So they don’t want to disband UNRWA. Because then israel would be directly responsible the 2 million starving Palestinians locked inside their concentration camp
But israel also wants to make sure UNRWA is defunded. So that UNRWA doesn’t have to means to actually feed Palestinians. And of course block all of UNRWA food trucks claiming they are Hamas.
It’s like the Nazi’s committing genocide but trying to invoke plausible deniablity. Americans must be brainwashed harder than CCP drones to still believe this shit.
KInda blows me away how people don’t acknowledge the overt genocidality of Israel’s position towards Palestine. Just call them rats, Yoav Gallant, we all know that’s what you mean. People all over social media are celebrating the actual ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
And after everything since the Nakba, we’re supposed to be surprised that the political situation in Gaza has deteriorated to the point where the government is just a pack of terrorists. We’re supposed to be confused as to how that could happen.
The attack by Hamas is chilling, but punishing all Gazans for what their government has done is collective punishment, and also presupposes a lot of things (ie, “they voted for Hamas” – 44% of the electorate voted for Hamas, which means 56%, the actual majority, voted against Hamas, and they voted once, 17 years ago, so really, less than half of the electorate ever approved Hamas, but also, collective punishment is a war crime)
It seems likely Israel will succeed in clearing Gaza, because they’ve had the upper hand here and have since they stole the entire country at gunpoint with UN backing. This is depressing, but I don’t see how massacres will help anything. If anything, further violence just seems to play into Israel’s hand.
EDIT: it’s been 17 years, not 13, since the last elections in Gaza
EDIT: Corrected typo, this was early in the day for me sorry everybody, also fixed slightly incorrect info re elections, admittedly not the most up to date on the current situation over there, but at this point I believe the info in my post is at least overall correct
Mahmoud Abbas, president of Palestine and head of Fatah, was the one to suspend both legislative and presidential elections and not Hamas. In fact, the latter “strongly opposed the decision to call off elections” (npr.org).
Abbas’ party has been working closely with the Israeli authorities. His excuse was that “Israel refused to commit to allowing Palestinians to vote in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem” (npr.org).
Some (quite convincingly) hypothesise that the suspension of the elections was aimed at preserving his presidency and salvage “his fractured Fatah party [which] was expected to suffer another embarrassing defeat to Hamas.” (apnews.com).
How can one expect the people to not fight if democracy can’t be exercised freely?
Thanks for the updates, I wasn’t aware there had been scotched election plans in the last few years. I follow various global situations but Israel-Palestine is so hopeless it’s honestly hard to keep up with. It’s worth noting Hamas has also scotched attempts to hold elections since 2006. Interesting to note they called for municipal elections 10 days ago and apparently intended to discuss with the PA such elections at the same time as they were planning an actual massacre whose only strategic merits I have even heard suggested are “Israel’s response will galvanize Gaza against Israel,” except I’m not sure what iron resolve does against a military with IDF’s resources and lack of restraint.
Anyways, they can fight if they think it will help, but given how more or less every single armed conflict has panned out ultimately in Israel’s favor, I’d question if in their case going even harder and massacring civilians even harder is really going to help anything.
Since legislative/presidential elections haven’t actually been held since 2006, we can’t really know if the 44% of the vote (in a vote which had 76% turnout, so really, about 33% of all eligible voters, similar democratic mandates as GW Bush or Trump) would even still support Hamas today, so it’s a little generous to say Hamas massacring civilians is the same as “The Palestinian people fighting”
Inquiry into Detention in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
These guys are no joke, they have done this before. But more importantly, the comment that got them suspended?
“We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by, whether it is the Jewish lobby or it is specific NGOs, a lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us,” he said in the interview.
But above all that, the excuse that Israel is using is:
When asked by The Times of Israel what these claims were based on, Haiat said, “The commission of inquiry is there to investigate Israel without any time limits, unlike any other commission of inquiry from the UN system.
Keep in mind, not even the investigation team knows how long it will take, so of course there won't be a time frame. And they work for the UN, why do they need one?
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — 1.9 million people — have been internally displaced by the war […] displaced Gazans are reportedly living in squalid, overcrowded winter conditions with little clean water for drinking and washing.
Conditions are considerably worse now with the near-complete lack of fuel and electricity to operate sewage treatment equipment and hundreds of tons of garbage piling up daily in southern Gaza.
“Without enough latrines, open-air defecation is prevalent, increasing concerns of further spread of disease, particularly during rains and related flooding,” said a December 22 update from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
According to OCHA, it is projected that by February, the entire population of Gaza (approximately 2.2 million people) will experience severe food insecurity. This, in combination with a lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene, could lead to a completely dire health situation, said the World Health Organization.
