Humanitarian agencies say women and menstruating people are also facing alarming rates of severe infections due to Israel’s blockade of supplies and water.
Humanitarian agencies say women and menstruating people are also facing alarming rates of severe infections due to Israel’s blockade of supplies and water.
Yet Hamas is still fighting the war they started.
And punishing regular Palestinians for what Hamas does goes against the Geneva conventions.
Sure. How do you prove that what IDF is doing is collective punishment instead of warfare against terrorists?
Those are not even close to being mutually exclusive. The IDF is obviously and openly conducting collective punishment on all of Gaza ostensibly as a means of fighting terrorists. The IDF won’t stop until Hamas is gone and if that means killing every child in Gaza then I’m sure they’ll be glad to know you’re here justifying it.
How do you claim to “obviously” know that?
By having literally any awareness of reality? Ordering an evacuation of a whole area because you’re going to bomb it (even if you know for sure there are terrorists there) is by definition collective punishment. The only counter argument to this is to prove that every single person in that area is a legitimate target.
You wouldn’t believe the sort of things I’ve heard being justified by starting a claim with “if you don’t see this you must be an idiot”. But it’s still not proof or even evidence of any kind.
It literally is. If I order your whole block to evacuate their homes because I want to blow up a meth lab 3 doors down from you, I am engaging in collective punishment. It’s literally what words mean.
Forget the fact that countless international organizations warned the time frame was unrealistic for evacuating civilians. Impossible, even.
What you describe is an active attempt to protect innocent lives from a violent operation. It’s the opposite of punishment.
You force a ceasefire and investigate.
How do you enforce it?
Full embargo and then UN peacekeeping forces.
Impossible for a very long list of reasons. I think you know that.
What reasons? I don’t think it’s impossible, it’s what needs to be done, so we better figure out a way to do it.
The US would block the necessary UN resolution for this at the security council, because it’s against one of their closest Allies. Since the late '60s and in earnest the early '70s, there has been a strong relationship between America and Israel. Shared values, shared enemies, shared economic interests. This support is bipartisan, with both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly recognizing the strategic importance of Israel to the US.
This kind of resolution would also set a dangerous and illogical precedent, essentially signaling that it’s illegal for countries to use their armed forces what they are ideally used for, destroying forces hostile to their home country that struck first or pose a serious threat of striking first, which in turn signals to terrorist groups like Hamas that they can attack and that whoever retaliates must fear UN intervention.
Then there’s the whole business that absolutely nobody would want their troops to be fighting Hamas directly or play peace keeper in this hideous powder keg (remember the UN doesn’t have its own army - blue helmets are just soldiers from member states), because this would potentially invite Hamas and other Islamist extremists from using this as an excuse for terrorist attacks against them. This isn’t unfounded: See several Hamas plots that have been uncovered recently, like in Denmark and Brazil. Hamas is not just a threat to Israel and they are not acting alone, but have relationships with other Islamofascist organizations.
Absolutely nobody would want to risk an armed clash against Israel either (because I don’t think they would just accept an international coalition, even with UN mandate, endangering their sovereignty): It has both formidable conventional capabilities and is nuclear armed, including with nuclear-armed submarines and ICBMs. This strong deterrent - only about a third of their armed forces are engaged in Gaza right now, the rest are guarding their borders - essentially gives them immunity against direct attacks and other hostile actions from state actors (everyone who tried in the past, when Israel was significantly less powerful, failed, even when they outnumbered and outgunned Israel, even when they had a technological edge, very much unlike now), which is why Iran in particular has to use proxies with a thin veneer of “plausible” deniability to engage this arch enemy of theirs or else risk anything from a painful retaliation to total annihilation.
There is also the economic factor: Israel is the Taiwan of the Middle East, with a high-tech economy that is extremely important to the world. Items like 10nm computer chips are vital to the global economy. An embargo against the small nation could have potentially devastating effects. Embargoes that only target arms don’t make much sense either and would be toothless: Israel is a major producer of high-tech weaponry and several armed forces in the world partially depend on supplies and technology from them. They can produce almost everything locally, only using e.g. American-made bombs and interceptor missiles, because it’s faster, cheaper (or free). The times when they had to smuggle in hunting rifles and scrapped tanks due to an American embargo against them (which existed until the Kennedy administration) are long over.
