Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Loren Pechtel]

I too support a secular, liberal democratic single state between the river and the sea as the resolution of the conflict.

But how is that going to happen? One state = Palestinian Majority, the biggest power blocks want genocide. Why do you think a secular, liberal single state is possible?

 

[TV and credit cards]

So now the Israelis are bombing Damascus because they're so worried about the Druze. What kind of Barbosian like excuses are there for these Israeli acts of aggression?

Netanyahu is hellbent on making sure Syria doesn't stand a chance.

Following calls in Israel to help Druze in Syria, scores of Israeli Druze broke through the border fence on Wednesday, linking up with Druze on the Syrian side, a Reuters witness said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli military was working to save the Druze and urged Israeli Druze citizens not to cross the border. The Israeli military said it was working to safely return civilians who had crossed.
U.S. Syria envoy Tom Barrack, who has praised Syria's new rulers and declared in May that peace was possible between Syria and Israel, condemned violence against civilians in Sweida.
"All parties must step back and engage in meaningful dialogue that leads to a lasting ceasefire. Perpetrators need to be held accountable," he said.

When the US envoy puts out this type of statement it means our side is wrong but we can't flat out say it.

And I'm sure the Israeli Druze had a hell of a time breaking through the border fence. They must have overwhelmed whatever Israeli security forces there were. Twenty dollars and my left nut says there was little if any resistance in crossing the border.

Are you not aware of how many of the Druze in Syria are being massacred by the new regime?
(Update, found the tab I meant to post before):

Syrian regime forces execute Druze civilians, reports say: 'Adopted brutal tactics'

Syrian government declares ceasefire, but deadly clashes persist in Sweida; over 200 killed as Druze accuse al-Sharaa loyalists of atrocities; Israel strikes in response

www.ynetnews.com

Even Wikipedia manages to admit it:

April 2025 massacres of Syrian Druze - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

As does the BBC:

'They shot patients in beds' – BBC hears claims of massacre at Suweida hospital

The BBC visits Suweida's National Hospital where staff claim patients were killed by Syrian government forces.

www.bbc.com

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

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

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This is the logic of someone mistaking a press release for a morgue log. The absence of televised bodies in a warzone with bombed hospitals, buried families, and a collapsed civil registry isn’t proof of falsehood — it’s the reality of infrastructure collapse. You’re demanding battlefield journalism from beneath pancaked concrete, and calling the silence a lie.

We see so many posed pictures out of Gaza, they clearly can get stuff out. We see the atrocity videos that Hamas people upload, those get out. Yet they can't document so many other horrors they claim exist--the only thing that makes sense is that they don't have anything to show because it's fake.

No — you cherry-pick history. When Hamas lies, you cite it forever. When Israel misleads, you give them a 10% margin of honor. You’re not reviewing patterns. You’re locking in conclusions and trimming facts to fit them.

I consider 10% normal fog of war.

That’s not skepticism — that’s outsourcing your entire sense of morality to a terrorist group’s camera crew. You’re giving Hamas editorial control over your empathy. If they don’t film a dying child, you declare that child imaginary. That’s not logic. That’s learned indifference.

I declare it imaginary because if you can report on a dying child why can't you take a video? What reporter doesn't have a phone these days? When they fail to do something that should be totally easy it must not actually be totally easy--and about the only way for that to be true is if it's a fabrication.

I understood your rationale. I didn’t say it held up. You dismiss every group whose findings contradict your preferred story, then cite military sources with zero critical pressure. The standard shifts not based on method — but on conclusion.

I disagree with any group that failed to note the garbage. That's proof they aren't checking, and thus by implication proof they aren't checking the other stuff, either.

Proportionality isn’t a slogan. It’s the legal measure of military necessity against civilian harm. You treat tunnels under apartments as green lights for flattening blocks. But Geneva doesn’t give you moral clearance just because a tunnel was beneath the kitchen. The burden is on the attacker to prove restraint — not just intent, but effect. You treat that burden like a footnote.

You keep up with this magic word. Reality is they have done far better than anyone else, the burden has been met.

Statistics don’t replace scrutiny. Mass death isn’t even across strikes — it concentrates in errors and high-value hits. One hospital, one refugee camp, one misidentified building — that’s all it takes. And when a whole family dies, you say “look at the father” as if that voids the rest. That’s not proportionality. That’s guilt by association, scaled up to neighborhoods.

1) You are simply claiming they must be wrong without even considering whether they are.
2) The refugee camp has been addressed repeatedly--that fire started from Hamas munitions.
3) And, yes, I say to look at the father--because when families are wiped out it's normally a strike on some senior Hamas person. You aren't even trying to address that.

No. I’m starting from: mass death requires moral scrutiny. You’re the one starting from innocence. That’s why any critique becomes bias, any dead child becomes an acceptable statistic, and any law that gets in the way becomes a “magic word.” You’ve already decided the verdict — I’m just refusing to look away from the evidence.

Yes, you want scrutiny--and are happy to take whatever "scrutiny" you can find without any regard for whether it's true, just that it blames Israel.

And when you focus on that dead child--Goodhart's Law. You are creating more dead children.

 

[TomC]

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

That's nonsense.
Israel has been the target of multiple attacks, including missile strikes, from Syria.
Ukraine has done no such thing to Russia.
Tom

 

[Tigers!]

Hamas’s demands are absolutely unacceptable. That’s not the debate.

That is part of the debate. The current situation is due to what HAMAS did on 7th Oct. 2023. It cannot be ignored, though many are trying so hard to do so.

The debate is: does Israel’s total war strategy offer a viable alternative?

So what is your alternative to
1) returning, retreiving the remaining hostages?
2) Ensuring that Hamas cannot, does not attack Israel again?
3) Making that that Hamas cannot remain in control of Gaza and enslave the Gazans all over again?

Because flattening Gaza hasn’t brought the hostages home either — and it’s buried thousands of people in the process. If your only response to hostage-taking is siege and starvation, you’re not saving lives. You’re burying more.

Again what is your alternative to not just stopping the current carnage, but preventing it from reoccurring?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say 1.5:1 is a “job very well done,” as if the only moral threshold worth caring about is whether Israel kills fewer civilians than the U.S. did in Fallujah. But here’s what you miss: no family grieves less because the ratio was good. No child’s death is softened by statistical comparison. You’re confusing technical performance with moral clarity.

You say I rely on emotion — as if facts and empathy are mutually exclusive. No, Lauren. What I’m saying is that your entire position reduces morality to math: if the numbers look better than NATO’s worst day, then everything’s fine. But war isn’t graded on a curve. “Fewer corpses than usual” is not a defense — it’s an indictment of how low the bar is.

