It’s sick. I don’t know how else to describe it. Parsing out population numbers to try to prove that violence didn’t happen, or didn’t happen enough, to count. The reduction of human beings and their suffering to an accounting gotcha.
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral it’s not an accounting gotcha. from the best quality info we have available, Israel is killing scores of hamas fighters with less collateral damage than the US wrought in Mosul when ISIS terrorists were rooted out of the city building by building.
“Collateral damage” is a euphemism for murdering innocent people, and morality is not a contest with scores. The IDF is not justified in murdering innocent people in Gaza any more than the US was in Mosul.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@zakalwe the US was absolutely justified in destroying ISIS, an organization responsible for many sufferings and evil. your conception of collateral damage is flawed, to put it mildly.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@zakalwe ok, so a terrorist entity can obtain unlimited license to strike a neighboring nation with impunity just so long as they have some innocent victims they can coerce into being used as human shields?
I was not aware that the two options available to a nuclear-armed regional hegemon with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world were “kill thousands of children” and “do absolutely nothing.” Thanks for clearing that up, General 8124.
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral i’m being sincere. what would you have Israel do? surrender to hamas and accept all future attacks with no response until Israel is gone?
I believe all people, including Israelis, have the right to self-defense. A right to self-defense, definitionally, cannot extend to people who have not harmed you. If you harm people who have not harmed you, you become their aggressor, and they are justified in violently defending themselves against you. This is as equally true for Palestinians resisting the occupation as it is for Israelis defending themselves from Hamas.
“We face such a terrible threat or suffered such a heinous harm that we’re justified in harming anyone we want, because the ends justify the means,” is identical logic by both Hamas and IDF apologists.
@8124@HeavenlyPossum@aral Stop trying to turn this into a false dichotomy of "Israel vs. Hamas". Hamas is not in the right here. Neither is the Israeli government. Both are in the WRONG. It is the Israeli and Palestinian people who just want to live together in peace who are in the right. The Hamas attack was an atrocity. And so is the Israeli government's response. To try to pretend that you have to pick one or the other, in order to excuse ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter of civilians, is a bald-faced lie.
@8124@HeavenlyPossum@aral Well, Israel COULD have not deliberately derailed the peace process twenty or thirty years ago. Israel COULD treat Palestinians like human beings instead of spreading dehumanizing rhetoric and saying that they are no better than animals. Israel COULD allow Palestinians a decent, humane standard of living so that there is not a vast well of disaffected youth for Hamas to recruit from. Bibi Netanyahu COULD have chosen not to SUPPORT HAMAS because he would rather have a strong Hamas than have peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu and Likud CREATED this situation. All they had to do was not create it. This is on Bibi's head. If Yitzhak Rabin's peace process had been allowed to go through, Hamas would have withered on the vine, its purpose spent.
Now that it has been created, the onus is upon those who created it to undo what they built. And if that means going door to door looking for Hamas, then bite the damn bullet and go door to door looking for Hamas. But just bombing the entirety of Gaza to rubble is an atrocity.
@zakalwe@aral@HeavenlyPossum hamas could have created a second Singapore in 2005 and instead chose endless war. even hamas members are still human and can still choose to do the right thing at any moment by immediately releasing the hostages and surrendering unconditionally.
Of course, Hamas isn't going to do that, because they're a catspaw for Iran and Vladimir Putin. So it falls to Israel to stop just escalating the violence forever.
@zakalwe@aral@HeavenlyPossum you would never expect that of any other nation because the demand amounts to suicide. the options for deescalation have been exhausted so the only route to peace left is through crushing hamas.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@zakalwe you dodged my question, how luxurious to just criticize Israel all day while never providing realistic suggestions for improvement, which you should know suggests that there are none.
I think you’d benefit from working through this yourself. If it were you, what would you suggest to the IDF to persuade them not to murder you and your family?
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@zakalwe@szczur now you’re dodging questions on behalf of others lol. take your own advice. anyway i wouldn’t try to persuade the IDF of anything. i would move to where the IDF told me to go. i would not obey hamas and shelter in place.
Many Palestinians have departed their homes and been killed at or en route to places they believed were safe.
Some lack the physical means of leaving. They are elderly, infirm, sick, or very young. Some are infants in incubators in ICUs. What might you suggest to the IDF if it were your child in an incubator, unable to move to where the IDF told you to go?
