Israel-Gaza war

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No side is disputing this theory that "actually the hospital was a secret disguise for rocket launchers" because no one is alleging it other than a manaic republican Talk Elections poster from Ohio.

It is widely reported that Hamas uses hospitals and schools as bases. (First page Google Results for "hamas hospitals bases", "hamas schools bases". Some of these are Israeli sources, but some are The Guardian.)

Come on! "Hamas uses hospitals to launch attacks" is, like, the first thing that anybody learns about this conflict. I guess to some it's presented as "false Israeli narrative", but everybody's heard it. It's literally common knowledge and goes without saying.

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I mean, they legitimately don't just level buildings with hundreds of civilian casualties, but either way it seems nobody is disputing "there was a depot in the hospital and it blew up", which I think is sufficient to assign blame.

Possibly the Israelis struck something in the hospital and caused a much bigger explosion than they'd anticipated.

It's common for warships to be sunk not from the initial impact of the missile but a fire causing the magazines to explode. That's why firefighting is a key part of all sailors' training.

The point is that nobody disputes that the explosion was much larger than a normal attack and this was caused by the explosion of a weapons cache on the ground, and nobody disputes who put it there. Whether it was caused by a Hamas misfire or an Israeli mis-targeting doesn't change who the blame falls to. That's why today's story is frustrating: there isn't a version of this story anyone has claimed where the blame doesn't go to Hamas, even if you just assume the least-sympathetic-to-Israel course of events.

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Ultimately, Palestinian liberationism will be defeated only when foreign sympathy for it is completely destroyed.

LMAO

The cause of Palestine will only die when the light of Islam is somehow and someway vanquished off the face of the Earth. Fortunately, that will never happen.

Nah, my guess based on current population/economic growth rates is that it will continue to weaken with time and then eventually go away once they suffer a defeat bad enough that the leading Palestinian organizations agree to become instrumentalities of the Israeli state. When that'll happen, I can't say; both economic and demographic projections are hard*, and it also depends a great deal on the exact course of foreign feeling. (Like, if a shift happened tomorrow in the opinions of the US government/news media, it could plausibly happen this week, but my guess is 20-30 years. Within my lifetime the Palestinian movement will go away among the Palestinians themselves, much less foreigners.)

*Eg, between 1995-2010 or so pretty much everyone thought that a Jewish majority in Israel+West Bank was not sustainable, but that majority looks far safer today. That Israel will strengthen against the Palestinians more over time is assured, but how much more is really hard to say, because it depends on the exact levels of population growth/emigration, and small shifts might cause larger changes down the road.

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2. I initially thought that the narrative was that PIJ was firing missiles from the hospital, accidentally set a fire, and one or more missiles exploded (both its warhead and its fuel), which itself detonated the ammo deposit. This seemed plausible. Now it appears the allegation is that *one* missile accidentally hit not only the hospital, but also pretty close to the ammo deposit within the hospital, since these missiles usually only kill, like, 7 people per missile, misfire or not. This obviously isn't impossible, but it seems a hell of a lot more likely that Israel just bombed the hospital (it's not like they never do this).

I mean, they legitimately don't just level buildings with hundreds of civilian casualties, but either way it seems nobody is disputing "there was a depot in the hospital and it blew up", which I think is sufficient to assign blame.

I don't think it's even been proven that there was a depot in the hospital? Just that, *if* a PIJ rocket caused the explosion, there must have been a depot, because no rocket could have caused that large of an explosion on its own.

And no, I don't think the existence of a depot would be sufficient to assign blame. This mentality makes no sense to me. We don't tell American cops to just kill hostages taken by criminals.

This is standard practice in some countries, though (eg, my family came to the US from the Soviet Union, where standard practice for decades was in fact to just try to kill the hostage-takers in order to discourage future hostage-taking attempts, and if the hostages die then so be it), and I'm not sure that it shouldn't be standard practice more generally. We would have a world with fewer hostage-taking attempts.

Fair enough, however, that Americans do not do this. Nor do Israelis, normally.

No side is disputing this theory that "actually the hospital was a secret disguise for rocket launchers" because no one is alleging it other than a manaic republican Talk Elections poster from Ohio.

