Israel-Gaza war

[Blue3]

So they're bombarding Rafah now? That was little time to evacuate (and to where?)

[certified hummus supporter 🇵🇸🤝🇺🇸🤝🇺🇦]

Man GMac, that's certainly one helluva way to brush aside the fact the IDF had blown up a masjid

"Oh, soldiers throughout history have done bad sh!t, therefore we shouldn't care about another instance of it happening again"

[Silent Hunter]

You know that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the Germans run out of the bunker, try to surrender, and the American GIs say "what?  I don't speak German" and gun them down while laughing?  Imagine if they were videotaping that for their TikTok to try and get likes from their buddies.

Plenty of images of the Holocaust were taken by German soldiers on their own initiative with their own cameras.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Man GMac, that's certainly one helluva way to brush aside the fact the IDF had blown up a masjid

"Oh, soldiers throughout history have done bad sh!t, therefore we shouldn't care about another instance of it happening again"

The IDF blowing up a mosque (or masjid) as a standalone isn't automatically a bad thing.  In an ordinary war, a building like a mosque would be considered off-limits.  This isn't an ordinary war, because Hamas has decided that nothing is off-limits.

Was the mosque being used as a base by Hamas fighters?  A weapons cache?  The entrance to a tunnel complex?  If so, whether it's swarming with fighters or infested with booby traps, I'd rather it just get obliterated from afar than have IDF soldiers put their lives at risk raiding it.  You can say it's worth it to spill IDF blood to try and protect some plaster, bricks and alabaster that have sociocultural significance to the civilians of the country Israel's at war at.  But certainly you can understand why the IDF wouldn't agree.

So with that in mind the only evidence we have that this was some bad act is a claim made by an IDF fighter in a viral TikTok video.  But I'm extremely skeptical of this because (A) that guy isn't the one making the decisions, (B) it's a TikTok video of some dude showing off for his friends, so he could be joking/lying, and (C) that rationale makes no sense -- even if Israel was gonna blow up a mosque because "we weren't allowed to say prayers in it", how/when would such an event occur, what, an IDF soldier went to a mosque in the Gaza Strip during wartime and tried to say a Jewish prayer and the imam told him he wasn't allowed to?

So if you grant that the dude is probably not actually telling the truth about why the mosque is being destroyed, then the video becomes meaningless.  It's just some jackass making a dumb joke on TikTok.

But even if he is telling the truth about why the mosque is being destroyed, you would still have to prove that this is part of a widespread campaign by the IDF, as opposed to just a one-off war crime, a decision made by a couple middle-ranking men with power, of the sort that are sadly common in all war environments.  Otherwise it's just analogous to the Saving Private Ryan example I gave.

[Silent Hunter]

Man GMac, that's certainly one helluva way to brush aside the fact the IDF had blown up a masjid

"Oh, soldiers throughout history have done bad sh!t, therefore we shouldn't care about another instance of it happening again"

The IDF blowing up a mosque (or masjid) as a standalone isn't automatically a bad thing.  In an ordinary war, a building like a mosque would be considered off-limits.  This isn't an ordinary war, because Hamas has decided that nothing is off-limits.

Was the mosque being used as a base by Hamas fighters?  A weapons cache?  The entrance to a tunnel complex?  If so, whether it's swarming with fighters or infested with booby traps, I'd rather it just get obliterated from afar than have IDF soldiers put their lives at risk raiding it.  You can say it's worth it to spill IDF blood to try and protect some plaster, bricks and alabaster that have sociocultural significance to the civilians of the country Israel's at war at.  But certainly you can understand why the IDF wouldn't agree.

Religious buildings tend to make very good observation posts due to their thick walls (in some cases) and often being the tallest building in a community. They're also pretty useful for a last stand.

If they're being used for a military purpose, they lose their protected status.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

There are Tiktok videos showing Israeli soldiers gleefully blowing up mosques. Are you suggesting they are being fabricated?

Yes, I've seen that video of the one idiot soldier.  Is there any evidence that this is the official policy of the IDF?  Is there any evidence that what the soldier says in the video ("I'm going to blow up the mosque because they wouldn't let me say prayers in it") is the actual reason for the mosque being blown up as opposed to him just being a jackass or trying to joke around with his buddies?  Typically a random grunt flipping the switch on a demolition would not be the same guy who made the strategic decision to authorize the demolition, and would not have had any input on the actual reason for doing said demolition.

