It’s been over a year since Israeli government officials announced that they were going to starve Gaza. They hold up aid for no reason. They massacred people collecting flour. They destroyed aid convoys they knew about and coordinated with. They have been doing exactly what they said they would and all America has done is make them pinky swear it would get better.

They will do nothing about this. Not because they will believe the lies Israel tells, but because they fundamentally do not care.

I really didn’t.

Edit: meaning I am not American and if I was I would have voted Harris, not that Trump is not significantly worse.

Over 50% of the god damn country voted for a man who has so many major, should-be career ending flaws we don’t even need to list them anymore. If he kicked a puppy it wouldn’t even make the top 10 worst things he’s done. The democrats lost to the stupidest president of all time, a man who’s entire economic policy revolves around tariffs that he fundamentally doesn’t even understand and who cannot seem to open his mouth without lying.

…and you’re here dunking on the people trying to oppose America’s blatant complicity in genocide. Well, you sure showed them.

“Yes, my candidate is Mussolini, but her opponent is Hitler! Clearly a vote for Mussolini is better than a vote for Hitler!”

Why would you be criticising Mussolini if you didn’t secretly want Hitler to win?! I cannot possibly come up with any other explanation. You must be trying to trick us.

Maybe Trek was just a few years off on the Bell Riots

The Sweden Democrats, once an openly Nazi but now a “not Nazis we promise” party are in the government. Like all “not Nazis” they spend most of their time looking for nebulous reasons to remove foreigners from the country.

We should have acted a year ago

Israelis concerned about morality should refuse to serve in the IDF at all and take the jail time instead.

For those who didn’t, they obviously believe in what they’re doing to some extent and I’m not convinced that the incentives are really there to do the right thing. What is the consequence for committing the war crime? It is non existent. Straight up. So if you risk punishment by refusing, why would you?

Again, if you have morals you should lay down your arms and fucking leave Gaza immediately. Refusing one order is pointless when there are war crimes committed every day.

Booby trapping civilian areas* is really bad because it puts innocent civilians at risk. Now, you’ve already written two comments on this but not one condemning the use of civilians as literal human shields. So you’re welcome to do so any time now…

*Tunnels are fair game imo, not intended for civilians, but anyway

You really don’t seem to understand how bad this makes you look. Using human shields is fine now apparently? Did you ever have principles or do you find that they get in the way of your blind hatred?

Can’t wait for the Times of Israel headline:

Israeli forces fire at UN peacekeeper terrorist positions in south Lebanon, peacekeepers say IDF says

No, I’m just saying the graph is probably useless. Israel definitely is launching more and larger attacks, because that’s how you win a war.

How can the graph be useless if it shows a point you agree with, that Israel is launching more and larger attacks?

Is this a joke? Hezbollah usually attacks with unguided rockets. This demonstrates zero concern for civilian casualties. Less than zero, actually, because the intent of the attacks is to cause civilian casualties. Relatively few Israeli civilians have died because Israel is successfully defending them, not because Hezbollah’s policy regarding Israeli civilians is different from that of Hamas.

Not joking. Just confused. Do you have a source for this about unguided rockets targeting civilians from Hezbollah?

This article among many others don’t mention this. In fact, according to them they are targeting troops and intelligence bases.

Hezbollah also fired more rockets and missiles into Israel - attacks that Mr Afif said were “only the beginning” of its response to Israel’s attacks.

Sirens sounded several times in the border town of Metula, where Hezbollah said its fighters had targeted Israeli troops with artillery and rocket fire without mentioning any incursion.

The group also claimed it had fired missiles towards two Israeli intelligence bases in the central Tel Aviv area. Paramedics said two people were injured on a highway near Kafr Qasim.

Much like with the IDF’s claims, I am not eager to believe what they say. I would just like to see the evidence for these unguided attacks because the death tolls and overall number of attacks do not seem to support this conclusion at all.

Even if that is true (and it would only be true in the short term) then Israel would still be foolish to make major concessions to its persistent enemies when it has the military power necessary not to. Meanwhile Hezbollah would be more inclined to launch future attacks because it would see that they worked.

