Due to the severity of the situation and the fast flowing news cycle, we have decided to create a general megathread for discussion regarding the conflict.

Informal/Satirical news sources are not allowed on the main feed of the community but you are free to post them in this thread.

Please remember that all community and instance rules apply to this thread hence keep is civil.

  • HMH@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Some facts about the Gaza Strip:

    • Population: ~2.3 Million
    • Area: 365 km² (141 sq mi)
      • 41 km (25 mi) long, from 6 to 12 km (3.7 to 7.5 mi) wide
    • Population density: ~6300/km² 1

    Gaza is very densely populated. In Gaza live as many people as in Houston. But Houston has an area of 1658.6 km² (640.4 sq mi). Thus Gaza has nearly five times the population density of Houston. New York City is the only city in the US with a population of more than a million and a higher population density than Gaza. 2 The tallest building in Palestine stands at 76.1 m (255 ft). 3

    A little less than half of the population of Gaza is made up of children. 4

    There are only three (“legal”) ways in and out of Gaza:

    • Rafah Crossing into Egypt in the south
    • Kerem Shalom Crossing into Israel in the south
    • Erez Crossing into Israel in the north

    Gaza has a very small port. It can only be used by small fisher boats. 5

    Israel built a wall and fences around Gaza. 6

  • simulacra_simulacrum
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    1 year ago

    There are a few Canadian citizens stuck in Gaza and very much in danger. I’m hoping that some solution can be found to help these people out.

  • deezbutts@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    A friend of mine is volunteering for this organization. We’re trying to help as IT guys but if you know anyone stranded in Israel or Gaza, or want to aid them indirectly, I thought I’d pass the link.

    https://saveourallies.org/

    (They’ve helped in other crisis scenarios as well)

    • Anomalous_Llama
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      1 year ago

      Can you elaborate on how you’re helping as “IT guys” ?

      I too am an “IT guy” and would be interested in learning how my skills could assist those in need.

  • MTK
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    1 year ago

    Removed by mod

  • fosho@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    apologies for the off topic, but this thread shows as 11 hours old and I only see 7 top level comments. for a major event mega thread I expected much more and I’m wondering if I’m doing Lemmy wrong somehow?

    • blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      A number of top level comments are from hexbear and lemmygrad so maybe your instance has those blocked? That will affect how many comments you see.

    • Serinus
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      1 year ago

      It’s being extremely heavily moderated. (Not just the defederation.) You can gather the political stance by what comments remain.

        • Serinus
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, it’s not the easiest to read because most of the censorship is “user was banned from community”. Which seems to remove the comments as well.

          The only comment text listed in the modlog are the truly vile ones.

          • Feddyteddy@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Is there anywhere on Lemmy that is allowing open discussion of this? Or is the censorship high enough up that it’s not possible on Lemmy?

            • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              That’s what I’ve been looking for too, I think maybe I need to make an account somewhere that doesn’t defederste from anyone with differing opinions?

              It seems ‘People who disagree with me are ontological evil and should be silenced’ isn’t the best place to get news and accurate information from.

          • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
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            1 year ago

            Sometimes you remove comment and then ban the user and the comment removal hasn’t had time to propagate. But yeah, the vileness you see is the ballpark for what we remove.

            • Serinus
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              1 year ago

              Can you look at this one by @Pipoca 2 hours ago? I won’t paste the full text here for obvious reasons, but it seems pretty reasonable, mostly facts, and not vile at all. It just looks like a bad case of overmoderation.

              mod Removed Comment - There’s a few things going on.

              reason: Bothsidesing a genocide

              • OurToothbrush@lemmy.mlM
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                1 year ago

                If I recall correctly it described a genocide primarily through the lense of a two sided religious conflict. We remove that stuff as genocide apologia.

