I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
> All the hospitals are now rubble
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
Do you understand the difference between being not in uniform in order to infiltrate enemy territory and being not in uniform in your own territory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
> pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
> Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
> Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67745092
The spirit of the law is reducing the civilian cost of war. Its hard to argue that Israel's few incidents of wearing civilian clothes for special operations increased the odds of civilian costs compared to the same operation done in uniform. Meanwhile, Hamas's lack of uniforms has led to significantly increased civilian cost.
Yeah, Israel has done some infiltration like that. Not proper, but you're pointing out a molehill while ignoring the mountain.
When the molehill is a war crime, sure.
So is the mountain, though
Yes. You will not find me defending Hamas war crimes, of which there are many too.
The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?
And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.
And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?
And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??
And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
> Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?
From the article we're discussing:
"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."
I would describe that as a walk-back.
>"Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
I guess we're in agreement that Reuters isn't engaging with the topic neutrally.
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
The reason is that it's false. All hospitals are not rubble.
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It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
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We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
> The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.
It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.
And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"
It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
War is always terrible and a mess. The problem is that the intention is, very clearly, ethic cleansing. And that, is, not in accordance to international law. That's the reason they target humanitarian workers and journalist. And the reason they block things like baby formula from entering Gaza. Because the worst are the living conditions to the population, the better.
If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.
Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.
By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/#/screen/home
> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?
If that was true, then why does it seem this conflict has gotten much more attention than the Russia-Ukraine war, which is on a much larger scale?
The power imbalance probably plays a role.
Certainly no one's donating Patriot batteries and F-16s to Gaza.
(I'm also not sure I'd consider the Russia/Ukraine war to be… undercovered in the press.)
The only country out of the four mentioned who was given a donation of arms is Ukraine.
> This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
> according to accepted conventions
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
It's pretty clear that Israel is ethnically cleansing so that they can live in a pure Jewish state.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.
It could not be more clear - https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144
There are modern European states refounded after the Allies pursued a deliberate and calculated policy of ethnic cleansing to ensure Germans would never be a problem again - in some cases going from 25% of the population prewar to 1% afterwards, with mass violence and rape included. Ethnic cleansing is only really frowned upon when you lose, or when you win so hard it's a convenient virtue signal and disapproval doesn't threaten the status quo.
Come on, that's not an accurate depiction of what happened to ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe. It is the neo-Nazi party line though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czec...
Can we not politicize historical events? This is not historically controversial. Or do you just want more examples?
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If Serbs wanted their own ethnostate they should have spent the last century subverting the structures of power and media of the West. They didn't do that and the civilians of Beograd paid the price.
If their objective is genocide they are doing a remarkably poor job of it.
Amazing how they can again and again drop bombs on a city while on average killing less than one person per bomb. Genocide?
Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.
I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.
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> I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital"
The pro-Hamas people, including the BBC, did lie about bombing a hospital. A PIJ rocket fell into the carpark.
There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb - with the usual evacuation warning - that MSF recently admitted was filled with Hamas fighters.
Like the genetics disorder kids (touted as 'starving children' by pro-Hamas accounts), and the 'genocide' where the population increased, I suspect this will also be proven wrong.
> There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb…
There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...
Lack of fuel doesn't mean it was bombed or destroyed.
> I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
The IDF has always said they will bomb anything used by Hamas. Hospitals have been widely used by Hamas for decades: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
If you're referring to the "hospital bombing" which was actually caused by a Hamas rocket on 10/17/23, which set off the widespread genocide accusations, that wasn't the IDF: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/26/gaza-findings-october-17...
The IDF has also widely accepted the total death toll as an approximation. They have widely disputed the breakdown of those deaths, both number of militants and women and children killed.
This particular incident, however, was clearly an egregious error or war crime and the IDF clearly attempted to cover it up. There were absolutely some such incidents in this conflict.
It should be telling, however, that the majority of the attention of groups such as "Forensic Architecture" is on Israel, rather than say, reasonably distributed among state level participants in war at present or in recent history. There are something like 20x as many deaths in each of Ukraine and Sudan - yet even HN has more stories about Israel.
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
The Act of Killing is near the top of my list of underappreciated films. Permanently haunting.
It's one of my favourite documentaries, almost as good as The Death of Yugoslavia.
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE
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I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.
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And the IDF?
They're hardly the only ones reporting this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g...
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
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1. No, it doesn't.
2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"
(That's a state-owned news outlet, to be clear; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan_11)
3. See above.
4. Accurate.
5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.
Where is the source? Show me the actual source. Showing me that one news agency is reporting that another news agency reported something, with no way to verify anything in that chain, does and proves nothing. It's a claim with no backing.
The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data". If you see it as "no contest" we're gonna have to chalk it up to cultural differences in parsing language.
> The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data".
