Israel-Gaza war

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The latest war crime from the world's most moral army: sending in a bound prisoner to evacuate a hospital, then executing him:

https://twitter.com/KenRoth/status/1758148646523097124

The initial evacuation order was communicated directly from the military to the hospital administration, according to Khaled Al Serr, a doctor working in Nasser Hospital. The Israelis, he said, had assured staff of “a secure passage through the northern gate of Nasser Hospital for civilians if they want to evacuate the hospital.” Another doctor in the hospital posted on social media about the order to evacuate but said he didn’t feel safe following it without a guarantee from the Red Cross.

The same evacuation order started to arrive again, by other means. “We were also surprised that the bulldozers, there was sound coming from it,” El Helou told The Intercept in a voice message. “I think through the bullhorn that said, ‘Get out, you animals. Get out, animals.’” El Helou caught the insulting order on video.

It was not long after this that the young man in the white PPE arrived. The young man was Jamal Abu Al-Ola, according to El Helou. He had been at the hospital earlier, but the Israeli military had subsequently seized and detained him, and put his hands in what appears to be black, plastic zip-tie cuffs.

“He said that he was subjected to beatings and humiliation and abuse by the soldiers,” El Helou recounted.

After Abu Al-Ola passed along the evacuation order, his mother, who was also sheltering at the hospital, pleaded with him to not go back out, but her son said he had to. “He said, ‘I’ve been threatened, I have to leave the hospital or it’s going to put all the civilians in danger,’” El Helou recalled.

He walked back out the door. In a video filmed by Mohammad Salama, the only other journalist in the hospital aside from El Helou, Abu Al-Ola can be seen walking away with a crowd of people around before they trail away and he walks in his own direction.

Abu Al-Ola was killed shortly after walking out of the hospital. According to El Helou, he was shot by an Israeli soldier three times in his chest and abdomen while still inside the gates of the hospital. Al Serr, the Nasser Hospital doctor, confirmed the account of Abu Al-Ola being killed as he left the hospital. El Helou later got footage of Abu Al-Ola’s corpse in a body bag, still robed in his PPE.

Completely justified because this is what they'd do in Saving Private Ryan. Storming hospitals, executing prisoners, destroying graveyards, plundering abandoned homes and posting it all to TikTok are no big deal because the Israelis are the Good Guys. Something something Dresden Hiroshima something something

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The only real argument against future developed-country urban warfare episodes being modeled off the Israeli effort in Gaza is the argument that the current technological advance in weapons of war is proceeding fast enough that any lessons learned from this effort will be rendered irrelevant quickly enough that they won't be applicable the next time a First World country tries to take a city by force. At a certain point, if even relatively second-rate powers like Iran or Ukraine have drones that will reliably track down and kill enemy soldiers, the role for infantry on a battlefield is going to be hugely reduced. (My guess in this world is that armies would transition towards 'being occupation forces' as their primary purpose...much like the IDF transition after 1967, funnily enough.)

The only people pointing to the IDF's "strategy" in Gaza as a model to follow are the ones working for think tanks funded by Israel or weapons companies that get money from Israel.

First off, Israeli newspapers have long since exposed the IDF's casualty reports as fraudulent so if you're using those numbers as proof that they're effective at reducing casualties then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. If you trusted the official casualty figures from Russia and Ukraine then you'd think war is safer than ever.

But even pretending the IDF's numbers are real, it doesn't matter because Israel has no coherent strategy. Case in point, in northern Gaza they declared Hamas command destroyed by January, IDF forces began pulling out and a month later Hamas is already back in control. The IDF can claim to have killed a billion fighters and to have exploded a trillion weapon cache tunnels but if Hamas is still in control then they've failed to achieve their stated objectives and it doesn't matter how few casualties they took.

As IndyRep pointed out, there's no clear alternative to Hamas running Gaza. The PA has no authority or legitimacy, the Arabs (let alone the UN) have no interest in doing Israel's job and Israel has zero interest in an extended occupation and rebuilding either. Despite the cope that Israel left Gaza out of some sort of goodwill gesture, the reality is that they left because defending a few thousand Israeli settlers surrounded by millions of angry Palestinians was strategically untenable against even the poorly armed Hamas of 2006. The IDF's conscript army is extremely unsuited to fighting a long war of occupation against guerrillas, hence their failure in South Lebanon in 2000.

It's immensely clear to everyone that isn't drinking the Koolaid that there is no long term plan here, Netanyahu is just desperately extending the war as long as he can so that he can stay in power.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

None of this even...seems to respond to my point? The expectation that most security services had for the Israeli invasion of Gaza was orders of magnitude more casualties than they've had (an average of 20 a day instead of 3), and the raw fact that Israel is going to seize control of Gaza so safely means that a future effort to take a city like this will be fought on very similar lines. That Israel's plans for the political aftermath of the war are unclear doesn't seem to be actually impacting who is winning.

The problem is

1. The casualty numbers are verifiably false so your argument is built on sand and
2. The Israeli definition of "seizing control" has left Hamas in actual control by the admission of the Jerusalem Post. They're incapable of maintaining an occupation as demonstrated by their withdrawal from northern Gaza

Israel really does not have a widespread censorship regime and has a demonstrated inability to censor unfavorable news (eg, it essentially failed to keep the news of the three friendly-fire hostage deaths under wraps before the government could tell their families). Individual names of casualties leak on social media routinely. It is very unlikely (like, does not seem remotely possible) that the casualty numbers aren't very close to correct, unless you're positing some sort of conspiracy that literally everyone in the country is in on.

Arguing with you is like arguing with a brick wall because you completely refuse to engage with cited sources.

That the IDF is covering up casualties is not a "conspiracy that literally everyone in the country is in on", it's a fact that's been reported on directly by Haaretz and countless other Israeli papers:

An examination conducted by Haaretz with the hospitals where the wounded soldiers have been and are treated shows a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals. The hospitals' data shows that the number of wounded soldiers to be twice as high as the army's numbers.

For example, Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon alone reports treating 1,949 soldiers hurt in the war since October 7 (out of 3,117 injured people treated there during the war), whereas the army reports a total of 1,593 wounded soldiers. Assuta Ashdod reportedly treated 178 patients, Ichilov (Tel Aviv) 148, Rambam (Haifa) 181, Hadassah (Jerusalem) 209 and Sha'arei Tzedek (Jerusalem) 139.

In addition, another 1,000 or so soldiers were treated at Be'er Sheva's Soroka Medical Center, while another 650 were treated at Sheba Medical Center in Tel-Hashomer. This is a partial list, as the data does not include soldiers currently in rehab wards who have already been counted as wounded upon arrival at emergency wards and inpatient wards.

Even accounting for various notation and reporting gaps, which may occur in the hospital field, the discrepancy is large between the army's figures and those of the hospitals. Reporting gaps include duplicate registration of wounded transferred from one hospital to another. It's also possible that at least some hospitals admitted soldiers requiring medical attention unrelated to the war.

Most of the relevant hospitals keep notes and also operate a situation room dealing with war casualties. Therefore, the reported data refers to soldiers wounded in the war.

The gaps between the army's data and the hospitals' data also comes into sharp relief in light of Health Ministry statistics maintained on its website. This website displays general casualty data – civilians and soldiers alike. According to the Health Ministry's data, 10,548 soldiers and civilians who were wounded in the war have been admitted between October 7 and December 10.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

In what way are they verifiably false? That's one article which has been used as a source repeatedly, and the fundamental claim (that there are many more wounded than Israel is admitting) is not one that stands up to scrutiny given the reality of the Israeli media environment. The deaths of wounded individuals make frontpage news even when they are obviously not caused by enemy action. My guess for the discrepancy is just that individuals are being double-counted -- presumably emergency situations are treated close to Gaza itself and then individuals are transferred elsewhere for recovery -- but I can imagine various other reasons there would be a discrepancy

Once again:

Even accounting for various notation and reporting gaps, which may occur in the hospital field, the discrepancy is large between the army's figures and those of the hospitals. Reporting gaps include duplicate registration of wounded transferred from one hospital to another. It's also possible that at least some hospitals admitted soldiers requiring medical attention unrelated to the war.

There is no justification for a single hospital reporting more casualties than the entire IDF officially, end of story, full stop.

Also, this isn't "just one article", multiple Israeli papers have conducted investigations and found similar discrepancies for the casualty reports. Ynet released an article around the same time as Haaretz and similarly found hidden casualties but the military censorship you pretend doesn't exist forced them to pull the original article and publish a lower number. A more recent estimate from the same source puts the number of casualties even higher:

At least 12,500 Israeli occupation soldiers will be added to the list of disabled troops, a report conducted by the Israeli Ynet news website revealed on Friday.