You are using emotion in place of facts here. There were a lot more grieving families in other wars.

You accuse me of misunderstanding you. But I understand perfectly. You believe your argument is airtight because it adds up numerically. What you refuse to confront is this: decency isn’t proven by ratios. The point isn’t whether Israel performs “better than average.” The point is whether we’re willing to normalize mass civilian death as just part of the scorecard.

You are after a fantasy solution that saves everyone. No such solution exists.

And when I challenge that, you call it a comprehension failure. It’s not. It’s disagreement. You’ve built a worldview so insulated by military math and moral triage that anything that doesn’t speak in metrics sounds like heresy. I’m not rejecting comprehension. I’m rejecting your premise: that a “good war” is one with the cleanest graveyard.

The facts are ugly but that doesn't make them go away. You don't understand that not prosecuting this war brings more 10/7s. Peace isn't going to happen, only a choice of war.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lauren, let’s walk through this, piece by piece — not with slogans, but with clarity.

You say it’s not fatalism to blame “outside forces,” but that’s exactly the dodge. You hand agency to everyone except the side wielding the tanks, the jets, and the siege. Saying “someone else made us do it” is just geopolitical victimhood with better PR. And it’s a tired excuse for policies that punish civilians more than fighters.

Gaza doesn't really have agency, either. If it wasn't Hamas it would be somebody else. Realistically this is a proxy war between Israel and Iran. Iran isn't interested in peace talks, thus it comes down to whether the battle is in Israel or in Gaza. And I'm not going to fault them for making the battle be in Gaza.

You claim Gaza’s despair came from being used by “Arab masters,” then pivot to praising their old economy. But refugee camp life isn’t an economic footnote — it’s the lived reality of inherited statelessness. And yes, that despair predates Hamas, predates 2000, and predates your talking points. You keep cropping the timeline to avoid what created the conditions for extremism in the first place.

The forces driving this have changed over time, but the conflict goes back to 1948. The people are stuck in refugee "camps" (cities in all but name) because Egypt and Jordan enforced that. Israel doesn't have refugee camps because even though it accepted a similar number of refugees it integrated them into society rather than keeping them around as weapons. And I'm not cropping the timeline--it goes back to 1948. Israel threw off the Muslim domination and the Muslims hate that.

As for hospitals and ambulances — Geneva doesn’t say “if it’s misused, flatten it.” It says protections can be lost in specific cases, not permanently stripped from all structures of care. That’s why proportionality matters. You don’t get to say “we called ahead” and then justify mass casualties as legally clean. It’s not a doorbell. It’s war. And the rules are stricter, not looser, because of it.

1) The repeated misuse of the symbol makes it meaningless.

2) Got an example of a hospital that was attacked but didn't shoot back???

You say I’m “parroting Hamas” for demanding basic restraint. That’s your tell. You’ve fused any demand for humanity with complicity. It’s not that you think I’m wrong — it’s that you think even raising the issue makes me the enemy. That’s how accountability dies.

Except that's not what Hamas wants. They claim it's "basic restraint" but that's not what's happening.

Finally, your reply about my “unrealistic view of war” just proves the point. You think realism means accepting cruelty as strategy. I think realism means confronting cruelty and refusing to excuse it — even when it’s convenient, even when it’s your side.

You still haven't proven that cruelty you keep claiming. The only unquestionable cruelty was by Hamas. You keep claiming "collective punishment" without even establishing punishment, let alone collective.

Because if your version of realism requires permanent siege, displaced families, and starving children to keep a flag safe — then what exactly is left worth protecting?

It's not about keeping a flag safe. It's about keeping a people alive. That flag falls, the people inside die. That's what you're calling for--a destruction many, many times greater than Hamas is claiming is happening to Gaza. And that's assuming they don't take the Sampson option.

 

[NoHolyCows]

This is the logic of someone mistaking a press release for a morgue log. The absence of televised bodies in a warzone with bombed hospitals, buried families, and a collapsed civil registry isn’t proof of falsehood — it’s the reality of infrastructure collapse. You’re demanding battlefield journalism from beneath pancaked concrete, and calling the silence a lie.

We see so many posed pictures out of Gaza, they clearly can get stuff out. We see the atrocity videos that Hamas people upload, those get out. Yet they can't document so many other horrors they claim exist--the only thing that makes sense is that they don't have anything to show because it's fake.

No — you cherry-pick history. When Hamas lies, you cite it forever. When Israel misleads, you give them a 10% margin of honor. You’re not reviewing patterns. You’re locking in conclusions and trimming facts to fit them.

I consider 10% normal fog of war.

That’s not skepticism — that’s outsourcing your entire sense of morality to a terrorist group’s camera crew. You’re giving Hamas editorial control over your empathy. If they don’t film a dying child, you declare that child imaginary. That’s not logic. That’s learned indifference.

I declare it imaginary because if you can report on a dying child why can't you take a video? What reporter doesn't have a phone these days? When they fail to do something that should be totally easy it must not actually be totally easy--and about the only way for that to be true is if it's a fabrication.

I understood your rationale. I didn’t say it held up. You dismiss every group whose findings contradict your preferred story, then cite military sources with zero critical pressure. The standard shifts not based on method — but on conclusion.

I disagree with any group that failed to note the garbage. That's proof they aren't checking, and thus by implication proof they aren't checking the other stuff, either.

Proportionality isn’t a slogan. It’s the legal measure of military necessity against civilian harm. You treat tunnels under apartments as green lights for flattening blocks. But Geneva doesn’t give you moral clearance just because a tunnel was beneath the kitchen. The burden is on the attacker to prove restraint — not just intent, but effect. You treat that burden like a footnote.

You keep up with this magic word. Reality is they have done far better than anyone else, the burden has been met.

Statistics don’t replace scrutiny. Mass death isn’t even across strikes — it concentrates in errors and high-value hits. One hospital, one refugee camp, one misidentified building — that’s all it takes. And when a whole family dies, you say “look at the father” as if that voids the rest. That’s not proportionality. That’s guilt by association, scaled up to neighborhoods.

1) You are simply claiming they must be wrong without even considering whether they are.
2) The refugee camp has been addressed repeatedly--that fire started from Hamas munitions.
3) And, yes, I say to look at the father--because when families are wiped out it's normally a strike on some senior Hamas person. You aren't even trying to address that.

No. I’m starting from: mass death requires moral scrutiny. You’re the one starting from innocence. That’s why any critique becomes bias, any dead child becomes an acceptable statistic, and any law that gets in the way becomes a “magic word.” You’ve already decided the verdict — I’m just refusing to look away from the evidence.