                • Serinus
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                  1 year ago

                  Oh. I thought that’s exactly what this was.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Tl;dr Israel showed up and kicked Palestinians out, Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications

      • Ktastic@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Also Israel has two means of aquiring citizenship. First is having Jewish ancestry. The second and more problematic is that anyone who converts to Judaism can apply in a slower process that grants them citizenship. People who aquire citizenship can then live there and gain govt benefits that subsidize living cost, in other words, govt sanctioned stealing of Palestinian homes/land. Thats why Palestinians say they often hear settlers with Brooklyn accents. People who live in places like NYC with high costs of living are basically given the option to have much cheaper housing if they convert and forget their morals about theft.

        So basically Israel recruits citizens from groups of people who have financial incentives to move there and lack a sense of humanity to turn down “free stuff stolen from destitute opressed people” and thus you build a citizenry who is totally comfortable with this Apartheid/Genocidal bullshit.

        • Pipoca
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          1 year ago

          There’s more than 2 ways to get Israeli citizenship.

          Both of those fall under the “right of return” for Jews.

          Non-Jews with permanent residency can become citizens after 3 years if they give up their previous citizenship. Meanwhile, Jews are allowed to be dual citizens. For example, some Druze in the Golan Heights became Israeli citizens that way, particularly due to the Syrian Civil War.

          Also, in 1952, Israel passed a citizenship law that gave citizenship to anyone who had been a national of the British mandate in 1948, had registered as an Israeli resident in 1949, and hadn’t left Israel before claiming citizenship. So about 170k Arabs were granted citizenship, while the ~720k who fled or were expelled during the war were excluded, although they expanded eligibility a bit in 1980 to include Arabs who had returned to Israel after the war.

        • WhatTrees@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          Europe (Britain mostly) and the US pushed the newly formed UN to pass a resolution calling for the creation of Israel in 56% of the territory, but the zionist militias actually took almost 75% of the land while destroying entire villages and murdering the existing population. The West continued to support them after that and have been tacitly approving of them taking even more of the land as the decades have gone by. The West is not blameless, but it was very much Israel that did it.

        • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          There was never a place called Palestine outside of the British mandate

          And there wasn’t a place called the United States of America until 1776?

          Only after ‘67 were these locations earmarked as “Palestinian land”.

          Because Israel took over more land that was fully inhabited by the Palestinians (for the second time)

          And why, when Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel, did they renounce any claims to Gaza and the West Bank instead of pushing for Palestinian statehood in those areas? It’s almost as if the Arab world chooses to keep the Palestinians poor and stateless as a means to vilify and discredit Israel…

          Assuming you’re arguing in good faith, which is a huge assumption, the answer comes down to negotiating power. Egypt was able to get the entire Sinai peninsula back during these negotiations. Israel never fully gave up the Gaza strip, hence the second part of my tl;dr above: “Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications”

      • Harpa
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        1 year ago

        Hey fella: they “showed up” from where, and why?

          • masquenox@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Why should the people in the Middle East suffer because of what nazi Germany did?

            It’s not just the Nazis - it’s the entire west.

        • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          There were always Jewish people in the area who were often treated as second class citizens by a Muslim majority, btw.

          When the west promised Israel to the Jewish people around the globe and the population already living there, many other Arab/Muslim countries were also already gladly exiling their Jewish population as well.

          It wasn’t “just the west”.

          With the promise of a state and Zionism as a religious driver they stomped the people already living there, although these people were simultaneously promised their own state called Palestine.

    • Ducks
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      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

    • Whitebrow
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      1 year ago

      Most normal people don’t. But the political situation of “we were here first” vs. “This is now the land of Israel” causes whatever you see happening nowadays.

      • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        It’s an option. An outpost in the Middle East that serves as a vanguard to easily start proxy wars with the oil countries. Then deploy boots on the ground while hiding behind plausible deniability. “We just supported our allies.”

        It’s like War on Terror, an excuse for the corporations to get more dollaroos. The problem is not that they are running out, the problem is that others still have some.

      • blterrible@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        “European settlers” in the sense that they hadn’t been in Israel since the Romans kicked them out in '65 for causing too much trouble with all their messiahs and religious zealotry.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          2000 years!

          They hadn’t ever been in Israel, they were born and raised in Europe by parents that were born and raised in Europe by grandparents that were born and raise in Europe etc. etc. They were Europeans, complete with white skin and European culture and European language.

