No, you’re right, it is not the few bad apples in the IDF spoiling the bunch and making it an illegal war or a war crime…
It’s actually all the other things the IDF did that makes it a genocide and war crime. Like turning the water off, making aid slow and kafkaesque, putting aid workers in danger so Palestinians can die of starvation, and destroying every university building (I think all seven have been destroyed).
It’s not Tamar or Ariel who killed a whole family in a summary execution that are the problem… It’s the entire platoon. They are not a “few dozen”.
I often wonder what kind of denial you are in given your comments because the rest of us wake up to a “few dozen” war crimes every day with no end in sight.
A few dozen every day? Maybe if all you do is watch TikTok videos and if you believe everything you read.
The media makes it sounds like thousands of civilians have been bombed on refugee camps or on humanitarian routes. As of last week there had been less than 100 deaths in such a circumstances. That’s not the story that people are hearing, though.
I had a comment deleted as false information because I said 99.996% of Palestinians were still alive. Mod “corrected” me and said “it’s actually 1% of the population.” Notwithstanding, it is absolutely correct that 99.996% of Palestinians are still alive (actual Palestinians killed is 0.004%).
See, even one of our mods got tricked here. Perhaps you’ve been tricked just enough times with regard to Israel and Hamas that your sympathies are with the side that actually bombs their neighbor indiscriminately and that actually targets women and children on purpose?
If the putative aggressor is three months in, going on four, of committing genocide, and only 0.004% of the people they’re allegedly trying to genocide have been killed, I don’t think anyone can reasonably call it genocide. At this rate of civilian deaths, if the actual true goal is genocide, as you suggest, it will take Israel another 6,250 years. Hmm weird, they certainly have the capability of wiping out every structure in Gaza and the West Bank within a matter of hours. Doesn’t that make you think, hey maybe I’ve been tricked?
I don’t watch Tiktok. My information is from respectable Journalists and human rights organization. Your information is from the IDF. Do you not recognize the issue here?
Most of my info on background is from public records of the State Department, White House, and CIA, as well as legal briefs and law reviews. I consider these primary sources on which I’ve formed my own opinions. I’m certainly not here regurgitating talking points. Happy to admit when I am wrong and learn from it, in this and any other aspect of life.
Sure, UN, too. I’ve read docs from HRW. I didn’t put NGOs on my list but certainly NGOs. Even think tanks sometimes are good for historical background, especially on histories or timelines or US relations with a particular foreign country. Wikipedia is a great aggregator for following a war, starting point for events or places that I’m unfamiliar with as I learn.
Hey, you seem very smart too and you’re asking intelligent questions. I suppose a younger me would have answered them much like you. October 7 significantly changed the calculus.
HRW seem to think Biden supporting Israel with weapons is also illegal given the war crimes and genociding Israel does right and left. When I read the reports from HRW or the UN who themselves have lost over 100 of their employees in violent deaths in Gaza, I can’t help but think the IDF use flimsy excuses to cover their crimes or deny them or say woopsie.
For example the Al-Israa University building they demolished recently? Israel is now saying it’s investigating why it’s doing that (I think that was on ToI yesterday), but the brilliant journalist Matt Lee from AP makes a good point in this exchange with the US State Department Spokespam: if the it was safe enough to plant demolition explosives which takes lots of time and work, why was it dangerous enough to blow up?
Unless of course the goal of Israel currently is destroy so much infrastructure in Gaza to make it unlibeable to the point that would make people die of famine or force them to leave, ethnic cleansing either way.
You said you read reports from US officials and IDF. What have they said about this university? And what would it look like if the IDF was wrong to demolish it but the US wanted to cover their ass?
Re: Al-Isras. This only happened four days ago so info is limited. I agree that if it is proven that the University buildings were destroyed for no reason other than to destroy vital infrastructure, that is evidence of genocide.
Looking at the video, it looks absolutely nothing like a controlled demolition. I don’t know what Matt Lee is looking at; and the entirety of his questioning is based on that false premise (that since it was a controlled demolition, it look a lot of planning and set up and obviously it was safe to go inside to set the charges, “it looks like a building bekng imploded”).
Obviously you may watch the video for yourself, but it looks absolutely nothing like Mike Lee described. He is lying.
It is a single, massive explosion that send debris out in every direction. It’s not in any sense of the word is it an implosion or controlled. It very clearly appears to be an airstrike to me, or perhaps a single large satchel charge. I also note that before the explosion, the building already looks like it’s been bombed out and is partially collapsed. I wonder if there was fighting with Hamas there during the time Israel used the buildings as a command center?
I don’t see an official explanation from IDF or the US or anyone. But I expect one will come out and due course.