Yes, you want scrutiny--and are happy to take whatever "scrutiny" you can find without any regard for whether it's true, just that it blames Israel.

And when you focus on that dead child--Goodhart's Law. You are creating more dead children.

You say they clearly “can get stuff out” because of some atrocity videos, so the absence of full famine or mass grave footage must mean it’s fake.

That’s not logic, Loren — it’s convenience. You’re demanding a pristine media pipeline from a population being starved, bombed, and surveilled 24/7. A society where journalists are killed, hospitals are shelled, and power is intermittent isn’t going to upload trauma on your schedule. Your threshold for belief is calibrated not for truth, but for denial. If horror isn’t edited and broadcast to your liking, you decide it never happened. That’s not skepticism. That’s the shield you hold up to avoid responsibility.

You say “10% is fog of war” when Israel misreports, but eternal condemnation for Hamas.

So you accept errors when they come from your preferred side but build entire moral frameworks out of your enemies’ worst lies. That’s not moral consistency — that’s rigged accounting. “Fog of war” doesn’t apply only to governments you like. It applies across the board. And if you’re going to invoke it for Israel, then have the intellectual integrity to apply it to Palestinian sources too — or admit you’ve made your choice and are just defending the scoreboard now.

You declare a child imaginary if there’s no video.

How did we get to the point where a child dying beneath rubble is “not real” unless there’s HD footage of their final breath? What standard of journalism requires war zone morgues to livestream for your approval? Not all stories are visible. Not all victims are documented. That’s exactly why international law uses patterns of destruction — not Instagram posts — as evidence. You’ve let your skepticism turn into emotional anesthesia.

You say you dismiss groups that don’t “note the garbage.”

Translation: you dismiss any group that doesn’t reach your conclusion. That’s not methodological critique — that’s ideological filtering. If HRW or Amnesty reports Israeli violations, you reject them wholesale. If the IDF tweets something, you trust it like scripture. That’s not scrutiny. That’s selective obedience to whoever tells you what you want to hear.

You say proportionality is a “magic word.”

No — it’s law. And it means the military value of a target must justify foreseeable civilian harm. It doesn’t matter if Hamas was nearby. If the IDF levels a building and dozens of civilians die, they have to show the strike wasn’t just legally targeted — but also militarily necessary and restrained. That’s not magic. That’s how civilized nations distinguish themselves from the very actors you claim to oppose. You keep waving away proportionality because you know it doesn’t clear your side’s actions — and you’d rather mock it than wrestle with it.

You say the refugee camp fire was Hamas’s fault.

Even if that’s true in one case, it doesn’t erase the pattern. Camps have been bombed repeatedly. UN shelters hit. Schools collapsed. Ambulances targeted. Are those all Hamas accidents too? You can’t keep handing out blame exemptions every time the numbers get uncomfortable.

You say “look at the father” when whole families die.

So now parentage justifies mass death? If one person in the house is Hamas, everyone becomes expendable? That’s not counterterrorism. That’s vendetta. That’s how law collapses into vengeance. The IDF isn’t supposed to act like Hamas. But by your logic, guilt is contagious and due process is optional — if it makes the operation easier.

You say I accept any “scrutiny” that blames Israel.

No — I accept that when hundreds of independent bodies, including Israeli ones, report the same patterns of abuse, it’s not propaganda. It’s evidence. You just can’t stomach where that evidence leads, so you brand it all as enemy lies. That’s not moral discernment — it’s deflection.

You end by saying I’m creating more dead children by pointing to the dead.

That’s the ugliest inversion of all. You’re defending a strategy that levels homes and starves civilians, and blaming people who notice. I don’t create the corpses, Loren — I refuse to look away from them. You, on the other hand, are so desperate to win the argument that you’ve turned grief into a sin and accountability into treason. That’s not justice. That’s moral collapse disguised as tough talk.

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Let’s be clear, Lauren — you’re not defending law. You’re redefining it so no action, no matter how cruel, ever violates it. And that’s the difference between law as principle and law as excuse.

No. I'm saying that the things you keep claiming are a violation of the law are legal. Your eternal chant of war crimes doesn't make them appear.

You say Hamas rerouting aid for payroll equals “military use.” But Geneva isn’t a tax code. “Military use” means direct advantage in the conflict — not controlling bakeries or paying salaries. Even if some food gets diverted, you don’t starve civilians to hit a payroll office. You don’t bomb a pharmacy to keep someone from reselling aspirin.

You need a dictionary.

And, yes, paying salaries of combatants is military use. And note that Geneva doesn't have all your weaseling--it simply says diversion.

You accuse me of misusing the word “punishment,” but your whole framework depends on erasing what’s happening. When you cut off insulin because a terrorist might get calories from the same aid truck, that is punishment. The goal is to make civilians suffer so Hamas loses control — you’ve admitted as much. Geneva doesn’t care whether you use the word “punishment” or “pressure.” The outcome defines the crime.

No. The goal is to keep Hamas from using that aid to support itself.

You say Hamas isn’t negotiating, so aid doesn’t need to be delivered. That’s not how obligations work. When you hold the gates, the burden is on you to find a workaround. Geneva doesn’t say “humanitarian access contingent on the other side being cooperative.” It says civilians don’t lose rights because their rulers are criminals. That’s not me blaming Israel for Hamas’s evil. That’s me refusing to let Hamas be the excuse for everything.

And it doesn't say 2 + 2 = 4, either. Geneva says under what conditions humanitarian aid needs to be allowed through. Those conditions are not being met.

You claim “Geneva only requires probability of diversion.” No, it allows delay for security screening, not full obstruction. It doesn’t say “if you’re worried, block everything.” That’s your invention — turning risk into veto power. If that standard applied, no aid would ever enter any warzone.

No. This isn't about security screening, it's about Hamas using the aid to control the country.

And again, you say Israel has total authority. That’s not regulation. That’s strangulation. International law doesn’t hand the jailer the keys and say “do what you want.”

In terms of distributing aid, it pretty much does say that.

As for your accusation that I “grasp at straws” looking for solutions — better that than clinging to barbed wire like it’s a life raft. You think calling hope a weakness ends the debate. It doesn’t. It just reveals how far you’ve internalized cruelty as the only viable policy.

The thing is you grab anything that purports to be a solution. Standard tactic: create or use a horrible situation, present a "solution" that's really just your wish list. The PATRIOT Act did basically nothing about terrorism.

You say “it’s not my job to take the food from Hamas and give it to the kid.” But the policy you defend is doing the opposite: keeping the food from the kid because Hamas might touch it. You call that realism. I call it engineered suffering.

Hamas was using it to control the kid.