Come on! "Hamas uses hospitals to launch attacks" is, like, the first thing that anybody learns about this conflict. I guess to some it's presented as "false Israeli narrative", but everybody's heard it. It's literally common knowledge and goes without saying.

The general statement that Hamas stores weapons in or under hospitals is correct. But no one besides you is alleging that it is true of this hospital (a Christian hospital mostly funded by US/UK church groups) or that it is the cause of this explosion.

The current speculation from Israeli sources is that it was a motor failure on one of the heavy-yield Qassems like this one.

That just seems like "it is possible for a motor failure on a Qassem to have caused this". More generally, the level of destruction and casualties here, and apparently the size of the explosion, are much greater than from a normal Israeli airstrike, or for that matter from a normal Palestinian rocket, so there needs to be a special explanation for why the explosion was so large and catastrophic, and everything that I've seen besides 'weapons depot' has been obviously wrong. 'Motor failure on a Qassem' is maybe not a ridiculous suggestion (though I haven't heard of a motor failure causing this large of an explosion), but this is basically one random tweet bringing it up.

I would be surprised if there were hospitals in Gaza it is not true for, just because of the incentive structure: if you penalize one side for attacking hospitals, then of course the other side will keep all of their equipment in hospitals -- why wouldn't they? (Unless they don't have enough equipment for it -- which seems dubious -- or they're broadly unwilling to militarize hospitals -- which we've already established is false. "None" or "all" both seem much more plausible than "some". It isn't as though hospital administrators can be expected to stand up to authoritarian regimes.)

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That just seems like "it is possible for a motor failure on a Qassem to have caused this". More generally, the level of destruction and casualties here, and apparently the size of the explosion, are much greater than from a normal Israeli airstrike, or for that matter from a normal Palestinian rocket, so there needs to be a special explanation for why the explosion was so large and catastrophic, and everything that I've seen besides 'weapons depot' has been obviously wrong. 'Motor failure on a Qassem' is maybe not a ridiculous suggestion (though I haven't heard of a motor failure causing this large of an explosion), but this is basically one random tweet bringing it up.

The most likely explanation for the level of destruction is that the warhead was much larger (400kg) than the usual PIJ rockets (most of which are much smaller). That is of course speculation at this point, but given that you have provided nothing (not even a random tweet!) to back up your theory beyond some articles showing that Hamas has previously stored weapons in other hospitals sometimes, assume true until proven otherwise. "Occam's razor," someone said ITT.

No, my first post here today was a quote from Gaza Report saying this.

https://twitter.com/gaza_report/status/1714337523592208695

It would also make sense, because there's no reason to think an organization using some hospitals as weapons depots wouldn't use all of them, unless you want to put forward a theory of them not having the equipment or some kind of hospital-religious-affiliation thing, from PiT, which both seem extremely dubious.

That just seems like "it is possible for a motor failure on a Qassem to have caused this". More generally, the level of destruction and casualties here, and apparently the size of the explosion, are much greater than from a normal Israeli airstrike, or for that matter from a normal Palestinian rocket, so there needs to be a special explanation for why the explosion was so large and catastrophic, and everything that I've seen besides 'weapons depot' has been obviously wrong. 'Motor failure on a Qassem' is maybe not a ridiculous suggestion (though I haven't heard of a motor failure causing this large of an explosion), but this is basically one random tweet bringing it up.

There is, in fact, a very simple explanation: that the IDF dropped a bunker buster on the hospital. The video of the strike doesn't show any of the secondary explosions characteristic of a weapons depot.

You only need to work yourself into a pretzel if you start from the assumption that Hamas or PIJ did it and then work backwords. If you consider the possibility that Israel could be responsible then the size of the explosion is easily explained.

The video of the strike shows a single ground explosion, 'all at once'. This wouldn't be consistent with, like, a parking lot with vehicles, but it would be consistent with the explosion of a weapons depot -- compare with videos of fertilizer explosions. It happens more-or-less all at once if the explosive material is packed closely enough together.

The IDF randomly bombing the hospital for teh evulz with a bunker buster deliberately is physically possible, I guess, but it isn't their usual MO (like launching weapons from hospitals is for Hamas), and you'd guess they'd be ready for the media coverage if that happened rather than investigating if they somehow messed up somewhere. 'Regular IDF airstrike accidentally blowing up explosive material on site' seems much likelier.

