As if there was any doubt left that this Israeli government had even a shred of interest in peace and human rights for Palestinians… the bigoted and murderous supremacists in charge of Israel have approved another illegal settlement plan for the West Bank, effectively cutting it in two.
The settlers and their supporters and enablers in the Israeli government really are no better than Hamas and other extremists. And that’s not hyperbole.
An Israeli magazine is reporting that, according to Israeli intelligence data, as many as 83% of those killed in Gaza are civilians.
I recall a discussion about civilian vs militant death rates, earlier in the thread. 83% is much, much worse than even the IDF defenders in the thread were saying was the line between acceptable and unacceptable.
Children and other civilians continue to suffer and die in the worst ways humanly possible, all because of the actions of the IDF and Israeli government. All while accomplishing nothing.
And believing the 83% number requires you to believe the IDF is accurate in their classification of who was a combatant, and accurate in total number killed. In reality, the first number is probably much lower and the second number much higher.
It’s still astounding that even with fudged numbers, the best they could come up with was 83%.
Some “interesting” or perhaps “creative” math there. They’re taking the full list of dead and comparing it to the list of Hamas members killed whose name is known to Israel.
So it doesn’t mean that 83% of those killed in Gaza are civilians; it means that 83% of those killed were not identified by name by the IDF.
If an IDF soldier calls in a tank strike on a position where someone was shooting him from, and the shooter is killed by the tank shell, and because of this Israel can’t identify him by name, this methodology counts him as a civilian.
The IDF says the numbers are wrong, though provides zero details or evidence:
The Israeli military did not dispute the existence of the database or dispute the data on Hamas and PIJ deaths when approached for comment by Local Call and +972 Magazine. When the Guardian asked for comment on the same data, a spokesperson said they had decided to “rephrase” their response.
A brief statement sent to the Guardian did not directly address questions about the military intelligence database.
It said “figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without specifying which data the Israeli military disputed. It also said the numbers “do not reflect the data available in the IDF’s systems”, without detailing which systems.
Using the IDF definition of combatant, probably 80% of the Israelis killed on 7 Oct were combatants.
A US Navy SEAL writes as follows, pretty much exactly my view:
At the Naval Academy, I internalized something even bigger than tactics or raids: the necessity of defending humanity from genocide. On my second day of plebe summer, we were bused into DC to the Holocaust museum. It was intentional. The Holocaust was not abstract as we learned the craft of warfare. It was a warning. It demanded vigilance. It demanded that men like me, trained and armed by the United States, understand that the use of force must serve a moral purpose. Our training wasn’t just about marksmanship or demolitions—it was about judgment, about knowing when violence is justified and when it becomes cruelty.
By those lights, I should be firmly on Israel’s side. I respect their ethos of survival, their recognition that the world often looks the other way when Jews are threatened, their refusal to accept annihilation without a fight. I understand that October 7 was not just an attack, but a massacre meant to instill terror, a reminder of why they believe no one else will ever defend them but themselves. Any military professional who studies history sees the legitimacy of that fear, and the moral right the Israelis have to play rough when Jews are murdered.
But that was then. And now, what Israel is doing in Gaza makes it impossible for me to simply salute and stand with them. The principle of defending humanity from genocide applies to Palestinians as well. Indiscriminate bombing, mass displacement, starvation used as a weapon—these things are not strategy, they are punishment. They are the flattening of an entire people under the logic of collective guilt. They are war crimes, crimes against humanity, and whether they meet the legal definition of genocide under international law is irrelevant. They are wrong, and the government committing them is in the wrong. You can’t study Entebbe, where precision, appropriate violence, and risk turned chaos into triumph, and then justify the wholesale destruction of Gaza, where entire neighborhoods are reduced to rubble in the name of rooting out Hamas.
Pretty much every organization not directly allied with Trump/Netanyahu is calling what’s going on in Gaza a famine. The IDF and its defenders insist only they can be trusted. ISTM that if they really wanted to convince people there was no famine, they’d allow outside journalists into Gaza to verify it.
That they haven’t done this is extremely telling. There’s a famine in Gaza, perpetrated by the Israeli government and IDF, and they want to pretend this can be hidden. It can’t.
We are likely to see some redefinition of Northern Gaza like buffer or demilitarized zone, with a renamed settler population. The IDF is free to use the more appropriate US term of ‘squatter’.
…I think its important that, if you can stomach it, that everyone watch this video that I’m about to post.
It is an upsetting video. It shows Palestinians getting killed. You don’t see anything graphic. Not in the first video. But I’ll spoil it anyway so nobody accidentally clicks it, and describe it clearly so that people know what it shows.
The second video that I will share shows the aftermath. That one is graphic, and I’d be very careful about clicking that one.
The first video shows a warcrime. To be precise: multiple warcrimes. Spoiled because it includes footage of people getting killed by an explosion. As mentioned, you don’t see anything graphic. Just a group of people, on a stairwell, trying to rescue other people, then an explosion.
Its a warcrime because its an attack on a hospital. As I’ve made the case for over and over again on these boards: attacking a hospital is a warcrime. There are exceptions to this. Hospitals can lose their protections if the hospital is used to “commit acts harmful to the enemy.”
But we can see exactly what the people that were killed were doing here. This is one of the clearest videos you will ever see of that. Most of the people we can see are rescuers. They are trying to save the lives of the people that were hit in the first strike. We see another person, probably one of the four journalists killed in this strike, filming them.
Because this was a double-tap. Arguably illegal under International Humanitarian Law, a double-tap is where they firstly drop a bomb, and when people arrive to rescue the people targeted in the first bomb, they get hit by a second. A double tap isn’t about the target of the first strike, but about killing the first responders.