You say proportionality doesn’t “automatically make Israel wrong.” Of course it doesn’t. It forces us to ask: was there an alternative? Was the harm excessive? Was this target worth an entire family buried alive? And every time, you skip those questions — not because you answered them, but because you’re afraid they might matter.

I skip the questions because I'm not a military planner. Nor is the data going to be available even to someone with the skill.

I'm simply looking at the results: Israel kills fewer. I can see no other explanation than that they are doing a better job.

You brush off Israeli airstrikes hitting schools and hospitals as “not disproving Hamas was there.” But your own logic demands evidence before calling someone a terrorist. Suddenly, when it’s a bomb crater instead of a ballot, your standards disappear.

Where do we have a bomb crater on a hospital without also having clear evidence of misuse? Remember, if they are taking fire from the hospital it's automatically a valid target.

Finally, on radicalization: You say Gaza kids become extremists because schools teach hate. But what do you think daily siege, destroyed homes, and dead relatives teach them? You want to treat textbooks like the root of everything and ignore the missiles falling outside their classrooms.

The thing is we don't see that extremism elsewhere without a group doing it.

Still not a peep about Western Sahara.

 

[laughing dog]

You are misinformed. According to the UN, among children, the proportion of malnourished had almost doubled since March.

You have provided no evidence to support your counterfactual explanations.

Since you seem to think the UN is a credible source of information it's clear you are misinformed. I've gone into a long explanation with NHC over this--any group that supposedly verified the data yet missed the obvious stuff Israel caught did not actually verify the data--and thus everything else should also be assumed to be Hamas propaganda.

WTF are you going on about? The UN is reporting their results after seeing and treating children during a month (about 15,000).

The UN is there, reporting numbers. You are in the US making baseless assumptions. Whatever credibility the UN has or not, it is better than yours.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say casualty numbers “don’t matter” because they don’t change your view of the war. That’s not strategy — it’s moral insulation. When your framework tells you tens of thousands of corpses, whether 20,000 or 60,000, change nothing about how you judge a war, that’s not clarity. That’s numbness repackaged as reason.

You're mixing up what I said.

I'm saying they're irrelevant for figuring out right and wrong, not that the people don't matter.

Israel claims to have killed 20,000. Hamas claims 60,000 "civilians" dead but doesn't count anyone as a combatant even when it's their senior people. Thus at worst we are looking at two civilians per combatant and that's much better than anyone else.

You obsess over the hospital video timestamp as proof of fraud, but never ask why your outrage over one misreported blast lets you sidestep every other one. One lie, in your logic, justifies total blindness — even when the rubble keeps piling up. You want coverage to be perfect in a siege zone, yet accept military justification on press release alone. That’s not skepticism. It’s asymmetric doubt.

The point was showing the degree of deception in what you're looking at.

You say yes, everyone is lying out of fear. That includes doctors, drivers, translators, NGO workers. All of them. What a convenient way to filter out all ground truth. You don’t even question the moral cost of making fear your standard for dismissal. Instead of asking why people fear Hamas, or how they work around it, you flatten the entire info landscape to preserve your comfort.

We know why they fear Hamas, why should we ask? And we aren't the ones flattening the info landscape, it's Hamas doing that. They ensure nobody is in a position to prove they're lying.

You say no one is targeting birth registrars or teachers — but when their offices are bombed, when schools are reduced to ash, you shrug. You refuse to see the people in these jobs as civilians in a civic infrastructure because once you do, it disrupts your clean “valid target” calculus. This is why the law matters — because it draws a line your narrative keeps trying to erase.

Whatever Hamas uses gets hit. And Hamas has been using basically everything. Parts of Gaza basically everything standing is booby-trapped by Hamas.

You say “so the evil can prevail by killing kids,” as if killing the kids yourself is the answer. That’s the moral endgame of your argument: Hamas is evil, therefore anything Israel does in pursuit of stopping them is fine, even if children are starved in the process. You’re so focused on blocking Hamas’s leverage, you’ve forgotten children aren’t leverage. They’re people.

You keep saying they're starved, but Hamas can't seem to find the dead.

You call proportionality “magic words” while defending a strategy that flattens cities. You treat foreseeability and alternatives as fluff, even though they’re foundational legal tests. You say Hamas is the one causing the deaths — but then why is the military with the drones, surveillance, and air power the one doing the bombing? “Hamas bad” doesn’t erase your side’s choices.

Hamas uses everything as military, it gets flattened. Blame the side that chose that path.

You laugh off the idea that field teams exist. Do you think every satellite photo is analyzed in a vacuum? Who do you think compiles casualty lists, logs burial records, cross-references witness accounts? It’s not magic — it’s how wartime documentation happens. And yes, people still risk their lives to do it. You dismiss all that with a sneer, because any source of data threatens your certainty.

I certainly laugh because how do they function?

And note that when evil presides over a country in a war we usually never get accurate body counts.

I dismiss it because where are they? Where are the reports? It's always anonymous and disconnected.

And finally, your logic on 10/7 is the purest example of what’s wrong with this posture. Yes, Hamas committed a horrific atrocity. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But you act like that license never expires, never hits a red line, never requires recalibration. You say “there’s no bag limit,” as if this is sport. As if there’s no point where the cost outweighs the pursuit.

The license certainly persists as long as Hamas holds hostages. And if you permit there to be a line where the cost (you're only counting the cost to Gaza) exceeds you have set the world up for horror. Iran would have no problem with trading every life in Gaza for more damage to Israel.

You say I don’t understand war. I understand it’s ugly, it’s cruel, and it’s easy to excuse — which is why we created laws to stop that slope. You’ve chosen to slide all the way down it, waving a legal banner while closing your eyes to what it’s protecting you from seeing.

You continue to see the laws as saying things very different than what they actually say.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say 1.5:1 is a “job very well done,” as if the only moral threshold worth caring about is whether Israel kills fewer civilians than the U.S. did in Fallujah. But here’s what you miss: no family grieves less because the ratio was good. No child’s death is softened by statistical comparison. You’re confusing technical performance with moral clarity.

You say I rely on emotion — as if facts and empathy are mutually exclusive. No, Lauren. What I’m saying is that your entire position reduces morality to math: if the numbers look better than NATO’s worst day, then everything’s fine. But war isn’t graded on a curve. “Fewer corpses than usual” is not a defense — it’s an indictment of how low the bar is.

You are using emotion in place of facts here. There were a lot more grieving families in other wars.

You accuse me of misunderstanding you. But I understand perfectly. You believe your argument is airtight because it adds up numerically. What you refuse to confront is this: decency isn’t proven by ratios. The point isn’t whether Israel performs “better than average.” The point is whether we’re willing to normalize mass civilian death as just part of the scorecard.

