You think the boy scouts would be spared if the IDF just sent soldiers in straight away instead of targeting the building with a bomb?
In the US you’d call the police. In Gaza, Hamas is the police.
If some militants took over a school and started shooting rockets at a neighboring town, and when people tried to stop them the cops from the town the school is in barricaded themselves in the school to defend the rocket shooters, you might have a different reaction.
How do you “send in soldiers” to a place like Jabalia which is in the middle of Hamas territory and surrounded by Hamas territory in every direction?
If you announced that everyone should leave because you were going to bomb/shoot/arrest the terrorists, I imagine that the terrorists would leave with them. I imagine the question that the USA considered in WWII, “Is it better to kill a bunch of Japanese civilians, or kill a million US servicemen?” came to mind.
With Gaza city surrounded, one would hope the IDF would send soldiers into hiding places rather than bombs.
Is your argument that the IDF is going to kill the bystanders one way or another, so why not use bombs? That’s maybe not going to win people over to your side.
If the cops were alone in the school, then sure, bomb away. If the cops were there with hundreds of students, I feel confident that the response in the US would not be to bomb the school.
Israel calls up individual houses and tells them that they’re in an area that’s about to be bombed. Civilians who don’t leave are often prevented from leaving by Hamas.
No, that Hamas will not go down without using up every available resource, including innocent civilian lives.
I believe there have been instances in history where soldiers went into hostile territory.
That doesn’t really match the US’s behavior in any of the places it has bombed, like Iraq or Afghanistan or…
Thanks, Babale.
Indeed, even as we speak, Israel is in Gaza. However, there are areas where they aren’t yet, from which they are being fired at; part of a combined arms operation involves bombing those positions so ground troops can advance.
Are you under the impression that I supported our approach in Iraq or Afghanistan? We do the same thing there as the IDF is doing in Gaza, because we don’t put a high enough value on civilian lives in a foreign country. And it’s disgusting there too.
My argument is that whether you use bomb or send in soldiers, if your opponent makes a point of hiding behind civilians and actively discourage them from getting the hell out of dodge, either way is going to result in dead civilians. The only way to prevent that altogether is for the IDF to say “Welp, Hamas is surrounding themselves with innocent people and won’t let them leave to fight us, so i guess we’ll just have to go home”. Obviously that is not going to happen.
The US does that, as does every other army that actually has to fight (as opposed to armies that rely on the US to commit war crimes for them while they wag their fingers and benefit from the geopolitical situation), because that is how war is fought. It is horrible - war is really fucking horrible.
If the US ever had to deal with a domestic threat that was serious enough - say, a whole state’s worth of Y’all Qaeda secedes and starts firing rockets at neighboring states - I guarantee you that we’d treat them the same way.
I watched an Israeli describe how soldiers entered a building, and as is done in hostage situations, yelled “Get down!” and shot everyone standing or holding a weapon.
Including some 16 year old Hamas soldiers, which they will add to the child body count that they send out to the press.
I’ve noticed that no one is even attempting to split the death toll on the Palestinian side between combatants and civilians. I understand that the Ministry of Health Hamas is not going to but it seems irresponsible for everyone else to just report their numbers verbatim. “Fool me once” and all that.
Genuinely just stating this as an example, not because I think it supports one or the other side, but the closest analogy in the US to what you and TroutMan are describing would be the Waco Siege. I guess there’s also the MOVE bombing, but that IMO is such a clear case of mass murder by US law enforcement with absolutely no justification based on the proportionality of the threat that I don’t know if it applies.
So, that’s 14 teachers–out of nearly 10,000 teachers. They’ve documented less than two tenths of a percent of UNRWA teachers saying outrageous things. They’ve documented 100 Hamas terrorists who graduated from a UNRWA school, out of a population of more than half a million kids educated every year.
I’m not saying that’s great, and those 14 teachers should almost certainly lose their jobs (the “almost” is only there to allow for some factor such as mistaken identity, e.g., someone else with the same name who posted that nonsense). But I’m not sure I accept the conclusion that " the specific organization in place to do this perpetuates the conflict and coordinates with Hamas," absent some corroborating evidence.
I’m not sure what could happen that would make you consider if the IDF has gone too far, because anything that happens to date is justified with some variant of war is hell, it’s Hamas’ fault, there is no choice other than bombing, or we’ll review things after it’s over and apologize then. I think you’re pretty locked in to this belief, and I don’t blame you for it, and I’m not going to keep harping on it.
But please try to consider the true position of the dissenters in this thread. I’m not arguing against the current approach because I’m a pacifist, or I support Hamas, or I don’t believe Hamas is using civilians as human shields, or all these other things you are attacking me for. I just think there is a lot more that Israel and the IDF could be doing to support the children and civilians in Gaza. The number of dead children cannot be justified, and I am disappointed that so many accept that as an unavoidable cost.
That’s where I stand as well–with an addition. There’s so much conflicting information that’s coming out of this horrific war, and it’s often impossible for me to evaluate things fairly. Netanyahu’s comments about the Amalekites are a great example: I just lack the cultural background to understand all the implications of what he’s saying.
Given that, I have to rely on parties with a proven track record. Netanyahu has one proven track record. The World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and the Human Rights Watch have a different track record. When the human rights organizations are calling in almost unison for a certain set of actions, I pay that a great deal of attention. Where I lack the expertise to evaluate things fairly, they don’t.
If those organizations were saying, “These deaths are tragic, but the IDF is taking every measure possible to avoid civilian casualties,” I’d give that a lot of weight.