A related point here, that I’ve been making, is that the tunnel systems under Gaza and elsewhere in Palestinian territory, including some tunnels in the West bank, are just and moral targets for Israel to destroy. It is most unfortunate that Hamas decided to construct those tunnels under vital civilian infrastructure. When the tunnels are now being destroyed, it makes such infrastructure unstable and unsafe and virtually all of Gaza City is uninhabitable from a structural engineering standpoint because of the tunnels, and will remain so until it is paved over and rebuilt. Significantly, the people of Gaza have neither the ability nor capacity to rebuild.
I agree with you, I watched it again and watched compilations of controlled explosions and it doesn’t look the same (likely due to the debris hiding anything from plain view). I wonder if anyone on lemmy would be more of an expert on this. Still, they had time to go in and plant explosives.
But the IDF itself said it was a controlled explosion.
But of course your next explanation always comes to the rescue in such questions
wonder if there was fighting with Hamas there during the time Israel used the buildings as a command center?
Do you see how the whole “command center/hamas-did-it/human-shields” trope is what allows the IDF to bomb anyone and anything and kill any child, woman, or man without repercussions?
You’re smart, surely you understand that you are here making speculations to excuse inexcusable IDF behavior?
Also somehow it’s okay for Israel to use the university as a command center, but not a resistance group fighting a colonialist power? I mean… you make anything okay for Israel, anything justified, no matter how ugly.
The IDF could kill your mother at this point and you would still go online and say “wonder if there was a Hamas tunnel in her house?”
The Gaza Strip is a tiny little area over on the left. The whole of Gaza is the size of Vegas and Gaza City is similar in size and population to Newark, New Jersey.
The West Bank is over on the right (eastern Israel, on the western bank of the Jordan River).
Three out of Five Palestinians live in the west bank.
Hamas operates primarily out of Gaza City (Northern Gaza), but they also fight in the West Bank. There are tunnels in West Bank, but they are small and disconnected from one another, tunnels connecting handfuls of buildings, or just hidden underground rooms used for snuggling weapons and people. There’s been a handful of airstrikes on personnel and tunnels in the West Bank. The death tolls in the West Bank, wjere the majority of Palestinians reside, is less than 300.
The large majority of deaths have been in Gaza City. That’s why I find it credible that Israel really is striking the tunnels, and not just saying “oh there was a tunnel there” as a pretext to bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In Gaza alone, 1% of the population is dead. If you include the West Bank, 0.004 0.4% of the population is dead. The claim is that Israel are bloodthirsty villains trying to rid the world of Palestinians. That claim doesn’t hold water in light of these facts.
The place with more Palestinians living in it has 1/100th of the deaths in than in the part of Palestine just includes the Gaza tunnels. I can ot reconcile this fact with claims of a Palestinian genocide. The strikes to me look very measured and proportionate.
So your math is wrong. The dividend should be 5,000,000, the total population of Palestinians, not 2,300,000 million, the total population of only the Gaza Strip.
Edit: My total for Palestinian deaths was not properly converted to percentage. It is 0.4% on 0.004%.
You see this is what everyone else is talking about.
So your math is wrong. The dividend should be 5,000,000, the total population of Palestinians, not 2,300,000 million, the total population of only the Gaza Strip.
Maybe you should check your math. You didn’t multiply by 100 to make the percentage I guess.
But more importantly, including the West bank is these stats is misleading. If you’re going to do that why not also include all the diaspora around the world? The war is in Gaza. The numbers that make sense are those pertaining to Gaza.
Shit you’re right. I’ve shared this math maybe five or six times and the first time I said “hey there’s a chance my math isn’t right it’s not my strongest skill so please correct me if I’m wrong” and nobody has tried to correct me.
Well, I stand corrected and feel like a dumbass, it’s 0.4%.
Well thanks! I appreciate you admitting your mistake.
Next up, do you really think the right denominator is the whole Palestinian population? Shouldn’t it just be the population of Gaza? And if not, why shouldn’t we also include all the Palestinian diaspora from all over the world?
I would include Gaza and the West Bank but not the diaspora. The claim is that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. Palestinians include the West Bank.
I would not include the diaspora because the diaspora isn’t being killed and could not readily be killed by Israel. They are in other sovereign countries and protected by their militaries. Israel has neither the means nor opportunity to kill the Palestinian diaspora.
But if the claim is about the Palestinians overall how could you not include them? “Palestinians” includes them too.
Despite all the ongoing killing in the West Bank, they don’t have a political cover to kill in the West Bank in the way they do in Gaza. So they can’t really do that either, because they are “protected” in the same way because there is zero justification for a bombing campaign in that case. America and others would certainly take issue. Maybe a security council vote would actually pass.
So I would say it’s much more reasonable to focus on the percentage of those actually at risk of large-scale killing.
No, you’re right, it is not the few bad apples in the IDF spoiling the bunch and making it an illegal war or a war crime…
It’s actually all the other things the IDF did that makes it a genocide and war crime. Like turning the water off, making aid slow and kafkaesque, putting aid workers in danger so Palestinians can die of starvation, and destroying every university building (I think all seven have been destroyed).