As far as I can tell literally the only thing we know about this incident is a TikTok video from some random grunt dicking around and making some stupid claim to impress his buddies.  This is exactly what I'm talking about.  We're asked to judge the entire Israeli war effort based on the dumbest TikTok videos posted by individual knucklehead soldiers.  I mean imagine how bad other wars would've been if every soldier was equipped with a camera they used to broadcast their day-to-day soldiering to the world.

You know that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the Germans run out of the bunker, try to surrender, and the American GIs say "what?  I don't speak German" and gun them down while laughing?  Imagine if they were videotaping that for their TikTok to try and get likes from their buddies, and then Al Jazeera reposted it and 100,000,000 people worldwide saw it and people started acting like it was reflective of the entire American war effort.  Saying vague things like "Americans are gunning down surrendering Germans, not taking any prisoners, it's a war crime, they are engaging in anti-German genocide" -- implying this is the official policy of the entire American army, rather than just two soldiers being idiots.  That would basically be the equivalent of how we're still talking about the "IDF soldier shoots three guys waving the white flag" story.  Is it official IDF policy to shoot anyone waving the white flag?  Or was this just one soldier being an idiot?  If the latter, is there literally any reason to talk about this incident other than to try and imply that it's reflective of the entire IDF?

I hate to break it to you but in every army throughout the world across the course of history, there have always been idiot soldiers.  Having a handful of idiots in your army does not make your entire army unethical or your war unjustified.  It does not make their actions reflective of military or state policy -- even if they can give that appearance by using TikTok to broadcast their dumbest moments to billions of people around the world, getting 100x as many likes/views/reposts as your official army press conferences.


P.S. and by the way -- needless to say -- if Hamas guys had TikTok and were going down in their tunnels abusing and raping their prisoners and posting it up on TikTok, this war would look very different.  Thank heavens we don't have to see Hamas in their lowest moments broadcast all across the world.  We got a little taste of that on 10/7 and it was one of the most vile things in human history.

I wouldn't judge the IDF just by the behavior of a few personnel or a squad. But it's evident that there's a real and impossible-to-hide campaign to destroy what the people of Gaza value, to make it unfriendly and unsafe, that includes mass-scale permission for the worst abuses to go unchecked. And those abuses include targetting things that are seen as belonging to "the enemy". A-OK to blow up a mosque, apparently...who cares? They could be mass raping thousands of Gazan woman in their homes every day and it wouldn't matter, because of October 7th...which really was them for the first time in a long time that the humanitarian abuses the Israelis did and still do against Palestinians were done in large scale on Israelis for many years.

The Israeli military has a right to exist. Israel has a right to defend itself. But what's going on is effectively a Rape of Gaza. And unlike the past, when Israeli built up a lot of infrastructure for Palestinians (to their credit), any gains they make in this war will likely turn into a campaign to remove any Arabness out and push a Jewish-only Holy Land, as Israeli politics has gotten more deranged than in the past.

Up to 70-75% of what's there in Gaza is now demolished. And for what? I've always stressed IRL that October 7th remains a vile act. But at this point, what's being done in Gaza is downright counterproductive to the security of the state of Israel and unlike most on both sides I value Palestinian and Israeli lives equally. The only people here at real risk of mass-scale ethnic cleansing is the Arabs. The only who are capable of the kinds of acts many people in the Hamas networks dream of doing, is in fact the Israeli government and its supporters among the electorate, who want a powerless serf population and all the best pickings of land for themselves.

May God save them by pulling them away from the brink, before they can bring down themselves. The last thing we need is more human misery.

[Birdish]

I know this thread is no longer for news on the conflict, but I'm doing my best to keep track of what's going on even if no one else is.

It does seem like there could be a ceasefire starting to take shape. Like I mentioned yesterday, Israeli diplomats will be in Cairo tomorrow. And Biden is heavily pushing in the background too. Not to mention the immense pressure Hamas is probably facing now that the last city still currently in their control will start to be contested.

Pray for the people of Rafah(regardless of which side you support)that a ceasefire comes together because that 28,000 deaths number will go up substantially if the IDF continues on this current course.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I wouldn't judge the IDF just by the behavior of a few personnel or a squad. But it's evident that there's a real and impossible-to-hide campaign to destroy what the people of Gaza value, to make it unfriendly and unsafe, that includes mass-scale permission for the worst abuses to go unchecked. And those abuses include targetting things that are seen as belonging to "the enemy".