You are after a fantasy solution that saves everyone. No such solution exists.

And when I challenge that, you call it a comprehension failure. It’s not. It’s disagreement. You’ve built a worldview so insulated by military math and moral triage that anything that doesn’t speak in metrics sounds like heresy. I’m not rejecting comprehension. I’m rejecting your premise: that a “good war” is one with the cleanest graveyard.

The facts are ugly but that doesn't make them go away. You don't understand that not prosecuting this war brings more 10/7s. Peace isn't going to happen, only a choice of war.

You say there were more grieving families in other wars, as if that’s a meaningful rebuttal.

Grief doesn’t get diluted by statistics, Loren. “Other people lost more” isn’t comfort — it’s dismissal. You’re trying to bury a present crisis under the weight of historical body counts. But each child buried in Gaza is not made less dead by what happened in Aleppo, or Dresden, or Fallujah. You’re using scale as anesthetic — as if morality is a numbers game and fewer coffins means fewer questions.

You say I’m after a “fantasy solution.”

No — I’m after a moral compass. You frame any call for restraint as naïveté because you’ve resigned yourself to a world where atrocity is inevitable and therefore excusable. You’ve mistaken despair for realism. But normalization of civilian death isn’t wisdom. It’s moral surrender dressed up as pragmatism.

You say peace won’t happen, only war.

Then say it plainly: you’ve given up. Your framework assumes endless cycles of siege, bombing, and suffering are the only tools left. You talk about 10/7 as if it sanctifies any response, no matter the toll — but that logic only guarantees more war, more dead children, more “unfortunate” statistics. And when the next 10/7 comes — because your model breeds nothing but retribution — you’ll hold up the numbers again and say, “See? At least we did it better.”

You say I don’t understand that not prosecuting this war brings more violence.

No, I understand it perfectly. But you think prosecuting the war like this is the only option. Flattening neighborhoods, starving civilians, treating the wounded like enemy assets — this isn’t counterterrorism. It’s collective degradation. You can fight Hamas without abandoning every principle that claims to separate you from them. But you’ve accepted that the line can be blurred as long as the kill ratio is efficient.

You call my position emotional, but it’s yours that runs on fear. Fear that decency is weakness. Fear that restraint is surrender. Fear that anything short of overwhelming force is an invitation to be hurt again. But fear isn’t strategy. And mass death isn’t a necessary cost. It’s a choice — one you’re defending not because it’s right, but because you’ve forgotten there was ever another way.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Lauren, let’s walk through this, piece by piece — not with slogans, but with clarity.

You say it’s not fatalism to blame “outside forces,” but that’s exactly the dodge. You hand agency to everyone except the side wielding the tanks, the jets, and the siege. Saying “someone else made us do it” is just geopolitical victimhood with better PR. And it’s a tired excuse for policies that punish civilians more than fighters.

Gaza doesn't really have agency, either. If it wasn't Hamas it would be somebody else. Realistically this is a proxy war between Israel and Iran. Iran isn't interested in peace talks, thus it comes down to whether the battle is in Israel or in Gaza. And I'm not going to fault them for making the battle be in Gaza.

You claim Gaza’s despair came from being used by “Arab masters,” then pivot to praising their old economy. But refugee camp life isn’t an economic footnote — it’s the lived reality of inherited statelessness. And yes, that despair predates Hamas, predates 2000, and predates your talking points. You keep cropping the timeline to avoid what created the conditions for extremism in the first place.

The forces driving this have changed over time, but the conflict goes back to 1948. The people are stuck in refugee "camps" (cities in all but name) because Egypt and Jordan enforced that. Israel doesn't have refugee camps because even though it accepted a similar number of refugees it integrated them into society rather than keeping them around as weapons. And I'm not cropping the timeline--it goes back to 1948. Israel threw off the Muslim domination and the Muslims hate that.

As for hospitals and ambulances — Geneva doesn’t say “if it’s misused, flatten it.” It says protections can be lost in specific cases, not permanently stripped from all structures of care. That’s why proportionality matters. You don’t get to say “we called ahead” and then justify mass casualties as legally clean. It’s not a doorbell. It’s war. And the rules are stricter, not looser, because of it.

1) The repeated misuse of the symbol makes it meaningless.

2) Got an example of a hospital that was attacked but didn't shoot back???

You say I’m “parroting Hamas” for demanding basic restraint. That’s your tell. You’ve fused any demand for humanity with complicity. It’s not that you think I’m wrong — it’s that you think even raising the issue makes me the enemy. That’s how accountability dies.

Except that's not what Hamas wants. They claim it's "basic restraint" but that's not what's happening.

Finally, your reply about my “unrealistic view of war” just proves the point. You think realism means accepting cruelty as strategy. I think realism means confronting cruelty and refusing to excuse it — even when it’s convenient, even when it’s your side.

You still haven't proven that cruelty you keep claiming. The only unquestionable cruelty was by Hamas. You keep claiming "collective punishment" without even establishing punishment, let alone collective.

Because if your version of realism requires permanent siege, displaced families, and starving children to keep a flag safe — then what exactly is left worth protecting?

It's not about keeping a flag safe. It's about keeping a people alive. That flag falls, the people inside die. That's what you're calling for--a destruction many, many times greater than Hamas is claiming is happening to Gaza. And that's assuming they don't take the Sampson option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lauren, the tragedy is that you believe recognizing suffering equals rewarding it — as if human decency is some kind of diplomatic loophole Hamas is waiting to exploit. So let’s address your points clearly, because your entire framework flips morality upside down and calls it realism.

It is a loophole Hamas is exploiting.

So let’s get this straight: thousands of dead civilians — children, medics, aid workers — are, in your view, not primarily victims, but weapons wielded by Hamas. That’s not recognition. That’s inversion. That’s turning suffering into complicity so you don’t have to reckon with the moral cost of what’s being done to them. Yes, Hamas exploits death. But when you use that fact to emotionally detach from the dead themselves, you’re doing the same thing — just from the other side of the missile.

You keep treating everything as a binary. They can be both victims and weapons.

Where’s the starvation? It’s in the UNICEF reports showing widespread child malnutrition. It’s in the WHO alerts about famine-like conditions in the north. It’s in the parents boiling weeds because nothing else is available. You reduce it all to PR failures because the suffering hasn’t met your photographic threshold. That’s not skepticism. That’s willful blindness. You’re not looking for facts. You’re looking for excuses not to care unless the pain is camera-ready.

And you continue to treat Hamas propaganda as truth.