Davidovitch and Calderon-Margalit were among a group of public health physicians who condemned a provocative statement by former head of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland in a November 21 interview with the Hebrew-language financial publication Globes. Eiland suggested that humanitarian aid should be denied to Gaza so that epidemics would spread and lead Hamas to surrender more quickly.
Add biological warfare to the growing list of crimes against humanity committed by the Zionist entity in just the past couple months.
Ya it’s like they’re using the multiple billions of dollars we’ve invested in spy satellites and other technologies to track people against Hamas or something…
It just seems that in USA it’s self they can know about a guy whose been calling for help because he’s on the verge of shooting up a place and they don’t do nothing about it until they start shooting things up. US intelligence seems incredibly dysfunctional and if they can’t sort things out at home I don’t know how they would figure these things out abroad.
Internal affair with 1 citizen is a police matter. Terrorists are the intelligence community’s focus. The same organizations wouldn’t be involved in both examples.
Literally every violent conflict is filled wth abuses on all sides.
Having mercifully never been in a war, I don’t know how it feels. But it’s easy to see how individual soldiers just snap, and do completely unhinged shit.
For example we all agree the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were despicable. Yet learning about how Allied soldiers would execute prisoners, extract body parts (teeth, ears) as trophies, and so on, really brought home to me how even the most “necessary” wars, even in self-defense, are grotesque perversions of human nature.
Reminder that the West Bank is under Israeli occupation against international law (UN resolutions 446, 452, 465, 471, 476 (not an exhaustive list); the Venice Declaration) since 1967. The only countries to deny illegality are: Israel (and the US if you believe Donald Trump lol). This is an exhaustive list.
The comments on that article are really missing the point that leveling a city block to kill a few terrorists almost invariably means you created more terrorists than you killed.
Unfortunately I'm not so sure they're missing the point. I'm afraid there's quite a few people who are just excited to see their scheduled genocide put into motion.
Far too many people seem to be itching to find an enemy, all so they can justify their desire for vindictive bloodlust.
Finding an enemy, anyone, to rally angry and hate-fueled people has been a solid political staple for at least the last decade or so. The only “new”-ish part is that a lot of people are dying as a direct result of that now.
In the past Israel beloved that. But the organization of Hamas has scared them. They believe that they need to destroy the Command and Control infrastructure Hamas has for its 40k person military or Hamas will simply organize followup slave raids.
The ultimate tragedy of the last few weeks is that the average Israeli will only be more radicalized against Palestine, while the average Palestinian will only be more radicalized against Israel. It's a perpetual cycle of anger and violence that has no end in sight, and I don't feel any hope for a better future for the region and the innocent people on either side of the conflict.
What should have happened, like yesterday, should be obvious to anyone with a brain and a heart: Hamas should free all of their hostages and turn over anybody who participated in the terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, and Israel should cease fire immediately, call all settlers back and return the Gaza borders back to what they were a month ago. Terrorism and genocide are inexcusable, and the simple fact is that both sides have the blood of the innocent on their hands, all because of the politics of greed.
Hamas wants “peace” in the form of a repressive Islamic state which is run by Sharia law. They are not friends to the Palestinian people. They are Iranian puppets.
Wow look at all those downvote for stating a fact. The pro-Israel crowd sure is sensitive when facts that don’t agree with their propaganda are mentioned.
Like in any war of occupation: the ever more militarized government of the occupier and the ever more militarized force of the occupied are objective allies.
We shouldn’t be.
The only solution to the region is a Palestine that is prosperous and free. So long as people have nothing to lose, they will continue laying down their lives.
The first thing that should have happened is the dethroning of Netanyahu. The fact the guy who let it happen is still in charge is by far the biggest cause of this.
They know this, that’s the point, they want a biting dog that you can euthanize instead of the calm golden lab everyone will be upset with you for putting down
Is this the only thing that troubles you? Hamas creates terrorists anyway. Palestinians are being told they need to kill Jews in order to become heroes, which will get them money they really need. It’s not much different from Russia where people are led by propaganda but ultimately decide to abandon peaceful life for a chance to get big money.
You prefer calling a truth you don’t like useless? Because it’s the truth that hamas will not be able to achieve its goals (kill all jews and destroy Israel) using what they have and receive as aid, even if they build tons of missiles they usually build. This is not how you “fight for freedom” because the freedom will never be the result of it. They need to change a lot in order to even try better. For example build defenses along with missiles for a change etc.
I did this kind of work for a bit. I really do think this was more of a 9/11 slash Pearl Harbor kind of thing. It has that feel all over it. I think it was an epic and world (or at least region) changing fuckup.
I do not doubt the current government of Israel has used Hamas as a cat’s paw. I think the constant low level violence cost them little and produced huge political returns for the most far-right government in the history of the country. But I think this was unanticipated in scale and scope, and that both the attack and the response were far beyond what anyone - Israel and Hamas included - would have intended.