Among those killed in this strike were, as mentioned, four journalists. It included Mariam abu Dagga, who recently did some work for the AP, who was described by a colleague as " A mother, a kind lady with a beautiful soul and smile."
It included Dr. Mohamed Al-Habibi.
Fifteen people have been reportedly killed so far.
Here is the second video. This shows the aftermath. WARNING: this one is graphic. It shows multiple dead bodies in the stairwell from after what I’m assuming is the second bombing.
The two big pieces of news out of Gaza in the last few days is firstly, Gaza is now, according to the IPC Famine Review committee, Gaza is now in famine.
https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Famine_Review_Committee_Report_Gaza_Aug2025.pdf
Phase 5 for Gaza Governorate and Phase 4 for Deir al-Balah and Kahn Younis. And its probably worse in the north, but as I’ve noted multiple times recently in this thread, nobody has been able to get accurate information from the north since about April.
There is a lot of intentional disinformation about the IPC designation, including from government accounts. Jeremy Konyndyk, formerly USAID and currently President of advocacy group Refugees International, addresses those here.
And the second-biggest news out of Gaza is that the IDF have launched a major “offensive” against Gaza City. The reports from the ground are, as you can expect, horrific. People are expecting Gaza City to be flattened. Just like Rafah and many places in the north. From the UN:
Bolding not mine: but from the UN statement.
Yes. They showed photos of tunnels that everyone knew were under the hospital, and a handful of guns. It was shockingly little evidence. And if that space was really being used by Hamas, Israel could have cut the power to the tunnels and poured some concrete to close them off, and left the hospital running. They could even have left some soldiers there to maintain control. Instead, they destroyed it. (And had to keep coming back to destroy it again, as Palestinians cobbled together some hospital functionality.) And they destroyed all the other hospitals. And they’ve been assassinating journalists at an unprecedented rate.
I’m Jewish. I was raised to support Israel. My synagogue still has an Israeli flag and and a prominently displayed empty chair to represent the hostages. But i can’t support Israel now. It’s much too obvious that they are trying to remove Palestinians from Gaza.
Maybe he wouldn’t have, but i would have. I was shocked at the paltry evidence.
Yup. They sure missed that opportunity.
I expected the IDF to parade in international journalists to show off the sophisticated command and control center they destroyed, and to justify their attack on a hospital. Instead… Nothing. And you know, if anyplace that has a laptop and a gun is a “command and control center”, you don’t gain anything by destroying those places. Because they will obviously pop up elsewhere. Sure, cut the power and keep some soldiers patrolling places that really need power, like, i dunno, hospitals. Turning hospitals into rubble seems much less effective than stationing a few troops there.
Yeah, even Israelis are no longer backing this war.
Right. After all, most of them served in the Israeli military at some point in their lives.
What does that do though? I’m pretty sure the IDF will just continue killing them (because all cameras in Gaza are Hamas cameras) and then turn around and blame them for not sharing their location. I guess not sharing the locations means the IDF will have to work a little harder to guide the missiles/bombs/bullets in but we’ve already seen they are clearly willing to go through the effort.
I cannot find where I read this but apparently the Israeli government has said that it considers first responders to be Hamas and therefore the enemy. Same with journalists.
Have they not just basically confessed to war crimes? I initially had some sympathy for Israel in 2023. That sympathy is long long gone now. As in, never coming back.
This is essentially Holocaust II.
…the way I read that statement: they stopped sharing their locations a long time ago: unrelated to this particular incident.
They confess to warcrimes daily. From today:
Just casually proposing ethnic cleansing. Except he’s a bit late: because they are literally imposing a siege on the territory in the north right now, and are forcing Palestinians to head south. The only difference is he is saying the “annexation” thing out loud.
So, are they going to stop at 6 million dead, or go for the record?
Won’t they have to move on to the West Bank for that?
Why are you phrasing that like they’re not already there?
Striking a deal? There is no “deal”. This is a war. Surrender, turn over all hostages, and abdicate all political power. We didn’t make a “deal” in WW-II. It was unconditional surrender.
None of the Islamic countries want to take in refugees from Gaza and have called for Hamas to surrender. They don’t want their militant nonsense in their countries.
Hamas has to go and the Palestinians need to make that happen.
…that is the language chosen by the author of the article. Feel free to substitute whatever other language you like. Like ceasefire. Or “pause.” Or “end to hostilities.”
These things happen all the time. In fact: there was a ceasefire a few months ago until Israel just decided to end it.
Hamas has agreed to turn over all the hostages and abdicate all political power. They did that months ago. Israel has chosen not to negotiate. Instead they are currently in the process of flattening Gaza City, a clear and obvious crime against humanity with zero justification.
This isn’t World War 2. Countless wars and conflicts since then have been solved without unconditional surrender. That isn’t a prerequisite.
A reminder that the United States of America, one of the biggest funders, supporters and cheerleaders of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza (both the Republicans AND the Democrats) halted medical visitor visas for children who have had their limbs blown off by American bombs. So if you want to complain about countries not taking in people from Gaza then perhaps look at what your country is doing first. You actually have some agency here. Write a letter to your congressman. Let the medical visitor visas continue.
Not that it matters anyway, because Israel have total control of the borders in Gaza, and are barely letting anyone in or out.
Palestinians in Gaza are starving. They are trying to avoid getting bombed. They aren’t in a position to make Hamas do anything. They are just trying to stay alive.
Not that it matters because again: Hamas has agreed to step down. They have already agreed to go.