In what the outlet described as a "gloomy forecast", the Israeli occupation's list of injured soldiers will increase by more than 20%, according to officials in the Security Ministry's Rehabilitation Division. Although the official number of injured soldiers, since October 7, is around 2,300 injured troops, the report sheds light on the staggering toll of military casualties, which has been kept hidden. Additionally, Ynet confirmed that the number of moderate and light injuries is rarely ever recognized in official announcements.

According to the outlet, an independent company conducted an assessment at the Ministry's request. It indicates that a "conservative and cautious estimate" suggests that around 12,500 soldiers would be legally recognized as disabled. However, the total number of requests for recognition is expected to reach an astonishing 20,000.

(the main one being that "hurt in the war" reads like a much lower standard than "wounded" and might include mental healthcare or very minor injuries, but I don't want to reach conclusions off of exact wording in translations from a foreign language). I think the suggestion that there's some vast number of wounded that an omnipresent censorship regime is hiding is laughable, to the point that it's kind of hard to refute precisely because it's so rarely suggested.

Well you can think it's laughable but you're like the textbook example of an IDF stooge, the IDF could tell you that the world is flat and you'd instantly believe them.

The simple reality is that multiple Israeli papers have said that the IDF is hiding casualties, the official hospital statistics clash with the claims of the IDF and it really doesn't require some incredible conspiracy for the military censor to cover up the number of casualties taken in a conflict, that's like "war censorship 101". And nobody said it was "vast and omnipresent" or even effective since Israeli papers have exposed it, it's just ubiquitous enough to make the actual figures hard to pin down.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Some Palestinians now appear to be espousing Vosem thought:

https://www.twitter.com/joetruzman/status/1760071819355464182

Protests against Hamas appear to be spreading to the northern Gaza Strip. "O Sinwar O Haniyeh. The people are the victims. Down with Hamas."

Interesting.

or they were forced to chant slogans by the world's most moral army at gunpoint

Palestinians abused, forced to chant anti-Hamas slogans in ‘safe corridor’

According to testimonies from Palestinians who have made the journey, including one of the authors, those passing through the corridor were forced to chant slogans against Hamas; many had their belongings confiscated; and men were separated from their families, stripped, and subjected to hours of physical abuse and deprivation. All the while, thousands remain trapped inside Khan Younis, unable to leave their shelters out of fear of being shot on the streets...

He then told us that in order to be allowed to pass through the checkpoint unharmed, we had to chant slogans against the resistance: “The people want the overthrow of Hamas,” and “God is sufficient for us, and he is the best disposer of affairs against Hamas and the Qassam Brigades” (appropriating a line from the Qur’an). The officer insisted on the repetition of these slogans; only after more than 45 minutes did the soldiers permit women and children to pass, while men were kept behind...

Zaqout describes his mental and physical state as very bad — all the more so for having lost the work that he kept on his electronic devices. “I will never forget what I went through in the past few days,” he said. “We were deliberately humiliated, and forced to repeat slogans against the resistance and Hamas. All of this happened while soldiers filmed us on their mobile phones, so they can boast about it by publishing the footage on social media.”...

Zohdiya Qdeih found herself unable to utter the slogans that the soldiers ordered Palestinians to chant. She questions the notion of a safe passage when it involves humiliating unarmed civilians, and pressuring them to say words that hurt a segment of the Palestinian people.

“The soldier asked me why I didn’t repeat the slogan,” she recounted to +972. “I remained silent and did not respond. He said, ‘I know your heart is with them, and you will not insult them, but they are the ones who brought you into this situation. They did not stand by you, and you will not find any place to shelter after leaving this checkpoint; all of [the population of] Gaza City is in Rafah.’”

Qdeih emphasizes that many of the people repeated the slogans merely to comply with the soldiers and safely cross the checkpoint. “Our hearts are with the resistance in all its actions, and with the steadfastness on the ground, despite being displaced from one place to another,” she added.

The "Heads of the Hydra" argument again... it was just two weeks ago I wrote this.

snip

It's just incredible to me that anyone could look at the GWOT and think that it's a campaign to emulate.

First off, nobody ever said that destroying the original Al Qaeda (which at its peak had a few hundred to a few thousand fighters) or catching Bin Laden was impossible but that the campaign to "destroy terrorism" would fail. Al Qaeda died but Salafist terrorist groups created in its image (some even calling themselves "Al Qaeda") have multiplied like rabbits since then ranging from Al-Shabaab in Somalia or Boko Haram in Nigeria to Al Nusra and ISIS in Syria. By any objective measure there are way more Bin Ladenite terrorist groups today than there were in 2001.

Second,

The United States would dearly love to do exactly what we did in Iraq -- depose the Ba'ath party, kill Assad, and install a new regime that has nominally acceptable relations with the West -- or at least, do what we did in Libya and allow the opposition forces to form a new government.  But we can't do that because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Russia backs the Assad regime.

In Iraq the US installed a puppet of Iran, America's top geopolitical opponent in the region, with the primary opposition of said Iranian puppets being the top anti-American insurgent leader of 2006. Libya is a failed state to this day, a one stop shop for jihadis to get ordinance and slaves, plus the primary source of migrants flowing into Europe that are destabilizing the whole continent. I'm not sure why America would dearly love to hand a country over to its worst enemy or to create a power vacuum that damages its allies but I guess you don't have many examples of American foreign policy success to point to so you have to make do with what you've got. Syria itself is basically a combination of both: it's a failed state and it's largely under the control of America's worst enemies.

Also, the "ISIS disproves basic counterinsurgency theory" is nonsense because ISIS wasn't some deep rooted local insurgency at all, it was a glorified looter gang empowered by the CIA flooding Syria with weapons and the USAF bombing Assad into oblivion. Remove either factor and ISIS ceases to exist outside of a few lone wolf terrorists. The RSF in Sudan is more like ISIS than Hamas is and unlike Hamas you probably could destroy the RSF by just bombing them.

EDIT: Also the "Taliban only won because of Pakistani smuggling" argument is pure cope, the Taliban had connections to and weapons from the ISI in 2001 and they weren't in control of almost half the country. Twenty years later and pretty much everything including former Northern Alliance territory is theirs. That isn't because of smuggling but because America picked the most depraved, corrupt and shortsighted warlords as puppets, thereby creating support for the Taliban in every corner of the country. Talk about disproving your own point.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

I don't think you fully appreciate the extent to which the establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a humiliation and an international embarrassment to the Muslim world and to an extent to the Third World/Non-Aligned World as it would come to be constructed in the ensuing years.

Quite the opposite, that's exactly my point.  Israel and the Jews didn't do anything to the Ugandans, but Uganda, a landlocked central African country the size of Nevada, which has absolutely nothing to do with Israel and lies 5000km away, for some reason looked at Britain taking 12% of Mandatory Palestine/Transjordan and denoting it for a Jewish state, and said "this is a horrible thing that affects us, and we're going to get really really mad about it.  So mad that we're going to aid a terrorist group that hijacks an airplane and takes 100+ hostages."

Why do we just accept this as some inevitable thing?  Why should we have to pretend this is a reasonable opinion for a state to hold?  Is it not utterly bizarre and horrible?  Why should Uganda care at all about which Levantine ethnic groups get land claims in the British section of the former Ottoman Empire?

So Uganda, which is 5000km from Israel, is "bizarre and horrible" for supporting Palestinian terrorists but America, which is 10000km from Israel, is perfectly justified in supporting a regime that intentionally provoked political instability through terrorism in Egypt, bombed Iraqi synagogues to force Iraqi Jews to emigrate and created a front terrorist group in Lebanon which killed hundreds of innocent people and tried to assassinate the (Jewish!) American ambassador

I get what you're saying though, to the Arabs of the region it has the appearance of a bunch of Europeans coming in and saying, this is our land now.  But that's not even what happened.  The Jews legally purchased land under the laws of the Ottoman Empire.  They're no different than any other immigrant group.  When Irish-Americans came to America, legally under our immigration laws, and purchased land here (also legally), was that imperialism?  Was that colonialism?  No, it was just some people who wanted to live in America finding a legal way to do it, en masse.  The Ashkenazi Jews of the early 20th century, legally immigrating to a barren desert in the outreaches of the Ottoman Empire, were no different.