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral@szczur the hamas and islamic jihad terrorists don’t want them to leave and they’re also famously terrible at aiming rockets.
I’m also now trying to imagine a scenario in which some of these Palestinian civilians got their hands on rockets and fired them at IDF targets to protect Palestinians from IDF attacks. You’d be ok with that? If they have advanced notice to civilians in the path of those rockets and told them to leave their homes, in case the rockets missed, that would be ok with you?
Palestinian civilians are being killed by IDF attacks which, if we follow your logic, grants them an equal right to defend themselves against the IDF that Israelis possessed following 7 Oct.
By your logic, those Palestinians can fire rockets at the IDF. If they gave warning to Israeli civilians, those Israelis would—by your logic—be obligated to flee. If any stayed in their homes and were killed by Palestinian rockets, it would be their own fault, per your logic.
@HeavenlyPossum@szczur@zakalwe@aral your reasoning chains are severely broken, there are too many errors, it's going to cost me too much time to correct them.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@szczur@zakalwe wouldn’t say anything. i would respond to their warnings and move where i was asked to. what would you do? go down with the ship singing hamas praises?
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@zakalwe and you dodge again. i'm not going to answer any more of your questions until you answer the question i sent you a link to, after you denied my having ever asked you one.
Your baby is in an incubator in an ICU and you cannot flee or your child will die. What could you say to the IDF not to bomb you and your child?
Could you ask them to use weapons and tactics other than indiscriminate air raids against civilian infrastructure?
There’s literally nothing I can suggest that you won’t try to twist into evidence somehow of anti-Semitism, because you’re a troll, so I’d really like you to think this through yourself and see if you can come with anything on your own.
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral the difference is that Israel doesn’t target civilians. this is the crucial point you are missing. i understand a life is a life. war is horrible and it’s about selecting the least bad options.
But even if that were the case, the distinction is sophistry. A policy of restraint that routinely and predictably produces civilian casualties year after year is indistinguishable from a policy of deliberate violence against civilians.
The point of a system is what it does, not what its cheerleaders claim it is for.
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral that’s a serious allegation, what do you base it on? when one of the parties intentions and founding purpose are openly genocidal, these distinctions do begin to matter. this is the source of your moral failure.
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral there will always be isolated incidents of criminality, even among the most law-abiding nations on Earth. the reason is that humanity has not yet determined how to attain perfection of itself. you linked to a far left publication citing one of Israel’s most left leaning organizations, by the way. from 2009 (when peace with hamas was still thought to be somehow possible)
@HeavenlyPossum@zakalwe@aral i can’t because i truly believe that the IDF is doing the most it possibly can to cause as few innocent deaths as possible. the most i’ll say is that the unity government should be doing more to reign in the settler extremists in the West Bank, and i think they’re beginning to do just that
Let’s imagine that Bad Guy has harmed Good Guy and taken hostages. Bad Guy then hides out near your home with some hostages. Good Guy is very apologetic but has informed you that its only options are to drop a bomb on Bad Guy—killing you, your family, your neighbors, and potentially the hostage—or to surrender to Bad Guy to be murdered.
You try to persuade Good Guy not to murder you and your family. What’s one possible alternative you could propose to persuade Good Guy not to murder you and your family?
@HeavenlyPossum@aral there are well over 300k civilian deaths in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, a place where genocidal weapons were used by Bashar al-Assad and nothing was done about it. were you outraged about that?
@8124@HeavenlyPossum@aral I am assuming that you're an adult and as such, far too old to be asking "What about..." when confronted with specific cases of wrongdoing. Please find true North.
@HeavenlyPossum@Adam_Cadmon1@aral ethnic identity is not being targeted, what a joke, hamas is being targeted. humanitarian convoys and 100+ aid trucks per day do not comport with genocidal intent.
The Israeli demand for Palestinians to evacuate the northern third of Gaza is ethnic cleansing.
Allowing in only a bare fraction of the resources needed to sustain the lives of Palestinians in Gaza is not inconsistent with the genocidal goal of expelling Palestinians from Gaza, which is something that the Israeli government has openly considered.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@Adam_Cadmon1@8124 and when were residents of Gaza forced to leave Gaza? pretty sure they’re still there, in the designated safe zone to receive international aid, and after hamas is gone they’ll probably return to their homes and begin the process of rebuilding.
Residents of Gaza cannot leave Gaza, because Israeli forces murder them when they try.
