I wish that were true, but it’s not. All the news about the war has an effect. All the images of dead Palestinians and bombed out buildings do, too.
In that case I stand corrected.
I didn’t misunderstand your post; I assumed you meant that you think Israel’s selection of targets is morally equivalent to Hamas’s selection of you as a target. The reason I think that’s unreasonable is that IDF has not targeted the Palestinian diaspora abroad, nor in the West Bank outside of what I understand are Hamas-controlled enclaves (the Settlers are a separate matter and the US absolutely should be making aid conditional on their being reigned in immediately), nor even in Qatar where Hamas leadership lives. So if someone uses Israeli targeting Hamas targets near or in areas where civilians live as moral cover to target you (or me) far away from any IDF assets, that seems like a false equivalence on their part, and not one that the IDF should be responsible for.
So, this is from a few weeks ago, but it says the Israeli military found:
Photographs released later by the IDF appeared to show the full alleged haul, laid out neatly: Military uniforms, 11 guns, three military vests, one with a Hamas logo, nine grenades, two Qurans, a string of prayer beads, a box of dates.
How can that possibly justify having shut down a major hospital, leaving patients unable to leave to die?
As best as i can tell, the IDF selection of targets is random. And they could have sent soldiers into that hospital without shutting it down if they thought there was something actually valuable there.
(And if the claim is, “there was more stuff, but Hamas moved it” then the whole assault was a waste of lives. Because if the military assets can move that easily, there’s no particular benefit to targeting buildings at all.)
Again, that article is simply gaslighting you.
There were significantly more weapons found than that. The videos of Shifa from the first couple days on the IDF official channel alone show far more than “11 guns”. This link has a picture from Shifa with dozens of guns.
The idea that all that the IDF found at Al Shifa was a handful of guns is simply not true. It’s gaslighting. It’s as insidious as all the “Israel kills 500 in hospital airstrike” nonsense we heard at the beginning of the war.
And I hope that when you’re asking “what did military action accomplish” you realize that the reason Hamas came to the table and agreed to release the hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, after a month of saying “there can be no negotiation without Israel ending their attack first”, is that they got their asses kicked for long enough that they decided it was time to lick their wounds.
If the IDF isn’t making any progress, why did Hamas suddenly make concessions?
Thank you for that link. Honestly, it’s still not a very impressive haul for destroying a hospital and all the fragile people in it. And the article says Hamas removed most of what was there, which gets back to “if their stuff is that easy to move, what’s the value of destroying buildings?” And while I’m sure it was useful to destroy the tunnels, i still wonder if they couldn’t have been taken without shutting down the hospital. The tunnels are under the building, after all.
But yes, Hamas did agree to a hostage exchange, after saying they wouldn’t negotiate at all without a cease fire. So yes, the IDF has done some damage to Hamas.
It’s still an awful lot of dead civilians. An awful lot of destroyed homes. An awful lot of new orphans to fight for Hamas.
So the Washington Post is gaslighting, but an Israeli news site is telling nothing but the truth. I see a photo of a pile of guns. How do I know where they came from. More importantly, how do you know?
Well, you could read the attribution, for one. YNet, a reputable news site, makes that easily available to find right under the photo.
It was taken by Ahikam Seri, a respected photojournalist and documentarian who is certainly no right-wing apologist. If you pay attention you will see that American papers use him too.
I read the article, even translated it. This reporter and that newspaper are more reputable than the Washington Post? Not to me.
Why should I believe that a single word printed in an Israeli news source right now isn’t incredibly biased by either the reporter, the news outlet, or the by the IDF and the Israeli government. Or a combination of all three. That reporter was given a tour by IDF personnel, did he actually see weapons before they were nearly stacked for a photo op?
Part of the reason for my mistrust is because the IDF and friends spoke so loudly about there being a Hamas HQ hiding under the hospital. Reminds me of the similarly laughable claims 55 years ago that the Viet Cong were being run out of a bamboo Pentagon.
And then the big reveal - a couple of guns and some equipment. IDF way oversold what was in there. They should have just gone with the much more realistic claim that Hamas forces were hiding there. But no, had to be an HQ.
Whelp, until the IDF delivers a hidden HQ I don’t think I need to believe any Israeli gaslighting that is coming out of Gaza. When you make bullshit propaganda claims, it ends up biting you in the ass, and costs you credibility in the rest of the world.