Could you remind me of the part where Irish Americans engaged in decades of terrorism after immigrating to demand their own country be carved out of the Northeast, won the acknowledgement of their sovereignty from a foreign body that had literally just been created and used said acknowledgement as a justification to start deporting or even slaughtering non-Irish people who had the misfortune of being on the wrong side of the arbitrary line? Then over the following decades conquering the rest of America and turning everyone there into occupied subjects without basic human rights? Because that's the part most people have a problem with. If Ihud has won out and the Zionists had settled for a "Jewish homeland" within a secular state then it would be a whole different story.

This is putting aside the fact that, again, these were not just a bunch of random European dudes, they were the diaspora of a people who were native to the land thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled.  That doesn't directly give them the right to be there, but even if they had not come there legally, it would not be colonialism.

I guess the Rhodesians should have said they were "the diaspora of a people who were native to the land (hundreds of) thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled"

Israel's attacks on Egypt were because Egypt threatened Israel with annihilation.  Israel saw these attacks as a proactive form of self-defense.  Both the Suez Crisis and the Six-Days War were preceded by large arms build-ups and mobilizations on the Egyptian side, rhetoric promising the conquest and annihilation of Israel, and Egyptian actions to restrict Israeli trade.  If Egypt hadn't done these things I doubt Israel would have attacked Egypt.  Yet you blame Israel for the conflicts.  This is what always happens with Israel!  The Arabs are held to absolutely no standard whatsoever, while all the consequences of violence that Israel is forced into get blamed on Israel.

The projection on display here is incredible.

First off, as usual, you're fighting a strawman. Nobody here is saying that the inept and corrupt Arab states - whose borders and leadership were pretty much uniformly imposed on them by the colonial powers - were blameless.

But you really are acting like Israel is entirely blameless! You talk about peaceful immigration and ignore the terrorism and ethnic cleansing, you talk about Egyptian rhetoric and completely ignore the Israeli connections to their former colonial overlords or the terrorism perpetrated by Mossad (and these days even the Israelis don't deny the Lavon Affair) or the fact that in reality as opposed to rhetoric the Israelis started the war both times.

The Arabs were held to the standard that Israel can do whatever it wants and expect nearly unlimited Western support and protection. In 1947 a third of the population of Mandatory Palestine was granted more than half of the territory and a few decades later they wound up conquering nearly all of it. They didn't even have to worry about the demographic consequences like the South Africans or Rhodesians did because unlike literally every other country on Earth they were allowed to keep the Palestinians in a state of legal limbo where they didn't have the rights of Israelis but they also didn't have a state of their own.

By the 90s the negotiations were so one sided that they were about whether the Palestinians would be allowed a state in just 22% of what had been Palestine. Yet even then, the most generous Israeli offers would have still taken land out of this 22% for settlements and left the Palestinians with a Bantustan that didn't control its own borders, didn't control its own airspace and didn't have its own army. Of course the Israelis have had little pressure to change the status quo because they effectively control 100% of the territory while providing none of the rights or services that states are typically expected to provide to their citizens (in fact, the Israeli state is so one sidedly extractive of Palestinians that they literally ban Palestinians from collecting rainwater).

Israel is a country that's literally never had to deal with the consequences of its actions, that's why they're completely humiliating Biden and using his unconditional military aid and UN veto to starve the population of Gaza to death despite Biden's empty promises of restraint and the ICJ's rulings. Decades of protection from consequences have created the likes of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, men who believe that Israel's success is entirely self made, that brutality always works, that they can fight the whole world at once and that God is on their side. The only question now is whether they've actually gone far enough to break the dam of unconditional American protection.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

You don't say you support Netanyahu, you just support sending him unlimited military aid, protecting him from international sanctions for war crimes in the UN, defending him from military intervention from his neighbours and doing everything possible to allow him to extend the war for no clear benefit to anyone except himself

As they say, actions speak louder than words

The point is that this undercuts the notion that the Arab population of pre-state Israel was an indigenous population being displaced by the Jews, and that the dramatic increase in the Arab population between 1918 and 1948 represented a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous Arabs whose presence on the land made the creation of Israel unjust.

In actuality, most of the Arabs in pre-state Israel were not indigenous at all, they were Syrian or Lebanese or Jordanians who saw that there was good land and good economic opportunity in this newly-transformed land being developed by the Jews, and migrated (often illegally) to take advantage of it.  Then once they were in the country, in 1948, they declared that they were indigenous peoples who had a right to a state and that it was a horrible crime to push them out of their homes or force them to live under Israeli law.

Yes, this is the Benny Morris narrative, it's also obviously absurd if you bother to actually look at the statistics.

Specifically, what was the Jewish proportion of the population in the Palestinian Mandate in 1900? How about 1920? Presumably they'd be a shrinking majority at the time if the "mass Arab migration" story was true, right?

and yes, it is a horrible crime to force people out of their homes on the basis that their presence is inconvenient for a demographic majority in a given area. Would you support President David Duke forcibly deporting Latinos to restore the demographic balance America had back in 1965?

If you want to write a long post and expect me to respond to all of it you're going to have to come up with something better than a lame whataboutism and the absurd notion that Israel was the aggressor in the multiple wars of extermination that the Arabs waged against them.

1956:

Israel invaded on 29 October

1967:

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities, launching its war effort.[28] Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt's military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip

What's absurd is how you accuse us of being one-sided when you literally refuse to acknowledge the most basic facts of the conflict. Those of us on the "pro-Palestinian" side have all acknowledged that Hamas engages in terrorism yet you refuse to acknowledge that Irgun, the Haganah and other Zionist groups engaged in terrorism prior to 1947. You won't say it explicitly but you act like Israel is literally blameless and refuse to engage with their long history of aggression and terrorism.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The UN partition plan gave 800,000 of those 1.2 million Arabs an Arab-only state.  Only 400,000 Arabs** were asked to live alongside Jews in the State of Israel that was not an Arab-exclusive ethnostate.  Instead, they wanted all the land for themselves, to build an ethnostate that was Jewish-exclusive.  And thus began 75 years of conflict.

Between "Arab exclusive ethnostate expelling all the Jews" and "Jewish exclusive ethnostate oppressing the Arabs" there was an alternative you ignore: a secular, non-exclusive state that represents all of its citizens equally.

On the ground when you say the Palestinians wanted "all the land for themselves" what they actually wanted was to not get deported from villages they'd occupied for decades if not centuries because it happened to be on the wrong side of the arbitrary line drawn by the UN. Some of them didn't even fight back and tried to negotiate with the Zionists only to be betrayed and slaughtered for their naïveté.

Why is it reasonable to expect 400,000 Arabs to live as second class citizens under a Jewish ethnostate but not reasonable to expect Jews to live as regular citizens under a secular Palestinian government?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The UN partition plan gave 800,000 of those 1.2 million Arabs an Arab-only state.  Only 400,000 Arabs** were asked to live alongside Jews in the State of Israel that was not an Arab-exclusive ethnostate.  Instead, they wanted all the land for themselves, to build an ethnostate that was Jewish-exclusive.  And thus began 75 years of conflict.

Between "Arab exclusive ethnostate expelling all the Jews" and "Jewish exclusive ethnostate oppressing the Arabs" there was an alternative you ignore: a secular, non-exclusive state that represents all of its citizens equally.

On the ground when you say the Palestinians wanted "all the land for themselves" what they actually wanted was to not get deported from villages they'd occupied for decades if not centuries because it happened to be on the wrong side of the arbitrary line drawn by the UN. Some of them didn't even fight back and tried to negotiate with the Zionists only to be betrayed and slaughtered for their naïveté.

Why is it reasonable to expect 400,000 Arabs to live as second class citizens under a Jewish ethnostate but not reasonable to expect Jews to live as regular citizens under a secular Palestinian government?

But today 20% of Israel's population is Arab, there are no Jews living in Gaza.

0

Shut the **** up about ethnostates. It is clear which side will allow a state to represent all its citizens. It isn't the Arabs...

There were more black people in Johannesburg circa 1984 than white people in KwaZulu. Checkmate, apartheid haters!

Also, if Gaza, Israel and the West Bank were all one country then Jews could go to Gaza. The Israeli government is the force preventing Jews from living in Gaza, not the Palestinians.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with "anti-Zionism" per se.

Yes most (though not all) Jews disagree with it - sometimes vehemently - and yes it can, if care is not taken, develop into actual anti-Semitism. But claiming the two are the same is simply wrong.

Sure there is: it is an attack on the modern system of international law, and it is usually based in a theory of racist grievance against the inhabitants of Israel or their co-ethnics.