No, Lauren. That’s not what I’m saying — it’s what you’re afraid of admitting. My position is that war, even against monstrous enemies, must have red lines. Your position says: if the enemy is brutal enough, no red line exists. That’s not preventing victory by manipulation — that’s granting impunity to power. If you think the only alternative to crushing civilians is surrendering to terror, then you’ve already accepted Hamas’s logic: that everything must be war, and war excuses everything.

It's not a matter of Hamas logic, but that Iran is the one in control.

I’m not saying stop defending Israel. I’m saying stop abandoning the very principles Israel claims to defend. Because if the only way to fight Hamas is to mirror their disregard for civilian life, then what exactly is being defended?

You still continue to believe what Hamas is telling you.

War is hell — but it’s not a moral void. And if your answer to atrocity is simply “they started it,” then you’ve already conceded the ethical ground you think you’re standing on.

Hamas pretends atrocity, you believe it.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Let’s be clear, Lauren — you’re not defending law. You’re redefining it so no action, no matter how cruel, ever violates it. And that’s the difference between law as principle and law as excuse.

No. I'm saying that the things you keep claiming are a violation of the law are legal. Your eternal chant of war crimes doesn't make them appear.

You say Hamas rerouting aid for payroll equals “military use.” But Geneva isn’t a tax code. “Military use” means direct advantage in the conflict — not controlling bakeries or paying salaries. Even if some food gets diverted, you don’t starve civilians to hit a payroll office. You don’t bomb a pharmacy to keep someone from reselling aspirin.

You need a dictionary.

And, yes, paying salaries of combatants is military use. And note that Geneva doesn't have all your weaseling--it simply says diversion.

You accuse me of misusing the word “punishment,” but your whole framework depends on erasing what’s happening. When you cut off insulin because a terrorist might get calories from the same aid truck, that is punishment. The goal is to make civilians suffer so Hamas loses control — you’ve admitted as much. Geneva doesn’t care whether you use the word “punishment” or “pressure.” The outcome defines the crime.

No. The goal is to keep Hamas from using that aid to support itself.

You say Hamas isn’t negotiating, so aid doesn’t need to be delivered. That’s not how obligations work. When you hold the gates, the burden is on you to find a workaround. Geneva doesn’t say “humanitarian access contingent on the other side being cooperative.” It says civilians don’t lose rights because their rulers are criminals. That’s not me blaming Israel for Hamas’s evil. That’s me refusing to let Hamas be the excuse for everything.

And it doesn't say 2 + 2 = 4, either. Geneva says under what conditions humanitarian aid needs to be allowed through. Those conditions are not being met.

You claim “Geneva only requires probability of diversion.” No, it allows delay for security screening, not full obstruction. It doesn’t say “if you’re worried, block everything.” That’s your invention — turning risk into veto power. If that standard applied, no aid would ever enter any warzone.

No. This isn't about security screening, it's about Hamas using the aid to control the country.

And again, you say Israel has total authority. That’s not regulation. That’s strangulation. International law doesn’t hand the jailer the keys and say “do what you want.”

In terms of distributing aid, it pretty much does say that.

As for your accusation that I “grasp at straws” looking for solutions — better that than clinging to barbed wire like it’s a life raft. You think calling hope a weakness ends the debate. It doesn’t. It just reveals how far you’ve internalized cruelty as the only viable policy.

The thing is you grab anything that purports to be a solution. Standard tactic: create or use a horrible situation, present a "solution" that's really just your wish list. The PATRIOT Act did basically nothing about terrorism.

You say “it’s not my job to take the food from Hamas and give it to the kid.” But the policy you defend is doing the opposite: keeping the food from the kid because Hamas might touch it. You call that realism. I call it engineered suffering.

Hamas was using it to control the kid.

You say proportionality doesn’t “automatically make Israel wrong.” Of course it doesn’t. It forces us to ask: was there an alternative? Was the harm excessive? Was this target worth an entire family buried alive? And every time, you skip those questions — not because you answered them, but because you’re afraid they might matter.

I skip the questions because I'm not a military planner. Nor is the data going to be available even to someone with the skill.

I'm simply looking at the results: Israel kills fewer. I can see no other explanation than that they are doing a better job.

You brush off Israeli airstrikes hitting schools and hospitals as “not disproving Hamas was there.” But your own logic demands evidence before calling someone a terrorist. Suddenly, when it’s a bomb crater instead of a ballot, your standards disappear.

Where do we have a bomb crater on a hospital without also having clear evidence of misuse? Remember, if they are taking fire from the hospital it's automatically a valid target.

Finally, on radicalization: You say Gaza kids become extremists because schools teach hate. But what do you think daily siege, destroyed homes, and dead relatives teach them? You want to treat textbooks like the root of everything and ignore the missiles falling outside their classrooms.

The thing is we don't see that extremism elsewhere without a group doing it.

Still not a peep about Western Sahara.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Lauren, the problem isn’t that I misunderstood your words — it’s that I understood them perfectly. And the context only confirms what I said: you’ve walled off the moral cost of this war from any serious scrutiny, so you can claim it’s just unfortunate fallout instead of a deliberate result of chosen tactics.

If you understood them I wouldn't have to keep correcting you.

No — what I’m saying is that the existence of Hamas doesn’t justify treating two million people like insurgents by default. You call that “facing reality.” I call it moral surrender. You want to reduce every option to siege, airstrikes, and denial of aid, and call that the entire menu. But if you box out every path that isn’t collective punishment and then declare, “These are the only choices,” you’re not analyzing. You’re rationalizing.

If Israel chooses from “the options that exist,” then expand the options. Demilitarized corridors, international monitors, mediated truces — they’ve all been proposed and shelved. Not by Hamas. By Israel. That’s not forced necessity. That’s chosen strategy.

And you are back to babbling the magic words. Do any of those things return the hostages? No. Why in the world should Israel be expected to leave them?

And try looking at history. International monitors--we have that to the north, in Lebanon. They report violations all day long, which promptly get discarded because doing something about it would end up in a war with Hezbollah. In other words, they surrendered without firing a shot--actually, the correct action in the situation except they should have left rather than pretend to do the job.

That’s not context. That’s compartmentalization. You say you do care about civilian deaths, just not when evaluating whether something is wrong. That’s like saying, “Yes, the building collapsed, but I’m only evaluating the blueprint.” Human suffering isn’t a side note in a legal memo — it’s the outcome that the law is supposed to restrain.

You’ve drawn a firewall between empathy and evaluation. But they can’t be separated — because if your moral framework doesn’t start with the human cost, then your conclusions will always excuse it.

This is the heart of it, isn’t it? You think refusing to bomb civilians equals rewarding genocide. But that’s not how morality works. Restraint isn’t surrender. Protecting civilians isn’t capitulation. And if the only way you believe Israel can be safe is by acting with total impunity, then you’re not defending peace — you’re just defending control.

