Hamas/Israel conflict: news and discussion

[Magnus McGinty]

You're talking bollocks and shifting your position after refreshing your memory of me geography

You don’t think it’s there to discourage other actors? What’s your hypothesis then?

 

[brogdale]

Yes. I'm sure that's how people like you would choose to read that.

Other than an explicit justification of war crimes, how should this have been read, then?

If someone just killed your mum and raped your sister; then ran into a house to which you controlled the electricity and water ... what would you do?

 

[Pickman's model]

You don’t think it’s there to discourage other actors? What’s your hypothesis then?

That the Americans feel they must be seen to Do Something. Also that they're not risking another liberty incident

 

[sheothebudworths]

What exactly is the intent of a pilot firing missiles at apartment blocks? When under orders.

Or hospitals, or schools.

More than 830 dead in Gaza since Saturday as shelling hits school, hospitals and homes

‘There is no safe place in Gaza right now’ say humanitarian workers, as Israel bombs sole border crossing with Egypt, preventing refugees’ escape

www.theguardian.com

 

[dilute micro]

Where the ethical issues are so muddled, as is the case here, I see no reason for the US to be involved

• The US said on Sunday it was sending the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group toward Israel.

View attachment 394978

That group is there only as presence, not to help Israel, for now. There's always a carrier group in the Med and this is part of what they do. Everyone there knows it and is used to it. The major worry is Hezbollah joining in and the whole thing going up. That could start a world war. There's actually a very good interview on the danger of this potential powder keg here.

 

[Pickman's model]

That group is there only as presence, not to help Israel, for now. There's always a carrier group in the Med and this is part of what they do. Everyone there knows it and is used to it. The major worry is Hezbollah joining in and the whole thing going up. That could start a world war. There's actually a very good interview on the danger of this potential powder keg here.

There'll be no starting a world war before 2025

 

[planetgeli]

There is of course, the difference in intent.

Mate, they've hit 1200 targets in an area of about 200 square miles where half the population are kids. If it's 'intent' then there's a fuckton of denial going on. Palestinian babies are being loaded into morgues.

 

[TopCat]

That group is there only as presence, not to help Israel, for now. There's always a carrier group in the Med and this is part of what they do. Everyone there knows it and is used to it. The major worry is Hezbollah joining in and the whole thing going up. That could start a world war. There's actually a very good interview on the danger of this potential powder keg here.

It didn’t start a world war before. Why would it do so now?

 

[Magnus McGinty]

That the Americans feel they must be seen to Do Something. Also that they're not risking another liberty incident

Not sure how that wildly differs from what I said.

 

[Pickman's model]

Not sure how that wildly differs from what I said.

Except materially

 

[Magnus McGinty]

Except materially

Either way it’s theatre.

 

[Pickman's model]

Either way it’s theatre.

All the world's a stage

 

[dilute micro]

It didn’t start a world war before. Why would it do so now?

Perceived vulnerabilities

 

[Magnus McGinty]

All the world's a stage

Doing theatre for regional powers is acting. It’s also being seen to be doing something.

 

[Magnus McGinty]

This is what I was replying to before the edit.

 

[PR1Berske]

All the world's a stage

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

 

[Spymaster]

Mate, they've hit 1200 targets in an area of about 200 square miles where half the population are kids. If it's 'intent' then there's a fuckton of denial going on. Palestinian babies are being loaded into morgues.

Both sides are guilty of indiscriminately targeting civilians but if what we're hearing is true, only one has deliberately and specifically slaughtered babies.

One side doesn't give a fuck about killing babies, the other kills them on purpose. That is a difference in intent.

 

[Pickman's model]

This is what I was replying to before the edit.

View attachment 394980

And? Let's see something better than your recent offerings.

 

[Pickman's model]

Both sides are guilty of indiscriminately targeting civilians but if what we're hearing is true, only one has deliberately and specifically slaughtered babies.

One side doesn't give a fuck about killing babies, the other kills them on purpose. That is a difference in intent.

One side is admittedly rather better at it

 

[The39thStep]

There'll be no starting a world war before 2025

Thank heavens, some of our war experts on here could do with a rest or at least an opportunity to pace themselves.

 

[Pickman's model]

Thank heavens, some of our war experts on here could do with a rest or at least an opportunity to pace themselves.

You can't have a world war without the big yin, china

 

[agricola]

I don't think it's odd at all.

The first people to go into the room - with the possible/probable exception of someone from the kibbutz who had survived the attack - would have been police/IDF, followed by paramedics.

Given the normal human reaction to, and emotions around, dead children, it's almost certain that a) the bodies would be covered, and removed from the rooms to somewhere 'clean', somewhere more fitting, more dignified, more peaceful, and b) that the people who had carried out that indescribably grim task would be being protected by their colleagues, and kept a long way from the media.

You have, you know, actually spent time among people before, haven't you?

The point I was trying to make was that the original tweet said she'd spoken to those sources though (the military, internal security) and to foreign journalists who had confirmed it. She'd even seen photos.

The article below (paywalled link here) has just been posted to the Haaretz paper, from one of their correspondents who has visited the same kibbutz (possibly in the same visit as the CNN journalist):

The stench of death has formed an invisible cloud over Kibbutz Kfar Azza. It gets fiercer as you walk towards the western side of the kibbutz. It is a silent witness to a massacre.

It is a stench constituted by the many bodies of kibbutz residents still lying in their homes and of the terrorists who came to slaughter them and were then killed by Israeli soldiers. Those bodies are still lying on the kibbutz paths, three days later. Signposts on a trail of short-range murder. Shots fired through windows and doorways into tiny kibbutz rooms. A crime committed by perpetrators who lived just a short distance apart from their victims, just two kilometers away.

