…Eli Cohen, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, decides to rage against the United Nations in his latest social media post. So far in this war, the IDF have killed 142 members of the United Nations team. More UN staffers have been killed in this conflict than in any other single conflict in its history. The previous highest was 56.
It was, but bear in mind that that post was responding to allegations that Israel has nothing to show for its military action. Yes, only 6 of those killed (at the time of that post) were mid-level leadership, and maybe those are the most impressive of the Hamas personnel captured or killed, but according to even Hamas’s estimates, a full third of the dead - that’s over 6,000 - were active Hamas fighters. It’s not like Israel’s only target are the leaders of the group.
Al-Jazeera is not at all a credible site when it comes to Israel-related news. And even if some tunnel shafts were pre-existing for other purposes, there is no question that Hamas has been creating others, and using a vast tunnel network for military purposes, which might well have included co-opting existing underground infratructure.
I disagree. That makes them a prime suspect for where Hamas militants will be based.
Also known as “using human shields”
Either the fact that the hospitals were already arranged for advantageous military positions, or the PR value of making Israel look bad on the world stage.
Even if evidence (that the IDF has been willing to release publicly) is lacking that these hospitals were any sort of high-level command center, there is no questioning the evidence that there were active fighters based there, caches of weaponry beyond what might be stored from injured fighters seeking treatment, and that they were used at least to some degree for the facilitation of the hostage-taking.
Given the ratio of combatant-to-non-combatant casualties in other recent conflicts, yes.
It’s truly tragic that war cannot be waged in urban areas without a great number of non-combatant deaths, but up through 10/6, there hadn’t been ANY non-combatant deaths in Gaza for years. All that was necessary to maintain that would have been for Hamas and its allies to not commit a historic massacre. Hell, before that, Israel basically accepted daily rocket fire from Gaza as a fact of life without retaliating and even continuing to send in supplies of fuel, electricity, water, etc. But if the price of allowing Hamas to maintain an organizational presence - and certainly a leadership role - in Gaza is risking being attacked like on 10/7, then Israel has a duty to it citizens to do whatever it takes to destroy Hamas.
Perhaps they are attempting to rack up the body count/structural damage so they have something to show after the US ultimatum to wrap things up. I would still like to to see a leak of some of the actual political and operational directives.
There seem to be many hospitals in the Gaza strip.
No more than any other urban area.
Not any more.
We have three hospitals in Little Rock with 202,000 people. Gaza has 2,000,000 people and 26 hospitals, so 67,000 people per hospital in LR, 70,000 in Gaza. I stand corrected.
…provide a cite for the bolded, please.
This is nonsense. That cite was perfectly fine. It provided multiple independent verifiable sources. And its not as if there are any other news sources that one could claim are completely unbiased when it comes to “Israel-related news.” I’ve cited the BBC, I’ve cited CNN, I’ve cited the Jerusalem Post, all of which have shown bias in their reporting. You can’t just dismiss them outright. If you think there is something wrong with that cite, don’t just attack the source, tell me what is wrong.
Well yes, there is question to this. Because Israel is flattening much of Gaza. Israel has forced 1.9 million out of 2.3 million people out of their homes. Because Israel has destroyed essential infrastructure. It isn’t enough to just claim the existence of this allegedly vast tunnel network justifies the level of destruction. Tunnels obviously exist. But not to the extent that would justify the degree of destruction we have seen.
Being a “prime suspect” doesn’t make them legitimate targets. That isn’t a high enough standard according to the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war.
You acknowledge that Hamas didn’t use hospitals as bases, right?
With all due respect, “PR on the world stage” is a really fucking stupid reason to use hospitals as a base. Its like… Palestinians aren’t stupid. And setting up bases in hospitals, making themselves prime targets, in order to achieve a PR victory doesn’t make any sense at all.
And when it became apparent early in the war that Israel didn’t give a damn what the international community thought as they openly and brazenly attacked then took out each hospital, one by one, it would make no sense for them to continue looking for a “PR victory.” And the reality was that they weren’t looking for this. Because they never had bases in the hospitals in the first place.
