely the point: you’ve set the bar so impossibly high that the only truth left is the one that serves your narrative. That’s not investigative rigor. That’s engineered doubt.

I never said the whole dataset is fabricated. I said the whole data set is completely untrustworthy.

You seem to be dividing the world up into true and false. No, the real world is true, false, and unknown. I consider the Gaza death toll to be an unknown.

And of course errors happen in war. Initial reporting is going to be bad and probably a major overcount. But this is supposedly carefully verified data. Suppose I listed my social security number on my voter registration as 123-45-67890. Think that would go through??

And your point about “check digits” in ID systems is utterly beside the point. You’re treating an administrative formatting glitch like it invalidates 35,000 corpses. It doesn’t. And pretending it does is a grotesque deflection from the actual human toll.

We have no evidence of 35,000 corpses. You continue to treat this as if I'm nitpicking when I'm actually showing that your data is based on garbage.

And it's moot anyway as 35,000 corpses would prove nothing. Last I saw Israel claimed to have killed 20,000 combatants. If that produced only 15,000 dead civilians that's actually evidence of them doing a very good job.

Reuters picked up the 20,000 figure:

How many Palestinians has Israel's Gaza offensive killed?

This explainer examines how the Palestinian toll is calculated, how reliable it is, the breakdown of civilians and fighters killed and what each side says.

www.reuters.com

And note that the "war" deaths are not all war:

Hamas fatality figures for Gaza war are ‘clear disinformation,’ according to new study

In contast to Hamas claims, paper finds female and child fatalities are underrepresented relative to their proportion of the Strip's general population, demonstrating IDF efforts to avoid civilian casualties

www.timesofisrael.com

Some of the natural causes deaths are leaking into the data.

As for ceasefires and humanitarian solutions: yes, I’ve offered them, and no, you haven’t seriously engaged with any of them. You dismiss ceasefires because “Hamas still has hostages,” as if military occupation has ever been an effective rescue strategy. You scoff at UN monitoring because of what happened in Lebanon, ignoring that monitoring works when backed by teeth—as it has in dozens of other conflicts. And you scoff at international diplomacy without acknowledging that your own logic ensures nothing else can be tried.

Ceasefire with the hostages still held is a big win for Hamas. That's why they're trying to promote it.

Where has the monitoring actually worked against terrorist forces???? It works against armies, not against those who fight from the shadows.

You complain no one proposes viable solutions—then reject anything short of total war as unworkable. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological paralysis. Your whole worldview is a self-sealing loop: Israel is always right, every critic is compromised, and every solution is a fantasy. But the real fantasy is believing that infinite bombs will somehow bring finite peace.

It's not my job to find viable solutions. There are a lot of military analysis in the world, many are hostile to Israel. Why in the world have they not presented anything? They would love to get egg on Israel's face, but they don't have any egg to throw.

You say past U.S. governments didn’t support better ideas. But that’s false: the Kerry peace framework, the Arab Peace Initiative, even internal Israeli proposals for demilitarized autonomy zones in Gaza were floated and shelved—not because they were too violent, but because they required restraint. You’re not interested in restraint. You’re interested in punishment with plausible deniability.

Let's see what that "peace" initiative says. While I do not trust Wikipedia on issues like this it's bias is against Israel so it's good enough here:

Arab Peace Initiative - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The initiative offers normalisation of relations by the Arab world with Israel, in return for a full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (including the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Lebanon), with the possibility of comparable and mutual agreed minor swaps of the land between Israel and Palestine, a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee problem based on UN Resolution 194,

Israel gives up every bargaining chip and evacuates tens of thousands of people in exchange for normalization of relations? That's ludicrously stupid.

And note the poison pill: resolution 194. Full right of return, the destruction of Israel.

So this amounts to Israel commits suicide.

Just because it contains the word "peace" doesn't mean it's about peace.

And let’s address the most telling line in your response: “Israel rejected our ideas as killing too many civilians.” That’s not a defense. That’s a confession. You just admitted that Israel chose the bloodier path. If that’s your gold standard, then stop pretending you care about minimizing harm. You care about victory, full stop. And your version of victory has no room for the civilians who happen to be in the way.

You really need to learn to read.

I said Israel rejected the US approach as too bloody. In other words, Israel chose the less bloody path!

So no—you haven’t exposed bias. You’ve exposed the playbook: discredit the witnesses, redefine the law, deny the bodies, and claim the moral high ground while standing on the rubble. That’s not justice. That’s whitewash. And history has seen it before.