Again, Occam's Razor. You don't have to contort yourself; just eliminate the possibilities which are unlikely.

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The thing specific to me, which I have to imagine is an experience very few have had, is that I’ve taken college courses where “Western media is biased against Israel” was presented as uncontroversial fact to teach students about the concept of media bias generally.

You deserve a refund.

This isn't a thread about my life, Ferguson, but I've brought up before that I meet American-right people (or, even more specifically, often techno-libertarians) in ways way out of proportion to their fraction of society, and this is true even when I'm meeting people somewhat randomly (such as being assigned teachers/professors in some mandatory class/course). In hindsight, my high school/college/law school experiences were all pretty unusually right-wing in various ways (I've said before that, while the all-law-school group-chat was quite left-wing/"woke", policy discussions in actual classes, particularly tax classes, tended toward the extremely fiscon even by my standards), even setting aside that my family also gave me assigned reading. For those of you who have been on the Forum longer, I think this is the fundamental reason I didn't think "wokeness" was a thing until, like, 2018-19, or well after most people on the right had become concerned by it.

(Also TBF that was just one course, though generally quite non-woke attitudes towards relationships between countries prevailed broadly in the department; Why Arabs Lose Wars was assigned reading in a different class.)

Ultimately, Palestinian liberationism will be defeated only when foreign sympathy for it is completely destroyed.

LMAO

The cause of Palestine will only die when the light of Islam is somehow and someway vanquished off the face of the Earth. Fortunately, that will never happen.

Nah, my guess based on current population/economic growth rates is that it will continue to weaken with time and then eventually go away once they suffer a defeat bad enough that the leading Palestinian organizations agree to become instrumentalities of the Israeli state. When that'll happen, I can't say; both economic and demographic projections are hard*, and it also depends a great deal on the exact course of foreign feeling. (Like, if a shift happened tomorrow in the opinions of the US government/news media, it could plausibly happen this week, but my guess is 20-30 years. Within my lifetime the Palestinian movement will go away among the Palestinians themselves, much less foreigners.)

*Eg, between 1995-2010 or so pretty much everyone thought that a Jewish majority in Israel+West Bank was not sustainable, but that majority looks far safer today. That Israel will strengthen against the Palestinians more over time is assured, but how much more is really hard to say, because it depends on the exact levels of population growth/emigration, and small shifts might cause larger changes down the road.

When Hezbollah trully enters the war, you'll see how many Israelis will leave the country. Palestinians don't have nowhere to go, you'll have to kill them all.

"What do a Russian mobilization and an Israeli mobilization have in common?"

"The flight Moscow to Tel Aviv is sold out."

The issue with this theory is that the start of the current war led to a bunch of Israelis returning to the country (and Hamas/Egypt taking special measures to stop Palestinians from fleeing!), so...it seems like this is exactly backwards?

https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1714390254935851272

Good thread from GeoConfirmed, which has been reliable in the past and seems to confirm that part of a Palestinian missile hit the yard of the hospital in question. Still not drawing any conclusions, but I think I'm now leaning towards this being the cause of the explosion.

Right; assuming these people are correct they are basically confirming the Israeli government's story (that the hospital was hit by a Palestinian rocket), and at least implying the thing that I've been saying (something on or under the ground must have caused the explosion because those rockets are not normally large enough for this). It was basically deducible from first principles.

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Funny how American media now say that it could be both sides. But when Russians say there's no reason residential buldings in some God forbidden town in Ukraine are hit on purpose and that's the remains of air defense, there's no both sides, Russians are just pure evil. Yet Israelis with it's history of war crimes vs Palestinians are to be beleived.

I don't know about the bigger war which started in 2022, but in the 2014-15 War in Donbass there were credible-ish reports of both sides using human shields, Hamas-style. Unfortunately so long as the current journalistic norms are what they are this is a style of fighting that is likely to spread, as militant groups around the world bid for sympathy from the developed world. Until the BBC/NYT/Reuters axis falls, you can expect to see many more exploded hospitals.