They were just hospitals.
Bolding mine.
And yes: we should be questioning all of this. Because 23 hospitals were shut down, and I’ve been documenting what was found at many of these hospitals, and there were no active fighters based at any of the hospitals, there were no caches of weapons beyond what we could expect, no evidence that they were used to “facilitate hostage taking” beyond giving some hostages medical care.
There is no evidence of this. We absolutely have to question all of this. The standard to make a hospital a legitimate target is much higher than this.And once the threat has been eliminated, the IDF have the obligation to allow the hospital to continue running. Instead: the IDF destroyed essential infrastructure in the hospitals so they couldn’t run any more. And we are finding that hospitals in the north have been completely destroyed.
But there is strong evidence that the IDF had staged scenes. So how can you argue we shouldn’t be questioning this?
How many of those other recent conflicts had killed 149 UN staffers? Because the previous highest number in any other conflict since the UN started was 56. How many other recent conflicts have nearly 70 journalists been killed? Because this is over twice the number of journalists in a single conflict since the CPJ started keeping records in 1992.
There is no reason why we should think that “the ratio of combatant-to-non-combatant casualties in other recent conflicts” is a ratio we could apply here. The raw numbers, from hospital workers to UN staffers to journalists to children are all out-of-whack from the norm. A ratio, based on previous recent conflicts doesn’t tell us anything. Because what is happening in Gaza, as has been related by every single humanitarian agency, is that this isn’t like any other conflict. In other conflicts, people at least have the chance to run away. But there is no escape for the people in Gaza.
The siege isn’t “waging war” in Hamas. The siege is indefensible. We are over 80 days of siege right now. Most Gazans are starving. We are weeks away from famine. This isn’t just “truly tragic.” This isn’t an accident. Innocents weren’t simply in the way of the bombs. This is a deliberate decision to let the Gazans starve.
Firstly, cite please, secondly, why does that matter?
You realize the reason why Israel sent supplies of fuel, electricity, water, etc was because of the fifteen years of blockade, right?
It wasn’t peaceful until suddenly everything changed on October the 7th. Israel has treated Palestinians brutally for decades. This has been documented in this thread and others. Every single Palestinian has a story of either how they have been treated by the IDF or family have been treated. Almost every person ever detained by the IDF tell us how they witnessed or experienced humiliation and beatings. Others tell us about torture. The occupation hasn’t been a benevolent one. Gaza is often called an “open air prison” for a reason.
As Israel pounded targets in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, a member of the country’s war cabinet threatened action on a second front, along the northern border with Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah has fired rocket barrages into Israel.
“The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out,” Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet and former defense minister, told reporters Wednesday. “If the world and the Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the I.D.F. will do it,” he said, referring to Israel’s military.
“The next stages in fighting will also be deep, forceful, and surprising,” added Mr. Gantz. “The campaign will continue and expand, according to necessity, to more foci or fronts.”
…
The Israeli military said Wednesday that its northern command, along the border with Lebanon, was in a “state of very high readiness.” The military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said, “We need to be prepared to strike if required.”
Israel had already bombed southern Lebanon but apparently this is for a ground invasion.
…just on this number: the only people I’ve heard or can find that have used the “full third of the dead were active Hamas fighters” have been IDF spokespeople. But that would mean, from the latest Flash Update:
That would mean that practically every single male over the age of 18 that has been killed in this conflict were active Hamas fighters. This also matches up with recent IDF claims that they have killed almost the exact number of Hamas fighters since the start of December as the amount of adult males the Ministry of Health has reported killed. This is even worse than a ratio. Its the assumption that every adult male is a Hamas fighter.
More from the latest flash update:
Palestinians aren’t stupid, but as best as i can tell, Hamas is perfectly happy to have a lot of Palestinians killed if they think it might hurt Israel. That is, i am claiming that hamas leadership is evil, and is happy to have a large death toll on both sides.