Continuing to chant about supposed evidence doesn't prove anything.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You’re trying to rewrite the rules of war mid-conflict because reality has become inconvenient for your side. So let’s clear away the evasions and deal with what you’re actually defending.

You say: “Where exactly does it say that?”—referring to the illegality of killing civilians en masse during a hostage recovery. It says it in Geneva Convention IV, Article 33: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” It’s also embedded in Articles 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I, which demand that parties to a conflict distinguish at all times between civilians and combatants, and cancel or suspend attacks if civilian harm is expected to be excessive. These are not vague suggestions. They are binding treaty law.

Note the term "punished". What Geneva is talking about is things like "we were ambushed while driving through this town so we are going to shoot 100 of you". It is not talking about civilians caught in the crossfire.

And note "civilian harm is expected to be excessive." You're skipping over the last part.

And your “yardstick” of comparing Israel’s conduct to Western powers? That’s not a legal defense. That’s a race to the bottom. If you’re saying, “Well, others have done worse,” congratulations—you’ve joined the moral company of Iraq 2003, Vietnam, and My Lai. Those weren’t victories. They were crimes.

No, the treaty simply says "excessive" without providing a yardstick. I'm selecting the only yardstick around: the actions of those who try to comply with Geneva.

Then you argue that the rules “don’t work against someone who’s trying to subvert them.” That’s the oldest authoritarian justification in the book: suspend law because your enemy ignores it. But that is precisely why the rules matter. You don’t need the Geneva Conventions for battles between equals. You need them when one side believes the rules are an obstacle, not a guide. Because if your morality disappears the moment it’s tested, it was never morality to begin with—it was convenience.

I'm saying the rule is designed to avoid mistakes, not designed to prevent subversion. And you do need the Geneva convention for battles between equals.

Next, you defend the IDF’s targeting doctrine by claiming their “track record is excellent.” Let’s unpack that. Over 35,000 killed, nearly half of them women and children. Thousands of videos showing collapsed buildings, shredded bodies, aid workers killed in marked convoys, journalists bombed in their homes. Are you seriously claiming this is the gold standard of precision warfare? That the carnage is a sign of success? No amount of smug anecdotes about civilians standing nearby proves anything—except that humans get used to hell when there’s no escape.

Look at any urban war, you'll find pretty much the same thing. Here we see a multitude of "press" that have a tremendous amount of overlap with Hamas. Hamas is 1-2% of the population. Yet a large majority of the "press" are Hamas. And note that this doesn't even need to be duplicity--the cameramen recording the atrocities are in one sense "press", yet are unquestionably combatants as they are working on a military objective: propaganda video. Legitimate embedded reporters are never taken to the front lines and while they very well might be told "don't film X" they aren't told what to film.

Israel has put together a video showing scenes that Hamas posted. They don't release it out of respect for the families, but they have screened it for some reporters. It is much, much worse than the video they have released:

Spoiler: Warning: Video is not safe for humanity, let alone work

Screams Before Silence Film

Never-before-heard eyewitness accounts from released hostages, survivors, and first responders. In Screams Before Silence, a 60-minute, presenter-led documentary film, Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta and founder of LeanIn.org, interviews multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first...

www.screamsbeforesilence.com

Then you accuse me of parroting Hamas deception because I refuse to whitewash civilian death. That’s not just dishonest—it’s lazy. I’ve condemned Hamas repeatedly, directly, and without qualification. What I refuse to do is adopt the cowardly moral equation that says: because Hamas is evil, anything done to destroy them is automatically just. That is not law. That is not ethics. That is vengeance dressed up in the language of justice.

You "condemn" Hamas but demand perfection in dealing with them.

Finally, your parting claim is that “we don’t see an entire civilian population torched.” Maybe you don’t. But the UN does. The WHO does. Doctors Without Borders does. The satellite images, the field reports, the starvation data, the mass graves, the shattered shelters—all of it tells a different story. One that you’re either ignoring or justifying.

And I've already pointed out that they aren't seeing anything, just parroting Hamas. If they were seeing they would realize the data is bad.

And starvation data? Very few cases--the first was known to be medical, since then they wised up and didn't admit it but when you see one person that's skin and bones while everyone else looks ok the likely explanation is medical.

