Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine - Page 531

On September 01 2026 23:31 Jockmcplop wrote:


The point is that the IDF obviously fabricated this evidence. As if Hamas keeps lists of journalists with things like '[Journo's name] - Sniper' written on them lol. Absolutely ridiculous.

On September 01 2026 23:31 Jockmcplop wrote:


I'm not offering a solution, other than simply imprisoning these people and holding trials to determine whether they stay imprisoned.
I'm simply saying I don't trust the IDF to determine whether any Palestinian gets to live, because they constantly lie about people being terrorists as an excuse to kill Palestinian people. They aren't going to suddenly stop doing that now.

On September 02 2026 00:27 oBlade wrote:

You are assuming your own conclusion that a journalist cannot also be in Hamas. That's circular.

They would have a list of Hamas people, and then that person would also be a journalist affiliated with a different organization. Why wouldn't they have personnel rosters? Lists of operatives? Communication records? Is your belief Hamas has no paper trail, like it's a massive Fight Club? Or do you mean for a journalist agent specifically it would be top secret super covered up with no provable record?

Despite not stopping, they have apparently highly reduced that at least.

On September 02 2026 00:31 Jockmcplop wrote:


There is quite alot of space between 'secret super covered up' and 'written out in the most convenient possible terms for Israel' and if the paperwork did exist it was probably somewhere within that space.

Would you believe it if an EU operative went to Russia and found a piece of paper saying 'we blackmailed Donald Trump in 2015 to permanently weaken America on the world stage to Russia's advantage - Signed - PUTIN' ?

Some things are just implausibly convenient and this is one of those.

On September 02 2026 00:31 Jockmcplop wrote:

I suppose the acid test will be how many are found not guilty.

On September 02 2026 00:49 oBlade wrote:

You know there are other dead journalists that nobody ever accused of being terrorists, right?

You dispute the UNRWA cases or not? I think you're not acknowledging how widely Hamas metastasized.

That's not independent from the pool of what cases are tried. If you put hydrochloric acid on an acid test, it will give you pH under 7 every time. If you try people with the strongest levels of evidence, you will get guilty verdicts every time.

On September 01 2026 22:40 WombaT wrote:

I particularly recall a bunch of aid workers being killed and then buried, with the story being that they approached a checkpoint/patrol at night with lights off and so the IDF forces couldn’t take the risk

Well someone dug them up and quelle surprise a mobile phone recording showed this absolutely wasn’t the case.

I’m not a source monkey, and it’s been a relatively long conflict with so many such instances that I couldn’t be arsed to Google it and I’m going off memory. If that’s a particular issue I can go digging

It’s definitely something that separates the IDF from the likes of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in Afghanistan and Iraq for me.

It’s cold comfort to the folks who lost loved ones when a wedding was bombed or whatever obviously in the latter cases.

But user error and collateral damage is at least, for me plausible most of the time in those conflicts. Mistakes were generally admitted, not always though, although there probably not enough consequences for the perpetrators of such fuckups, absolutely.

The IDF on the other hand has been caught lying about various incidents that many times that anyone trusting them as an overall institution is a lunatic and I’ve some magic beans to sell them.

On September 01 2026 23:13 Jankisa wrote:


Unless you are a human rights lawyer by profession or a journalist with a similar background, going around and emailing actual scholars who do this for a living is pretty unhinged.

Not a lot of space between you and folks who email people from NASA to ask them why they are covering up that Earth is flat.

On September 02 2026 00:17 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:


The theoretical question was if what Israel is currently doing is genocide.
To answer that it's important to focus on now. What Israel has done before (such as offering a 2 state solution) has no bearing on if they are genociding Palestinians today (it might be a reason for why but that's not the question).
What Palestinians might do if they had a state is also unimportant to the if part (but maybe not the why).

Going back to the definition I had.

"Genocide is an international crime defined as specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group."

Obviously you don't need to destroy the entire group (or even the holocaust wouldn't count).
Palestinians are not an ethnic group, not a racial group and not a religious group.
Quite clearly they are a national group as their identity is tied to territory (even if it's not a nation).

The question is, how many would need to kill to make it a genocide (or do you need to kill at all?)
China was brought up as an example also on the line. There you have an ethnic/religious/cultural group that China is effectively trying to destroy. But the death toll is not that large and the people are not driven from their land. They are "just" trying to make them more Han Chinese.
Is that genocide?

The question is. If you have a national group, drive them from their territory and prevent any way of forming a state, effectively making them into a stateless diaspora, is that a genocide since it's that groups identity?

If it is:
Established by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide encompasses not only mass killing but also causing serious harm, inflicting destructive life conditions, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children"

Then the actions Israel has conducted would qualify if there is intent (or at least knowing that the actions would lead to it and still doing it).
Since we know Israel has tried several times to get other countries to take all the people in Gaza, are displacing them and have people on the record about the aim of them never getting a functional state intent is easy.

I personally do not think it's genocide (maybe attempts at ethnic cleansing and various war crimes) but I don't think it's impossible to argue that it could be.