I simply do not agree that it's "evident" or "impossible-to-hide" that there is a campaign to destroy what the people of Gaza value.  Gaza is an incredibly small area -- the entire Gaza Strip is only 1/4 the size of Los Angeles.  Gaza City itself is significantly smaller than the island of Manhattan.  Imagine trying to fight a war in Manhattan while being asked not to destroy anything of value to the people of Manhattan -- a war where your enemy is intentionally hiding inside civilian buildings, churches, museums, libraries, and other culturally significant buildings.  It would be virtually impossible to avoid the destruction of things that "the people of Manhattan value", even if you did care.  Which I don't think Israel really does.  I don't think Israel is intentionally destroying everything the Gazans value, but I don't think they care much either.  If Hamas is hiding inside a mosque, and Israel decides they want to blow it up to kill the Hamas guys, they're not gonna care much whether the mosque was an important community hub or whatever.  Sure you can say that's bad, but that's very different from the intentional campaign of cultural erasure that you've alleged.

A-OK to blow up a mosque, apparently...who cares? They could be mass raping thousands of Gazan woman in their homes every day and it wouldn't matter, because of October 7th...which really was them for the first time in a long time that the humanitarian abuses the Israelis did and still do against Palestinians were done in large scale on Israelis for many years.

Needless to say, if IDF soldiers were mass-raping thousands of Gazan women in their homes every day not only would I not support that but I would probably switch sides, since that would be a horror even beyond what Hamas committed (and that's saying something).  But realistically at that point I would probably be demanding an American-led intervention to put an end to the wanton cruelty.

Of course, the IDF has not done anything remotely close to this hypothetical "Rape of Nanking" scenario you describe, nor will it.

Up to 70-75% of what's there in Gaza is now demolished. And for what?

The only who are capable of the kinds of acts many people in the Hamas networks dream of doing, is in fact the Israeli government and its supporters among the electorate, who want a powerless serf population and all the best pickings of land for themselves.

For what?  To eliminate Hamas.  That has been Israel's goal from the beginning.  It was clear within minutes of 10/7 being reported that this would be Israel's goal.  Israel has never wavered in their commitment to naming this as their war objective.  Every peace deal they've offered thus far has been some variation of "we get back the hostages, and Hamas no longer controls the Gaza Strip."  It's unambiguous that these are their objectives, and it's also pretty clear that most of the demolition has been in service of pursuing and destroying Hamas.

The Hamas network dreams of driving the Jews "into the sea" and "purifying" Israel of Jewish filth.  In practice this entails killing all the Jews and conquering the sovereign state of Israel.  I don't think even the most committed extremist (Itamar Ben-Gvir) in the Israeli government has fantasies approaching that level of horror.  In contrast, this is the goal of your average Hamas member.

Yes, there are plenty of Israelis who would like the Arabs out of the Gaza Strip permanently.  Reasons for this have been discussed elsewhere, but is 75 years of constant terrorism, violence, hatred and war not enough of an explanation?  This is a very different desire from the genocidal mass-killing fantasies that you ascribe to Israelis when you say "the kinds of acts many people in the Hamas networks dream of doing".

[Blue3]

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1757108015423963386

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1756990510487449645

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1757108015423963386

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1756990510487449645

Hamas is not a credible source

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

"Minors" is a perfectly acceptable journalistic term to use and it's really weird how normally reasonable people have gotten about it today.

[GeneralMacArthur]

"Minor" means anyone under the age of 18.  Killing a 16-year-old soldier who's been given a gun by Hamas and ordered to shoot the IDF is fundamentally different from killing a 6-year-old.  Categorizing the former as "killing children" is nothing more than a manipulative emotional appeal.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1757108015423963386
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1756990510487449645

Hamas is not a credible source

Why has the IDF considered, and rejected, the idea of not using their data then?

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1757108015423963386
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1756990510487449645

Hamas is not a credible source

Why has the IDF considered, and rejected, the idea of not using their data then?

Because unfortunately there isn’t really any other data to work with at the moment, but that doesn’t mean Hamas’ is even remotely credible. 

[GoTfan]

If you are Israel, every single soldier must behave in a manner 100% ethical and mistake-free 100% of the time or else the entire war is wicked and unjustified.

If you are Hamas, any unethical act, or even intentional (not mistaken or unavoidable) infliction of cruelty and harm upon civilians is justified and good because it's fighting against Israel, who as already mentioned, are indefensibly wicked.

When we say "ethical and mistake-free" we are not referring to the typical rules of war, wherein the usage human shields and civilian population areas for military purposes incurs responsibility for harm/death upon the defending party, not the attacker, but rather wholly new rules of war that we invented specifically to apply solely to Israel, and will change on the fly  to match with whatever Israel just did.

BTW even if Israel somehow manages to follow our made-up rules we will simply lie about what Israel did, or totally make things up, or post pics/videos from Syria and say they're from Gaza, etc.

Long live the glorious struggle of Hamas the Palestinians against the disgusting, vile, wretched Jews Zionists!

