Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad, to “kill as many people as possible,” seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.
NPR aired a story yesterday about the Gaza evacuation. It’s worth listening to (or reading the transcript), as it puts faces on the people trying to evacuate.
Not analagous, unless the mexican drug cartel was the terrorist arm of an area government which had been oppressed by the US for decades and had the zeal of a holy war against infidels, which frankly is not the case in drug cartels I know anything about. False equivalencies are not any path to understanding.
Understanding is useful. You don’t have to be sympathetic in order to want to comprehend the reality. For the record, I am not sympathetic to Israel’s oppressive actions nor am I sympathetic toward Hamas in any way at all. This tragedy has no white hats. Just a lot of innocent deaths, with many more to come.
They are being sent to the south end of Gaza because that’s an area that’s not as built up. If that’s where the civilians are Israel can engage in the very deadly urban combat with Hamas with a lot less civilian casualties. This is to me a good thing. The fewer civilians die, the better. If there’s a specific place where the bulk of the fighting will occur, and where it will be hardest to prevent damage to people you aren’t targeting, doesn’t it make sense to do what you can to empty out that area of civilians?
I think that’s a nasty turn of phrase that no government official has any business using. I think it was harmful for him to use that phrase.
I linked the source of those comments earlier. Hagari was being pressed by reporters, he told them multiple times that Israel is fighting Hamas and not the Palestinians and that it will make every effort to protect innocent lives. He then did say the line you quoted here. I used that as an example of something I’ve seen quite often - misleading translations or out of conntext statements used to paint people as saying something different than they actually did. That same interview was where he told a reporter that the IDF does understand that the evacuation will take time, for example; but that is never what is quoted.
No, because I didn’t think Israel would be willing to wait as long as they have before beginning a ground invasion. Depending on how many civilians actually leave Gaza, this strategy could very well save many Palestinian civilians compared to strategies I thought were on the table (namely a ground invasion days ago).
Yes, this. The whole thing is awful.
Is this a real question? because the answer is very fucking obviously yes.
I might agree with you if 1) Israel had established humanitarian safe corridors to allow the evacuation - something that’s only been tossed around as an idea after the 24-hour deadline they ‘didn’t really mean’ even though it’s what was printed on the leaflets dropped all over the city and apparently aren’t actually at all safe. 2) if the entire population wasn’t being subjected to being cut off from food, water, electricity, and medical supplies and 3) if Israel wasn’t shrugging off humanitarian concerns with the comment “it’s a war zone”. Even with all those caveats, again, there is nowhere to shelter these 1,000,000 people being put to flight to the southern Gaza Strip, the sanitation situation alone is going to result in easily preventable deaths, since, as a reminder, there is no electricity or running water, to say nothing of potable water.
Again, where did you quote this? I’m not finding it in this thread. I’m not saying it’s not the case, but I’d like to give it a read myself. Again, my apologies if I’m just missing it, but I don’t see it in this thread.
Regardless, they are very clearly not making every effort to spare innocent lives, as the hospitals, UN refugee shelters and other civilian locations that Hagari brushed off with the “it’s a warzone” comment clearly isn’t just an example of a mistranslation whether it was mistranslated at the press conference or not:
Bolding mine:
The UN Palestine refugee agency (UNRWA) issued an urgent call on Saturday for Israeli Authorities to protect all civilians sheltering in Gaza.
The statement came as the Israeli-imposed deadline for some 1.1 million civilians to leave the northern part of the enclave, ahead of what is expected to be a major advance into Gaza by Israeli ground forces, expired.
“UNRWA shelters in Gaza and northern Gaza are no longer safe. This is unprecedented,” said the statement.
The agency reminded that according to the rules of warfare, civilians, hospitals, schools, clinics and United Nations premises cannot be a target.
“UNRWA is sparing no efforts to advocate with parties to the conflicts to meet their obligations under international law to protect civilians, including those seeking refuge in UNRWA shelters,” the agency emphasized.
UNRWA pointed out that many of the vulnerable, particularly pregnant women, children, the elderly and persons with disabilities simply will be unable to flee south.
“They have no choice and must be protected at all times.”
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said that with water supplies running dry due to Israel cutting off all utilities to Gaza, “it has become a matter of life and death”.
“It is a must. Fuel needs to be delivered now into Gaza to make water available for two million people”, he said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Saturday strongly condemned Israel’s repeated order for 22 hospitals in northern Gaza to be evacuated, describing it as a “death sentence” for the sick and injured.
With around 2,000 desperately ill patients inside their wards, WHO said the forced evacuation of both patients and health workers “will further worsen the current humanitarian and public health catastrophe.”
The statement said the lives of those in intensive care or who rely on life support – including newborns in incubators and those needing hemodialysis – now hang in the balance.
“Health facilities in northern Gaza continue to receive an influx of injured patients and are struggling to operate beyond maximum capacity. Some patients are being treated in corridors and outdoors in surrounding streets due to a lack of hospital beds”, said WHO.
“Forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence.”