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If true, it would make the Israeli misuse of the wrong footage even harder to rationalise. By lying, they have made it harder to argue their own case.

The people who run the twitter account have a long history of the sort of egregious incompetence that ought to get someone running the social media account of a medium-sized business sacked, let alone the government of a sovereign state.

Lapid made the correct call in not joining the unity government. Gantz and co. should have known from last time that they could not cancel out the malefactors and incompetents with Netanyahu in charge.

I would guess the people running a government Twitter account are civil servants and probably not high-ranking ones, rather than political appointees. Of course that makes the mistake (or pattern of mistakes, if one exists) less excusable, if someone is doing this as a career.

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It does get frustrating that western news organizations quote "Palestinian Health Officials" verbatim, even though its a Hamas spokesman. If the IDF is correct and the Hospital was hit with Hamas rockets, then it's been almost 2 hours of multiple news websites top headline essentially being "IDF blows up hospital, kills 100s of innocent civilians".

There are currently multiple violet protests happening in the middle east right now because of this. Even more people are going to be killed. All for what could be a horrific accident.

Imagine thinking Western media is biased against Israel. Just lmao. Boy do I wish we had emojis so I could fill this post up with even more laughs.

https://twitter.com/daniopp/status/1714394637966663803

Hard to believe the paper that employed Walter Duranty would ever come to this!

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Are there any instances of Palestinian missiles causing this kind of damage? I imagine terrorists would have done so already against Israeli target. Perhaps capable but missed? Or is this clearly a bunker buster?

No, there are not, because Israel does not need to hide weapons depots in hospitals. This is very clearly 'something set off an explosion on or under the ground'.

Anyway, more fun media bias news (just from today!) -- compare story to headline:

https://twitter.com/PyriticVictory/status/1714382118770401512

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Are there any instances of Palestinian missiles causing this kind of damage? I imagine terrorists would have done so already against Israeli target. Perhaps capable but missed? Or is this clearly a bunker buster?

No, there are not, because Israel does not need to hide weapons depots in hospitals. This is very clearly 'something set off an explosion on or under the ground'.

Anyway, more fun media bias news (just from today!) -- compare story to headline:

https://twitter.com/PyriticVictory/status/1714382118770401512

Not sure whats wtf considering Israel actually did a 1 for 1000 trade 10 years ago.

The headline might be cut off depending on your browser, but the headline is 'Hamas says it's willing to release all civilian hostages immediately if Gaza bombing stops'. The article reveals that there are other pretty large demands.

Israel did do a 1 for 1000 trade 10 years ago, but it was deeply unpopular with the public, obviously bad policy, certainly contributed to where we are today by incentivizing Hamas to take hostages, and I would really hope we're not living in a world stupid enough for that mistake to happen twice. "There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee..."

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Yes but there are military bases or gasoline storage areas in Israel with weapons depots. Jas a Palestinian missile ever caused that much damage? Not trying to lead to an answer honestly do not know. Also are there large scale targets with ammo that can be hit? Or are these things just too unreliable.

No, this explosion was much more powerful than those normally caused by Israeli airstrikes much less Palestinian missiles. Your alternative explanation to 'there was an explosion on or under the ground' is that Israel would use a special missile for the attack and then not be prepared to react to it landing; this is also not really consistent with video footage, which shows an explosion on or under the ground. (Note that 'there was an explosion on or under the ground' would be consistent with how we know Hamas uses hospitals, and it is very likely that every hospital in Gaza is a depot like this unless Hamas does not have enough weaponry to make that happen. Moreover, current journalistic norms are incentivizing militant groups to do this around the world).

Occam's Razor; most of this was obvious within around an hour of the story breaking. The only part I was unsure about is whether the thing setting off the explosion was a Palestinian rocket (like the IDF claimed) or an Israeli airstrike (like the Palestinians claimed); it seemed likelier to be the former given how they're set off, but not so much likelier that I was willing to go out on a limb to say that. It seems like we have evidence now that what set off the explosion was a Palestinian rocket, though.

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I am not a rocket scientist (….) but don’t rockets have a lot of fuel in them, in addition to the ordinance? This is what distinguishes them from shells. If the rocket hit the ground almost immediately after shooting off (as the video shows) wouldn’t the mostly unspent fuel all igniting explain the explosion?