You're literally inventing a strawman to argue against.

It seems that any concern about any dead civilians on here is enough to, in my case, get labelled a Nazi sympathiser and slavery supporter.

[CumbrianLefty]

You're literally inventing a strawman to argue against.

Dunno about you, but I'm starting to see a bit of a pattern with the "Israel no matter what" crowd.

[Silent Hunter]

If anything, Hamas' figures are probably an underestimate as they're not in control of the vast majority of Gaza anymore.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

If anything, Hamas' figures are probably an underestimate as they're not in control of the vast majority of Gaza anymore.

And don't account for now-dead people under rubble they haven't accounted for.

[Vosem]

https://twitter.com/GailSimone/status/1757108015423963386
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1756990510487449645

Hamas is not a credible source

Why has the IDF considered, and rejected, the idea of not using their data then?

I think it's actually an interesting consistent failure mode of liberal societies that they tend to accept data from authoritarian regimes at face value when the incentives to just make it up are very strong. The CIA consistently accepted ludicrously wrong economic figures from the Soviet Union, Western media uncritically repeat Chinese estimates of economic growth which seem very flawed under the hood, and African countries are incentivized to exaggerate their populations to receive larger subsidies from international organizations.

I think "data from authoritarian regimes which makes those regimes look better is massively flawed and being accepted uncritically by naive small-d democrats" should be the null hypothesis in pretty much all situations where those regimes are producing data for outside use. (Incidentally, and though I am not too confident of this given that it would be a very convenient fact pattern for my own beliefs, this kind of implies that the population of Palestine is probably exaggerated, like the populations of other places which are dependent on international aid).

If anything, Hamas' figures are probably an underestimate as they're not in control of the vast majority of Gaza anymore.

Given the entire history of how "data produced by authoritarian regimes for public consumption" works, we can treat information produced by Hamas as 'ludicrous, comical upper bound'.

There are Tiktok videos showing Israeli soldiers gleefully blowing up mosques. Are you suggesting they are being fabricated?

Yes, I've seen that video of the one idiot soldier.  Is there any evidence that this is the official policy of the IDF?  Is there any evidence that what the soldier says in the video ("I'm going to blow up the mosque because they wouldn't let me say prayers in it") is the actual reason for the mosque being blown up as opposed to him just being a jackass or trying to joke around with his buddies?  Typically a random grunt flipping the switch on a demolition would not be the same guy who made the strategic decision to authorize the demolition, and would not have had any input on the actual reason for doing said demolition.

As far as I can tell literally the only thing we know about this incident is a TikTok video from some random grunt dicking around and making some stupid claim to impress his buddies.  This is exactly what I'm talking about.  We're asked to judge the entire Israeli war effort based on the dumbest TikTok videos posted by individual knucklehead soldiers.  I mean imagine how bad other wars would've been if every soldier was equipped with a camera they used to broadcast their day-to-day soldiering to the world.

You know that scene in Saving Private Ryan where the Germans run out of the bunker, try to surrender, and the American GIs say "what?  I don't speak German" and gun them down while laughing?  Imagine if they were videotaping that for their TikTok to try and get likes from their buddies, and then Al Jazeera reposted it and 100,000,000 people worldwide saw it and people started acting like it was reflective of the entire American war effort.  Saying vague things like "Americans are gunning down surrendering Germans, not taking any prisoners, it's a war crime, they are engaging in anti-German genocide" -- implying this is the official policy of the entire American army, rather than just two soldiers being idiots.  That would basically be the equivalent of how we're still talking about the "IDF soldier shoots three guys waving the white flag" story.  Is it official IDF policy to shoot anyone waving the white flag?  Or was this just one soldier being an idiot?  If the latter, is there literally any reason to talk about this incident other than to try and imply that it's reflective of the entire IDF?

I hate to break it to you but in every army throughout the world across the course of history, there have always been idiot soldiers.  Having a handful of idiots in your army does not make your entire army unethical or your war unjustified.  It does not make their actions reflective of military or state policy -- even if they can give that appearance by using TikTok to broadcast their dumbest moments to billions of people around the world, getting 100x as many likes/views/reposts as your official army press conferences.


P.S. and by the way -- needless to say -- if Hamas guys had TikTok and were going down in their tunnels abusing and raping their prisoners and posting it up on TikTok, this war would look very different.  Thank heavens we don't have to see Hamas in their lowest moments broadcast all across the world.  We got a little taste of that on 10/7 and it was one of the most vile things in human history.