They will not be able to return to their homes because Israeli forces have already, in the last few weeks, damaged or destroyed fully half of all residential units in Gaza.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@8124@Adam_Cadmon1 no, hamas is attacking them. and try to apply some basic logic here. hamas is incentivized to maximize innocent loss of life. Israel is incentivized in the opposite direction. therefore who is the most likely culprit behind attacks on civilians fleeing to safety?
yeah, sometimes you have to rebuild after war. that’s why most people don’t want war.
I am aware that Hamas has attacked people to prevent them from fleeing parts of Gaza to other parts of Gaza.
Palestinians cannot leave Gaza—what I wrote above—because Israeli forces will murder them if they attempt to leave. Israel mined the sea so they cannot leave by boat. Israeli forces shoot Palestinians in Gaza if they approach the fence that surrounds Gaza. Israel destroyed Gaza’s airport and controls Gaza’s airspace. Palestinians cannot flee Gaza because Israel forces will murder them.
@HeavenlyPossum@8124@Adam_Cadmon1@aral you seem to have conveniently forgotten the Egyptian border, and the countries who for all their supposed concern refuse to admit any refugees to their land.
As I have repeatedly noted elsewhere, the fact that the Israeli state cooperates with its ally, the Egyptian military dictatorship, to enforce its blockade of Gaza and prevent exit from the territory by Palestinians does not somehow exonerate the Israeli state.
@HeavenlyPossum@Adam_Cadmon1@aral@8124 you’ll have to forgive me if i didn’t read every word of your low-effort sophistry. Egypt and Israel have a peace treaty, describing them as allies is…interesting. so do the countries who profess concern about the Palestinian cause, including Egypt, actually give two shits about them? or is it more like they just hate Jews and Palestinians are a useful instrument to wield in their quest?
I have never once defended any of the various dictatorships that rule over Arab publics. The crimes of Arab dictatorships do not change Israel’s blockade of Gaza or exonerate Israel from its murder of Palestinians who have attempted to escape.
@HeavenlyPossum@8124@Adam_Cadmon1@aral if your point is that Israel is under some obligation to open the border to Gaza after October 7th then we’re done. and if at least one of your followers reads this and unsubscribes, the world will be a better place for it.
You asked “when were residents of Gaza forced to leave Gaza?”
I explained that Gazans cannot leave Gaza, because they will be murdered by Israeli forces if they try; this has been in place for decades and is not a security response to 7 October.
Of course, many thousands of Palestinians have been expelled from their homes in Gaza by Israeli bombardments, but none of them have been forced out of Gaza itself, because they will be murdered if they try to leave.
@HeavenlyPossum@8124@aral@Adam_Cadmon1 again, Israel does not control the border of Egypt, so if your contention is that Israel must allow Gazans to cross into Israel, any reader would be right to question your moral character and even your credentials as a “conflict observer”, when it is likely that you stole someone else’s work.
@HeavenlyPossum@8124@aral I'm asking rhetorical questions that I know that guy can't answer without twisting himself into a moral donut. But he's going to try and fire back.
@8124@HeavenlyPossum@aral Do you honestly think at the end of this Hamas will be eliminated or is it more likely that Israel is radicalizing the members of Hamas 2.0 even as idiots like you cheer them on?
Israel has never militarily “eliminated” an adversary, but it has achieved durable peace with multiple former enemies by negotiating treaties with them, one of which entailed the return of conquered land to Egypt.
Of course, doing that with the Palestinians would mean abandoning the occupation, and the Israeli state clearly prioritizes maintaining the occupation over peace.
@HeavenlyPossum@Adam_Cadmon1@aral Israel tried this in 2005, hamas immediately set about trying to fulfill their genocidal vision “by any means necessary”
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@Adam_Cadmon1 did Israel leave Gaza or not? was Gaza not ideally situated to become the next Singapore, if it weren’t for the genocidal death cult UNRWA schools?
The Israeli state withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza, but retained control of Gaza’s borders; airspace; sea access; water; electricity; imports of food, fuel, and medicine; customs revenue; and telecommunications, so I can’t agree that Israel “left” Gaza.