Israel is one of very few countries that has the ability to develop nearly every weapons system known to man and produce most of them locally, including small arms, armored vehicles (including tanks), drones of all kinds that make those used in the Ukraine war look like toys, multirole fighter jets (they have mothballed programs in the past in favor of buying American aircraft - but they are capable of reverting this decision), all sorts of defensive systems they invented, like Iron Dome and Trophy, naval vessels (co-designed or entirely in Israel and built elsewhere, but they could likely build them locally, at a great expense) and of course their dual-use space program, by which I mean that their ability to launch multistage rockets gives them both the ability to send satellites into orbit and hit any point on the planet with ICBMs. I don’t remember where I read this, but they essentially have factories ready to go that can be activated within days if American and other currently existing international support was ever suddenly cut off and/or they needed a large amount of arms and ammunition very quickly, e.g. in case of a multi-front war. The reason for this is that in the past, vital arms supplies to them have been cut, e.g. when the British refused deliveries of tanks, which led to Israel developing and producing their own.
The gist of it is that they have friends in high places, are - even without those - simply too powerful on their own and that nobody else wants to touch Hamas with a ten-foot pole.
I hope this clears up why your idea is completely unrealistic. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.
Is Hamas in the room with us right now?
Are you saying that IDF has defeated them already? Or that Hamas never existed at all? What are you suggesting here exactly?
That the IDF calls hospitals Hamas bases they call reporters and UN workers Hamas agents, they call innocent civilians Hamas, refugee bases Hamas, etc even when there’s proof they’re lying. According to the IDF, there’s a hidden Hamas terrorist behind every one of the 30,000 innocent civilians killed 🙄
Is the lady in the picture in Hamas?
No no, the fetus is Hamas.
Those dastardly Hamas babies are born in tunnels under hospitals and pop-out with rockets in their hands which they immediatelly fire in the direction of Israel.
Obvs Israel has to get them before they pop-out, purelly to defend itself.
Let me ask you something. If Hamas was hiding themselves amongst the Israeli population, would the IDF tactics be the same?
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That’s a pretty big if. How could they do such a thing without local support?
It’s not a big if it’s a simple question. “Would Isreal be bombing so indiscriminately and so heavily if that ment thirty thousand Israelis would die as a result?” we all know the answer, its obvious eradication of the Palestinian people is the only goal here. Additionally no Israel leader has explained what happens after they destroy Hamas. Then what? Will Palestine be granted self determination? Will Palestine be recognized by the internal community? Will the apartheid state be abolished? If the answer is no to any of those, then we will just be back to another Hamas like terrorists organization getting control.
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Not quite true (but this is a pretty fresh statement, so your view is understandable):
https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4798646-netanyahu-israel-has-destroyed-two-thirds-hamas-regiments
If Netanyahu gets to keep his head (politically), it looks like Gaza strip will be controlled by Israel and Palestine will not exist. It’s not at all necessary that he will, though – he’s currently very unpopular in Israel. Then again, if he gets to claim victory, that might change.
I wish it was possible for Hamas to be unpopular in Palestine. How great would that be.
That’s basically proof of genocide. They want to control everything and kick out all the Palestinians.
Probably, or at least security.
That remains to be seen, I guess.
How else do you do it? You can’t just occupy a populace forever. It doesn’t work without sharing equal rights. There will always be attacks, whether it’s from Hamas, IRA, Black Panthers or Weather Underground, ANC, the Jewish ghetto uprisings or slave revolts, oppression always leads to fighting back. It’s either use diplomacy to share human rights in one state, grant sovereignty through setting up a second state, or genocide. Even if they “kill Hamas” all these orphans and widows are just going to grow up to start another group. It might even be called Hamas.
I don’t claim to know, but clearly it has worked a couple of times in recent history. WW2 ended with Germany, Italy and Japan being totally defeated and conquered by Allied forces. And they mostly left in just a few years. I’m guessing what it takes is that the population needs to understand they lost.
When you realize Israel held the record for most civilians killed before October 7th let alone after, or the fact that Israel has been annexing, razing Palestinian communities to push into tighter ghettos all the whole laying seige and preventing aid from getting in… Perhaps it was IDF that started it after all.
IDF is fighting against an entity who denies the existence of Israel. Hamas could take the first step towards peace and accept Israel.
The bombings and blockades will continue until morale improves is a hell of a way to convince Gaza folks that Israel is worth accepting. Unless they are trying to just up end and displace all in the region.