Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) called some of his colleagues’ quickness to blame Israel for the hospital blast in Gaza “disturbing” in a statement Wednesday.

“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza,” Fetterman said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

  • @kava
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    81 year ago

    here’s a map of the area showing a rough radius of what the explosion damaged

    we can see the center is somewhere around the parking lot. however, there is damage to the southern roofs of the buildings 45m away. so while perhaps the center radius of the explosion was on top of the parking lot, the reach of the bomb certainly touched the hospital

    however, the reason it killed so many people (i think 500 is probably exaggerated for propaganda, real number probably closer to ~200) is because a lot of people were sheltering outside this hospital around that parking lot. for example west of the parking lot there were many people sleeping on blankets and such. people on the second story of the hospital also got killed.

    it’s really hard to get an objective view of the situation right now because the propaganda wings of both sides are out in full force.

    here’s a video by aljazeera- https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1714984258358391057

    coincidentally the only news outlet that caught the whole thing live

    • @SCB
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      1 year ago

      it’s really hard to get an objective view of the situation right now because the propaganda wings of both sides are out in full force.

      Yeah and that’s made significantly more challenging when you begin from a position of “blame Israel” and outright lie about multiple “facts”

      There is no way you are both closely following the situation (as you imply) and also believe this to be true

      b) out of all the places to land, it lands precisely on top of a hospital in precisely a way that kills as many people as possible.

      Truth comes more readily when you stop lying to confirm your own biases

      • @kava
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        -51 year ago

        Are you denying that the blast hit the hospital? Here’s a high resolution image the morning after the blast. The marks are mine. There’s visible damage to the windows (you can see also here taken the night of the blast) and part of the outside structure of the hospital. Purple X is origin point of explosion. There was also damage to the roof of a building less than 30m away. Here’s another image that shows shrapnel damage to the roof of the hospital.

        Even ignoring that, let’s pretend all of the damage was strictly limited to the parking lot and the area around the parking lot (even though that’s not true). When hundreds of people are using the grassy field next to the hospital parking lot as a temporary shelter and a bomb kills them, is it wrong to say the bomb “hit the hospital”?

        Going further, is it wrong to say the probability of a misfiring rocket landing precisely the point where hundreds of people happening to be sheltering, right next to a hospital, is low?

        Again, if we assume rocket failures are random then if we pick random points on a city to drop a rocket, the chances of it killing hundreds of people are very slim. What difference does it make, in the context of the premise of my original comment, if it landed on the hospital or on the parking lot next to the hospital? The probability is the same. The point was that is was an unlikely place for a rocket to fall. Not impossible. You flip a coin 5 times and sometimes you’ll get heads 5 times. If you flipped a coin 25 times and it landed heads 25 times in a row, it’s more probable that there is something wrong with the coin.

        Please address other things. I don’t believe you would have such a response to my comment if a semantics discussion on what constitutes as “hitting a hospital” was your main point of contention with my comment.

        • @SCB
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          1 year ago

          Are you denying that the blast hit the hospital?

          This is a far cry from “landed directly stop the hospital in such a way as to maximize civilian casualties”

          You’re just disingenuous at every point. Even in this post.

          Going further, is it wrong to say the probability of a misfiring rocket landing precisely the point where hundreds of people happening to be sheltering, right next to a hospital, is low?

          This is ignoring that

          A) it’s a public area and there are lots of people looking for shelter

          B) there was likely a munitions dump near the hospital because Hamas and other militant groups readily do that

          C) bigger, more dangerous, less commonly-used rockets are more likely to have incidents, for all of those very reasons in the descriptor.

          D) Israeli attacks have been precision attacks thus far, full stop. The idea that they are indiscriminately bombing is absurd and does not match evidence of said bombings. If they wanted the hospital levelled to maximize civilian casualties, as you literally state, then the hospital would not be standing.

          Oh and E) it’s on fucking video happening and we have audio of IJ soldiers discussing it

          I don’t believe you’re engaging in this topic in good faith at all.

          • @kava
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            01 year ago

            This is a far cry from “landed directly stop the hospital in such a way as to maximize civilian casualties”

            I will repeat myself because now I realize you are not understanding. Read carefully.

            If I pick a random point on a map, and decide to drop a bomb there - no matter the size - the chances of it causing hundreds of deaths is low. Even strong munitions. This “event” happened to cause hundreds of deaths. This is a rare occurrence. Go ahead and randomly throw a dart onto a map of a large city. Then kill everyone within 10 meters of that point. The vast majority of the time, you’re not going to get hundreds of deaths.

            That’s the only claim I’m trying to make here. The probability of such an event happening is low. I don’t see how that is a controversial statement.

            there was likely a munitions dump near the hospital because Hamas and other militant groups readily do that

            I don’t understand how this is relevant to the discussion at hand. Please elaborate.

            bigger, more dangerous, less commonly-used rockets are more likely to have incidents, for all of those very reasons in the descriptor.

            It’s still unusual. If big rockets fail at 5x the rate as small one, but you send out 9 big rockets and 1 big one, it’s still more likely for a failure to be the small one. Realistically, I think it’s the opposite though. The big ones are donated by Iran which has a much more advanced defense industry. The small ones are jerry rigged together by Hamas themselves.

            Israeli attacks have been precision attacks thus far, full stop. The idea that they are indiscriminately bombing is absurd and does not match evidence of said bombings. If they wanted the hospital levelled to maximize civilian casualties, as you literally state, then the hospital would not be standing.

            Here you let slip your bias. Israel themselves announced 6 days into the war that they had dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza. It’s been 12 days into the war, if we assume the same ratio that’s 12,000 bombs. The same government that couldn’t stop some terrorists from literally driving a bulldozer up to the border wall is now somehow capable of having a mountain of precise and accurate intelligence of over 10,000 targets?

            As for the precision attacks… please see this video with a large stock of MK84 bombs. There are more videos of them loading it onto their planes. These aren’t precision guided munitions. They are dumb bombs. read more about them here

            I want to re-iterate the ridiculous amount of bombs they have dropped. In 2019 during the ENTIRE YEAR the United States dropped 7,500 bombs on Afghanistan. And 2019 was a particularly bad year, it was the most bombs in the past decade.

            Consider the size of Afghanistan. Consider the size and population density of Gaza.

            Come on man, think for yourself a little bit. Stop floating in the mayonnaise.

            I don’t believe you’re engaging in this topic in good faith at all.

            Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, I know. The people you think are good guys are actually brutally murdering thousands of people. Don’t worry, just like we eventually realized as a society that the Iraq war was a crime, we will eventually realize that this destruction of Gaza is a crime. Of course, that doesn’t help the thousands of dead children.

            • @[email protected]
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              fedilink
              21 year ago

              One can believe that the destruction of Gaza is a crime and also believe that this particular explosion was caused by some other group.

              • @kava
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                11 year ago

                i agree absolutely.

                i don’t know what happened with the hospital. i don’t know how many people died. i don’t even know who stands to benefit, really. what has been the immediate after-effects of the attack?

                the US and Israel are now isolated from the western world. Who would want that? Well, Hamas is the obvious one. Iran and Russia, too. But what about Israel? Now the US and Western Europe are further committed to this conflict, and they don’t have to juggle the interests of the Arab countries.

                so the typical question - cuo bono - doesn’t even help here.

                the only constant i have is the nagging feeling that we are being lied to. i think everything happened too fast and the probability of such an event too low for it to be an accident.

            • @SCB
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              1 year ago

              Lol the irony of

              he people you think are good guys are actually brutally murdering thousands of people

              Maybe you do genuinely believe the shit you say but that’s not exactly better lol