My understanding is that it probably wouldn't be that large, or we'd see similar explosions very frequently. There are varying estimates, but a very large fraction of Hamas rockets land in Gaza; last year this was estimated at "roughly 20%". (I'm seeing "30-40%" repeated all over Twitter from, like, pro-Israel accounts copying each other, but I have no idea where they got those numbers.) Explosions of this magnitude don't happen that frequently, though, so there needs to be a special explanation. Given that this was a hospital and storing weapons in hospitals is a long-standing Hamas policy, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (...) to figure out what happened.

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Are there any instances of Palestinian missiles causing this kind of damage? I imagine terrorists would have done so already against Israeli target. Perhaps capable but missed? Or is this clearly a bunker buster?

No. Palestinian missiles are not this powerful.

It doesn't need to be powerful if it struck somewhere ammunition was being stored. It is possible that either a building at the hospital site or a neighboring building was being used for such purpose. You can hardly rule it out, especially given the GeoConfirmed analysis. It isn't confirmed that a Palestinian rocket caused the explosion but it certainly looks possible.

I would wager that the reason you don't see similar explosions in any cases where Palestinian rockets have landed in Israel is because the IDF is an actual military and follows proper ammunition storage procedures which are crafted specifically to prevent such explosions.

We have seen plenty of ammunition depots being blown up in Ukraine before.

There would be one or more secondary explosions from the ammunition.

Probably, yes (although not necessarily), if it were an ammunition depot. But if it is a rocket depot (which is what the original report claimed), and particularly if it is a rocket depot in a small and confined space where the rockets are packed together very tightly, then all the fuel would simply go up at once.

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https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1714381171901997133

Apparently rocket motor failure can explain the second blast, rather than explosives on the ground, though I still think explosives on the ground is the simplest solution and therefore the likeliest.

In any case, Meclazine, I suspect anything shown on TV has been on the Internet for a while, and I doubt there's any more footage left to release; both governments have made their points and I'd be surprised if there's more stuff either has (not to say that, like, security camera footage might not be found later, but I don't think there's anything one side or the other is waiting to release). OSINT accounts have basically settled on the IDF explanation of "Palestinian rocket hit the hospital and caused the explosion", though I don't think there's any conclusive account of what caused the explosion available. (My very very strong guess is "the hospital was used to store rockets and something like this is true for every hospital in Gaza", which would be consistent with prior practice, but it's not as though I've physically been there and can prove it.) There might be postwar investigations which can uncover something, but I think for the moment we've gotten all the information we're getting.

Are there any instances of Palestinian missiles causing this kind of damage? I imagine terrorists would have done so already against Israeli target. Perhaps capable but missed? Or is this clearly a bunker buster?

No, there are not, because Israel does not need to hide weapons depots in hospitals. This is very clearly 'something set off an explosion on or under the ground'.

Anyway, more fun media bias news (just from today!) -- compare story to headline:

https://twitter.com/PyriticVictory/status/1714382118770401512

Not sure whats wtf considering Israel actually did a 1 for 1000 trade 10 years ago.

The headline might be cut off depending on your browser, but the headline is 'Hamas says it's willing to release all civilian hostages immediately if Gaza bombing stops'. The article reveals that there are other pretty large demands.

Israel did do a 1 for 1000 trade 10 years ago, but it was deeply unpopular with the public, obviously bad policy, certainly contributed to where we are today by incentivizing Hamas to take hostages, and I would really hope we're not living in a world stupid enough for that mistake to happen twice. "There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee..."

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4135847,00.html
It had 80% support and it makes some sense. IDf soldiers are conscripts after all.

It was popular at the time, but it's since become a staple of anti-Netanyahu rhetoric and an example of him being too soft on the Palestinian issue; here's Bennett critiquing him over it and here's Livni. It's legacy is very negative; there are counts of how many Israelis have been killed by individuals released in the exchange (though the exact numbers vary) and it's very unlikely to happen again.

It's clear this is becoming an inflection point in international sentiment. Over a decade of diplomacy with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States has been incinerated. The West Bank has become a powder keg.

