this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Except Isreal’s actions in Gaza aren’t defending themselves against Hamas, are they? If they were targeting Hamas, half the Israeli munitions would not have been dumb bombs that are not physically accurate enough to target a spasific building. They would not be using their smart weapons to kill over two and a half times as many journalists as have died in Ukraine since that war started in 2014. They would condem the Israeli politicians who call for the elimination of every last Palestinian in Gaza.
The same party that currently holds office in Israel proudly and publicly funded the Hamas until 2019. They knew what the Hamas had planned for over a year, and did nothing, because an attack would be good for the prime minister’s numbers.
If Israel was focused on mearly defending itself, they would not be in front of a UN war crimes tribunal. If Israel was mearly defending itself, it would not be burning though its goodwill with the west. Instead its leaders have chosen to escalate and kill innocent people who have no connection to Hamas, and that has consequences on how much other nations donate to support it.
Israel literally spent billions of dollars building a wall, and even a missile defence system... How much more defensive do you want Israel to be before they get tired of getting punched and retaliate?
Palestinians got around them anyways and killed almost a thousand Israeli civilians.
Would you let you neighbor come over to your house every day and punch you without retaliation despite you installing a fence and an alarm system?
Hamas is hiding in the same buildings as civilians and using them as human shields, it's literally guerilla warfare 101. They are winning the propaganda war because of this, and they did it very intentionally.
The west is going to keep supporting Israel, and it has nothing to do with goodwill. Governments understand this isn't a civil war, this isn't even about Palestinians, it's part of a larger geopolitical battle between the west on one side, and Iran and other middle eastern nations on the other.
Yea it sucks that Palestinians are caught in the crossfire, but this could end very quickly if the supply of weapons being smuggled to Palestinians was cut off. Instead, Iran and others will keep building tunnels from Egypt and smuggling rockets and ammo in for them to keep the fighting going.
That's a framing designed to justify murder. I don't want them to be less defensive, I want them to be less bloodthirsty.
I don’t know, maybe use bombs and missiles that have a CAP small enough that there is even a 50% in perfect conditions that they land on the building they were targeted at. You know, the missiles the US has been using since the eighties and which make up a significant portion of the Israeli stockpile, but which arn’t getting used. That way, there would even be a possibility that such rounds migh kill a Hamas soldier and not the family half a block over.
Maybe Israel could prioritize useing snipers to counter fire at the Hamas soldier who just launched a shoulder fired rocket off the roof of an apartment building and ran, instead of blowing up the whole building fifteen minutes after they got into their truck drove off, this might also actually kill some Hamas too.
Maybe Israel could send some of its own ground forces into the hospital or church they are so sure had a tunnel entrance underneath instead of giving everyone an hours warning to flee and then bombing it. You could then even send some of these soldiers into the network to slowly clear if of Hamas, instead of them only needing a half hour to clear the rouble out of the tunnel entrance and continue on completely the same. Yes, I know bunker clearing sucks, but if you want to destroy Hamas, congratulations, this is how you find Hamas. If you don’t go in to their bunkers, there is not even the theoretical possibility that you actually eliminate the Hamas.
Maybe, you could use this little thing called ground penetrating radar to look for tunnels under the border and follow them. Tunnels arn’t exactly able to doge out of the way of a border patrol after all, and militaries are trained on bunker mapping and clearing. This might actually cut them off from resuply, and is a necessary prerequisite for an blockade to actually do anything at all. Again, as might be a theme here, doing so would not only comply with the Geneva convention, but actually have the possibility of killing a Hamas soldier by more than just random chance.
Maybe, just maybe, those are bad ideas. Which is why Israel has chosen it's current tactics.
Sending in troops to clear individual buildings is dangerous as fuck, go ask the Americans about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan when they tried that. Why sacrifice Israeli lives to preserve Palestinians who are supporting Hamas by allowing them to be in their living spaces?
Ground penetrating radar? Are you fucking high? The Israelis and Egyptians a lot better tech than that and it still isn't stopping them. There are hundreds or thousands of these tunnels, with new ones constantly being constructed. The US tries this too, they've found hundreds and there are still plenty they haven't found.
you've been persistently testing the boundaries of what's acceptable rhetoric toward other users in this thread and i think it's time you take some time off here to chill out a bit.
It’s funny you didn’t respond to the comment about using weapons that can hit the specific building they were aimed at.
Yes, fighting the people that can actually shoot back is hard, that’s why the military constantly practices and drills doing it. It is however impossible that avoiding the Hamas and only killing random innocent people will ever have an impact on stoping the Hamas from attacking Israel. That is why it was so easy to outlaw collective punishment as a war crime under common article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, because it does not and has never worked to do anything but breed resentment and prolong a conflict.
You know tunnels of any significant length take months to years to construct, right? They also lead back to the places you want to target if you want to actually achieve anything. It also seems to work ok on along the rest of Gaza’s borders, as for some strange reason none of these magically infinite tunnels had crossed that border, or we would have seen them on Oct 7th.
But please, explain how Isreal’s current tactics of avoiding using weapons that can hit Hamas and never engaging any stronghold or trying to capture any Hamas leader without explicitly warning Hamas they are coming hours in advance is magically going to end this war.
Why, it’s almost like the government party that publicly funded the most extreme members of Hamas until 2019 to explicitly foster increased hostility and prevent a two state solution from ending hostilities might just not actually be trying to do what they were forced to say was their goal after October seventh.
The fact that you are being sanctioned for speaking sense does not reflect well upon the administrator of this forum.
Edit: Never mind, you were a bit rude below. You are making good points, so please keep doing that, just without insulting people.