It’s not Tamar or Ariel who killed a whole family in a summary execution that are the problem… It’s the entire platoon. They are not a “few dozen”.
I often wonder what kind of denial you are in given your comments because the rest of us wake up to a “few dozen” war crimes every day with no end in sight.
A few dozen every day? Maybe if all you do is watch TikTok videos and if you believe everything you read.
The media makes it sounds like thousands of civilians have been bombed on refugee camps or on humanitarian routes. As of last week there had been less than 100 deaths in such a circumstances. That’s not the story that people are hearing, though.
I had a comment deleted as false information because I said 99.996% of Palestinians were still alive. Mod “corrected” me and said “it’s actually 1% of the population.” Notwithstanding, it is absolutely correct that 99.996% of Palestinians are still alive (actual Palestinians killed is 0.004%).
See, even one of our mods got tricked here. Perhaps you’ve been tricked just enough times with regard to Israel and Hamas that your sympathies are with the side that actually bombs their neighbor indiscriminately and that actually targets women and children on purpose?
If the putative aggressor is three months in, going on four, of committing genocide, and only 0.004% of the people they’re allegedly trying to genocide have been killed, I don’t think anyone can reasonably call it genocide. At this rate of civilian deaths, if the actual true goal is genocide, as you suggest, it will take Israel another 6,250 years. Hmm weird, they certainly have the capability of wiping out every structure in Gaza and the West Bank within a matter of hours. Doesn’t that make you think, hey maybe I’ve been tricked?
I don’t watch Tiktok. My information is from respectable Journalists and human rights organization. Your information is from the IDF. Do you not recognize the issue here?
Most of my info on background is from public records of the State Department, White House, and CIA, as well as legal briefs and law reviews. I consider these primary sources on which I’ve formed my own opinions. I’m certainly not here regurgitating talking points. Happy to admit when I am wrong and learn from it, in this and any other aspect of life.
Wouldn’t it be wiser to diversify your sources? For example, why not B’Tselem? Why not HRW or the UN?
Sure, UN, too. I’ve read docs from HRW. I didn’t put NGOs on my list but certainly NGOs. Even think tanks sometimes are good for historical background, especially on histories or timelines or US relations with a particular foreign country. Wikipedia is a great aggregator for following a war, starting point for events or places that I’m unfamiliar with as I learn.
Hey, you seem very smart too and you’re asking intelligent questions. I suppose a younger me would have answered them much like you. October 7 significantly changed the calculus.
So when the UN says that Israel is starving Palestinians in Gaza as a war weapon , is that showing both intent and action towards genocide? 🤔
HRW seem to think Biden supporting Israel with weapons is also illegal given the war crimes and genociding Israel does right and left. When I read the reports from HRW or the UN who themselves have lost over 100 of their employees in violent deaths in Gaza, I can’t help but think the IDF use flimsy excuses to cover their crimes or deny them or say woopsie.
For example the Al-Israa University building they demolished recently? Israel is now saying it’s investigating why it’s doing that (I think that was on ToI yesterday), but the brilliant journalist Matt Lee from AP makes a good point in this exchange with the US State Department Spokespam: if the it was safe enough to plant demolition explosives which takes lots of time and work, why was it dangerous enough to blow up?
Unless of course the goal of Israel currently is destroy so much infrastructure in Gaza to make it unlibeable to the point that would make people die of famine or force them to leave, ethnic cleansing either way.
You said you read reports from US officials and IDF. What have they said about this university? And what would it look like if the IDF was wrong to demolish it but the US wanted to cover their ass?
Re: Al-Isras. This only happened four days ago so info is limited. I agree that if it is proven that the University buildings were destroyed for no reason other than to destroy vital infrastructure, that is evidence of genocide.
Looking at the video, it looks absolutely nothing like a controlled demolition. I don’t know what Matt Lee is looking at; and the entirety of his questioning is based on that false premise (that since it was a controlled demolition, it look a lot of planning and set up and obviously it was safe to go inside to set the charges, “it looks like a building bekng imploded”).
Obviously you may watch the video for yourself, but it looks absolutely nothing like Mike Lee described. He is lying.
It is a single, massive explosion that send debris out in every direction. It’s not in any sense of the word is it an implosion or controlled. It very clearly appears to be an airstrike to me, or perhaps a single large satchel charge. I also note that before the explosion, the building already looks like it’s been bombed out and is partially collapsed. I wonder if there was fighting with Hamas there during the time Israel used the buildings as a command center?
I don’t see an official explanation from IDF or the US or anyone. But I expect one will come out and due course.