Was the destruction of the Soviet Union and its replacement by Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania etc also an "attack on the modern system of international law"?

It's also pretty rich for a defender of the regime that's basically openly defying UN Resolution 242 to say anything about attacks on international law.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with "anti-Zionism" per se.

Yes most (though not all) Jews disagree with it - sometimes vehemently - and yes it can, if care is not taken, develop into actual anti-Semitism. But claiming the two are the same is simply wrong.

Sure there is: it is an attack on the modern system of international law, and it is usually based in a theory of racist grievance against the inhabitants of Israel or their co-ethnics.

Was the destruction of the Soviet Union and its replacement by Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania etc also an "attack on the modern system of international law"?

It's also pretty rich for a defender of the regime that's basically openly defying UN Resolution 242 to say anything about attacks on international law.

No? The Soviet Union fell to its own political process, not to illegal militants or terrorists on its soil. The Belovezha Accords and Alma-Ata Accords were negotiated and signed by Soviet political leaders amongst themselves. (And the Soviet presence in pre-1939 Lithuania, apart from Vilnius, was not plausibly legal.)

Chechen independence, particularly when led by forces which wished to conquer Ingushetia or Dagestan by force, was an attack on the modern system of international law, which is why the world generally supported Russia in the Second Chechen War, and were right to do so. I think some of the controversies about methods of waging war are justified in the Chechen case, but nobody seriously disputes that Russia was politically in the right. (Similarly, Donetsk and Luhansk independence with the goal of conquering Novorossiya constituted such an attack on the modern system of international law; nobody disputes this. My position is that Ukraine would be justified in expanding the war to Belgorod Oblast, since they were attacked first, but I know you dispute that.)

I...don't think Israel is defying UN Resolution 242 at all? It was, in fact, deliberately phrased in a way advocated for by Israeli government lobbyists in order to justify their presence? Certainly laws do sometimes get read in ways their writers never intended (in the US for instance the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment were quite clear that they did not intend to set a one-man-one-vote standard like the Supreme Court adopted in Reynolds in 1964, but the matter was read that way anyway), but I think there's always an element of cynicism about this.

1. It's kind of absurd to talk about "attacks on the international system of law" while acknowledging that the Soviet occupation of Lithuania (which lasted for decades) was very obviously based on nothing but the law of the strongest

2. If the Soviet leadership hadn't agreed to allow the constituent republics to break off, would you consider sending tanks to crush protesters to constitute a "defense of international law" once you exclude "illegal" cases like Lithuania?

3. How does this logic apply to Kosovo, Bosnia and South Sudan?

People should read Thomas Freidman's newest column on how Israel's acceptance in the world is rapidly evaporating. It's on the fast-track to becoming South Africa and Israel's most ardent defenders refuse to even acknowledge the incoming disaster. It's wolf warrior diplomacy or nothing to the Vosemites. 30,000 dead civilians in four months don't matter to them.

Probably the largest Zionist demonstration in history happened this past weekend in Brazil, with 750,000 people marching and many of them waving Israeli flags. Your own cited article notes that India is likely to democratically reelect a relatively pro-Israeli government (in spite of its archenemy Pakistan having nearly gotten into a shooting war with Israel's archenemy Iran!); every election we've had since the start of the war where this has been made an issue (TBF there have been only two, in Argentina and the Netherlands) has seen victories for parties with stances on the war significantly more pro-Israeli than mine.

Have you considered that you may be closer to the Vosemites than to the actual state of global public opinion? (Little bit of a troll suggestion here, but the electoral record frankly suggests it and people in this thread have not made strong efforts to critique it.)

That wasn't a "Zionist demonstration", that was a "don't lock up Bolsonaro" demonstration and Bolsonaro happens to be a Zionist (where's RV when you need him). Of course the observant would point out that Bolsonaro actually lost the most recent election so clearly that isn't the ringing endorsement for Israel that you seem to think it is. Wilders and Milei both won due to factors totally disconnected from foreign policy.

The obvious counterpoint is to look at any UN vote on the subject which pit nearly every country on Earth against Israel, the US and irrelevant Pacific islands like Nauru.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

https://twitter.com/cdrsalamander/status/1762207930365956170

Everybody who has sent aid into Gaza Leningrad, or who has advocated for this (...and, really, on some level, whoever has knowingly failed to shame those who would send aid) has rivers of blood on their hands.

-Georg Carl Wilhelm Friedrich von Küchler

But as I said months ago, this isn't some unintentional slip up, this is an intentional Hunger Plan coming straight from the top of the IDF. The talk about imposing some new puppet regime is a fig leaf. If the IDF seriously wanted to implement the "plan" Netanyahu proposed and that Israel defenders in this thread lauded then they'd have created humanitarian distribution zones in sectors under their control right from the start. But the goal isn't to create some sort of post-Hamas, Palestinian run puppet state, the goal is to inflict as much suffering upon the Gazans as possible to extend Netanyahu's term and to satisfy the sadism of the Israeli public. Biden's total impotence and unwillingness to impose real costs on Netanyahu has led him to conclude that he can basically get away with anything.

https://twitter.com/ireallyhateyou/status/1763221846387032280

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1763230393250046430

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The last piece of fake Hamas-fabricated outrage propaganda was already a while ago, so I suppose it was time for something new again. Gladly consumed by the 'Western, enlightened, liberal' target audience, of course, with no questions asked.

Call it propaganda as much as you want, but no amount of "well aktually they deserved it..." by Vosem or the other rabid Pro-Israelis can change the fact, as of 9 AM CST on March 1st, that scores of people are now lying dead because the IDF had shot people desperately trying to get food.

No, this is exactly the propaganda. This didn't happen.

On the one side we have video evidence and witness testimony backed up by everyone from the media (at least those who bothered to report it) to even Israelis and government officials taking pride in the slaughter

on the other we have military propagandists for one side who have done nothing but tell the most absurd, blatant lies for the entire length of this war, up to and including holding up a calendar and calling it a list of terrorist leaders

"Hmm, everyone says the Germans are committing war crimes but that's just propaganda because Herr Göring says otherwise"

snip

When the Tsar's soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protesters on Bloody Sunday 1905 even the most ardent monarchists didn't have the gall to say "actually some portion of the protesters were trampled to death and didn't die directly from gunfire, therefore the Russian Army bears no responsibility".

Again, the Israelis have claimed to have had full control over northern Gaza for months. That there is no humanitarian safe zone to speak of for aid distribution by now is precisely because inflicting suffering and starvation on the civilian population is the whole point, something that Israeli military officials have admitted and which Israel defenders here (except Vosem lol) totally refuse to acknowledge. It's the same reason anti-Netanyahu protesters face rubber bullets and West Bank protesters face real bullets while the protesters blocking the entry of humanitarian aid miraculously face no obstacles from the authorities whatsoever.

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When the Tsar's soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protesters on Bloody Sunday 1905 even the most ardent monarchists didn't have the gall to say "actually some portion of the protesters were trampled to death and didn't die directly from gunfire, therefore the Russian Army bears no responsibility".

This is not an accurate comparison.  As far as I can tell there is no evidence that a single person died from Israeli gunshots.  I'm sure some people did die, but there is no evidence that it was a large number of people.  Based on the current information we have available it seems far more likely that IDF fire was responsible for only a few deaths, rather than all or a majority of the 100+ deaths.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1763600123194380711

Guess they must have guns for feet over in Gaza to produce all those gunshot wounds from "trampling"

I swear the IDF could say that shapeshifting aliens appeared and committed all the crimes they've been accused of and you'd just take them at their word for it

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Gaza doctor says gunfire accounted for 80% of the wounds at his hospital from aid convoy bloodshed

Guess they must have guns for feet over in Gaza to produce all those gunshot wounds from "trampling"

I swear the IDF could say that shapeshifting aliens appeared and committed all the crimes they've been accused of and you'd just take them at their word for it

See the thing is I just do not trust the word of these Gaza doctors who speak to the media.  They have lied repeatedly in the past.  This claim doesn't even seem that outlandish to me, since he is specifically talking about "wounds", and we know Israel says they shot at the legs/feet of people swarming around the IDF position.  But I don't take his word as any evidence one way or another.

https://twitter.com/NadiaJa11363107/status/1763758700819337323

also it's kind of incredible that you still consider the IDF's word to be more reliable than that of the doctors on the ground

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

That article is confusing with its language.  It describes a large number of gunshot wounds among "dozens" of Palestinians being treated.  But then a few paragraphs later it says Al-Shifa admitted 700 injured people and 70 dead.  Which is it?