But it is rewarding genocide. You want to let Hamas attack Israel with impunity because they'll ensure a bunch of civilians dies if Israel does anything. That's their whole strategy--get civilians killed, cry to the press, get the world to stop Israel. They are very, very good at it.

I’m not asking you to excuse Hamas. I’m asking you not to mirror them. Because when your answer to mass suffering is: “Well, look who started it,” you’ve already stopped asking what’s right. You’ve only asked what’s justifiable. And history has never looked kindly on that standard.

You have never asked what's right for Israel in the first place.

 

[NoHolyCows]

You say casualty numbers “don’t matter” because they don’t change your view of the war. That’s not strategy — it’s moral insulation. When your framework tells you tens of thousands of corpses, whether 20,000 or 60,000, change nothing about how you judge a war, that’s not clarity. That’s numbness repackaged as reason.

You're mixing up what I said.

I'm saying they're irrelevant for figuring out right and wrong, not that the people don't matter.

Israel claims to have killed 20,000. Hamas claims 60,000 "civilians" dead but doesn't count anyone as a combatant even when it's their senior people. Thus at worst we are looking at two civilians per combatant and that's much better than anyone else.

You obsess over the hospital video timestamp as proof of fraud, but never ask why your outrage over one misreported blast lets you sidestep every other one. One lie, in your logic, justifies total blindness — even when the rubble keeps piling up. You want coverage to be perfect in a siege zone, yet accept military justification on press release alone. That’s not skepticism. It’s asymmetric doubt.

The point was showing the degree of deception in what you're looking at.

You say yes, everyone is lying out of fear. That includes doctors, drivers, translators, NGO workers. All of them. What a convenient way to filter out all ground truth. You don’t even question the moral cost of making fear your standard for dismissal. Instead of asking why people fear Hamas, or how they work around it, you flatten the entire info landscape to preserve your comfort.

We know why they fear Hamas, why should we ask? And we aren't the ones flattening the info landscape, it's Hamas doing that. They ensure nobody is in a position to prove they're lying.

You say no one is targeting birth registrars or teachers — but when their offices are bombed, when schools are reduced to ash, you shrug. You refuse to see the people in these jobs as civilians in a civic infrastructure because once you do, it disrupts your clean “valid target” calculus. This is why the law matters — because it draws a line your narrative keeps trying to erase.

Whatever Hamas uses gets hit. And Hamas has been using basically everything. Parts of Gaza basically everything standing is booby-trapped by Hamas.

You say “so the evil can prevail by killing kids,” as if killing the kids yourself is the answer. That’s the moral endgame of your argument: Hamas is evil, therefore anything Israel does in pursuit of stopping them is fine, even if children are starved in the process. You’re so focused on blocking Hamas’s leverage, you’ve forgotten children aren’t leverage. They’re people.

You keep saying they're starved, but Hamas can't seem to find the dead.

You call proportionality “magic words” while defending a strategy that flattens cities. You treat foreseeability and alternatives as fluff, even though they’re foundational legal tests. You say Hamas is the one causing the deaths — but then why is the military with the drones, surveillance, and air power the one doing the bombing? “Hamas bad” doesn’t erase your side’s choices.

Hamas uses everything as military, it gets flattened. Blame the side that chose that path.

You laugh off the idea that field teams exist. Do you think every satellite photo is analyzed in a vacuum? Who do you think compiles casualty lists, logs burial records, cross-references witness accounts? It’s not magic — it’s how wartime documentation happens. And yes, people still risk their lives to do it. You dismiss all that with a sneer, because any source of data threatens your certainty.

I certainly laugh because how do they function?

And note that when evil presides over a country in a war we usually never get accurate body counts.

I dismiss it because where are they? Where are the reports? It's always anonymous and disconnected.

And finally, your logic on 10/7 is the purest example of what’s wrong with this posture. Yes, Hamas committed a horrific atrocity. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But you act like that license never expires, never hits a red line, never requires recalibration. You say “there’s no bag limit,” as if this is sport. As if there’s no point where the cost outweighs the pursuit.

The license certainly persists as long as Hamas holds hostages. And if you permit there to be a line where the cost (you're only counting the cost to Gaza) exceeds you have set the world up for horror. Iran would have no problem with trading every life in Gaza for more damage to Israel.

You say I don’t understand war. I understand it’s ugly, it’s cruel, and it’s easy to excuse — which is why we created laws to stop that slope. You’ve chosen to slide all the way down it, waving a legal banner while closing your eyes to what it’s protecting you from seeing.

You continue to see the laws as saying things very different than what they actually say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NHC

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This isn’t Hogwarts, Lauren. The Geneva Conventions aren’t incantations — they’re the legal boundaries between war and barbarism. You wave off starvation of civilians as if it’s just tough love. But when you justify cutting off aid because Hamas might use it somewhere, that’s not targeting — it’s siege warfare designed to grind civilians down. That’s what “collective punishment” means. If you have a better term for starving children to weaken a regime, by all means — let’s hear it.

You are treating them as incantations.

And it's not about Hamas might use it somewhere, it's about Hamas is using it to control Gaza.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/21/hamas-gaza-war-financial-crisis/

That's what's going on.

First: yes, we do have the ability to evaluate proportionality. We do it all the time — post-strike assessments, satellite imagery, hospital and morgue reports, survivor testimony. You act like proportionality is unknowable unless we can pull up an Excel sheet with body counts and blast radii. But law doesn’t demand omniscience — it demands restraint based on foreseeable outcomes.

No. You have no way of evaluating military advantage. One number of an equation is an unknown, the answer is unknown.

And since you asked: yes. On multiple occasions, strikes on residential buildings killed entire families, including infants. Don’t play dumb. You’ve seen the footage. You just don’t count it unless Hamas delivers notarized proof of intent.

Showing a strike on a residential building is not showing that the strike was not on Hamas.

As for Hamas shooting people trying to flee — yes, they do that. It’s a war crime. But it doesn’t erase the obligation to avoid turning apartment blocks into coffins. Two wrongs don’t make a proportionality waiver.

Yes, it does. Israel is obligated to give warnings when possible. Israel is not obligated to prevent Hamas from getting Gazans killed. Those deaths are on Hamas, not on Israel--but you blame Israel anyway, so Hamas does it again. You (collectively) are responsible for the horrors in Gaza. You are Hamas' primary weapon.

No, Lauren — I’m referencing the standard. The one your side claims to follow. The one enshrined in international law, not dreamt up by me. You treat anything that makes Israel accountable as a foreign imposition, when it’s the legal baseline every military is expected to uphold. If your only response to accountability is “unfair standard,” maybe it’s not the standard that needs changing.