There will always be the Monday morning quarterbacks who will quite rightly point out that the information was just there. Looking backwards, we can reverse-solve the problem and say that we could have (or even did) know about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Oct 6. The truth is that we know shitloads of things, all the time. We have a constant flow of information, from all corners of the world. We even have constant fire hoses of information from our allies and even our own citizens.
The paradox of the panopticon is that when you’re looking everywhere, you’re really looking nowhere. There’s not ten thousand people in a bunker in North Dakota watching monitors. There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday and overnight, and write up summaries that themselves get summarized. If they have too many sources of information, it’s all processed algorithmically first, but it’s still a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
We need to fix that. We cannot surveil everything, even with our best and brightest working on technical solutions. But at the end of the day, these are human in the loop systems, and sometimes people fuck up. Sometimes they fuck up royally, and they lose the playoffs or they start a war.
I think it’s done at this point. The system fucked yo, and now a lot of people are going to die, afraid and in pain, because that’s what we do and we just don’t have it in us to stop doing that kind of thing quite yet. I quit the business and know others that did, but at the end of the day there’s still people who think other people need to be killed, and a second group of people who buy the argument and are good with doing it.
I think that the conspiracy theories will continue to fly as they tend to do, but this really just smells like a colossal fuckup in which 20-30k civilians are going to die, and it’s just a train that doesn’t have the ability to stop at this point.
I appreciate your well thought response, but I think the comparisons with 9/11 and Pearl Harbor are weak.
For 9/11, the USA had no incentive to let 9/11 happen. And it was a very novel attack that nobody was predicting. Conspiracy theories on 9/11 have no credibility for those reasons.
Pearl harbor is a little bit different. The USA was definitely pushing Japan and could have expected them to respond. But US leadership thought the Japanese wouldn’t want to drag the USA into the war through an obvious act of war. History is clear that US leadership could have expected it, but gambled on Japanese leadership making a different choice.
This attack is different. The only surprise is the extent of the success.
Israeli leadership has been baiting and nurturing Palestinian terrorism for decades in order to have support for land grabs and ethnic cleansing.
This time they just got burned harder than they expected.
Yo we spent like 4 trillion dollars on war. What the fuck do you mean there was no incentive? The billionaires accumulated like half of the countries GDP for 2 decades.
There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday
You're speaking as if Palantir etc didn't exist. In a world where every 10 year old in the West can get Chat GPT to help with homework, why would we believe that govt level networked surveillance is like something straight out of an old John Le Carré novel?
If only because no way Bibi would actually bomb his political career forever, and go down in history as a failure, for this. This current government is finished, they will put the keys on the table. The majority of Israel already wanted them out of office, especially Bibi, now? They’re responsible for the worst event in Israel’s existence, to its existence…
There are warnings all the time. The intelligence failed, the protections failed, and we paid the price.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” Guterres said.
He later added that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
It kind of sounds like they’re deliberately misinterpreting what he said.
When you’re a thin-skinned fascist conducting ethno-religious cleansing, any criticism must be met with absolute resistance. Fascism requires extreme black-and-white thinking and complete rejection of nuance.
We see the same pattern in the US with the MAGA movement, where even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Liz Cheney get demonized for “betraying” their “side”. Facts and nuance are rejected, and the only thing that matters is team loyalty.
They openly say antizionism is the same as antisemitism, even that Jewish peace groups protesting at the US capitol for a ceasefire weren’t Jews.
Having experienced the news cycles for the previous 3 escalations of this conflict, this time around it’s very different. The Israeli press and propaganda is making it very obvious how they’re trying so hard to control the perception of this conflict, and that alone draws suspicion because it’s of such low quality.
And that’s exactly why “we” shouldn’t let that kind of behavior slide.
The impulse for revenge is understandable, but a statesman shouldn’t use the diplomatic equivalent of autistic screeching as a political tool. That’s pathetic on a personal level and not helpful on a political level.
The proposal comes following Netanyahu's rejection of a Hamas offer that sought an end to the war in return for the release of the remaining hostages.
The Israeli government has offered a new proposal to Hamas that would see a two-month ceasefire in return for the release of Israeli hostages, after rebuffing a Hamas offer.
It is also unknown if any of the over 6,000 Palestinians that have been detained by the Israeli military since 7 October from the occupied West Bank will be included in the deal.
Some 250 hostages were taken during Hamas' attack on Israel on 7 October, with 130 being released during a one-week ceasefire in November.
Families of the Israeli hostages have ramped up calls for their release, with protests occurring outside Netanyahu's house and inside the Israeli Knesset on Sunday.
UN agencies have repeatedly called for a ceasefire for an increase in humanitarian aid into Gaza, as UNRWA reports that 570,000 people face catastrophic hunger in the enclave.
timesofisrael.com
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