Each morning, those living in the section of Kfar Azza populated by younger members would look over at their neighbors across the border fence, who looked back at them. Until the morning the neighbors arrived at their door. A kibbutz named for the neighboring city of Gaza, which had persevered through many challenges over its 72 years of existence, until the men of the city came and ended it.

There are no more kibbutznikim in Kfar Azza. Just numbers in columns in a spreadsheet that is filling up. Dead, wounded, missing and captured, and those brought out alive. Slowly, with tears and love, the numbers will be resuscitated as the stories of peoples' lives. And there are those who were lucky to be away from their kibbutz on that Simchat Torah morning, such as the 33 older members who were on an organized trip to Bulgaria. They were spared, but are now returning to the funerals of their children and grandchildren.

Many houses in Kfar Azza have been destroyed, by explosions or by arson, but not all. In the center of the kibbutz, there are still a number of homes that look as if their families are just about to run outside. The front of one house is festooned with colorful paper chains, perhaps for Sukkot or for the birthday of grandfather or granddaughter.

The neighboring house is covered with banners from Israel's pro-democracy protest movement – “It's a Duty to Oppose Dictatorship” and a blue-white flag with the word “Peace” instead of a Star of David. “Don’t go in,” warns a soldier standing watch. “There are bodies there that still haven’t been documented."

Even on Tuesday afternoon, over three days after the Hamas attack, some of the houses have yet to be 'cleared.' Soldiers are checking them to make sure there are no more terrorists lurking inside them. A bomb disposal squad is on hand to remove the hand grenades and RPGs still rolling around. But the army has decided to bring a large group of reporters and photographers from the international media so the world can see the horror.

Major-General Itai Veruv, who rushed down south on his own initiative on Saturday to join and help direct the fighting, said that when he saw the scenes at Kfar Azza, he "remembered General Eisenhower who, when the American army liberated concentration camps in Germany, insisted that the media arrive immediately so the world would know what had happened.”

IDF officers don’t want to give a number for the death toll in Kfar Azza yet. Largely because the work of locating and removing the bodies only began on Tuesday afternoon and will take long hours, perhaps days, until the burial teams of the Military Rabbinate and Home Front rescue forces have gone from house to house. But quietly they say: “This is as bad, probably worse, than the slaughter at Kibbutz Be’eri,” where 108 bodies were discovered the day before.

Kfar Azza, the largest of the kibbutzim in the northern area of the Gaza border, where 800 Israelis lived until Shabbat morning, could turn out to be site of the biggest massacre of the first day of this war. It could be the biggest massacre to take place in a Jewish community in the Land of Israel since the start of the Zionist enterprise. The infamous massacre of Hebron in 1929, where 67 Jews were murdered, pales in comparison.

From the descriptions of the battle, as recounted by Israeli soldiers and officers who arrived there on Simchat Torah, it seems that the border fence near the kibbutz was breached in at least three places, from the direction of Gaza’s Shuja'iyya neighborhood. Through those breaches streamed scores of terrorists belonging to Hamas’ Shuja'iyya Battalion. They attacked the kibbutz from four directions with the younger members' section, just 800 meters from the border, coming under fire first.

The attackers burst through the fence using explosives, some on foot, others in vehicles, and quickly reached the tiny old houses, where students and young couples, some with babies, lived. The somewhat makeshift 'safe rooms' within their homes were easy to breach and in some cases they were set alight. Nothing remained in them but blackened walls and bed-frames.

The slow work of collecting the bodies began there, in a methodical process. They were wrapped in black plastic body bags and carried on stretchers into a large truck where they were piled in straight lines. In the absence of names, the location of the body was recorded on a white circle on each bag. At the end of a street was a pile of cardboard boxes with the plastic body-bags folded in slim squares. Every few minutes, a new box was opened.

The bodies of the terrorists received a different treatment from their victims. They were left out there, uncovered until the last of the kibbutz members was taken away.

Lieutenant-Colonel Karmi Meir is the commander of a reserve battalion which arrived on the scene in the late afternoon of Simchat Torah and fought with his 250 paratroopers in Kfar Azza along the kibbutz paths, taking house after house. The soldiers had been summoned within hours from their homes. Meir said that, “There was one wonderful moment in the first evening, when we managed to get a large group of 50 parents and small children safely out of the kibbutz gates and on to buses waiting outside. I don’t think there were many other rescues.”

 

[Kid_Eternity]

 

[Magnus McGinty]

And? Let's see something better than your recent offerings.

I’m off to sleep now. You really are a pretty decent sedative. We should make you available on prescriptions.

 

[Spymaster]

One side is admittedly rather better at it

For sure.

But is someone who kills 100 babies recklessly, more evil than someone who kills 10 on purpose?

 

[Pickman's model]

I’m off to sleep now. You really are a pretty decent sedative. We should make you available on prescriptions.

And you're out of arguments hence the - rather decent - insult

 

[Pickman's model]

For sure.

But is someone who kills 100 babies recklessly, more evil than someone who kills 10 on purpose?

The zionists aren't reckless, they're really rather calculating

 

[planetgeli]

For sure.

But is someone who kills 100 babies recklessly, more evil than someone who kills 10 on purpose?

Maybe you were struggling for a word. Maybe not.

It's not like "oops! didn't realise there may be kids there!"

But it's not worth 7 pages

 

[Cid]

Point?

 

[Pickman's model]

Margaret Hodge, the paedos' friend?