If Israel did not bomb the hospital, they need to release all of the available video footage from before, during and after the explosion so the public can see for themselves just what did or did not happen.

And they'd better do it now, before POTUS arrives and they have an opportunity to tank our international standing along with theirs.

This is not a good look.

Biden should cancel the trip.

Isn't it? I feel like a lot of the "not a good look" stuff between 2009-19 ended up working out in Israel's favor in public opinion, and it's at least possible to imagine that reflecting on Biden himself. So far in this conflict at least in the West public opinion has been pretty uniformly pro-Israel, but then that makes sense given decades of shifts.

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I hate how the worst people are on the right side of the argument in this conflict.

This is me. When you're being mean to me, this is who you're being mean to.



For those who don't get the joke, my username means "eight" in Russian, which is why it's an octopus.

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So, it appears today that the hospital strike was essentially made up and literal fake news. Most of my speculation yesterday (about what could have caused an explosion of that size, and so forth) was incorrect.

That said, my point that the media is horrendously biased in favor of the Palestinian parties is obviously true, since they made the whole thing up. (In fact, if you read the early articles closely, you'll note that there was never even a Hamas statement -- they literally just quoted some guy in the Gaza Health Ministry.) If you simply assume that any story reported in mainstream Western news outlets about Israeli atrocities is scandalously and blatantly false, and don't give it serious consideration, you'll be much closer to an accurate view of the world. (True for everyone reading this, even if you consider yourself a pro-Israel partisan. You too, lurkers.)

This is not to say that Israel doesn't sometimes do bad things, or that you should trust IDF press releases (lol). It is simply to say that more-or-less all accounts of Israeli atrocities in Western media are lies, and you should dismiss them off-handedly. When you do this, your model of the world will be closer to reality.

https://twitter.com/spengjr/status/1714413067990134967

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Under normal international law the area would belong to Israel anyway. Conquering Gaza is no more (...also no less, I guess) illegal than establishing settlements in the West Bank.

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Under normal international law the area would belong to Israel anyway. Conquering Gaza is no more (...also no less, I guess) illegal than establishing settlements in the West Bank.

Right- Egypt and Jordan have dropped all claims to Gaza/WB, and there has never been any internationally recognized sovereign Palestinian state, so surely Israel would be the only country with any rights to the area.

Under normal international law the area would belong to Israel anyway. Conquering Gaza is no more (...also no less, I guess) illegal than establishing settlements in the West Bank.

This isn't true. The International Community has delegated the West Bank and Gaza Strip to a future Palestinian state.

The international community cannot do this without the agreement of the country in question here, which is Israel. (I agree that the predominant opinion within the international community is that these areas were never legitimately Israeli to begin with, but that is very much not how decolonization usually works; it respects colonial-era borders. Otherwise Africa -- and for that matter the Middle East -- would be much more splintered than it actually is; consider the nonrecognition of independence movements in Ambazonia/Biafra/Katanga. And Kurdistan.)

Israel agreed to this in the 1993 Olso Accords. Any West Bank settlement is ILLEGAL under international law. A process that Israel agreed to. The IDF occupation in the West Bank is also illegal, since Israel said they would withdraw all military forces from the West Bank in 5-10 years from when Olso was signed.

No, Israel agreed to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, but never agreed that it would comprise the entirety of these areas. It only ever agreed to withdraw from Areas A and B (and Gaza), which do not comprise most of the West Bank territorially, and it has never recognized with finality that it does not have a claim to any specific part of the West Bank or Gaza. Israel has never actually agreed to withdraw from Area C (though this has been offered, in 2000 and 2008, in exchange for Palestinian concessions, specifically the permanent disclaiming of any Palestinian right of return or influence over Israeli immigration policy; this was never actually agreed to).

It also did not fully withdraw, as you point out; both sides blame the other for not fulfilling their part of the agreement.

The blockade of Gaza since 2007 is also illegal even if Hamas is not the internationally recognized government.

No. Multiple theories have been proposed for why this would be the case, so I don't know which to respond to here, but they are all wrong.

Any military action, by any country, that isn't entirely defensive is illegal unless authorized by the UN security council. The exception being to stop genocide.