Officially, Israel has no nuclear weapons. (lol)
At the end of the day, you made a conscious choice to accept the claim that the IDF confirmed the death toll as truth, and to spread it online as such, despite not having any actual proof. That was Hamas strategy since 0day, long before Israel even managed to clear the last Hamas terrorist from its borders after the attack: just make anti-Israel claims. Just make them. Everybody will accept them, no questions asked.
At the end of the day, I make the conscious choice to trust three different Israeli news outlets, CNN, the fact that the IDF isn't offering a different estimate, and satellite photos of the destruction in Gaza.
The IDF is most welcome to publish a claim and have it dissected. I would remind you we're on a thread where their "official data" fell apart because of direct video evidence of their war crimes obtained from their dead victims' phones.
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Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
"Much of" and "all of" are very different things.
I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
This is a common excuse, but The Truth is Israel doesn't care they're housing anything in the basement, they'll bomb it anyway. The ethnic cleansing agenda is plainly obvious at this point. In fact they seem to prefer having Hamas in predictable places, easier to take out and a convenient excuse to cull a few hundred of a superfluous population -- the Palestinian birth rate is way above that of Israelis. The operational reality is that Hamas is simply the best advertisement for the political hacks in charge of Israel, the system perpetuates itself because the current situation provides leverage for both ruling parties. And it turns out when you have two antagonistic death cults, people die. Solution: don't get born a Palestinian in Israel? Depressing.
I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
In the PNW there is also plenty of discussion in public school about the shame of Japanese internment camps in the US.
As others have pointed out "The War on Terror" has been nearly constantly criticized by Americans since it's inception. Mocking it on the Daily Show was a fairly common theme even 20 years ago.
The war on terror, it might have been criticized in hindsight, but let's not pretend it was unpopular at the beginning...
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
So yeah, I'm sure many people in Israel have a complicated view of the events that happened post October 7 too. Yet people will mostly ignore all of that and go completely out of their way to criticize basically everything Israel has done.
I'm quite partial to it all, I just hate the hypocrisy.
> I don’t like it but it was a war.
I don't disagree.
There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)
> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”
I don't think you were listening very hard.
> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.
If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.
I saw Israel using very precision weapons too. Warning people to leave areas etc. I even saw "live leak" style videos where people in Gaza were filming buildings because they knew precisely when they'd be demolished.
None of that was good enough though, clearly...war sucks, best to avoid starting one in the first place if you care about the welfare of others...people can say the IDF did all the wrong things, and you could also say it was stupidly reckless of Hamas.
For those people who are really unhappy with the IDF, also need to be eqaually unhappy with Hamas, else nothing will improve for the innocent people of the region.
> I saw Israel using very precision weapons too.
I would suggest that fairly indiscriminate use of precision weapons isn't quite what I'm referring to.
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You saw pictures of a hospital.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
Pictures of a basically untouched hospital. The destruction is way overstated.
And let's look at the numbers. Hamas numbers are fantasy but let's pretend they're accurate. ~70k. I have not seen anyone contesting the Israeli database being combatants. ~9k. Note that even granting the most extreme claims this is still better than what western powers typically do--and it's in an unevacuated urban environment which is the worst case.
You might be the only person on the Internet still inexplicably defending the Israeli government on this.
> All the hospitals are rubble?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
> And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes.
A lie.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
This is an outright lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
It was "reported that", doesn't make it so. And note that one of the reasons noted was "lack of fuel". Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.
Why do you say it's a lie that they lose their protected status? Read what Geneva actually says.
And I note yet another reference to "proportionality" as if it's some magic spell. Such usages imply the actions are not proportionate--but that is never actually addressed. Underwear gnome logic.
Citing chapters in Geneva is not a rebuttal. "Geneva" is yet another magic spell. I'm reminded of the repeated denials by Hamas of bunkers under the main hospital. And Israel came out and said there's no question they exist as we built them. Israel is very big on civil defense.
Night, not illuminated. And note that your summary of Israel's conclusions does not say whether the people actually were non-combatants.
> Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_blockade_of_the_Gaza_S...
> Night, not illuminated.
The red/blue emergency lights (and headlights) are visibly illuminated in the video.
You cannot quote Wikipedia on any topic (Wikipedia policy - cite the source, not Wikipedia) but especially matters to do with Hamas/Israel war. Even Jimmy Wales has noted severe issues with bias.
Which fact would you like to dispute?
That the Geneva Conventions cover more than civilians is... not tough to back up. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949
And what is the relevance here? That's talking about prisoners of war, not talking about military use of "civilian" things.
Are POWs civilians?
Again, the claim upthread: "All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things..."
Accurate, or not?
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In general Muslims are not out to exterminate Jews. Jews are "people of the book". They are followers of Moses who is one of the most revered prophets in Islam. Jews are brothers and sisters and it is even permitted to marry them.