          This wasn’t refugees returning to their home. It was settlers invading nonwhite people’s land and stealing it for themselves.

          • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, if we stretch this logic even further down, we all get to claim our ancestral land in Africa from 200 millennia ago.

          • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            A third of Israelis are (family of) refugees/emigrants from the middle-east or north Africa.

            It’s not a ‘white european’ country, which you’d know just looking at them.

            Imposing simplistic American notions of race on a complicated conflict is stupid and embarrassing.

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, now. That’s because they imported Jews from everywhere they could to become Israeli. It started as a European settler project.

              But if you look at the positions of power, the government and businesses and celebrities, you’ll see mostly white faces. Israel definitely has a white supremacist bent to it - you don’t think an Ethiopian Jew will ever be the prime minister do you?

              America’s white majority is going to disappear too, but you don’t think that will actually end American white supremacy right?

                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  If they were given their own settler colony and started being treated as an equal by all the other white countries? Yes.

                  I wouldn’t consider a European Jew before the formation of Israel to be white, but they’re sure as fuck white now.

    • Mrkawfee
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      1 year ago

      Zionist colonisers from Europe forced Palestinians from their land 75 year ago and have continued to inflict death and misery on those that remain.

      • Pipoca
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        1 year ago

        It goes back a bit further than that, right?

        The Jaffa riots, for example, were back in 1921. Palestinians rioted and killed about 50 Jews, and British police killed about 50 Palestinians while trying to restore order.

      • FunkyButter
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        1 year ago

        You mean the world finally allowed the Jewish people to establish a country in their ancestral homeland (which has maintained a Jewish presence in that land for the last 4000 years) and the Arab world continually rejects a partition plan that would allow 2 states for 2 people, instead resorting to terrorism and a repeated call for the extermination of the Jewish people, resulting in Israel having to do what it must to protect its interests and the interests of the Jewish people everywhere.

        Let’s not forget - the people referring to themselves as Palestinians could have had a state any number of times in the last century, but it’s not really about that, it’s about killing Jews. If a state is what they wanted, they could have had it by now:

        San Remo conference decisions, 1920 League of Nations decisions, 1922 Peel Commission proposal, 1937 UN General Assembly proposal, 1947 Israel’s stretched out hand for peace, 1948 Israel’s offer of fixed official borders, 1949 Israel’s stretched out hand for peace, 1967 Begin/Saadat peace proposal, 1978 Rabin’s contour-for-peace, 1995 Barak/Clinton peace offer, 2000 Sharon’s peace gesture, 2005 Olmert/Bush peace offer, 2008 Netanyahu’s invitation for peace, talks, 2009 Obama/Kerry contour-for peace, 2014

        • masquenox@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Oh look… a genocide apologist has shown up.

          You mean the world finally allowed the Jewish

          What do you mean, “the world,” apologist? Antisemitism is purely a western invention - don’t blame the entire world for that which white people did.

          Also, don’t pretend that Zionism is (somehow) a Jewish idea - the idea originated in Christian countries that wanted to dump Jewish people in Palestine due to… drumroll, please… the west’s antisemitism.

          Do tell, Clyde… which part of the world’s murderous antisemitism is the root cause of the idea of a modern-day Israel even making sense to many Jewish people, eh?

          Stop pretending that Christian Zionism doesn’t predate Jewish Zionism - that cat is out of the bag, Clyde.

          Israel’s stretched out hand for peace

          Oh, look… the genocide apologist is pretending the side that has been engaging in genocide somehow isn’t and that it’s the people experiencing genocide that is the cause of the fucking genocide.

    • CluckN
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      1 year ago

      They don’t it’s a bit to keep the west from crowding their tourist spots.

      • BradleyUffner
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, these attacks and bombings are just an elaborate stage play to keep out the tourists… 🤦‍♂️

        What’s the matter with you?

    • Awkwardly_Frank
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      1 year ago

      It’s worth noting that the article relates a claim by Hamas that an Israeli airstrike hit the hospital, while Israel claims it was a misfired rocket from the Islamic Jihad. Both sides of the conflict would have good incentive to lie about this one.