Nobody has seriously put this forward since the 1950s and this rule has very clearly gone into desuetude; otherwise a literally double-digit number of things done by permanent Security Council members (US/Russia/China/France, at least) would be illegal. (It is also not relevant because, again, Gaza belongs to Israel under normal rules, so suppressing some political entity there which is not recognizing Israeli jurisdiction is defense under normal rules.)

So all military action by the IDF taken in Gaza is illegal unless its shooting down missiles or bombing strictly missile sites. Bombing hospitals, shelters, schools, declared safety routes, food pantries etc are all war crimes which goes beyond unauthorized miliary action.

Targeting non-military targets is a war crime. Reoccupying Gaza would not be one, because under normal international law Gaza belongs to Israel. (And even if it didn't, given that its government tried to hold positions in Israeli territory...uh...last weekend, Israel would still be justified in advancing until that government is replaced, though really the issue here is just that the territory's rightful ruler under normal laws is Israel).

As we have already discussed, it is a long-standing policy of Hamas to militarize hospitals and schools (and apparently mosques), and use them as sites for storing or launching weapons. This would, in fact, make them quite valid military targets; that Israel does not do things like destroying hospitals is because its government holds its military to a (substantially) higher standard than normal international law.

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First, let me say I appreciate the well thought out and well written post.

Thank you.

Let me respond to some points

2. There was no indication that Israel would expand settlements in Area C. The whole point of Area C was to be discussed later, for potential Israeli military concerns (like troops on Jordan border). Not for future settlement. You even have former Israeli prime ministers say that present governments building settlements in Area C (like Netanyahu) was not the intention of the Olso accords and violated the spirt of the treaty and making a future peace harder.

I think I agree that the settlements go against the spirit of the agreement, and that the Israeli politicians who negotiated it did not expect the backlash that occurred in the 1996 election. That said, I don't think there ever was an Israeli government which would agree to give up more than Barak did in 2000 (the 1999 election "put it back on track", on some level), but this agreement was still refused (as was a version of it in 2008). Since 2000 I think the idea of a negotiated peace has been basically dead; Sharon's political platform was establishing a separate Palestinian state by force, but this resulted in Hamas's takeover of Gaza in 2007 and is now also a dead letter. Not much is left besides the Netanyahu strategy of kicking the can down the road, or learning to live with the status quo.

(But I don't think the settlements are illegal, although, yes, most countries do think this. I think this judges the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by a standard foreign to the most obviously similar comparisons.)

3. No country on Earth can deny food, medicine, water, energy, shelter, treatment etc to another country's citizens. Or their own citizens based on your definition. This is illegal.

This is not the case; no country has a responsibility under international law to allow in refugee flows. Perhaps there is a moral law that mandates this, but there is no clause of international law. (No one is disputing that Egypt and Jordan are well within their rights to refuse entry to individuals fleeing Gaza). Food, medicine, water, energy, shelter, and medical treatment were all available in Gaza before the current more intensive period of conflict started; there were not people starving (...as in Venezuela, for instance -- which nevertheless remains under quite legal US sanctions), and the reason we can have controversies about who, if anybody, bombed a hospital is because functioning hospitals exist within Gaza.

In general, countries are well within their rights to sanction other countries (...and superpowers like the US exercise this right routinely), or to blockade rebellious areas; most of the other examples of this are from much poorer places than Gaza, much less Israel -- it took place in Yemen and takes place in African conflicts -- but that mostly goes to show how unusual a conflict like this is in a relatively wealthy part of the world.

4. Countries violating this rule doesn't make it right.

It makes it not a valid rule.

5. While Israel has the right to go into Gaza to take out Hamas (with the unlikely approval from the UN), it still has been targeting civilian targets. Which are war crimes.

Even attacking civilian targets like hospitals that have been militarized is a war crime.

It legitimately is not; the third part of this expressly notes that where there is not doubt, "places of worship...houses...other dwellings...schools" all can be valid military targets. There is no standard for what is meant by 'doubt'.

'Disproportionate force' against such targets is banned, but...like...only a military expert can actually determine what force would be 'disproportionate' (and really for 'doubt' ultimately it comes down to a good-faith effort on the part of the intelligence agencies of the attacking government).

