There’s thousands of trucks right outside Rafah. We don’t need more “aid corridors”. We don’t need more piers to bomb WFC vehicles on. Gaza is like 25 miles long. A truck can drive 25 miles.
The U.S. has significant leverage over Israel as its main supplier of weapons and military equipment.
They sure don't seem to, considering they never even explicitly threaten to use that leverage. Even the call, based on a situation that supposedly left Biden anguished, was still an implicit threat. At least based on what's published.
If Biden wants to actually get any change done he should damn well know that getting rid of Bibi is the only way to do that. The best way to get rid of Bibi is to make the Knesset realize he's an existential threat to Israel because he's about to cause the US to cut off support.
The Knesset just voted themselves a nice six week vacation. They don’t give a shit. If Bibi goes they’ll find another main man. They have plenty of genocidal nutbars to pick from in their ranks.
Forty-seven percent of Israeli Jews said in a poll conducted [in October 2023] that Israel should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza” in the next phase of fighting.
Bibi is a lynchpin that holds up a coalition of actual fascists. Those fascists have supporters(including in the IDF), but not a majority. Breaking the back of that coalition and facilitating the fall of Bibi's government would result in positive change for the entire situation.
The fact that Bibi will go to jail if he loses that coalition due to corruption charges is what makes Biden's softball moves so frustrating for me.
Bibi, like Trump, is a symptom of the pathogen. We will need to work harder than this to cut the head off such a snake. Jail for either is positive, yes. But it’s more like Tylenol for a rattlesnake bite than an actual anti venom.
I think he actually got a little worried about the pushback regarding the most recent bombing of aid vans. Like, even the most pro Israeli outlets and groups online were saying “wow… that was a huge fuck up…”
Of course, none of them were acknowledging it was likely intentional. But I think in terms of gauging “are the Israeli people cool with us literally starving civilians to death” IDF leadership got a fairly affirmative “no”.
How do we know it was intentional? Although I guess the practical difference between intentional and callously indifferent is not very large in this context. So maybe it doesn’t matter.
We don’t, which is why I say “likely” - but the sheer precision and clear markings on the vehicles makes me doubt the “it was a series of accidents” explanation.
Maybe I interpreted the word intentionally differently than you meant to use it. My understanding of the IDF’s explanation was that they mistakenly thought the vehicles were Hamas. So by intentional I thought you mean they were knowingly killing aid workers.
I think everyone agrees the vehicles were deliberately targeted, but why this was done is open to speculation.
No, we’re of the same mindset. It’s clear the missiles didn’t fall on these vehicles by chance, it’s just up for some debate regarding on if they were deliberately targeted knowing they were aid vehicles or not
Beyond the route being approved in advance and the vehicles being clearly marked, the vehicles were also 2 km apart from each other and each one was seperatelt targeted
It’s because there are different definitions of intentional and accidental in this context such that they are not always mutually exclusive.
The strike was intentionally targeted on those vehicles, but IDF claims it was accidental in that they were mistaken about the occupants of the vehicles. Whether this is true is unclear at this time.
The strike was intentionally targeted on those vehicles, but IDF claims it was accidental in that they were mistaken about the occupants of the vehicles.
I don’t believe that bullshit for a microsecond. Either Israel is forehead caved in stupid, or they believe people like you are.
“All three vehicles were carrying civilians; they were marked as WCK vehicles; and their movements were in full compliance with Israeli authorities, who were aware of their itinerary, route, and humanitarian mission,” WCK said in a statement Thursday. Source
Israel is a terrorist state that murders aid workers knowingly and intentionally, and abused claims of antisemitism to act with impunity against aid workers and civilians. There is a long history of this kind of behavior, so Israel deserves exactly 0 benefit of the doubt.
Part of the reason this conflict is so intractable is the blind rage that makes people see things in only black and white.
Personally I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not about the benefit of the doubt, it’s about the summation of what we know, what we don’t know, and filling in the gaps with reasonable assumptions about what is possible or likely. Even if what you believe is true, it is still worthwhile to prove it.
“All three vehicles were carrying civilians; they were marked as WCK vehicles; and their movements were in full compliance with Israeli authorities, who were aware of their itinerary, route, and humanitarian mission,” WCK said in a statement Thursday.
I’m not sure how it can be accidental if you were told about it in advance.
And even if for a moment, that the person who aimed the guns didn’t know, it was someone’s job to make sure they did. Someone knew.
Someone did but it could still be claimed to be “accidental” if that information didn’t make it to the person performing the attack. I’m not saying that’s what happened but it’s plausible. Though I will say at minimum I doubt they would have done this if they knew how well connected these aid workers were. It would have been politically very foolish.
I think their overall strategy makes it clear that they don’t much care to avoid killing civilians and aid workers that are not well connected. But it’s hard to prove it’s done intentionally.
We don’t know that they targeted aid workers. We can certainly say that they killed them without identifying them as valid military targets, because they weren’t.
I completely agree but legally speaking the intentionality does matter in terms of the genocide case, etc. So that’s why I am curious what evidence we have. But intent is almost always the hardest piece of a crime to prove.
First, the crime of genocide is characterised by the specific intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means: causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Note the repeated reference to deliberate or intentional actions. So proving intent is a big question in this case.
They weren’t “well connected”, it was just brazen slaughter of western nationals.
The WCF logo was clearly printed on top of the vans, the routes were already known and cleared by the IDF. Israel intentionally killed them claiming one of the occupants of the 3 vans looked like Hamas. They’re on an insane genocidal killing spree in Gaza, and it isn’t helpful that western media provides cover by calling it an “accident.” It was intentional, and IDF has already admitted this.
Well there have been many killings of Palestinian aid workers, but those did not break through to the mainstream conversation the way this one did. That is what I mean by well-connected. In other words, people with a prominent voice in the west cared that these people died. This is not generally the case for ordinary Palestinians, so similar incidents that have already taken place were shrugged off.
Why are you trying this hard to pretend there is more than one side to this situation? People have given you the facts and you keep snapping back to this CNN passive-voice “we can’t know for sure”.
Because that’s the default response to truth claims that are unproven? I don’t think this hyper-emotional speculation is very helpful personally.
I don’t really care about your emotions or frankly any emotions other than the people directly affected. I’m trying to sort out what is true and false and what can be definitively proven from the available evidence. But there is a ton of misinformation flying around, so I want to be careful about what narratives I endorse, since many false narratives are being used to justify violence and hatred right now.
Israel internationally bombed a clearly marked aid convoy after being informed of and approving their route.
Israel internationally adopted rules of engagement so lax that they allowed for 3 accidental bombings on a clearly marked aid convoy after being informed of and approving their route.
All of the above.
The problem for Israel is that all of those possibilities are war crimes.
Well, what they’re going to claim is that war is hard and this happens to everyone, so it’s not intentional at all. Unfortunately, for people predisposed to believe them, this argument can seem quite reasonable. So that’s why we need to rigorously challenge it using as many lines of evidence as possible.
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