Israeli airstrikes destroyed a tower block in Gaza City after Hamas militants launched a rocket and air attack on Israel in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The Israeli army launched Operation Iron Swords against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, with Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the country, is ‘at war’.
Al Jazeera journalist Youmna El Sayed was reporting live from Gaza the moment the missile struck Palestine Tower behind her.
Sources in Gaza said at least 198 Palestinians were killed in the strikes
City blocks are military targets when your goal is to get rid of people living there.
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Have you ever looked at a map of Gaza, the place is all civilian infrastructure, they have to operate from inside it there’s no other choice the place is completely overpopulated. Which very much makes it not a war crime as the Geneva convention is about avoiding avoidable civilian casualties, not unavoidable ones.
Shooting rockets indiscriminately is definitely an avoidable action. They don’t have to do it. Unfortunately people do need to defend themselves from Israel but the rockets are just to inflict suffering.
Palestine has all the right in the world to combat an occupying force. What are you going to say next “Ukraine doesn’t have to shoot rockets at Russians”?
Then Gaza, in particular, has the right to defend itself against a blockade threatening the wealth, health, and indeed survival of its people. Don’t want poor people to fight dirty? Don’t oppress them, it’s that simple. If Israel ever goes around stopping to do that (probably will require re-animating Rabin) they get the right to complain, but not before.
Let me know when Ukraine bombs civilian hospitals inside Russia or massacres Russian civilians at a music festival.
Let me know when Gaza has surgical strike capability. With the type of rockets they’re using you can’t really target hospitals because you can’t really target them at all, they’re ludicrously imprecise. Little better than a potato cannon.
People fight with what they have. The more desperate, the dirtier. It is way too easy to sit in your chair in front of your computer, presumably with a fully stocked fridge, reliable water, sewage, and electricity, technical marvels just a mouse click and next-day delivery away, and make moral judgements about people fighting for sheer survival with little more than sticks and stones.
Do I condone it? Nah. Both sides are invariably assholes, and not everything Hamas does is goal-directed enough to be categorised as “dirty war”. There’s lots of plain hatred in there. But then that hatred isn’t exactly unfounded.
And at that point we’re getting to a “If you deny me things, then I will deny you things” territory. The mutual assured destruction instinct: “Sure I may lose but I’ll make sure that you lose, too”. Eye for an eye. That, yes, means simply inflicting suffering. We’re past morals at this point, this is human instinct, or one branch of the genome telling the other “yo, cut it out”. It’s bigger and way more natural – in the metal sense – than the quaint and lofty systems we build in our heads.
…which brings me to why I even replied to your comment: We wouldn’t be in that situation, we could make moral judgements we’d actually feel good about, if Israel wasn’t tightening thumbscrews to mush levels just to inflict suffering, like the whole water situation in Gaza. And there’s no, absolutely no justification for that, as Israelis very much are not struggling for survival themselves.
So… terrorism.
No. That’s inexcusable.
We would not be the social beings that we are without that underlying threat level. Our whole capacity to emphasise and be kind hinges on being able to tell when we crossed a line with others, and for that people have to have lines that can be crossed.
What’s inexcusable is not the instinct, we all have it, but pushing people to a point where it breaks through. Be that to get rid of them, or to galvanise the in-group, as fascists do.