You think Hamas is the first to try this? Why is it that other western powers (usually) avoid hitting hospitals and schools?

Because it makes for bad press under the modern journalistic environment. This is very unfortunate because it incentivizes groups like Hamas (...or, in 2014, various Donbass paramilitaries) to militarize hospitals and schools and behave in ways that maximize civilian casualties. The solution must be to change the modern journalistic environment, so that they will not reflexively treat an organization more sympathetically if its enemies bomb hospitals and schools.

[Vosem]

The general issue is that among younger people there are far more undecideds, not huge pro-Palestine majorities or whatever. Old people are catered to partially because there are more of them, and in the modern West trying to appeal to a younger electorate always means shooting yourself in the foot, but also because they've made up their minds.

My vantage point on social media is that anti-Israel sentiment peaked circa 2014 in terms of how widely it was shared and has since fallen off, with left-wing pro-Israel sentiment picking up momentum and pro-Israel campus organizations staffing multiple Democratic primary campaigns in 2019-2020, particularly those of Buttigieg and Biden. But it might be that I lived in a community with many Arab-Americans in 2014 and then went to a college campus with an unusually active pro-Israel organizing even among liberal non-Jews. In polling of Americans, Israel made enormous gains between about 2001 and 2018 -- mostly concentrated on the right -- but since then gains on the left in sympathy for Palestine have probably been able to cancel continued increases in sympathy for Israel on the right. We'll see what the impact from this is -- generally renewed conflict with the Palestinians has been good for Israel in public opinion polling. But also, of course, opinion among journalists/State Department employees/NGOs is also a thing, beyond just the opinion of the public.

[Vosem]

https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1715377756865733008

It appears that the gentleman who published the hospital story for the New York Times agrees with me on the moral equivalence of Palestinian liberationism and Nazism!

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As it turns out, the Israeli's had already bombed this hospital a few days previously. But of course they wouldn't do such a thing a second time.

https://www.anglicannews.org/news/2023/10/anglican-run-al-ahli-arab-hospital-in-gaza-damaged-by-israeli-rocket-fire-as-conflict-continues.aspx

Not a good day for the credibility of neoconservative propagandists and online intelligence assets spreading naked disinfo.

The horseshoe theory is real especially when it comes to foreign policy

Every time I see this term thrown around, it involves reactions to people expressing their empathy for mistreated, bombed or starving people (yes, even brown people — shocking!) and their opposition to the actors committing those crimes, so it probably says a lot more about the 'centrist' people using that term than it does about the term itself..

The point on the fish hook most distant from “far left” is exactly where you find me 🤷🏽‍♂️

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That big of a polling gap could be explained by either wording differences or a rapid day-to-day shift in sentiment as coverage shifts to the ongoing bombing of Gaza. We'll see what future polls show as they come.

The poll that had 48% of Americans supporting sending weapons and supplies to Israel also had 76% saying that Biden is sending either the right amount or not enough aid to Israel; I think the entirety of the difference is just wording differences. “Weapons and supplies” sounds much more intense than “aid”.

[Vosem]

As it turns out, the Israeli's had already bombed this hospital a few days previously. But of course they wouldn't do such a thing a second time.

https://www.anglicannews.org/news/2023/10/anglican-run-al-ahli-arab-hospital-in-gaza-damaged-by-israeli-rocket-fire-as-conflict-continues.aspx

Not a good day for the credibility of neoconservative propagandists and online intelligence assets spreading naked disinfo.

The horseshoe theory is real especially when it comes to foreign policy

Every time I see this term thrown around, it involves reactions to people expressing their empathy for mistreated, bombed or starving people (yes, even brown people — shocking!) and their opposition to the actors committing those crimes, so it probably says a lot more about the 'centrist' people using that term than it does about the term itself..

The point on the fish hook most distant from “far left” is exactly where you find me 🤷🏽‍♂️

No? I think many far-right people have identitarian concerns, while my political philosophy boils down to “the way to improve the lot of the most people is to strengthen a disunited nouvelle riche in every society”, subject to certain post-Industrial Revolution assumptions. This is much more directly “the opposite of being far-left” than most far-right people, since many of the far-left believe the way to do this is to unite and strengthen the poor or working class.