Noman
4701
And you think this isn’t happening? Apparently you can only be bad if you kill the entire populatiion -few hundreds of deaths here and there aren’t due to indiscriminate bombing.
Timex
4702
No, it’s definitely not happening.
Like I said, if the Israelis were firing weapons into Palestinian population centers like Hamas is, then ALL THE PALESTINIANS WOULD BE DEAD.
Hamas has fired what, around 4000 missiles into Israeli population centers so far in this conflict? The only reason they haven’t resulted in mass casualties is because of the iron dome system which destroys most of them.
We are complaining about Israel killing civilians as collateral damage… Hamas is directly targeting civilians. Their actual goal is to kill women and children, directly.
If Israel was fighting with the same morality and ethics as Hamas, this discussion would be academic. We would be discussing history, as the conflict would be over.
Yeah, killing civilians as collateral damage, while tragic, is fundamentally different than just intentionally trying to kill civilians as the primary target.
Does anyone disagree with this?
It does say something about the power dynamic here when Hamas is desperately trying to kill civilians and Israel (supposedly) is trying to avoid that, that the death ratio is 200:12. even if you account for Israeli claims that at least 130 of them were combatants, that’s still a greater than 5:1 just counting civilians.
It’s like breaking the arm of a 4 year old who gives you a hard bite.
Timex
4704
Well Israel invested billions of dollars in ballistic defense systems, specifically for this reason.
Noman
4706
Yes, the families of those getting killed and the entire neighborhoods getting destroyed by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing will disagree.
I disagree, and most reasonable people who value lives of innocent people will also disagree.
And keep in mind what I was actually responding to, about how Israel’s government can perhaps be more good in this dealing, which is at best an ignorant statement (based on decades of media blitz in US about Israel good/Palestine bad type of idiotic takes) and at worst completely disgusting and hateful take of stripping any humanity from the Palestinians and minimizing the tragedy and injustices they have faced over the years, down to nothing.
When you’re bombing a foreign adversary thousands of miles away that’s one thing. When you’re choosing to bomb a city that’s less than ten miles away in territory that you have de facto military control of, that’s very different. It’s a conscious choice to use the weapons with the maximum risk of collateral damage.
Timex
4708
Again, the comparison here is just firing thousands of missiles directly at civilians, with the explicit goal of killing civilians, which is what the Palestinians are doing.
They chose to bomb a city or were forced to respond to rockets? Israel wasn’t the one who started launching munitions, Hamas was. You are right Israel controls the air space and the border, but Israel has no control within Gaza itself, Hamas does that’s why they had so many rockets stockpiled.
Collateral damage has never been predicated on distance or anything like that, it’s basis is intent and proportionality.
I thought the point was obvious, but when it’s ten miles away in territory you control why are you using the fucking air force?
The IDF can go where they like in Gaza and the West Bank, as they’ve demonstrated many times.
The last time the IDF was putting serious boots on the ground in Gaza was the last war with Hamas in 2014. IDF can’t patrol Gaza and they don’t.
Ground invasions have much higher risk of collateral damage in the age of precision guided munitions. And because they don’t have military control within Gaza, an invasion would be necessary if air power wasn’t going to be used.
I don’t know how you reconcile this statement with body counts that provoked this conversation.
Here is the last time IDF did a ground invasion of Gaza. I would say adding a magnitude to a civilian death toll during a ground invasion compared to an air campaign makes it pretty easy to reconcile.
The UN says at least 2,104 Palestinian died, including 1,462 civilians, of whom 495 were children and 253 women.
Gaza crisis: Toll of operations in Gaza - BBC News.
Ground operations are horrendous for civilian casualties and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. I’d also point out that the IDF went into Gaza because Hamas was going into Israel through their tunnel network. This time around the conflict was kept to rockets on Hamas’s side so a ground invasion would have been an escalation on the part of the IDF.
Dave47
4714
An Israeli ground incursion into Gaza would have been seen by Hamas, the Palestinian and Israeli public, the international community, and almost every poster in this thread as a massive escalation that would prolong the conflict and increase the toll of death and destruction inside Gaza.
Panzeh
4715
The missiles are fired at IDF HQ in Tel Aviv as well as IDF logistical targets. They’re military targets, attacked in response to Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem.
The IDF should not place military targets in urban areas if they don’t want to be targeted.
Timex
4716
This is just entirely false. The rockets Hamas fires don’t even have the CAPACITY to specifically select specific targets.
Their goal is to kill civilians.
Panzeh
4717
They target buildings suspected of harboring IDF support personnel, a similar targeting criteria for the IDF in Gaza. And given the IDF reservist requirements, this involves a lot of buildings. That they don’t have billions to spend on precision munitions does not bar them from fighting wars against colonialists.
Timex
4718
No, they do not. You’re mistaken. The rockets they are firing do not have the capacity to target specific buildings, so they cannot possibly be targeting them.
Hamas intentionally targets civilians. Here’s some info from Human Rights Watch talking about Hamas rocket tactics.
Panzeh
4719
By that logic, the IDF intentionally targets civilians, too, as they cannot target the specific laptops or ‘intelligence assets’ they claim to. Their goal is to intimidate Hamas by destroying their high rises so that the evictions in Jerusalem can continue afoot as part of a profoundly unequal Israeli absentee and right-to-return law, effectively legalized ethnic cleansing.
Timex
4720
No, the IDF actually hits specific military targets in Hamas, and we know this is the case because Hamas actually confirms and complains about those targets being hit.
Seriously, you are just employing an entirely counter-factual argument here, suggesting that Hamas is operating like the IDF when they are very clearly not doing that at all.
They have been firing missiles into Jerusalem and now Tel Aviv, with the explicit goal of killing civilians. Hamas is a terrorist group.