Israel’s disengagement was explicitly designed to end the peace process, not reach a peace agreement with the PA. Repeating falsehoods will not turn them into facts.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@Adam_Cadmon1 the blockade was imposed AFTER hamas broke the ceasefire. hamas is more committed to destroying Israel then governing Gaza and it’s a tragedy for everyone who lives there and has nothing to do with the terror
Israel’s blockade began in 2005 and became permanent in 2007. Hamas is indeed vile and I hope for its overthrow and defeat. This does not change such facts as: a) Israel has continued to occupy Gaza even after 2005, and b) Israel did not disengage from Gaza in 2005 for peace.
When we talk about one country occupying another, we do not have to demonstrate that soldiers literally occupied every square meter of surface area in the occupied country. We likewise would not consider prisoners to be free because guards patrolled the walls of their prison but were not physically present in each individual cell.
I assure you that I am comfortably and extensively familiar with this concept.
I’ve struggled to find a better way to describe Gaza than “concentration camp.” Maybe Bantustan? Gaza remains under Israeli occupation in the same sense that a prison is defined by its walls.
@HeavenlyPossum@Adam_Cadmon1@aral your true colors are showing, accusing Israel of being the real nazis is a common antisemitic trope. once again, who administered Gaza before October 7th? Israel, or hamas?
Concentration camps are unfortunately not unique to the Nazis—the British invented the modern incarnation during the Boer Wars. Priory to 7 October, Hamas administered Gaza as an Israeli proxy, like the various Bantustan governments managed the Bantustans on behalf of apartheid South Africa despite their nominal “independence.”
@8124@HeavenlyPossum@aral How is razing Gaza--and in the process killing over 10K civilians, in a month--self defense? How is bombing ambulance convoys, hospitals and residential neighborhoods self defense?
@Adam_Cadmon1@HeavenlyPossum@aral 10k civilians is a hamas figure. why won’t hamas share the number of militant deaths among the overall (likely inflated) casualty numbers? they 100% know the identities of all of their own combatants who number ~ 30-40k.
secondly, hamas has been recorded bragging about using ambulances to transport combatants and weapons because its “safer” yeah no shit. it’s also an illegal war crime known as “human shields”
UNICEF has corroborated the casualty numbers and we can extrapolate to essentially the same figure from numbers of UN personnel killed by Israeli forces. Considering the intensity of Israel’s assault on civilian infrastructure, there’s no material reason to doubt the casualty numbers.
Both Hamas and the Israeli state commit the illegal war crime of using human shields:
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@Adam_Cadmon1 oh yeah they did? they signed off on those wholly accurate hamas numbers, which don’t even attempt to describe combatant vs civilian ratios, for reasons that aren’t suspicious at all?
@8124@HeavenlyPossum@aral so...your logic suggests that because Hamas "brags" about using human shields, it's ok to kill those human shields in pursuit of Hamas? Do you hear yourself, buddy?
@Adam_Cadmon1@HeavenlyPossum@aral that’s what makes human shields a war crime. hamas attacks and then runs and hides behind them. you seem to think the only moral course of action is for Israel to stop fighting back, which would be suicide for any nation. read a history book
I am hard-pressed to believe that Israel’s only self-defense choices are “murder however many innocent people it wants” and “do literally nothing at all.”
In any case, the IDF also uses human shields, and this does not justify violence against Israeli civilians.
I would like to understand how a military objective of “end Hamas” in the manner it is being carried out currently will work unless the current population is eliminated. It’s seems like something Russia & USA learned in Afghanistan.
It almost certainly won’t, as repeated Israeli military interventions into Gaza at enormous civilian expense but little security success have demonstrated.
@roo_44@HeavenlyPossum@Adam_Cadmon1@aral it works by establishing humanitarian corridors and aid conduits, conducting operations to kill as many hamas as possible, for example by baiting ambushes, and realizing that time is not on the hamas side and they’re gonna run out of fuel for ventilation and then surrender, either by sheepishly emerging from a tunnel entrance or by barging out of a tunnel entrance waving a rifle.
The IDF has not established humanitarian corridors; it has only reluctantly allowed an inadequate quantity of resources into Gaza.
In contrast to your “baiting ambushes” approach (something you’ve argued literally can’t exist, as it’s not one of the Only Two Options Available to Israel), the IDF has dropped more munitions onto Gaza in a few weeks than the US did on all of Afghanistan in years, a massive and murderous air campaign of collective punishment.
@HeavenlyPossum@Adam_Cadmon1@aral@roo_44 how many trucks did the international aid community ask for? 100. how many did Israel allow to cross Rafah? 100. you say it’s inadequate for you. nothing will be enough you because you hate Jews.