At the end of the article it says "Israel said the casualties were in the dozens."  So if "dozens" of people were killed or injured by Israel, I mean let's say that's 50-100 casualties from Israeli gunfire.  And then the other 600-700 aren't?

So those goalposts must be on rockets because we've gone from

As far as I can tell there is no evidence that a single person died from Israeli gunshots.

to "Well, we don't have definitive proof that the overwhelming majority of the deaths came from Israeli bullets instead of trampling"

If we were talking about Russians gunning down starving Ukrainians nobody would be engaged in this idiotic quibbling over whether it's really a massacre because perhaps some of the people were trampled and not shot

I don't in particular, but the IDF didn't just offer their word they also offered satellite footage.

In a conflict like this with photos and videos constantly coming out I also consider a lack of evidence, of some event that really ought to have evidence, to be evidence in and of itself.  Israel shot 800 people but there's no footage of it in a crowd of thousands of people who had their cell phones out?  People say they were walking among dead bodies riddled with bullet holes the next day but there's not a single photo or video of this?  I feel like if this was true there would have been tons of pictures and videos.  Palestinians aren't exactly timid about documenting alleged Israeli war crimes.  Most of the IDF's biggest claims in this war have been backed up by unambiguous evidence.  Their claim that there was a stampede on the aid trucks was backed up by satellite footage.  Their claim that there was a tunnel under Al-Shifa hospital was backed up by camera footage running the entire length of the tunnel.  Their claim that they didn't drop a bomb on Al-Ahli Arab hospital was backed up by photos of the parking lot and the undamaged hospital.

The Israelis provide "evidence" and you don't question it for a second but if a Gazan doctor makes a claim and it's backed up by the UN and literally every other independent source you consider them inherently untrustworthy. Do you think Palestinians are inherently less trustworthy than Israelis, even when the UN on the ground backs up their claims?

Case in point, the "satellite footage" is edited and does nothing to prove their claims which are contradictory with literally all of the other evidence and testimony. That a stampede occurred after the Israelis began murdering starving civilians with gunfire is hardly surprising but it hardly absolves them of blame. 

People say they were walking among dead bodies riddled with bullet holes the next day but there's not a single photo or video of this?

the BBC says otherwise:

We have verified further footage filmed where the shooting occurred, of bodies being taken away on a cart north in the direction of Nabulsi roundabout.
There have been reports of casualties being taken to several hospitals.
Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: "Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people...142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts."

Incredibly, the Palestinians didn't just leave their dead and wounded to be eaten by stray dogs but took them to the hospital where the overwhelming majority were treated for bullet wounds. But I guess we can't believe that because the hospital manager who said it is one of those shifty untrustworthy Palestinians so we just have to believe the IDF because they provided an edited overhead video that proves nothing in particular.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Here is a case in point.  Let's look at the matter of the tunnel under al-Shifa hospital.  Back in November, I grew steadily more and more skeptical that such a tunnel existed, as Israel failed to produce any evidence of it for many days despite having control of the hospital, and instead put out some laughable videos of a few guns and diapers they found in the basement of the hospital.

I wrote the following post where I did not rule out the possibility of such a tunnel existing -- after all we did not have proof that the tunnel didn't exist -- but said I found it increasingly unlikely based on what little facts we were being given.  And I said a lot of mean things about Israel if no such tunnel existed.

If it does indeed turn out there was no complex under the hospital at all and Israel was just making it up then this will be their Iraq WMD moment.  Either a colossal failure of intelligence or outright lying.

What they have said so far makes little sense.  A massive underground tunnel network is not something you can just cover up, and should not be difficult to find even if Hamas militants had weeks to hide it.

The IDF also made these claims about other hospitals that they now control but have demonstrated zero evidence that they were used as operational bases, much less secret tunnel entrances.  The videos of "evidence" that they've released come off as juvenile and staged.  A single unopened case of diapers sitting in the hallway as evidence of babies being held as hostages, really?  Of course it doesn't help that the IDF and Israeli Twitter accounts have often been tweeting out wild claims, misleading statements and the occasional fabrication.

Now there's still plenty of reason to think they will end up finding the promised secret tunnel complex.  Other Western nations have made the same claims, hopefully based on more than just repetition of Israeli intelligence.  Independent actors have made the same claims.  We know without any ambiguity that the tunnel network exists, based on Hamas themselves providing video footage of it.  We also know that Hamas fighters just spent several days fighting a pitched battle to defend this hospital, just as Israeli fighters spent several days battling to take it, which doesn't make any sense if either side knows there's not actually anything to find there.  It also seems rather stupid and pointless for Israel to lie about such a specific thing.

The one thing I can think of that would make it all somewhat add up is that Hamas used the hospital as a fortress but not as the entrance to an underground command center, and Israel exaggerated so they could justify besieging the fighters holed up inside.  That doesn't really square with the past behavior of either party though.

At any rate, if there is a tunnel complex under the hospital, they need to prove it to the world quickly.  Otherwise it will be a massive blow to their credibility that will rightfully engender allied skepticism of any future operations.

Meanwhile, here is what you said at the same time.  Instead of engaging with what we were being given rationally, you let your anti-Israel bias guide you to surefire confidence that there was no tunnel, and jumped straight to degradation of Israel based on this confidence.

That the IDF has been making decisions based on "common knowledge" is exactly how they identified Al-Shifa as a "Hamas command center" in the first place. That's the whole problem: they pretend they have some mindblowing sci-fi ground penetrating radar that gives them the scoop on where Hamas is at all times and then it turns out that they stormed a literal hospital and caused the death of dozens if not hundreds of patients on the basis of "common knowledge" acquired by decade old rumours.

Now as we all know, as it turned out, there was a tunnel under al-Shifa hospital.  Israel provided proof of this by digging up the tunnel, blowing open the entrance with explosives, providing video footage spanning the entire length of the tunnel, and allowing journalists to enter the tunnel and verify its authenticity.

Now similarly, it's entirely possible that Israel did open fire into the crowd and massacre hundreds of people.  I am not ruling it out.  But we have not seen any footage of it so far.  Just like with the al-Shifa tunnel, at the current time I am inclined to believe that we will never see any such evidence, because I find it very unlikely that this actually happened and far more likely that Hamas news sources are lying or exaggerating.  But if evidence comes out proving that the story is true, I will change my position and beliefs accordingly.

This is a complete and utter misrepresentation of what happened at Al-Shifa.

Israel did not say there was "a tunnel" under Al-Shifa because they could have said that about nearly every building in Gaza. What they said was that Al-Shifa was a Hamas command center (in fact IIRC they initially claimed it was literally their HQ) - you'll notice in the quote I did not say "tunnel" because that is not what we were promised - , and to support this claim they provided a completely unrealistic CG representation of an underground fortress that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the final product. Perhaps most crucially, despite initial IDF claims there were no entrances to the tunnel connected to the hospital, meaning there was zero justification to storm the buildings, drag off the hospital workers and shut down the functioning of the hospital, thereby killing dozens of babies in incubators. To say they weren't lying about Al-Shifa is like saying those absurd infographics about Osama's "underground fortress" at Tora Bora were accurate because there really were caves

Ironically, subsequent releases from the IDF of the tunnels Hamas is capable of building have proven that the ramshackle tunnels they found were certainly not any form of command center, since the actual command centers have been far more complex. Considering they had disposable attack tunnels wide enough to drive a car through it seems absurd to suggest that the tunnels near the hospital were anything near the level of significance necessary to justify the actions taken.

and this really illustrates your problem: the IDF provides the most basic, perfunctory "evidence" which either proves something that wasn't in dispute or proves far less than is claimed and you provide zero critical thought to questions like "did the IDF edit this footage? Does it really show the whole event?" and "is this comically tiny tunnel with no direct connection to the hospital actually sufficient justification for multiple dead babies"

Also, you have yet to address the core point that the IDF bears ultimate responsibility for providing humanitarian aid to the areas it claims to have secured, a responsibility it has consciously shirked to the point where children are literally starving to death as it allows protestors to block the border. This is after

* The IDF gunned down Hebrew speaking hostages waving white flags
* IDF snipers sniped civilians with zero justification, in one case directly in front of TV cameras and in another at a woman sheltering at a church
* IDF tanks killed an entire family, then killed the ambulances sent after despite having given the green light by the IDF
* Multiple leaders within the IDF declaring the intent to starve the population of Gaza to death