The point is they don’t have to be persistent enemies. There can be peace, and the start of that is an actual two state solution. Given that the country was founded on ethnic cleansing, I totally understand why people in the region would see Israel as the enemy until they actually take genuine steps to rectify the situation. Currently, instead of this they are doing a genocide. And when this started is when Hezbollah started attacking, at least most recently. Not only that, they explicitly said that was why they attacked.

I am a bit concerned that your argument seems to be “why do peace and diplomacy when we can kill people until we’re safe?” It is incredibly short sighted to think that war can solve this persistent conflict. When was Hezbollah formed again? Oh yeah after Israel invaded Lebanon. So why would more war “solve” this issue rather than create new ones?

It’s easy to chest thump and drop bombs. Maybe it even makes you feel good. But all it does is guarantee more civilian deaths and displacement in future, on both sides.

Don’t you want the killing to end?

Are you implying that Israel’s much greater number of attacks are because they are doing really tiny attacks or something? According to Wikipedia, 1642 Lebanese dead vs 52 Israelis. I.e. 31 times more Lebanese than Israeli deaths. So if anything Israel is killing more per strike, given that they only made 5 times more attacks (or 4 times more counting up until mid September). So it’s highly likely Israel is doing bigger strikes with less concern for civilian casualties. Notably, nobody is surprised about this given the horror we’ve all been watching for the past year.

Israeli victory would mean reducing the red bars to zero

Then good news. A cease fire in Gaza would achieve this. Shame Bibi doesn’t seem interested in that but he sure does love killing children so I guess it works out for him at least.

Ah I see. Usually I’m not in favour of the sarcasm tag (ruins the joke) but it would have really helped here, lol.

You don’t need to be on Russia’s payroll to spew pro-Putin talking points

You know, if criticizing killing is a “pro-Putin talking point,” then pro Putin talking points clearly aren’t always bad? Should I be in favour of murder to really show how much I hate Putin? Literally what the fuck are you talking about

I agree with Putin that the sky is blue too. I’m expecting my rubles in the mail any day now.

Putin is a cunt and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine must be stopped.

If I was on Russia’s payroll that should be enough to get me arrested or at least fired.

So either I’m risking my safety OOOOORRRR not everyone opposed to Biden’s support for Israel is a Russian bot. Golly gosh I wonder which one it is

Biden:

So a low estimate of deaths (not counting people under the rubble for instance) and Israel’s claim on the number of Hamas dead.

Absolutely it will take years! So all claims about civilian to militant ratio in Gaza are unreliable and we should probably not make them

It’s generally not allowed under international law to target civilians. Civilians getting killed when military objectives are targeted are legal. Proportionally and necessity come into play here.

This is true but it’s only fine if you target “fighters” according to the blog. So it depends on the details of who these people exactly were, just being in Hezbollah is not enough. As you said it’s whether it’s truly proportional and necessary.

And for the targeting thing I think the main issue is whether it was possible in this case to control or even minimize the collateral damage. Since you don’t really know the situation you’re setting a bomb off in:

The targeting law concern will be more likely to centre on whether adequate consideration was given to the incidental injury and damage to be expected from these explosions, given, as is assumed to be the case, that those planning and conducting the operation cannot have known the circumstances that would pertain where each of the large number of explosions took place.

As you said, don’t confuse targeting with who gets hurt at the end. It didn’t come out too bad (by Israel’s standards at least) but that doesn’t mean they exercised the due care in how they did it, legally.

Compare that go Gaza, which has about 2 to 3 civilians per combatant killed.

Would be interested to see where you got those numbers

Very informative! Basically if I understand correctly: exploding pagers are illegal weapons anyway. But putting that to one side, if all of the targets were “fighters” (and not just Hezbollah in some other political/organizational/whatever capacity) then it might be ok, depending on the details of the targeting law the blog doesn’t cover much. But it seems they also weren’t all fighters sooo…

Even the targeting thing is debatable because they clearly couldn’t really predict the exact situation at the time, so how could they take the care to avoid civilian casualties?