The travesty is how many people are unable to say this out loud. Everyone is stuck in their black & white tribalism, making them blind for their own sides atrocities.
You can be pro Palestine and still condemn Hamas. You can be critical of the Israeli government and still grief for all the innocent Hamas victims. It's not actually that hard to be a decent human being.
The travesty is how many people are unable to say this out loud. Everyone is stuck in their black & white tribalism, making them blind for their own sides atrocities.
Personally I don't want to say it out loud because I'm just so mentally exhausted from the screaming. I know (like know, not just feel) that if I say this out loud in a more public space then somebody is gonna scream at me over it. And I just don't want that anymore. I feel in this instance it's better to just keep silent because I just hate it when people get so uppity at me over this kind of thing.
The fact that people don’t understand the differences in style and purpose between fact-based reporting and opinion pieces is a travesty. There is no way this can be anything other than an opinion piece because of its topic and tone. Whether you agree or disagree or find its position to be self-evident is irrelevant. It simply does not meet the standards of traditional fact-based reporting. Which people today don’t seem to understand the value of.
Obama changed the military's criteria for civilian deaths so he could pretend his numbers were lower.
I don't know that I'd call it an opinion. Civilian deaths are an eventuality we have no choice but to accept, especially here in the US, where we're making war in six, seven, or eight countries at once and it's normal.
That’s simply not true. If you hide ammunition, fighters amongst civilians, to use the as meat shield or their deaths as propaganda, they become collateral damage.
It’s horrible, but Hamas is counting on this! They could avoid this, by not hiding behind their own people.
Targeting civilians specificaly is a war crime.
EDIT: please, do explain how it’s ok to hide behind civilians… sorry, this doesn’t help
so if hamas is exploiting civilians for their own protection, they should kill their victims too? cool dude. you're totally not justifying killing civilians! it's not technically a war crime, so its fine! fuck. off.
True, they (israel government) fucked up the place, in so many ways. They’re not the only actors, but they’re the ones with most power and possibilities.
They are still effing up, because we’re talking about men of war with stupidly large guns, afraid (with good reason) for their whole people, who maybe know victims, know a hostage… everybody knows what happens when warriors are mad… so why the fuck poke that bear?
There’s no good move. If israel doesn’t react, hamas will attack again, because hamas wants to exterminate every jew, not peace. If they react, they have to take out civilians because hamas uses them as human shields. And now with all that rage, the most racists and extremists from each side will have a chance to assuage their bloodlust.
Hamas have ruined Gaza’s future in a way that, in almost 3 decades of following this conflict, I never thought would be possible. And the racists in Israels government are living their wet dream.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, it's also majority landlocked and has been under a naval and air blockade for nearly 2 decades.
You can make the case about the selection of which some specific civilian areas Hamas utilizes are intended to maximize the outage if struck, but ultimately there is NOWHERE inside Gaza that isn't a civilian area, period. It's just a matter of degrees i.e. retail shops vs schools.
Just looked at the gaza satellite map to be sure. There are kms of fields between the border and most cities. They’re cowards hiding behind their people.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege” of the Gaza Strip that would sever electricity, gas, and even food and water supplies – to an already hardscrabble place.
In one rendition, everything that occurred on 7 October owes to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians – the Gaza Strip, though under siege, isn’t occupied by Israel, unlike the West Bank – and Hamas’s attack was therefore righteous resistance against oppression.
Hamas’s stabbing and shooting civilians and slitting their throats cannot, however, reasonably be described as a justifiable form of fighting repression; nor have such means been widely used historically by national liberation movements.
While Israeli leaders couldn’t possibly have stood passively after the attack, nor are they entitled to retaliate without restraint and with no regard to the distinction between armed combatants and unarmed civilians.
The imperative of discriminating between the two during armed conflicts is central to both international humanitarian law and just war theory because, in the political theorist Michael Walzer’s words, the latter are not “engaged in harm”.
Similarly, depriving all Gazans of the most basic requirements for survival amounts to collective punishment: every man, woman and child suffers, whether or not they are engaged in hostilities in any fashion.