Mass graves? Yeah, I recall one such story--claims of a mass grave with people executed while bound. Israel's response: a photo of the open grave taken well before the IDF captured the area. I do not recall any substantiated claims of mass graves made by Israel. (Israel does admit to digging up the grave--they were looking to see if there were any of the hostages buried there. Judaism attaches great importance to proper burial. Found none, put things back as they were.)

So don’t talk to me about hypotheticals when the morgues are full. Don’t talk about restraint when the war zone looks like an earthquake hit it. And don’t talk about legality while sidestepping the law itself.

First, show the morgues are full.

This isn’t about perfect answers. It’s about not turning away from the ones we already know. And if your argument collapses the moment we apply the standards we’ve already agreed on—then the problem isn’t me.

You think we know. You continue to fail to do anything to establish the wrongs actually happened. (Yeah, I realize you can't. The data doesn't exist.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Learn the difference between “Gazans” and “Hamas,”

Feel free to explain why you think that Hamas is not Gazan.
Tom

I didn’t say that Hamas was not Gazan, though I don’t know that all of then were actually born in Gaza.

What I said is that ALL GAZANS ARE NOT HAMAS, and NOT ALL MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS. Can you fucking read?

So? Civilians suffer for the actions of their government.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

No collective punishment. No genocide.
At least not by the IDF defending the Israeli people.
Tom

Completely blockading needed food and medical supplies to civilians is not self defense. If it was, then the gov’t of Israel was not engaged in self defense up to March, 2025.

Look at what Geneva actually says.

Israel would have been completely within their rights to block all food and medical supplies.

You keep looking at the parts that impose restrictions, while skipping over the parts that limit those restrictions. Geneva requires letting aid through provided it is not diverted. Divert it, it no longer needs to be let through.

 

[ZiprHead]

We have no evidence of 35,000 corpses. You continue to treat this as if I'm nitpicking when I'm actually showing that your data is based on garbage.

And it's moot anyway as 35,000 corpses would prove nothing. Last I saw Israel claimed to have killed 20,000 combatants. If that produced only 15,000 dead civilians that's actually evidence of them doing a very good job.

Reuters picked up the 20,000 figure:

https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-01-15/

According to the Reuters article, the Gaza health ministry only counts actual bodies. But there are probably thousands more buried in the rubble of thousands of bombed buildings.

HOW DO GAZA HEALTH AUTHORITIES CALCULATE THE DEATH TOLL?​

In the first months of the war, death tolls were calculated entirely from counting bodies that arrived in hospitals and data included names and identity numbers for most of those killed.

As the conflict ground on and fewer hospitals and morgues continued to operate, the authorities adopted other methods too.

From early May 2024, the ministry updated its breakdown of fatalities to include unidentified bodies which accounted for nearly a third of the overall toll. Since then, health authorities have been working to identify them and none are now listed in the death toll.

Zaher Al-Waheidi, Director of the Information Unit at the Gaza Health Ministry, attributed progress in identifying bodies to the restoration of a central database from Shifa Hospital and a system allowing families to provide input on victims, which is then verified by medics and police.

In the two months of relative calm during the ceasefire that began in January, 2025, work accelerated, he said.
A Reuters examination of an earlier Gaza Health Ministry list of those killed showed that more than 1,200 families were completely wiped out, including one entire family of 14 people.

IS THE GAZA DEATH TOLL COMPREHENSIVE?​

The numbers do not necessarily reflect all victims, as many are still under rubble, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. It estimates some 10,000 bodies were uncounted in this way, with only a few dozen of them recovered since the ceasefire.

Official Palestinian tallies of direct deaths in the Gaza war likely undercounted the number of casualties by around 40% in the first nine months of the war as Gaza's healthcare infrastructure unravelled, according to a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet journal in January.

The U.N. human rights office also says the Palestinian authorities' figure is probably an undercount. In past Gaza wars, the U.N. tally sometimes exceeded the Palestinian count.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Your 2nd sentence is internally inconsistent: Gazans suffering because they are shields is a tacit admission of collective punishment. Pointing out your illogica claims has nothing to do with justifying terrorism by Muslims or anyone for that matter, so when you sling such bs, it makes your posts appear more like the ravings of a genocidal anti-Arab bigot than a reasoned defense of of Israel's actions.

No. Punishment implies intent. The intent is to harm Hamas, there is no intent on Israel's part to harm the civilians. (There clearly is an intent to harm them on Hamas' part but it's to use them as a weapon, generally not as punishment.)