@8124 No, this has nothing to do with antisemitism. It’s just a matter of recognizing a regional superpower using it’s power to level a city inhabited by 2 million people.
@szczur@HeavenlyPossum@roo_44@aral@Adam_Cadmon1 totally, that's why it is now pausing fighting in the north daily for 6 days in a row, now up to four hours per day to allow as many civilians to evacuate as possible to the designated safe area in the south with field hospitals and other international aid available, because it obviously doesn't care about the innocent, does it. and you should be informed that hamas has been caught firing upon those trying to leave, so many are still trapped.
@8124 I don’t care about Hamas, because they are scum too. And I condemn them. But I do worry more about a superpower with severe symptoms of warcrimesosis. Because you know, these 10k people dead weren’t Hamas.
@szczur@HeavenlyPossum@roo_44@aral@Adam_Cadmon1 and how would you know that? hamas has anywhere from 20-40k combatants. they 100% know the identities of all of their fighters, so why doesn't the hamas health ministry publish the military/civilian breakdown in casualty numbers, which also include deaths from their own rocket misfires?? it's more likely that a relatively high (by modern standards) percentage were combatants, of a smaller total number as well.
100 trucks per day to meet the material needs of 2 million people in dire humanitarian conditions, including children facing amputations without anesthesia, in the face of massive infrastructure loss, following weeks of a total Israeli closure of imports and years of blockade, are inadequate. That is not Jew hatred—I assure you, I love my children—but rather math.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@Adam_Cadmon1@roo_44 100 trucks is the quantity requested by international aid organizations, good to know it's inadequate based on your expert opinion though
@MnemosyneSinger@Adam_Cadmon1@HeavenlyPossum@aral ok, for the purposes of discussion let’s say it’s 20k. hamas knows the identities of 100% of their own combatants, so the civilized world is left guessing for now. does this change any conclusion?
@julieofthespirits@HeavenlyPossum@aral i am outraged that hamas prioritizes the destruction of Israel over providing for their population, siphoning aid meant for them, to build tunnels, rockets to attack Israel with instead, commits the atrocity known as October 7th and then hides behind their innocent people. it deprives them of the opportunity to have a thriving nation and has placed them in serious danger. i hope they survive this war.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@julieofthespirits that will happen once hamas is gone, a small glimmer of hope for a devastated population. hamas is delaying their own inevitable surrender.
Yes; I’ve written at length about it, including my experience with PTSD from working as a conflict observer. I could write a field guide to dead Syrian children and could distinguish a child murdered by sarin vs a child murdered by chlorine gas on sight.
This is one of the reasons I’m outraged by what’s happening now, in addition to my basic humanity.
But this is, of course, a red herring. “I counted and there are too many of you left for it to have been a genocide” is vile and you should be, with sincerity, ashamed.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral if you can’t see the difference in the graphs i shared with you, then you are blind. it’s not a red herring, did Israel use chlorine gas? #EndHamas#FreeTheHostages
@8124@aral I'd be very interested to see if you have Palestinian Territory population figures for the last month?
And I note your data in the last box only starts at 1967? Do you have any data for 1945-1967? Any data covering the Nakba?
What about figures that show how many Palestinians there'd be if Israel hadn't taken all their land?
Do you have figures that show square footage of land occupied by Palestinians and Israelis during this time?
Any figures that speak to quality of life for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank versus those in diaspora?
What you've presented is a data fairy tale, a sanitised version of events with zero context or attribution, and I guarantee you aren't even the author. Look at you, launching assaults using borrowed stats you haven't even questioned. And you dare to believe your lobes are wrinkled? Stop whitewashing Israeli crimes with borrowed garbage, you disgraceful deceitful muppet.
@Uraael@aral none of your screed actually managed to address the point made by the graphs, but that’s ok, i’m sure your attempt to justify October 7th with an argument reliant on your favorite geocities blog will go far. #EndHamas#FreeTheHostages
It is absolutely addressed; you just lack the wit to recognise it.
Provide figures for the month since 7th of October when their genocidal actions began in earnest. Or the Nakba. Genocide happening right there on our TV screens but you're pointing at peacetime figures like it's some supreme gotcha.
Meanwhile you've blissfully disregarded ALL of my points; tough being asked to do original thinking of your own, isn't it?