When you take all that context into account,

I don't think Israel opened fire into the crowd around the convoys and killed hundreds of people, which is how Hamas-aligned media is describing this.  If you want to decide to believe differently, that's fine, but you do not have any evidence for this.  It is supposition based on your priors.  The various pieces of evidence we have -- the cell-phone videos, the satellite footage, UN/doctor testimony -- do not give any proof that such an event occurred.  And when you are making an extraordinary claim -- that Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd of innocent people, massacred nearly 1000 victims, covered it up afterwards with full confidence that no evidence would be produced showing them to be liars, and then miraculously there was no video footage of this massacre -- you need to have a high standard of evidence.

looks like an absolutely ludicrous paragraph, because Israeli troops have opened fire on innocent Palestinians time and time and time again and have gotten away with it every time. They say "the incident is under investigation", nobody is prosecuted and everyone moves on while half-wits like you act like we don't already have countless examples of the IDF blatantly lying and totally getting away with it. The evidence has already shown them to be liars because IDF officials have made mutually contradictory statements. The IDF firing on crowds of innocent people isn't "extraordinary", it's just another day at the office for them. Last piece of evidence to throw on the pile:

Geneva - Initial investigations by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor confirm that Israeli army gunfire killed and wounded dozens of starving Palestinian civilians who were attempting to receive humanitarian aid in western Gaza at dawn on Thursday. The Israeli army is striving to disassociate itself from the atrocity, Euro-Med Monitor said, by releasing a shattered aerial video clip and arguing that the large number of civilian deaths was caused by a stampede and trampling.

In a brief statement, the rights organisation said that its research teams observed the event from the very first moments and recorded that Israeli tanks opened heavy fire on groups of Palestinian civilians attempting to receive humanitarian aid west and south of Gaza City. As a result, 112 civilians were killed and 760 were injured, while many victims are believed to remain in the targeted area.

Euro-Med Monitor stated that the evidence—which is supported by video footage showing the shooting operation—demonstrates that dozens of victims suffered gunshot wounds, rather than being run over or crushed, in contrast to what the Israeli army spokesman claimed.

The rights group highlighted four pieces of evidence confirming the Israeli army’s killing and wounding of starving civilians, the first of which is the signs of injuries on the bodies of the dead and injured. These injuries were documented by a Euro-Med Monitor researcher as soon as the victims arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital, as was the blood on flour bags and aid boxes.

The second piece of evidence is the footage released by the Israeli army itself, which includes audible evidence of gunfire emanating from Israeli tanks positioned near the coast, which the army purposefully covered up in the video using black; eyewitnesses have confirmed that the tanks were present close to the crime scene.

The third piece of evidence concerns the bullets’ distinct sound signature, said Euro-Med Monitor, which is audible in the footage released at the time of the shooting and identifies them as coming from an automatic weapon used by the Israeli army with 5.56 bullets.

Finally, the rights group stated that the aerial video published by the Israeli army is intentionally fragmented and distorted. At minute 1:06, however, the video footage does indicate the existence of at least two Israeli tanks, as well as multiple bodies, in the path of the tanks rather than the aid trucks.

The Geneva-based organisation noted that during minutes 1:06–1:28 in the video, the majority of those in attendance—including individuals who had initially been far from the aid trucks—can be seen fleeing from the trucks, i.e. running in the opposite direction. This indicates that the danger did not originate from the trucks themselves or from the surrounding crowd of people, but rather from an outside source that terrified everyone in the area, both close to and far away from the trucks. Furthermore, the video clip released by the Israeli army does not depict any ramming operations, which aligns with numerous survivors’ accounts of being shot in the back as they attempted to flee the scene.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor emphasised that under no circumstances should the veracity and credibility of footage released by Israel’s army to absolve itself of its crimes be accepted without first granting an independent external investigative body full access to the army’s data to review all of the information. If the international community immediately accepts Israel’s altered footage as fact, it will only result in an absurd scenario in which the Israeli army simultaneously acts as perpetrator, investigator, and judge.

In fact, Euro-Med Monitor added, the army’s video clip demonstrates Israel’s culpability, even if one ignores the edits and accepts the story of a “stampede”, as it reveals the extent of this Israeli-made humanitarian disaster and the crime of starvation that caused hordes of civilians to rush towards aid trucks today. As the entry and protection of these trucks are obstructed by Israeli army forces, starving Palestinians are seen risking their lives while trying to reach the trucks, which are located close to army concentration points.

Israeli forces clearly targeted starved civilians who did not pose any threat to them, contended Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, and whose only request was to receive a small amount of aid, despite the humiliating procedures that accompany the distribution process.

Euro-Med Monitor warned that the Israeli shooting of starving Palestinian civilians receiving aid has become a regular practice. In recent weeks, Israeli forces have directly attacked and killed dozens of people in Gaza City, including on Salah al-Din Street and in the vicinity of Kuwait Roundabout.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Yes, I know, one of us makes an effort to practice good forum etiquette by truncating long posts and highlighting just the parts we want to reply to, and the other just mashes the quote button and fills up the entire page with huge walls of quotes.

Most of his post was just a gish gallop of claims about al-Shifa hospital or claims of various bad things Israel has done.  The point of a gish gallop is to waste the other person's time and effort, since it takes you five minutes to dump a bunch of claims about Israel and takes me five hours to go through and verify or disprove each of them.  Literally his first claim was that Israel killed "dozens" of babies in incubators at al-Shifa hospital.  I Googled this, only eight babies died, so that was false.  Since the first one was false, I didn't bother with the rest.

"You claim the IDF killed dozens of babies but they actually only killed half a dozen babies. Checkmate, Israel haters!"

and this is literally the textbook example you provided about me being too hard on the IDF. They claim a hospital is a Hamas Command Center, they storm the hospital, they kill the babies on incubators (plus other patients, plus doctors), they find no entrance to the supposed HQ and then weeks later they turn up a tiny tunnel in the vague area of the hospital and you consider this proof that they were right from the start. It's not a "gish gallop", you're the one who wanted to use Al-Shifa as an example in the first place!

It doesn't even matter, because even if you accept that his entire post is true, in what way does it have bearing on the discussion?  None of his isolated incidents of Israeli soldiers harming or killing individual Palestinians bears any resemblance to the claimed cold-blooded mass-execution of hundreds, so they aren't even establishing a precedent, much less providing evidence that it happened.

Establishing the fact that IDF soldiers have a very long history of indiscriminately shooting at Palestinian civilians (or even Israeli hostages!) and facing zero consequence for it is, in fact, extremely relevant to the question of how implausible it is that they'd do the same on a larger scale. It also establishes that they're willing to make up absolutely absurd and implausible lies under the presumption that they'll never be seriously held accountable by their supporters if caught.

He also keeps strawmanning my position as "the IDF said it so it must be true" when I've literally said the opposite at multiple points.  At a certain point one gets tired of being strawmanned, or getting yanked in a different direction to a completely different argument after making a solid point.  I feel like I've made my point, no new information has come out to make further discussion worthwhile, so I'm pretty much done with this discussion.  Certainly I'm not going to continue indefinitely allowing myself to get dragged into tangential discussions.

My position is this:  IDF has told Story A, Hamas-aligned media organizations have told Story B.  There seems to be some evidence that Story A is correct, and there's virtually no evidence that Story B is correct, which is very suspicious since if it was correct you would expect lots of evidence.  Therefore, in my opinion, Story A is the more plausible of the two, and at the very least I am not going to enact the change in worldview that believing Story B would demand

If new evidence comes to light proving Story A -- for instance, if there's some drone footage Israel is hiding that shows tanks and soldiers firing on a big crowd of people at the food trucks -- then I will have a lot more to say.  If new evidence comes to light proving Story B, I probably won't have anything to say, because I already know that just like the other times Israel has been right, it will probably get swept under the rug and there will be no apologies from any of the outlets that rushed to report Story A, and the best concession we'll get is some goalpost-moving, just like with the al-Shifa hospital having a tunnel, but it wasn't Hamas HQ like the IDF and Amnesty International said, therefore Israel was lying about the entire thing and the whole siege of the hospital was a war crime.

On the one hand, we have drone footage provided by the IDF that proves nothing in particular. On the other, we have overwhelming eyewitness testimony, the composition of gunshot wounds vs blunt force trauma cases at the hospital confirmed by UN and EuroMedMonitor teams, the sound of the gunshots in video matching with the calibre used by the IDF, the initial statements by Israeli officials and literally every piece of evidence that doesn't come directly from the IDF all match the "IDF fired into the crowd" narrative.

