Death toll surpasses 1,300 as Israel strikes Gaza and fierce battles intensify between Hamas gunmen and Israeli troops.
Hamas’s Qassam Brigades has threatened to execute Israeli captives if Israel continues to bombard and kill civilians in Gaza.
“Any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives in our custody, and we will be forced to broadcast this execution,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’ Qassam Brigades.
“We regret this decision but we hold the Zionist enemy and their leadership the responsibility for this,” he said.
It’s great both sides of this conflict have so much respect for protecting the lives of civilians. Ugh. I wish the leaders of Hamas and Bibi’s reactionary government were the ones that would actually suffer the consequences of this war.
Wouldn't this whole thing just be a huge problem for him tho? After Israel is done, I would think that the government would start getting really uncomfortable questions from the people. Like wtf was the military and the intelligence doing.
I dunno, the internet has told me that Israel is just as bad. I definitely remember when the IDF took a bunch of civilian women and children as hostages and then announced that it was going to livestream their murder.
Hamas being terrorists doesn't make it OK for Israel to be committed to genocide any more than Israel's existence as an ethnofascist apartheid state makes in OK for Hamas to be bombing proms.
Both organizations are making it impossible for Palestinians to live peacefully.
If Israel were committed to genocide there would be no Palestine. It is their historical sensitivity to genocide and limitations placed on them by international law and foreign pressures that imposes on them very different standards of behavior in this war. If they operated by the same set of rules that Hamas does, this conflict would have been over long ago.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.
One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-account
Israel does not perform atrocities like this. This wasn't collateral damage, this wasn't an attack on a valid military target, it was intentionally kidnapping, raping, and murdering civilians. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to swallow the, "both sides are equally bad," narrative. I had a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian situation before, it is quickly evaporating.
Snark aside, I do completely agree, and there's a lot that I would criticize Israel for. That list does not, however, include mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of random civilians.
Remember when terrorists attacked the USA, UK, France and Spain?
And then we decided to commit war crimes and deprive civilians of water, electricity and food, while destroying their houses?
Oh wait, we didn't.
We actually tried to win hearts and minds while targeting just the terrorists.
Didn't work out, but we didn't become vicious war criminals against poor innocent civilians who just happened to be ethnically related to the terrorists.
Israel is not deserving of support by the civilized world.
Also, indiscriminate bombing killing civilians is bad.
A civilized world really shouldn't condone either. And one doesn't justify the other.
Flying planes into civilian buildings killing thousands wasn't an appropriate response to their government supporting tyrants who tortured and killed dissidents. (Also, probably not a good idea to support tyrants.)
The hundreds of thousands of civilians who died in the middle east in response to those attacks shouldn't have had to pay the price on such an attack even if their country had had anything to do with it in the first place.
The only appropriate "both sides" in these kinds of situations is the capacity to have empathy and regret over the suffering that occurs to normal people trying to live their lives on both sides of the conflicts.
Unfortunately a lot of what I'm seeing online these days is the logical equivalent of "Bin Laden was justified in 9/11 because the US's foreign policy caused the suffering of many in the middle east." Logic I happen to think is pretty disgusting personally, just as I've also always found dismissal of civilian suffering in broader military responses reprehensible.
Not a lot of countries have clean hands to be pointing fingers with, but the only way we move towards a world with less blood on our collective hands is by unequivocally pointing to human rights abuses where they occur and saying "this is not okay."
Not "this is okay because so and so bombed a city block first and wasn't touching black while saying I'm rubber and you're glue."
No - targeting or indiscriminately killing civilians is not okay - full stop.
And if one's attitude about the civilian deaths of one group of people is anything less than that, they might just be a bit racist towards that group of people, and may want to reexamine how they look at fellow humans and the degree to which minor differences in skin color or religion or ancestral identity outweighs the commonality of the human experience of pain, suffering, and loss.
TL;DR: It's perfectly appropriate to recognize that the Palestinian people have suffered injustice and mistreatment while also recognizing that a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians is repugnant. The mental gymnastics to recognize the former and not the latter is pretty gross though, and honestly every time I see it (and frequently these days) I can't help but think it probably really does boil down to racist assholes using false equivalency to justify their bigotry.
You know as well as I do that the IDF has never done anything like what happened on Saturday. Kidnapping children? Shooting random people waiting at a bus stop? Slaughtering 200 people at a festival? Taking a hundred hostages and then threatening to murder them while live streaming it?
Israel has done a lot of shit, and deserves criticism for all of it, but it has not done anything comparable to this.
Except that Oslo accord that they walked out on, and that fact that this is happening in the Gaza strip, a section of Palestinian controlled land with the 1967 borders, a foreign and maritime border and had all Jewish residents (including those that predated the 1948 beginning of hostilities) evicted, often an gunpoint and has had autonomy for nearly two decades now right? Besides that option.
So the USN is going to park the newest CVN in the fleet off the coast in a couple days. If they don’t end up participating in some sort of massive hostage rescue operation with a bunch of SEALs (and, perhaps, other regional/NATO specops branches), I’m honestly going to be kinda surprised.
This is very much “fuck around and find out” territory. I don’t think Hamas realizes how much the rules have changed in reaction to what they did this weekend. Israel isn’t going to stop until they’ve killed or captured every last militant they can get their hands on in Gaza.
Obligatory disclaimer: Both the IDF and various incarnations of Arab alliances/rebels/terrorist groups have been unequivocally heinous towards each other (and their respective affiliated civilian populations) since Israel became a country. We’re not here to debate that. This is about an attack on civilians in Israel that, proportional to their national population, had five times the casualties that 9/11 inflicted.
Every country who is an ally of Isreal will be sending in their special ops teams to assist, we can be sure of that. I expect the Canadian teams to be involved. I am sure there is a national kidnapped or killed from almost all developed countries by the sound of it.
Haha I love it how you guys watched enough GI Joe movies to think you can just helicopter some guys with night goggles into Gaza to surprise Hamas and free a few hundred hostages before they know what's up
Here's what'll happen in the real world: either they decide to surrender thousands of prisoners and admit defeat (highly unlikely) or they'll decide it's time to drop as many bombs as they can spare on Gaza as quickly as possible (unlikely) or they'll keep dropping bombs on confirmed positions for a few weeks and transition back to the status quo when support starts to wane (rather likely).
I'm sure Hamas will start offing Israeli and US hostages first while other governments can buy their citizens back for a couple mill a pop in the background
Always remember, if you plan on doing some stupid crime or barbaric thing, just make sure you say the other guy is responsible first. Prosecutors HATE this one trick!
I'm in support of not negotiating with terrorists. If I'm captured, kill me. I'm likely too suffer and then die anyway, and be leverage in the process. Fuck that.
Palistine, don't you know you're just supposed to let yourself be genocided quietly? You weren't supposed to fight back! The status quo! The more I see this shit the more I have to laugh. Is what Hamas doing good? No, not even remotely. Is it what you expect from people who have been nearly totally eradicated by the opressors that completely surround them? Yes, definitely.