“Being evil” doesn’t necessarily mean you want a huge death toll.
No, but i think it helps Hamas. They recruit angry people, and orphans. A high Palestinian death toll increases the number of both. And it makes Israel look bad, maybe bad enough to hurt Israel.
And being indifferent to the death of the people you theoretically support is evil.
…there is zero evidence that Hamas have set up hospitals as bases for PR wins. It doesn’t make any sense. Its typical deflection. People have been invested in the idea that Hamas were operating out of hospitals for so long that when it was shown that yes, these were just hospitals, they were saving countless Palestinian lives but now they are not, they had to come up with some sort of a defence. And this is the best they’ve got. And the best is just ridiculous.
We are so well beyond this argument at this point. Nobody on the ground cares about this. Not to any degree that it matters. Gazans are being moved around the map like chess pieces. They just want to live. They aren’t thinking about being recruited. They are worrying about shelter, and avoiding flooding, and food, and water, and not being a target of the indiscriminate bombing campaign. They are worried about missing people, either buried in rubble, or “disappeared” by the IDF. They are worried about how to take care of the increasing number of sick people from hunger, illness and infection. Most people don’t care about a propaganda campaign. They are just trying to survive.
What makes Israel look bad is the way they have decided to conduct this war. Flattening northern Gaza. Destroying thousands of homes. There is nowhere for people to return to.
What makes Israel are the detention camps that they’ve set up in stadiums, stripping men and children down to their underwear and kneel.
What makes Israel look bad is a bombing campaign that has killed thousand of children, destroyed churches, schools and Mosques.
What makes Israel look bad is 80 days of siege that has bought Gaza to the brink of famine.
What makes Israel look bad is shutting down all of the hospitals in the north, and bringing the remaining healthcare system to its knees.
What makes Israel look bad are the flood of instagram and tiktok posts from IDF soldiers obviously staging finding Hitler photos on Ipads and filming intimate garments found in a house and calling it a brothel, filming themselves stealing and destroying property belonging to Gazans, filming themselves mocking Gazans and their language, filming themselves humiliating Palestinian prisoners.
What makes Israel look bad is deliberately thumbing their nose at the United Nations, going as far as calling official statements “blood libel.”
Hamas doesn’t have to do a thing. Israel have made Israel look bad. And it hasn’t hurt them very much at all in this war.
I agree that Israel has done lots of stuff that makes Israel look bad . I’ll go further, and say that Israel has done lots of incredibly bad stuff fighting this war.
But i also think that Hamas launched the attack it did BECAUSE it hoped to provoke Israel into acting badly. Because Hamas can’t defeat Israel on the battlefield, but maybe they can defeat it in the court of international opinion. That was a brutal and extremely graphic attack, meant to provoke an irrational response.
…and this has nothing to do with the hospitals. It was never a PR campaign to get everyone to believe that the hospitals were bases. They simply weren’t bases. They were hospitals. There has been a sustained propaganda campaign by Israel to make everyone believe that hospitals were bases. It was effective. It worked spectacularly. It gave them cover to take over 20 hospitals out of action and now, when people have started to question it…its too late to do anything about it.
And Israel wants to bomb all these hospitals that aren’t being used by Hamas because…?
To do what, exactly? Israel is a sovereign nation in the midst of a war for its existence. Yes, i think they have committed war crimes. But
- who is in a position to stop them?
- i don’t actually think the goal of Israel is genocide. I think they see that as an unfortunate means to an end, which is to destroy Hamas.
- i think Israelis, including Israeli intelligence, believed there were military targets in the hospitals.
Yes.
Israel is very angry over the murders, rapes and kidnappings.
They want to end hamas, for hamas has declared they will do it again and kill Jews from the river to the sea.
If hamas hides with civilians in declared safe areas, Israel bombs them.
If hamas hides among civilians, the civilians should leave. There is somewhere to go, away from hamas.
Of course it does,that is the nature of evil.