Those running the hospitals now face an agonizing choice, the agency said: either abandon the critically ill, put their own lives at risk by staying amid the bombing, or endanger patients’ lives “while remaining on site to treat patients, or endanger their patients’ lives “while attempting to transport them to facilities that have no capacity to receive them.”
The agency said that overwhelmingly, staff have chosen to stay behind rather than risk lives by moving those who are critically ill.
Mistranslation or not, Israel is very clearly not respecting the requirements to protect hospitals, UN shelters and other civilian locations, and is in fact demanding they be evacuated, with no regard for the deaths that will result.
Making every effort to spare innocent lives:
I am frankly disguised by Israel’s conduct thus far. It’s only going to get worse in the coming days as Israel’s refusal to allow food, water, medical supplies, electricity and fuel into the Gaza Strip starts killing people. Going back to the OP, I’m not sure if it’s even going to matter if Hamas is destroyed. I’m finding it hard to see how any hope for peace hasn’t already been poisoned for another generation.
That’s exactly what the hardliner Israelis are saying about Hamas’ actions.
I mean, it’s not like the practice of hope-poisoning is limited to any one set of participants. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
You mean the ones who are actually calling for ethnic cleansing? The thing we agreed upon the other week was something out of the question for a civilized nation like Israel to do?
Hmmm. In the first place, IANAL but I thought that the annexation of territory from a defeated enemy state was prohibited by international law.
In the second place, it can be a bit mind-boggling how references to Palestinians often seem to present them as inhabiting a sort of “Schrödinger’s state” that does or does not count as an actual country, depending on the rhetorical intent. If it’s truly “their” territory to the extent that they can be expected to officially forfeit it by being defeated in war, how is it not “their” territory to the extent that Israeli settlements aren’t allowed to expand into it when not at war?
Oh wait, it seems I was wrong. Stop believing your lying eyes, the UN, WHO, Doctors Without Borders, the UK government, the rest of the world’s governments, etc. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
It comes after Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, claimed on Sky News yesterday that there was “no humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.
When asked what her country thinks about the humanitarian crisis emerging in Gaza on Sky News, Israel’s ambassador to the U.K., Tzipi Hotovely, said: “There is no humanitarian crisis.”
Sky News host Kay Burley told Hotovely that the channel has been showing photos demonstrating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“Are you a mother?” the ambassador replied. “What would you think if your children would have been executed in front of your eyes?
“Would you expect your government to think about those Nazis committing those crimes and to say, ’Wait a second — first of all we need to protect the enemy, and then we need to protect our children.′
…
Back on Sky News. when Burley mentioned the crisis again, Hotovely said: “Blame Hamas. And ask Hamas why they started those atrocities.”As the news anchor asked once more if Hotovely was acknowledging that there was a humanitarian crisis, the ambassador maintained that there is not.
Burley asked: “So what do you think is happening?”
The Israeli representative replied: “There is a war in Gaza, a war that Hamas started by committing horrible massacre on innocent Israelis.”
Your first article makes no determination who bombed the safe route:
The warring parties blamed each other for the attack. Hamas, the militant group in control of the Gaza Strip, said it had been carried out by Israel. In a briefing on Sunday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) denied Israeli munitions had hit the convoy.
Nor the third:
Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military blamed a rocket misfired by other Palestinian militants.
Two and four are simply saying that Israel is still bombing the south part of the region. I don’t see anything to suggest that Israel said they wouldn’t, simply that it’s safer there which as far as I can tell is still true.
Five and six are the same incident, in which Israel warned the people there before the strike:
The bombing occurred a few minutes after a warning was conveyed by the Israeli military to Gazan officials operating it.
According to the Associated Press, the Egyptians administering the crossing warned the crews on the Palestinian side to evacuate immediately due to threats of airstrikes
Your cites are not the dunk you think they are.
I have little doubt that the Israeli government would bomb a hospital if it served their interests more than it went against them. Tolerable bad PR and major Hamas operations set up there for example.
And I have even less doubt that Hamas would. Causing the damage to Palestinians that they can blame on Israel to make them seem like victims. Justifying their actions. The narrative this whole atrocity was done to create.
Right now I think it serves Hamas interests and not Israeli interests so I suspect it is at their hands.
Don’t know though.
Unless Hamas has magic rockets that can radically change direction in midair, or Israel has invisible rockets, then we know it was neither - it was an accident, due to a rocket fired at Israel probably by IJP (Islamic Jihad Palestine) that went off courses
And Hamas operations set up in a hospital makes it a legitimate military target, and legal under any theory of Law of War. It is well known that Hamas does operate out of civilian buildings, including hospitals, so “Israel bombed a hospital” would not even be surprising. It only becomes news if “Israel bombed a hospital without reason to think Hamas was there”. Which it’s unfortunately hard to prove.
I think it’s much more likely that Hamas intentionally bombed the hospital than that Israel intentionally bombed it with no intelligence at all that Hamas was in there, and even slightly more likely than that Israel bombed it with merely faulty intelligence and Hamas was never in there. Of course it could be neither: it could be an unintentional bombing from one side or the other like the missiles that fell on Poland a couple years ago.
Do you have a cite for this? Maybe a documented Law of War we could take a look at?