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

I don't insist on keeping them bottled up. The problem is that they have been weaponized in the past, nobody wants to let them in. Israel imposes some pretty strict requirements on allowing anyone to exit via Israel because of past weaponization. That doesn't preclude exiting by other means.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

View attachment 51058

Starving Gazan Baby is Hamas!

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

This picture is close enough up that not much else is visible, but there's enough. Look behind, just above the railing on the bed. We see a woman with quite a bit upstairs. You realize breasts are mostly fat? Kid is skeletal, she still has her fat reserves. That says there's something medically wrong keeping the kid from eating. (Assuming the picture is real, there's something about it that just feels off but I can't place it. I'm thinking it's likely AI.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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

Even the IAEA now admits that's not the case.

True: The IAEA had full access and verified Iran’s compliance during the deal.
Also true: After the U.S. withdrew in 2018, that access was curtailed and Iran ramped up enrichment.

There’s a thin line between misinformation and disinformation, and you’re the inebriated tightrope walker. Good luck convincing anyone you fell on the “misinformation” side.

They admitted to ramping it up after 2018. Doesn't mean they weren't doing it before.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's just Geneva was written as guidelines for avoiding inadvertent harm to civilians, it didn't envision the deliberate harm to civilians that Hamas engages in.

Do you have any actual independent evidence (not some sort of narrative from your imagination) to support that observation?
Under the assumption your observation is valid, then the civilized manner is to follow the conventions while working to get them changed. If that makes waging war more difficult, so be it.

Otherwise, observers have every legitimate reason to object to the violation of the Geneva convention.

It's one pretty minor aspect of Geneva that's being ignored: notification for misuse when the misuse is rampant. They're not going to redo Geneva over this.

In other words, these are violations of the Geneva conventions.

So? Expecting notifications in the current situation makes no sense, it would just be giving away intel without providing any benefit to civilians.

Who is talking about notifications? But your cavalier attitude to towards them is deeply ironic.

Look. 5 quote levels up, quoting post #8,310. Your words, talking about objecting to Israel not sending the notifications.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

Except this is just how the world works. The common man suffers for the actions of the leaders.

 

[laughing dog]

This week’s Economist reports that the gov’t of Israel admits arming a criminal gang in Gaza in the hope it will fight Hamas.

As Netanhsyu of all people should kniw how well the “enemy of my enemy” plays out.

Didn't they originally arm Hamas as well?

Funnelled cash to them.

Hamas used to not be the violent beast it is now. Israel encouraged a split in the Palestinians--and got it, Hamas and Fatah are now enemies. That keeps the violence down. But it does nothing about the flow of terror money, somebody would have taken it. Better to have Gaza being hammered than Gaza and the West Bank being hammered.

Wow. You really can come up with any excuse. Did it occur to you that without that money, Hamas may have never evolved to its current state?

You are failing to see the forest for the trees.

The identity of Israel's opponent really is "Iranian puppet". Exactly what group it is doesn't matter, remove one and the money would simply go to another.

Wow, you really can come up with any excuse. Hamas is a partial creation of Israel.
Israel is partially responsible for the predicament.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

We hear about the terrorist ones. The regular criminals are not controversial, we don't hear about them. Doesn't mean they don't exist.

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.

You aim at civilians, you're a terrorist. Note the "aim" part--if you aim at a military target that has civilians on it that doesn't make you a terrorist. Nor does it make us a terrorist when we bombed a Chinese consulate, aiming for the prior occupant of the space.

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.

I'm not going to demand an investigation because I know there's no way to conduct one.

In times past thorough investigations generally have been done and they come out pretty close to what Israel admitted and denied.

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.

The point is you look at any hint that they might be civilian and decree them to be civilian if you find such a hint. I'm looking for what is most likely.

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 continue to insist there has been third party checking when there clearly has not.

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.

It began with the 1948 attack by the various Arab nations. In response to Israel declaring it's existence. A state can't act until it exists, therefore it's impossible for them to have taken an action that caused the attack.

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.

Arafat was offered almost everything he was asking for. He walked rather than making a counteroffer. Anyone who had actually been seeking a resolution would have either accepted or counteroffered. Doing neither means he didn't want an agreement.

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.

Sure they do, when they don't have other options.

Just look at what was recently found in Ukraine:

(To save the reading: Offered $1k to deface a building. He looked--bomb with cell phone detonator, not paint.)

Russia pays young Ukrainians to be unwitting suicide bombers in shadow war

Oleh, 19, was offered $1,000 for a paint attack on a police station – but the bag he was given contained a crude bomb

www.theguardian.com