A related point here, that I’ve been making, is that the tunnel systems under Gaza and elsewhere in Palestinian territory, including some tunnels in the West bank, are just and moral targets for Israel to destroy. It is most unfortunate that Hamas decided to construct those tunnels under vital civilian infrastructure. When the tunnels are now being destroyed, it makes such infrastructure unstable and unsafe and virtually all of Gaza City is uninhabitable from a structural engineering standpoint because of the tunnels, and will remain so until it is paved over and rebuilt. Significantly, the people of Gaza have neither the ability nor capacity to rebuild.
I agree with you, I watched it again and watched compilations of controlled explosions and it doesn’t look the same (likely due to the debris hiding anything from plain view). I wonder if anyone on lemmy would be more of an expert on this. Still, they had time to go in and plant explosives.But the IDF itself said it was a controlled explosion.
So now that we have established this…
Why would the IDF bomb a university campus, forcing Gazans to rebuild? I think the IDF destroyed every university in Gaza. Why do that at all?
But of course your next explanation always comes to the rescue in such questions
Do you see how the whole “command center/hamas-did-it/human-shields” trope is what allows the IDF to bomb anyone and anything and kill any child, woman, or man without repercussions? You’re smart, surely you understand that you are here making speculations to excuse inexcusable IDF behavior?
Also somehow it’s okay for Israel to use the university as a command center, but not a resistance group fighting a colonialist power? I mean… you make anything okay for Israel, anything justified, no matter how ugly.
The IDF could kill your mother at this point and you would still go online and say “wonder if there was a Hamas tunnel in her house?”
Sorry I don’t understand this number at all. Can you explain your math?
(Over 23k killed ÷ 2.3 million in Gaza) × 100% = Over 1%, surely?
The Gaza Strip is a tiny little area over on the left. The whole of Gaza is the size of Vegas and Gaza City is similar in size and population to Newark, New Jersey.
The West Bank is over on the right (eastern Israel, on the western bank of the Jordan River).
Three out of Five Palestinians live in the west bank.
Hamas operates primarily out of Gaza City (Northern Gaza), but they also fight in the West Bank. There are tunnels in West Bank, but they are small and disconnected from one another, tunnels connecting handfuls of buildings, or just hidden underground rooms used for snuggling weapons and people. There’s been a handful of airstrikes on personnel and tunnels in the West Bank. The death tolls in the West Bank, wjere the majority of Palestinians reside, is less than 300.
The large majority of deaths have been in Gaza City. That’s why I find it credible that Israel really is striking the tunnels, and not just saying “oh there was a tunnel there” as a pretext to bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In Gaza alone, 1% of the population is dead. If you include the West Bank,
0.0040.4% of the population is dead. The claim is that Israel are bloodthirsty villains trying to rid the world of Palestinians. That claim doesn’t hold water in light of these facts.The place with more Palestinians living in it has 1/100th of the deaths in than in the part of Palestine just includes the Gaza tunnels. I can ot reconcile this fact with claims of a Palestinian genocide. The strikes to me look very measured and proportionate.
So your math is wrong. The dividend should be 5,000,000, the total population of Palestinians, not 2,300,000 million, the total population of only the Gaza Strip.
Edit: My total for Palestinian deaths was not properly converted to percentage. It is 0.4% on 0.004%.
You see this is what everyone else is talking about.
Maybe you should check your math. You didn’t multiply by 100 to make the percentage I guess.
But more importantly, including the West bank is these stats is misleading. If you’re going to do that why not also include all the diaspora around the world? The war is in Gaza. The numbers that make sense are those pertaining to Gaza.
Shit you’re right. I’ve shared this math maybe five or six times and the first time I said “hey there’s a chance my math isn’t right it’s not my strongest skill so please correct me if I’m wrong” and nobody has tried to correct me.
Well, I stand corrected and feel like a dumbass, it’s 0.4%.
Well thanks! I appreciate you admitting your mistake.
Next up, do you really think the right denominator is the whole Palestinian population? Shouldn’t it just be the population of Gaza? And if not, why shouldn’t we also include all the Palestinian diaspora from all over the world?
I would include Gaza and the West Bank but not the diaspora. The claim is that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. Palestinians include the West Bank.
I would not include the diaspora because the diaspora isn’t being killed and could not readily be killed by Israel. They are in other sovereign countries and protected by their militaries. Israel has neither the means nor opportunity to kill the Palestinian diaspora.
BTW the ICJ case is titled this:
But if the claim is about the Palestinians overall how could you not include them? “Palestinians” includes them too.
Despite all the ongoing killing in the West Bank, they don’t have a political cover to kill in the West Bank in the way they do in Gaza. So they can’t really do that either, because they are “protected” in the same way because there is zero justification for a bombing campaign in that case. America and others would certainly take issue. Maybe a security council vote would actually pass.
So I would say it’s much more reasonable to focus on the percentage of those actually at risk of large-scale killing.