@Uraael you didn’t but that’s ok. it’s difficult to know exact figures, it’s certainly less than the hamas-reported 10k but in the thousands. have you ever noticed that hamas doesn’t report military vs civilian casualties, even though they 100% know the identities of their estimated 30-40k combatants? don’t you find that the slightest bit suspicious? and when are you going to call for hamas to #FreeTheHostages? i know you are capable of doing the right thing.
@8124 You missed that too? Look at the hashtags in my first post, blind-o.
I did, and you missed it. End of.
This isn't the binary either/or situation you want to paint it as. I have already expressed my disgust at Hamas' actions and have no need, desire or obligation to repeatedly state them to partisan lackwitted trolls online.
If you can't read properly I have little faith you can be guided into correct action.
@Uraael no, you said “free all hostages” which probably contains a built in accusation of Israeli hostage-taking. your sophistry skills are not very good.
@8124#EndHamas clearly not enough for you, then? 🙄 I expanded it to "all" actually to widen the call from the initial Israeli civilian victims to any Israeli soldiers being held since the conflict started, but you clearly want to play partisan games still, sticking to your scripted preconceptions, so I think we're done here.
And even had I written it as you accused I'd have accepted an accusation of clumsy sophistry over your moral apartheid any day.
@Uraael#EndHamas is a great hashtag, but not next to a reference of supposed Israeli occupation. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in a bid for peace. hamas has no governance role in the West Bank so they cannot claim to represent anyone there. my intention is not to play games, rather to inform.
The Israeli state withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to disrupt the peace process and interrupt progress towards a viable Palestinian state. Ariel Sharon’s government was explicit about this.
Learning readily-available information might help you understand this situation.
@HeavenlyPossum@Uraael and who destroyed the perfectly functional greenhouses, launched rockets, and siphoned international aid to build a vast military infrastructure right underneath and among densely populated civilian structures, a war crime known as human shields, specifically banned by the Geneva Conventions? how are you going to blame Israel for those actions undertaken by the genocidal terror group known as hamas? tune in to find out…
Hamas did most of those things, though both Hamas and the Israeli state use human shields. None of that is relevant to your mistake which you could have avoided by learning about this situation rather than just making things up.
@RD4Anarchy@Uraael@aral hamas committed such barbarous, monstrous, unimaginable evil that Israel has no choice but to make the destruction of hamas the number one priority before anything else. it’s a horrible situation to be thrust into. Israel already rescued one, let’s pray they rescue even more.
If Israelis earned the right to murder Palestinian civilians in self defense because of Hamas’ attack, then Palestinians earned a commensurate right to murder Israel civilians in self defense because of Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza.
Which is precisely how we end up in this never-ending cycle of violence and suffering: because apologists for violence on both sides claim the same logical justification for murdering civilians. You’re the moral mirror-image of people you consider to be monsters.
@HeavenlyPossum@aral@RD4Anarchy@Uraael taking civilian hostages, raping and mutilating, beheading babies putting them in ovens is not self-defense!! are you joking??
@Uraael@HeavenlyPossum@aral@RD4Anarchy except for the hamas gopro cameras that filmed everything. they were proud and wanted to broadcast their heinous deeds.
This is largely a moot point. Hamas murdered civilians, including children. Whether they beheaded them as well doesn’t really change that fact. When we fixate on specific accusations like this, we run the risk of allowing ourselves to get bogged down in potentially unknowable and hyper-specific details that can be mobilized to distract us from broader, knowable facts.
It’s like debating whether an Israeli air strike or a PIJ rocket hit al-Ahli Arab Hospital, when we know that Israel has struck multiple other hospitals. It’s often the case that the whole point of the debate is to raise questions about whether anything at all is knowable.
But you don't know that it's true, either. That's my point, it's UN-EVIDENCED. And claims made were walked back pretty quickly, even by the US govt who ought to bloody know if there were any truth in it. It very much appears to have been a fabrication weaponised by an Israel-compliant media for obvious reasons.
And that's worth nothing too, that there's only an info-war here because people in power know what what people see and think matters. Calling discussion around these reports "moot" is pretty much doing the other side's work for them. We need to question and challenge everything.
I’ve just seen this play out too many times before—a focus on some particular detail in question in order to justify questioning the entirety of the situation. Can we really believe our eyes that Israel is bombing hospitals when we’re not sure if it bombed this one hospital?
That’s my motivation to move past it to address things we do not, so as not to get bogged down in an endless debate about particulars that, in the end, don’t really tell us that much either way.
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