Hamas does wrong, you blame Israel. Therefore Hamas does more wrong.

You’ve “shown” nothing but distrust. UN agencies, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders — all dismissed by you because they’re inconvenient. Meanwhile, every IDF statement is taken as gospel unless they apologize, in which case you say they’re apologizing too easily. That’s not consistency. That’s a rhetorical bunker.

It's a simple test: Any organization that claimed to be verifying but missed the garbage wasn't verifying. And that's all of them.

As for Amnesty International:

And yes — “lack of proper verification” has meaning. It means bombing a known civilian site with weak or no evidence of military use. It means bombing after coordinates were shared to prevent exactly that. It means mistaking “Hamas might be nearby” for “fire away.” You call those people human shields. The law calls them civilians. You just don’t want to face what that means.

You continue to take Hamas' words as absolute truth.

You keep defending a framework where any moral restraint is a liability, any civilian death is either propaganda or someone else’s fault, and every legal standard is dismissed unless it exonerates your side.

Israel doesn't blame Hamas for all the civilian deaths. But an awful lot of them are because Hamas was using human shields. And the death of a human shield is on the side that used them.

That’s not realism. That’s moral insurance fraud — signing every airstrike with a shrug and calling it “the cost of war,” as long as the receipts don’t pile up on your doorstep.

The thing is Israel is doing a very good job of separating civilian from Hamas. The death toll tells us that. Look north: Israel went after Hezbollah. Hezbollah doesn't do much with human shields, Israel got around 90% combatants. Gaza, Hamas makes heavy use of human shields, let's figure Israel aims equally well (same army, same techniques, I would expect a similar performance), let's pretend the Hamas numbers are truth: That leaves us with 95% of the casualties being due to Hamas, not Israel.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Lauren, the tragedy is that you believe recognizing suffering equals rewarding it — as if human decency is some kind of diplomatic loophole Hamas is waiting to exploit. So let’s address your points clearly, because your entire framework flips morality upside down and calls it realism.

It is a loophole Hamas is exploiting.

So let’s get this straight: thousands of dead civilians — children, medics, aid workers — are, in your view, not primarily victims, but weapons wielded by Hamas. That’s not recognition. That’s inversion. That’s turning suffering into complicity so you don’t have to reckon with the moral cost of what’s being done to them. Yes, Hamas exploits death. But when you use that fact to emotionally detach from the dead themselves, you’re doing the same thing — just from the other side of the missile.

You keep treating everything as a binary. They can be both victims and weapons.

Where’s the starvation? It’s in the UNICEF reports showing widespread child malnutrition. It’s in the WHO alerts about famine-like conditions in the north. It’s in the parents boiling weeds because nothing else is available. You reduce it all to PR failures because the suffering hasn’t met your photographic threshold. That’s not skepticism. That’s willful blindness. You’re not looking for facts. You’re looking for excuses not to care unless the pain is camera-ready.

And you continue to treat Hamas propaganda as truth.

No, Lauren. That’s not what I’m saying — it’s what you’re afraid of admitting. My position is that war, even against monstrous enemies, must have red lines. Your position says: if the enemy is brutal enough, no red line exists. That’s not preventing victory by manipulation — that’s granting impunity to power. If you think the only alternative to crushing civilians is surrendering to terror, then you’ve already accepted Hamas’s logic: that everything must be war, and war excuses everything.

It's not a matter of Hamas logic, but that Iran is the one in control.

I’m not saying stop defending Israel. I’m saying stop abandoning the very principles Israel claims to defend. Because if the only way to fight Hamas is to mirror their disregard for civilian life, then what exactly is being defended?

You still continue to believe what Hamas is telling you.

War is hell — but it’s not a moral void. And if your answer to atrocity is simply “they started it,” then you’ve already conceded the ethical ground you think you’re standing on.

Hamas pretends atrocity, you believe it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Lauren, the problem isn’t that I misunderstood your words — it’s that I understood them perfectly. And the context only confirms what I said: you’ve walled off the moral cost of this war from any serious scrutiny, so you can claim it’s just unfortunate fallout instead of a deliberate result of chosen tactics.

If you understood them I wouldn't have to keep correcting you.

No — what I’m saying is that the existence of Hamas doesn’t justify treating two million people like insurgents by default. You call that “facing reality.” I call it moral surrender. You want to reduce every option to siege, airstrikes, and denial of aid, and call that the entire menu. But if you box out every path that isn’t collective punishment and then declare, “These are the only choices,” you’re not analyzing. You’re rationalizing.

If Israel chooses from “the options that exist,” then expand the options. Demilitarized corridors, international monitors, mediated truces — they’ve all been proposed and shelved. Not by Hamas. By Israel. That’s not forced necessity. That’s chosen strategy.

And you are back to babbling the magic words. Do any of those things return the hostages? No. Why in the world should Israel be expected to leave them?

And try looking at history. International monitors--we have that to the north, in Lebanon. They report violations all day long, which promptly get discarded because doing something about it would end up in a war with Hezbollah. In other words, they surrendered without firing a shot--actually, the correct action in the situation except they should have left rather than pretend to do the job.

That’s not context. That’s compartmentalization. You say you do care about civilian deaths, just not when evaluating whether something is wrong. That’s like saying, “Yes, the building collapsed, but I’m only evaluating the blueprint.” Human suffering isn’t a side note in a legal memo — it’s the outcome that the law is supposed to restrain.

You’ve drawn a firewall between empathy and evaluation. But they can’t be separated — because if your moral framework doesn’t start with the human cost, then your conclusions will always excuse it.

This is the heart of it, isn’t it? You think refusing to bomb civilians equals rewarding genocide. But that’s not how morality works. Restraint isn’t surrender. Protecting civilians isn’t capitulation. And if the only way you believe Israel can be safe is by acting with total impunity, then you’re not defending peace — you’re just defending control.

But it is rewarding genocide. You want to let Hamas attack Israel with impunity because they'll ensure a bunch of civilians dies if Israel does anything. That's their whole strategy--get civilians killed, cry to the press, get the world to stop Israel. They are very, very good at it.

I’m not asking you to excuse Hamas. I’m asking you not to mirror them. Because when your answer to mass suffering is: “Well, look who started it,” you’ve already stopped asking what’s right. You’ve only asked what’s justifiable. And history has never looked kindly on that standard.

You have never asked what's right for Israel in the first place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if your answer is “everything, so long as Hamas loses,” then what you’re defending isn’t security. It’s a scorched moral field where only might makes right — and that, too, has a long history of failure.

NHC