Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month.
Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow, said: “This is among the worst footage I’ve seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal.”
I agree with your points. I’m gonna reply to you but be talking to anyone reading too. Thanks for your comment and critique.
Flat out though, the IDF is killing civilians. This is known.
But based off the comments and videos, I don’t think anything is known at all, but it seems unlikely these were civilians. Bizarrely, nearly everyone in this thread, and everyone who is going to downvote me, seems to want them to be civilians.
I would assume people would prefer them to be Hamas, who are terrorists and at the very least complicit in the massacre and kidnapping of Israeli civilians.
Outrage eliminates critical thinking and then anything that reinforces that outrage must be true.
I trust Al Jazeera, and I mourned their closure of Al Jazeera America as I was a supporter. But I could never trust anything they wrote about Israel and Gaza. It was barely veiled propaganda. This video is incindiary sensationalism because we are given zero context, but lots of guessing. By releasing this grizzly footage without context, that shows intent to exploit emotions and let us fill in the gaps. People really suck at this.
I’m really glad a bunch people, especially people like you, replied. It was fairly easy to separate the wheat from the chaff (that doesn’t mean only people who confirmed my suspicions btw) They/you spoke in terms of fact, objectivity, not in guesses, assumptions, and emotion.
To anyone who reads this ramble: If any journalist, holy-person, video, podcast, head-of-state, or meme is demanding your outrage, do not trust them because that is what propaganda looks like. This is a foundational aspect of media literacy and resisting the influence of power.
Every military in pretty much every war kills civilians. There is a distinction made between collateral damage and a military that deliberately targets civilians.
On October 7 Hamas deliberately targeting and killed civilians. This is known.
What we’ve seen from “alternative media” is a deliberate attempt to create a false equivalency between what Hamas did (genocide) and what Israel id doing (war). The video we’re commenting under now is one of many such reports.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, But the non-stop barrage of disinformation that people are gleefully going along with eventually does lead to questions about the motivations behind this.
I mean Al Jazeera reports the casualties like a scorecard in a sport. The Hamas casualties are included in the same number of the total Palestinian casualty number. The Israeli casualty numbers are civilian casualties only. They don’t include IDF casualties in their numbers as they do with Hamas casualties.
It’s a war so there’s no way to know the exact numbers especially when the war is ongoing. Hamas has admitted 6000 of their fighters have died, and as with all wars we can assume the real number is much higher. And that’s 6000 fighting men they admitted to. There’s no number given for the military support personnel (which are valid targets in a war) that the IDF killed.
And I’ve noted that as the numbers for casualties have flattened nobody reports it anymore. Does fit the genocide narrative I suppose. If it were a genocide then you’d expect civilian casualties to increase as the “brave Hamas fighters” that are “protecting the civilians” are eliminated. But instead the civilian casualties are decreasing. Numbers simply don’t fit with the genocide narrative so they don’t get reported.
I just look at what both sides are saying and the truth is somewhere in between. The actions of Israel makes sense to me. Terrorists when into villages and murdered everyone they could find. That’s an act of war. Given the the casualties the inevitably come with a ground campaign, I wouldn’t want to do that. Unless of course the terrorists took hostages and I had no other choice. And since that’s what happened, here we are.
For the actions of Hamas they only explanation I have is that they’re psychopaths. If your goal is to negotiate, you don’t murder a thousand people. They wanted this war, and they took hostages to force Israel into a ground camping to maximize the Palestinian death toll to gain international sympathy.
What’s disturbing to me is how easily people are going along with the plan that was made by these psychopaths. They created a war which would inevitably lead to deaths and had their cameras ready to broadcast the propaganda. And a lot of people swallowed and got into a competition to prove how dedicated to the cause they are. To the point where they are being overtly being antisemitic now. What’s the goal? Keep Hamas alive so they can continue this cycle of violence forever.
Israel isn’t going anywhere, and hatred of Israel is only going to cause the deaths of even more people. Everyone needs to calm down with the constant outrage and think about the best way to end the violence. Spreading lies to keep everyone outraged and hating isn’t going to accomplish this.
It’s not helping Palestine in any way. There territory is shrinking as the continue to choose violence. I’m under no illusions that Israel is the good guy, it’s a country full of both good guys and bad guys like every other country. But when you choose violence the only thing that matters is which side has the stronger military. And that is clearly Israel. For the Palestinians the best course of action is to somehow let go of their hatred and negotiate for whatever they can get. What they can get at a negotiating table now is much less than what they would’ve gotten decades ago, but it’s more that they’ll get a few decades from now.
The dream of a Palestinian state is almost dead now and Biden is desperately trying to resuscitate it. Which is something that only people that get the news from reliable sources understand. The “alternative media” take is just that he’s “Genocide Joe.”
It’s gotten crazy how far the non-stop outrage has caused people to stray from reality. Most of the efforts of activists have been at best ineffective because they’re too disconnected from reality to have a message that makes sense to anyone that still lives in reality. At worst the activists are prolonging the war and are increasing the number of deaths in the conflict.
Ok now I’ve been rambling.
You said it. Though it’s definitely understandable to be outraged by something that happened, you gotta stop and think about why someone is putting it in front of you. The mainstream media it’s their job to report the news and they have an incentive to be considered trustworthy so they’re going to make an effort to get the story right. Even then they get it wrong sometimes. Random person on the internet? They probably want to get clicks and don’t care if what they’re saying is a straight up lie. Or worse, they want you to be a part of a cause that serves their interests but don’t actually care about you.