Also speaking of goalpost moving, here is the video the IDF posted of what they claimed existed under Al Shifa:

https://twitter.com/cogatonline/status/1717911174350557234

Again: not "a tunnel", an underground HQ directly connected to the hospital. What they found is absolutely nothing like what they promised, and the fact that there was no connection to the hospital means that killing more babies than Hamas killed on Oct 7 to clear out the hospital was completely unjustified. I'm not even sure that they even proved that the tunnel was actually under the hospital, considering their long history of lying as to the actual location of tunnels to justify the destruction of civilian infrastructure like hospitals and graveyards.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

"You claim the IDF killed dozens of babies but they actually only killed half a dozen babies. Checkmate, Israel haters!"

See I knew, as soon as I wrote that I knew, with full certainty, that you were going to post something stupid like this.  Because that is the purpose of the lie.  You take something bad that Israel did, you exaggerate it so that it becomes something much worse than they did, and then when I correct you, you pretend like I am defending the bad thing Israel did.

For instance.

I agree that Israeli actions in the attack on al-Shifa led to the deaths of eight babies in incubators.  I am not disputing this!  But I am not going to let you get away with saying "dozens" of babies were killed.  That is a lie, and it is a lie you are telling intentionally so that you can exaggerate how awful Israel is.

I was going by memory because personally, I consider murdering babies in incubators to be a kind of moral event horizon regardless of whether the precise number is half a dozen or more. When Hamas was accused of beheading 40 babies it was generally considered gauche to start quibbling over exactly how many babies were killed or whether they were killed in some other manner because everyone understood that killing babies is evil. Whether Hamas killed 40 babies or 4 babies, we could all safely call them murderous terrorists who deserve destruction regardless of the exact number. Yet when it's the IDF killing babies suddenly we can't call it an atrocity until they've hit some arbitrary number.

I also agree that the IDF overestimated the scope of the base they expected to find under al-Shifa hospital.  I literally said this in my post.  It's entirely possible that they lied about this intentionally to defend their attack.  It's also possible they did not have good intel on the tunnel and were basing their claims on Amnesty International's reporting from 2014.  This does not mean that the tunnel was "tiny", or that there was "no connection to the hospital", or that "what they found was nothing like what they promised."  None of that is true -- the tunnel was just feet away from the hospital, ran under the hospital, drew power from the hospital, and was very long with many different sections and rooms.  There is literally a video of them going from outside the hospital, to down inside the tunnel, looking at all the wires coming down from the hospital up above, exploring all the rooms.  But you are still taking the fact that Israel was wrong (possibly lied) about it being Hamas's "headquarters" and using that to push for the notion that Israel lied about the whole thing.  I'll also note that you have switched from using the term "command center" (as in your original post) to "headquarters", which are very different things.

I say "headquarters" and "command center" because these are both terms the Israelis used. You'll notice I never said "tunnel" because, again, you could say that nearly every building in Gaza probably has a tunnel under or near it at some depth. I simply held the IDF to the standard of proving the claims they made, and those claims were found wanting. The tunnel, like literally every tunnel in Gaza, had basic features like lighting and power, but compared with subsequently discovered tunnels big enough to drive a car through it is absolutely "tiny" by comparison. The entrance to said tunnel was not in the hospital building and I've seen conflicting statements from the journalists they provided the guided tour as to whether it was actually on hospital grounds or if it was merely beside the hospital, a trick they used on CNN to justify destroying graveyards. Regardless, neither the location of the entrance nor the scale of the tunnel network justified storming a hospital and killing babies.

Now we are talking about an alleged massacre where Israeli soldiers shot nearly 1000 people.  To back up the notion that "Israel shoots people" you are posting assorted incidents where Israeli soldiers allegedly shot individual people or small groups of people.  Nowhere in here is there any precedent for Israel shooting 1000 people.  There is precedent for Israel shooting a small number of people, which is what I agree they did.  But you are trying to claim otherwise.

And I am just waiting for you to drop the "Israel only shot a couple dozen people rather than 1000, checkmate Israel haters!" mockery, because the truth doesn't matter, and when you harbor a seething hatred for Israel you can tell no difference between 1000 people getting shot and like 50 people getting shot, or between people getting massacred while trying to get food versus people getting shot because they were crowding around Israeli tanks and wouldn't disperse.  Because why bother making the distinction?  You can just pick the worst possible order of events and choose to believe that.  And run around for the rest of your life acting on your belief that Israeli soldiers massacred 1000 people in cold blood for just trying to get food.  Why bother learning the truth?

You seem to have a hard time with reading comprehension since you keep hinging these arguments on things that were never said.

Israel intentionally produced mass starvation among the civilian population in territory supposedly under its control, then Israeli soldiers fired into the crowd of starving people with the result that hundreds to over a thousand people are dead or wounded. That much is totally beyond dispute, and it would be an atrocity even if 90% of the casualties were the result of trampling, a claim in total contradiction to the claims by pretty much everyone besides the IDF. I'll repeat the Euro Med statement:

Euro-Med Monitor stated that the evidence—which is supported by video footage showing the shooting operation—demonstrates that dozens of victims suffered gunshot wounds, rather than being run over or crushed, in contrast to what the Israeli army spokesman claimed.

The rights group highlighted four pieces of evidence confirming the Israeli army’s killing and wounding of starving civilians, the first of which is the signs of injuries on the bodies of the dead and injured. These injuries were documented by a Euro-Med Monitor researcher as soon as the victims arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital, as was the blood on flour bags and aid boxes.

The second piece of evidence is the footage released by the Israeli army itself, which includes audible evidence of gunfire emanating from Israeli tanks positioned near the coast, which the army purposefully covered up in the video using black; eyewitnesses have confirmed that the tanks were present close to the crime scene.

The third piece of evidence concerns the bullets’ distinct sound signature, said Euro-Med Monitor, which is audible in the footage released at the time of the shooting and identifies them as coming from an automatic weapon used by the Israeli army with 5.56 bullets.

Finally, the rights group stated that the aerial video published by the Israeli army is intentionally fragmented and distorted. At minute 1:06, however, the video footage does indicate the existence of at least two Israeli tanks, as well as multiple bodies, in the path of the tanks rather than the aid trucks.

The Geneva-based organisation noted that during minutes 1:06–1:28 in the video, the majority of those in attendance—including individuals who had initially been far from the aid trucks—can be seen fleeing from the trucks, i.e. running in the opposite direction. This indicates that the danger did not originate from the trucks themselves or from the surrounding crowd of people, but rather from an outside source that terrified everyone in the area, both close to and far away from the trucks. Furthermore, the video clip released by the Israeli army does not depict any ramming operations, which aligns with numerous survivors’ accounts of being shot in the back as they attempted to flee the scene.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor emphasised that under no circumstances should the veracity and credibility of footage released by Israel’s army to absolve itself of its crimes be accepted without first granting an independent external investigative body full access to the army’s data to review all of the information. If the international community immediately accepts Israel’s altered footage as fact, it will only result in an absurd scenario in which the Israeli army simultaneously acts as perpetrator, investigator, and judge.

In fact, Euro-Med Monitor added, the army’s video clip demonstrates Israel’s culpability, even if one ignores the edits and accepts the story of a “stampede”, as it reveals the extent of this Israeli-made humanitarian disaster and the crime of starvation that caused hordes of civilians to rush towards aid trucks today. As the entry and protection of these trucks are obstructed by Israeli army forces, starving Palestinians are seen risking their lives while trying to reach the trucks, which are located close to army concentration points.

Israeli generals openly admit that they intend to use starvation and disease to create a humanitarian disaster to pressure Hamas:

https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1726326602399940867

If they succeed, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people will die. Yet I'm supposed to believe that shooting hundreds instead of dozens would somehow be out of character for the IDF?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Israeli generals openly admit that they intend to use starvation and disease to create a humanitarian disaster to pressure Hamas

I said I wasn't going to re-engage on this discussion and I am not going to, but I do just want to point out that this is another lie.

The "Israeli general" (singular) here is Giora Eiland, who retired from the IDF more than twenty years ago and has since been nothing but a pundit.

This is the equivalent of taking something Oliver North said on Fox News and going "look what the American generals are saying!"

You're a smart guy, so I am confident that you know this, but chose to write the above anyway.  I will let others make up their own minds as to why you would do this.