With the caveat that I can’t read Hebrew, the two stories don’t seem to be in conflict. The WaPo article documents a video released by the IDF shortly after securing the hospital and the YNet article is about what was found in the tunnels underneath it.
The WaPo article also says that US intelligence says Hamas uses the hospital. It seems weird to disbelieve an article that lines up with your preferred source.
I don’t think they are in conflict in their text. But the subtext of the Washington Post article is that the IDF was lying and those 10 guns are all there was, which is what I consider to be gaslighting.
Eta: perhaps that’s more to do with how the article has continued to be used with that subtext even once additional info came to light.
Good point. Can we date the articles?
…bolding mine. What makes you think this? Because your understanding isn’t correct.
My claim is that Al-Shifa, along with every other hospital in the north, have been taken out of action. It doesn’t matter if they were shot at by the IDF or they were bombed by the IDF. Because they were taken out of action by the IDF. They were placed under siege. Denied food, water, fuel. In some cases medical teams and patients were forced to leave, in other cases they left because there was no other choice. Then, from reports from people that returned during the pause, critical medical equipment had been destroyed.
So now there are effectively no hospitals in the north. I just want you to think through what that means. Think about all of the services that hospitals provide when there isn’t even a war. None of that is available. No dialysis. No cancer treatment. No covid treatment. Hundreds of mothers giving birth and with no access to healthcare.
When I say the hospitals have been taken out of action, this is what I mean.
That would be because I wasn’t answering your question. I was questioning your premise.
I wouldn’t assume anything. If I had intended to argue that " any action against Hamas to be unjust" than I would have said that.
I would expect them to take the tunnel express with everything they could carry prior to the hospital being breached.
…the “number of guns found” is just missing the point.
For starters: we aren’t just talking about Al Shifa. We are talking about al-Rantisi, al-Nasr, Indonesian, al-Awda, the International eye hospital, al-Quds, Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital, the Psychiatric hospital. Hospitals have protected status in war. They cannot be attacked or otherwise prevented from performing their medical functions. There are situations that allow the protective status to be removed. But every expert in international law that I’ve seen have said the bar to removing that status hasn’t been met. Not at Al Shifa. Not at any of the other hospitals.
If this cache of arms, all gathered together in one place for a photo op is all of the evidence the IDF has, then that isn’t enough to have lifted the protections for a number of reasons, the most important being the IDF didn’t know about the alleged presence of weapons until they had taken over the hospital.
The conventions require more than evidence gathered after the hospital had been taken. To lose protected status hospitals would need to have been used as a “party to the conflict”, used to commit an “act harmful to the enemy”, and if there was any doubt about this, then they should be presumed not to be so used.
The claim was that under Al Shifa was a command and control bunker. That wasn’t what has been presented here. But even if that collection of weapons wasn’t stored weapons of combatants getting treatment (allowable under the conventions) that doesn’t explain what happened at the other hospitals in the north.
And the conventions provide that once taken over, the IDF should not prevent the doctors from performing their medical functions, and if they were unable to do so, then the IDF should have provided those services. But that didn’t happen at Al Shifa or at any of the other hospitals. Medical staff, patients and people sheltering at the hospitals were forcibly expelled from the hospitals. And those that were allowed to remain weren’t given the resources they needed, so had to abandon the hospital anyway. And once they left, critical equipment and infrastructure at the hospital were destroyed by the IDF.
These are the things that actually matter here. That hospitals in the north have been effectively taken out of action. Critical infrastructure is gone. And everyone that wasn’t able to get to the south (not that it matters anyway as the south is now a target) have no access to any sort of healthcare at all.
Obviously they did, which is why they said that Shifa was a Hamas HQ and then attacked it.
That’s because I was responding to gaslighting claims that Al Shifa had no weapons and was not used by Hamas. There’s proof of the tunnels, too.
What’s gaslighting? That the article i read said the idf had only shown them 11 rifles when some other article said the idf had found a few dozen? Maybe it took the idf another day to find another few rifles. It’s still a pretty paltry showing for an alleged major base.
Sure, if we ignore the cells where captives were held in the basement, the tunnels underneath the basement levels, the combatants engaged in the Al Shifa complex as it was taken over, etc…