I wouldn't judge the IDF just by the behavior of a few personnel or a squad. But it's evident that there's a real and impossible-to-hide campaign to destroy what the people of Gaza value, to make it unfriendly and unsafe, that includes mass-scale permission for the worst abuses to go unchecked. And those abuses include targetting things that are seen as belonging to "the enemy". A-OK to blow up a mosque, apparently...who cares? They could be mass raping thousands of Gazan woman in their homes every day and it wouldn't matter, because of October 7th...which really was them for the first time in a long time that the humanitarian abuses the Israelis did and still do against Palestinians were done in large scale on Israelis for many years.

The Israeli military has a right to exist. Israel has a right to defend itself. But what's going on is effectively a Rape of Gaza. And unlike the past, when Israeli built up a lot of infrastructure for Palestinians (to their credit), any gains they make in this war will likely turn into a campaign to remove any Arabness out and push a Jewish-only Holy Land, as Israeli politics has gotten more deranged than in the past.

But this isn't true. Even if we take the Hamas numbers at face value, this siege is something like a fifteenth as dangerous for civilians as Mariupol. More than twice as many individuals died in Mosul, in spite of that city being under half the size of Gaza. What's happening, as measured by cost in civilian lives, is a remarkably restrained operation, and one which is obeying a vast number of expensive directives (like warning people before airstrikes) which are not required by international law. (Part of how you know this is that the most commonly cited 'war crime' -- that of striking militarized hospitals -- is something explicitly permitted in the text of the Geneva Conventions. One assumes this is because there are not better examples.)

Destroying infrastructure which has symbolic value to an enemy (like the former monument to Saddam Hussein, or the former Supreme Court of Gaza) is a common practice for demoralization. But I think the reason that hospitals and mosques are disproportionately targeted is precisely that they are disproportionately militarized by Hamas precisely to create news stories like this. The solution is a media environment which refrains from criticizing these actions, and shaming individuals or organizations who criticize those actions.

Up to 70-75% of what's there in Gaza is now demolished. And for what? I've always stressed IRL that October 7th remains a vile act. But at this point, what's being done in Gaza is downright counterproductive to the security of the state of Israel and unlike most on both sides I value Palestinian and Israeli lives equally. The only people here at real risk of mass-scale ethnic cleansing is the Arabs. The only who are capable of the kinds of acts many people in the Hamas networks dream of doing, is in fact the Israeli government and its supporters among the electorate, who want a powerless serf population and all the best pickings of land for themselves.

May God save them by pulling them away from the brink, before they can bring down themselves. The last thing we need is more human misery.

No; it is repugnant to any moral system to ask people to tolerate the existence of a government set on killing them. The only solution to October 7 is a campaign that continues until Hamas is destroyed, with every member either surrendering and enacting Israeli orders or imprisoned, executed, or forcibly conscripted. I hope God does not restrain the Israeli military in any way, and punishes those who would try to. I hope that the suffering ends when Hamas unconditionally surrenders, and agrees to implement Israeli policy.

[Vosem]

brb guys going back in time to tell GMac's parents to drill "two wrongs don't make a right" into his head as a child

Only one side in this war has wrongs as a government policy, which is why it must be destroyed.

(If I were powerful enough to have a time machine, I would be using my power to pressure governments besides Israel's to also bomb Gaza. Obviously the US shouldn't do so unilaterally -- that would just be politically stupid -- but the Gazan government might be likelier to receive the message if 192 UN members were to bomb its territory, rather than just Israel. The destruction of Palestinian liberationism, and the creation of a Palestine free from hatred, must be the verdict of humanity.)

[Velasco]

Bernie Sanders is one of the few US politicians with a sense of morality

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1757257562708218358?t=LwSMPPap9EIlguXyxNuo...

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

Bernie Sanders is one of the few US politicians with a sense of morality

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1757257562708218358?t=LwSMPPap9EIlguXyxNuo...

5x Corbyn endorser does what Corbynists do.

[Vosem]

Bernie Sanders is one of the few US politicians with a sense of morality

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1757257562708218358?t=LwSMPPap9EIlguXyxNuo...

Hopefully my children will get to live in a time where not just no US politicians, but no humans at all, have this sense of morality.

[Lief 🗽]

Bernie Sanders is one of the few US politicians with a sense of morality

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1757257562708218358?t=LwSMPPap9EIlguXyxNuo...

Nothing particularly moral about voting to abandon Ukraine to the Russian Nazis.

[Velasco]

[
5x Corbyn endorser does what Corbynists do.

Is this the best you can do to insult a decent politician? Calling him "Corbyn endorser"?

For all his faults, Corbyn is by no means comparable to the corrupt war criminal that governs Israel