More like if Oliver North went on Fox News and said "Here's the plan: we're going to take over Baghdad, destroy the civilian infrastructure, then starve everyone to death with the goal of pressuring the insurgents"

then not long after, children in Baghdad are literally starving to death and comparisons are being drawn with Mogadishu as pro-government protesters block the entry of aid trucks with the tacit support of the authorities

then you show up to helpfully inform people that Oliver North is only a retired general, as if he isn't just describing reality

Opposition to the air drops is also something shared by Amnesty and other human rights groups, who feel the US is virtue signalling and should be instead pressuring Israel to let more aid in by land.

The counter to that is that much of northern Gaza is now lawless and the truck drivers aren't willing to risk their lives.

The counter to that counter is that the IDF should, as the occupying force, establish humanitarian zones in the territory under its control to manage the distribution of aid like every modern army ever

This isn't some unsolvable issue, if the IDF wanted aid to reach people in northern Gaza without the risk of looting they could do so trivially

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

The idea that American media is somehow biased against Israel is one of the most delusional takes I've ever seen in my entire life. What planet are some of you on?

Did you skip where I specified "extremist" media orgs, or is that word too many syllables for you?  I'm talking about The Intercept and their ilk, which as you surely know, have been screaming at the top of their lungs for five months and counting that 10/7 was a hoax, nobody was raped, only soldiers were kidnapped, and the only people who died were actually killed by Israel.

It's all part of this wild conspiracy theory that 10/7 was a false flag where Israel killed its own people as a pretext for invading Gaza and killing all the Palestinians.  Seems like a really fun thing to pretend to believe if you already bear a seething, all-consuming hatred for Israel.

What they've actually been screaming at the top of their lungs is that the New York Times, a supposed "legitimate news outlet",

* Cited made up atrocities from an ultra-orthodox organization led by an ex-terrorist serial pedophile

* Claimed people to have been victims of sexual assault who were not

* Hired unqualified writers with no journalistic experience who explicitly told their interviewees that the purpose of their article was "Hasbara" (aka propaganda)

There's no defending this Iraq War tier yellow journalism so the NYT has to completely pivot to instead do battle with a strawman. The fact that the NYT never bothered with a massive, front page investigation of the Palestinians sexually assaulted by Israelis should make it pretty obvious where the actual media biases lie.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

If that's true, then he needs to be prosecuted.

He will probably be treated as a hero by the same people who should be prosecuting him. Or at best they'll just ignore it.

He certainly won't face consequences, I'd wager a solid majority of Israelis agree with what he did.

If that's true, then why do you think that is?

Because Israel can freely commit war crimes live on camera and rest assured that Joe Biden will protect them from any repercussions. He said that there are literally no red lines and nothing would stop him from sending them weapons and protecting them from their enemies. If there are no consequences then why change?

EDIT: Technically the above isn't entirely correct; the war criminal in question did face consequences, specifically from the Hamas fighters who killed him, took his helmet cam and sent it to Al Jazeera. So technically he also can't be prosecuted because he's dead. The dangerous lesson plenty of people are internalizing right now is that the battlefield can deliver justice where "international law" and "the civilized Western world" fail.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

US and UK doctors in Washington to warn of IDF’s ‘appalling atrocities’ in Gaza:

A delegation of American and British doctors is in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration the Israeli military is systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes.

The doctors, who have recently returned from volunteering at Gaza’s besieged hospitals, are expected to meet White House officials and senior members of Congress this week to warn that pledges of increased aid to Palestinians under bombardment are largely meaningless without an immediate ceasefire to allow safe distribution of food and the revival of healthcare services.

Professor Nick Maynard, the former director for cancer services at Oxford University who worked at the al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza at the beginning of the year, accused the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of “appalling atrocities”.

“The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system,” he said.

“It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”

The UN says none of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is fully functional. A dozen are partially working and the others are destroyed. On Monday, the Israeli military again raided the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Medical staff said the IDF killed and arrested Palestinians inside the hospital.

The crisis in the hospitals has been compounded by the killing or arrest of hundreds of healthcare workers by the Israeli military. Last week the BBC reported that medical staff said they were stripped, beaten and tortured by Israeli troops during a raid on the Nasser hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip, where half the population is now displaced.

Maynard said he believed the closure and damage to the hospitals was part of a strategy to force Palestinians out of their homes.

“It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south,” he said.

in other war crimes from the world's most moral army,

* accusations of mass executions by the IDF at Al-Shifa
* an airstrike against Gazan civilians gratuitous enough to flip Alex Jones against Israel
* IDF soldiers bragging about their use of torture

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

in other war crimes from the world's most moral army,

* accusations of mass executions by the IDF at Al-Shifa
* an airstrike against Gazan civilians gratuitous enough to flip Alex Jones against Israel
* IDF soldiers bragging about their use of torture

You really are operating at a high level when you cite Alex Jones as a source.

Alex Jones isn't the source, he's citing the same gratuitous footage that turned Ed Snowden

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1770936325996155290

days later, yet another drone caught Israeli soldiers executing civilians with white flags and then burying the bodies with bulldozers

https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1773065074162213322

the IDF's drones have been a great source of war crime evidence, though these days they've gotten so sloppy that State Department officials are accusing the IDF of the systematic use of rape against Palestinian women (ironically we only found out because the Israelis, having never been held accountable for anything even in private, announced it openly)

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Alex Jones isn't the source, he's citing the same gratuitous footage that turned Ed Snowden

The pro-Israel accounts I follow have claimed that this footage is of Hamas soldiers being blown up on their way to plant an IED.  Naturally, since Hamas commits a war crime by disguising themselves as civilians, it is impossible to tell whether these guys were Hamas or civilians, and people are just going to believe what they want to believe.  They could even be civilians that Israel blew up because they thought they were Hamas, and it would still be Hamas's fault because if Hamas didn't disguise themselves as civilians it would be impossible to make such a mistake.

FWIW, the Israel side says the secondary explosion after the missile strike is the detonation of the IED they were carrying, which provides evidence that they were Hamas.  I haven't seen any evidence that they weren't Hamas, other than "they were dressed like civilians" and "well, Israel always lies".

I suppose if the standard is "I don't see any proof they aren't Hamas" is all you need then it's pretty hard to prove anything to you. I could provide the most gratuitous Nazi crimes caught on photograph and you could say "but maybe they're actually secret Soviet agents who totally deserved it (or at least that's what the Good German Soldiers believed because the dastardly Soviet agents use disguises)"

To normal human beings, though, it's pretty obvious what happened. Also, the secondary strikes on the wounded (a common tactic of the IDF) would be a war crime even if they had been walking around with RPGs and weren't guilty of the crime of living in Gaza and walking out in the open

The tweet you quoted here has been deleted but I found the Al Jazeera footage and it is just an extremely blurry video of someone getting shot on a beach, and then a cut to some footage of bulldozers around the dead body some time later.  I don't see any evidence that he was waving a white flag, nor that the bulldozers were to bury the body (which wouldn't be a bad thing anyway).  Regardless, if Israel shot a civilian waving a white flag, that is a war crime and a very bad thing.  But again the reason this happens is because Hamas will commit the war crime of waving a white flag to pretend to be civilians before opening fire on Israelis, so Israel is suspicious of white flags.  It all comes back to Hamas refusing to follow laws of war that are designed to protect the innocent.

Can you prove this, or are you just relying on the IDF's claims without any evidence again? Considering their long history of telling blatant lies to avoid prosecuting war criminals within their ranks why do you treat their statements to hold any more authority than those of Hamas?

Also, "Hamas is responsible for the Israelis shooting civilians waving white flags because they don't obey the laws of war" is a pretty bold take. The Israelis used human shields and sometimes fought out of uniform on October 7, does it therefore follow that they're responsible for Hamas shooting civilians?

Israel violating UN resolution by dropping bombs on Rafah.

https://twitter.com/mhdksafa/status/1772780840134553885

No more weapons.

Unless the US has a way to get the hostages back, cutting off Israel won't stop the war, it will only escalate it. Biden knows this.

What's your logic here? Cutting off US weapons doesn't materially affect the balance of power between Israel and Hamas and Hamas no longer has the power to escalate beyond what it's already doing. So are you suggesting that Israel is going to escalate things because it's not receiving military aid?

Absolutely. Placing Israel under a weapons embargo (which is what this would be) would give them a ticking clock. They would then seek to finish off the threat of Hamas in ways that would make the war up until now look like a walk in the park. This is a thoroughly predictable outcome, which is why Biden, a very smart and effective President, has not taken that tack especially given that he can wait Netanyahu out.

If Israel was under a weapons embargo their air force would be grounded, they'd have no bombs, no artillery and no Iron Dome. Short of literally nuking Gaza there is no way they could escalate in any meaningful sense without American support.