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Israeli assault on southern Gaza could lead to 1m refugees, UNRWA chief warns

www.theguardian.com Israeli assault on southern Gaza could lead to 1m refugees, UNRWA chief warns

Philippe Lazzarini urges Israel to think of consequences of offensive if truce is not further extended

Israeli assault on southern Gaza could lead to 1m refugees, UNRWA chief warns
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  • …says someone probably too young to remember Hamas strapping bombs to human beings to blow up a Sbarro.

    Hamas are terrorists. Always have been. Always will be.

    I do not regret what happened. Absolutely not. This is the path. I dedicated myself to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and Allah granted me success. You know how many casualties there were [in the 2001 attack on the Sbarro pizzeria]. This was made possible by Allah. Do you want me to denounce what I did? That's out of the question. I would do it again today, and in the same manner.

    …said a woman who killed eight children

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahlam_Tamimi?wprov=sfti1#Public_and_personal_reaction

    • This might be hard for you to understand, but history also goes back before 2001. Yes Hamas are terrorists, but they only exist because of Israel's even worse terrorism over the last 75 years.

      • Oh… Really? You mean like back to 1980 when Palestinian terrorists took newborns and toddlers hostage at Kibbutz Misgav Am? Or in 1929 when Arab policemen murdered women and children of the “Old Yishuv” in Hebron because Jews (not the ones the Arabs were killing, mind you — but let’s ignore that inconvenient fact) were checks notes buying land from Arab sellers? Or what about in 1948 when the neighboring Arab countries sent their troops to war in violation of UN resolutions — bearing symbols showing a knife through a Star of David? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kaukji-armored-car-1948.jpg

        Also, from your comment I realize you must be new to this conflict. On “your side” it’s passé to refer to “75 years of Israeli terrorism”. The pro move is to refer to “141 years of Zionist terrorism”.

        • I see you're just a run of the mill bigot who thinks all Arabs are the same and are violent savages so they deserve to be ethnically cleansed. A small amount of violently displaced people turning to terrorism doesn't retroactively justify the displacement.

          The Hebron massacre was terrible, and it doesn't make it okay, but saying it happened out of nowhere because Jews were buying land from Arabs is a wildly disingenuous misrepresentation of events. It was the culmination of a week of riots kicked off by Zionist demonstrations declaring intentions to take over the Al-aqsa mosque and the event itself was kicked off by misinformation that Arabs in Jerusalem were being massacred. Most of the Jews that survived the massacre were saved from the mob by other Arabs.

          Kicking hundreds of thousands of people out of their homeland doesn't magically become okay because the UN approved it. The Zionist military was literally executing a mass forced migration and leveling entire towns while flying the star of David as their battle flag. The star of David with a knife through it insignia was only used by an army that at it's strongest was 6000 people and were directly fighting the Zionist forces.

          And no, the problem is 75 years of Israeli terrorism, not a longer term of Zionist terrorism. Who is in control matters. The problem is the settler colonial project of Israel, not the existence of Jews in Palestine. If Israel never existed and a Palestinian state was oppressing their Jewish population in the same way, that would be equally bad.

          You're doing the exact same logic every single genocide in history has been justified with. Wildly misrepresenting events and picking out isolated events from a vanishingly small fraction of a population and using them to demonized a population of millions of people. If it was 1850, you'd be spewing the same genocidal nonsense about the Native Americans citing attacks on settlers.

          • I don’t think Arabs are all the same and neither does Hamas. That’s why they kidnap Bedouin civilians and take them hostage too. That’s why they shoot at Druze IDF soldiers.

            The Hebron massacre was terrible, I agree with you. And I know that Arabs also sheltered Jews in 1929. But we can’t ignore facts: Old Yishuv Jews were killed for things they had nothing to do with. They were not marching at the Wailing Wall. They were simply soft targets for Arab militants. Militants do not distinguish between good and bad. They reduce to ethnic identity — on both sides.

            I also know that Deir Yassin was terrible. That the Hadassah Hospital massacre was terrible. That the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre was terrible. That Entebbe was terrible.

            But I’m fucking sick of the left-tankie-Hamas alliance on social media that overlooks the reality of the conflict. They simply spout off about Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide” without any 1) reference to legal definitions of those terms or 2) historical knowledge.

            But there is a reality we cannot ignore: Hamas will never accept Jews west of the Jordan River, period. That’s what they showed on October 7. It’s not about the occupation. It’s not about the Green Line. It’s not about the settlements in the West Bank. It’s about killing Jews and those who collaborate with Jews. It’s about establishing an Islamic theocracy from the river to the sea and killing Jews who remain.

            For too long the left tried to contextualize and explain away Hamas’ brutal hate. We need to accept what they say is what they believe. We need to believe what they wrote in their first charter.

            • Yes, its almost like Hamas recognizes that their support stems from opposing the occupation as a whole and not Jews as an ethnic group. They literally changed their charter to reflect this. Thanks for making my argument for me.

              I was merely pointing out that you were completely misrepresenting the chain of events that led to the massacre, and even here calling an angry mob "militants" is still misrepresenting the situation. Listing more violent events doesn't change my argument at all. There were probably tens of thousands of raids by Native Americans on white settlers and it still doesn't justify the almost entire wholesale destruction of their population, eradication of culture, and relegation of the survivors to reservations.

              Almost no one on the left supports Hamas as an actual governing body (you know, given that they're explicitly anticommunist and Islamic fundamentalist), or wholesale supports their tactics. We just recognize that they are the only force that are on the ground fighting for the liberation of the Palestinians as a people. I'd much rather the charge be led by the PFLP or even the PLO, but that's not the world we live in. If Hamas hadn't been propped up by Likud (who also want a theocratic ethno state, you know believe what they say) and the US hadn't forced an election when the PLO was at its weakest we wouldn't be in this situation.

              I call it an apartheid state because experts on apartheid like Nelson Mandela called it one and I call it a genocide because it's as close to the textbook definition of one as it gets. If the Rohingya genocide, which is internationally recognized as a genocide, is one, this absolutely is as well. Hamas's original charter being openly antiemetic doesn't excuse that.

              If we were in the situation where Hamas was governing over a unified Palestine and were trying to ethnically cleanse the historic Jewish population of Palestine, I would absolutely be screaming genocide as well. But that's not the world we live in, and it never will be. Acknowledging the realities of the situation means acknowledging that sometimes an oppressed people resorts to supporting extremists when they're the only ones left fighting for them. The only two ways to get rid of Hamas are ending the oppression that feeds them or a full scale successful genocide of the Palestinian people.

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