The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians…
> That’s Hezbollah, Hamas…
Sleight of hand happening here.
There's no sleight of hand, just a horrifying reality. It's not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Civilians from Gaza participated in October 7 and poll after poll shows broad palestinian support for the destruction of Israel.
Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.
That is kind of a dishonnest take. You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades.
You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas.
You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.
You wrote: "You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades."
This sounds like: "You make sure to avoid mentioning that the Nazis are not just a genocidal army of aggression, intent on geocoding Jews and taking over Europe. They are also an administrative body that bla bla bla"
I wasn't simply saying that there was broad support for Hamas among gazan civilians, I was saying there was broad support for the destruction of Israel and the crimes against humanity that Hamas, along with a broad contingent of Gazan civilians, perpetrated on civilians on October 7.
And would Israeli polling about Palestinians justify their deaths, too?
Nobody is justifying Palestinian deaths, whatever that means. You don't know my position on the war, since I haven't articulated it here.
I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians and allies are complaining. Their stated aim is the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. That’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Yemen. And they’ve tried but are too incompetent to succeed.
It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.
The old, they had it coming defence of genocide.
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> By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.
An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.
I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
Yes, it's specific. It's also a fact that is in direct contradistinction to the OP's claim.
Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
Again:
> I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
Yes, I can elaborate. I'm not quibbling with you about whether Israel has been firing missiles at hospital buildings versus dropping glide bombs on them. I'm disputing the very foundation of your argument. You claim that Israel has "destroyed hospitals." It has not. This is a fact, little-known but true, and easily verifiable by simply trying to find a destroyed hospital (you won't be able to). What Israel has done, in rare and isolated instances, is fired tank shells at areas of hospitals with Hamas militants.
I don't blame you for making these mistakes, as the information space is poisoned, but if you're interested in being correct rather than ideological you owe it to yourself to (at bare minimum) show me (and yourself) which Gaza hospital has been reduced to rubble.
In terms of "sappers" it is true that Israel has sent special forces into hospitals with confirmed Hamas presence, but that is very different from "bombing and leveling hospitals," an alluring but ultimately false claim.
This is all occurring against a backdrop in which Hamas has weaponized hospitals. For example, they brought Israeli hostages to Gaza hospitals. They have killed an Israeli hostage in a Gaza hospital (and sent video to the family of the slain hostage). They have built tunnels under hospitals. They shoot from hospitals. They meet in hospitals. etc.
Israel is an oppressive, genocidal, apartheid illegally occupying force. You can't compare the two sides.
Palestinians have been under this assault by Israel and Zionists in general for nearly a century. Defending anything Israel does at this point is indefensible. Their context has ALWAYS been wrong and they've been caught lying so many times it's more accurate to believe exactly the opposite of anything the IDF says.
A word salad of false claims.
Hamas didn't "weaponize every hospital in Gaza."
Finally, a refutable claim. Can you name me a hospital in Gaza that didn't have a Hamas presence?
Can you name me any official in the Israeli government who isn't lying?
I see you won't do it. Conversation over.
If you make claims, you should be able to back them up.
I see you won't do it. Conversation over.
Stop defending the murder of children in hospitals.
Stop denying a genocide.
Two things are valid at once:
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.
Tens of millions protested the US response.
Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.
You either weren't there, have a bad memory, or are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.
Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist the so-called "war on terror".
You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.
>the local indigenous people called Palestinians
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.
> implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous.
Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
This will be the case tho.
US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.
I am entirely behind this take.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
> and it quickly grew beyond any reason
Why did it quickly grow?
Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
Consider the possibility that “bomb bomb bomb” was the entire and only point of the exercise.
Because there were children to starve. Brown children.
Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
We should stop using this term terror/terrorist, it's lost any meaning. If Hamas are terrorists because they're terrorizing Israeli population then so are Israelis' IDF or whatever force kills other country's population. And the list extends beyond that. To paint a resisting force/army as terrorists is just charged language to emotionally manipulate and pollute discourse. It would be more useful to put in balance what each side is fighting for.
You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
> Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
Lol if you believe that Hamas has not been lying about the death toll. Including immediate precise counts split by women and children within minutes of each Israeli strike.
here you go:
> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.
I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.
Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.
I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?
That’s total BS. Hamas used hospitals as their headquarters and war rooms. Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian. Moreover, it hid the hostages in the hospitals, making their discovery harder. Moreover hospital and ambulance workers admitted and were implicated by evidence. they were working for the Hamas and using medical worker and press worker as a disguise. By doing any of this it violated every convention pertaining to the special status of such entities.
Note for the those unaware: Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one. In fact it is the most anti Israel newspaper, along with Al Jazeera there is.
> Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one.
No such claim was made.
Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
> Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian.
Yes, this is not allowed.
The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.