On September 02 2026 05:15 KwarK wrote:
Let’s split the difference. It’s not genocide because they’re not just killing all the Gazans at once, they’re creating a scenario where Gazans are a renewable victim source and then killing them in a sustainable way to maximize Gazan suffering. Do we have a word for that? Seems like genocide is a bit too mild. It’s different, but it’s also worse.

On September 03 2026 13:05 PremoBeats wrote:


The incident you remember is horrific but I think the comparison to wars in the early 2000s misses important context.
Just think about how many Iraqis or Afghans had smart phones with serious cameras and bandwidth to broadcast 24/7 from a war zone…
We also know from a shit ton of cover ups from these wars, without the public being primed to watch every misstep.

Do singular units fuck up? Sure. Does the IDF uncover all of these fuck ups in its entirety? Impossible. But does it always have to be a cover up conspiracy? Not if you take into account the thousands of incidents that are reported in such a chaotic conflict, especially with an enemy that doesn’t distinguish its fighters from civilians and is known for using the most underhanded tactics.

So several reasons can lead to the impression that the IDF lied more than to these conflict zones
- in relation more incidents are reported, which are buried in far away regions in bigger conflict zones and in ones that are not nearly as well reported on as this conflict
- More incidents occur because the enemy uses tactics, that were not used in Afghanistan and Iraq / there are circumstances unique to Gaza
- You’ve got the highest ratio of aid workers and journalists of any modern conflict in an extremely densely populated area, some of whom are proven to the public to have worked with Hamas; others only on account by the IDF.
But I wouldn’t understand why the IDF should bomb a vehicle with 4 journalists simply to lie about them being Hamas. Or the incident you mentioned. What exactly would be the benefit of that except the whole world having more fodder to question their methods?

A rather logical explanation could simply be: a legitimate or mistaken strike / attack occurs -> information is incomplete / the personnel reporting the incident want to save their asses cause they realized they fucked up -> commanders make an initial attribution that seems plausible -> institution has an incentive to defend its personnel and has limited resources to deal with all incoming incidents -> an incorrect explanation gets presented publicly -> later evidence contradicts it
So a top-down conspiracy isn’t by far the only explanation.

Plus, you don’t mention the counter-examples where the IDF actually admitted that something went wrong.
It could very well be that the IDF is actually doing better if we look purely at contextual explanations for the fuck ups but to make a qualitative statement, we’d need to know how many incidents are reported and how many of them turn out to be correct, which is actually impossible. The necessary data to calculate how frequently those accounts are false relative to the number of controversial incidents and military operations is simply not available.




How many fallacies without actually addressing the issue you yourself brought up are you able to compress into two sentences?
Jankisa:





I think your points are pretty valid and especially the collective evidence of rhetoric from officials and the scale of destruction could lead to a genocide verdict. But - I know it must be unnerving to read - I have to come back to intent. Article II reads:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”
So intent to destroy is the essential additional element. All the 4 following points are not genocidal with intent to destroy in whole or in part. You can kill, cause serious bodily or mental harm, bring about atrocious conditions of life and even prevent births without it being genocide if there is not intent to destroy the group in whole or in part.
The acts in Article II aren't independently genocide; they become genocide when accompanied by the specific intent required by the Convention.
That at least is my understanding from having gone into several cases and distinguishing the verdicts.

So to come back to your question: “If you have a national group, drive them from their territory and prevent any way of forming a state, effectively making them into a stateless diaspora, is that a genocide since it's that groups identity?”
Not necessarily. Suppose, hypothetically, Israel permanently prevented Palestinian statehood, annexed the West Bank and Gaza, and expelled Palestinians into neighboring countries.
That could potentially involve: forcible transfer, persecution, apartheid, unlawful annexation, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and potentially other international crimes.
But it wouldn't automatically be genocide.

For genocide, you still need the crucial element: intent to physically or biologically destroy the protected group, in whole or in substantial part.

“Then the actions Israel has conducted would qualify if there is intent (or at least knowing that the actions would lead to it and still doing it).”
As I understand it, for genocide, knowledge that one's actions will cause the physical destruction of a group is not, by itself, equivalent to the specific intent to destroy that group. The two concepts need to be legally distinguished. Knowing that your actions will result in someone's death is not necessarily the same as intending to kill them. The former can certainly be evidence of the latter, depending on the circumstances, but it doesn't automatically establish it. If I knowingly undertake an action that will result in someone's death, that doesn't automatically mean that my purpose was to kill them.

On September 03 2026 14:48 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:


The argument that Israel doesn't want to genocide the Palestinians in Gaza (usually this is the distinct subgroup talked about, it's not genocide of all Palestinians) and only wants to destroy Hamas is very common.
It's not a particularly good one.

First of all even neglient homocide is a thing. Being on your phone and blowing through a crosswalk in a car, killing someone, will get you convicted. Even if you had no intent of killing anyone and didn't even know someone would die

Robbing a bank and shooting at police to hold them off, hitting and killing one of them, will get you convicted of murder.

Even fireing excessivly in self defence and hitting a random bystander can result in a murder conviction if you should have known your actions had a high chance of killing innocents.

There is a difference in not intervening and giving HLR even when you could and that person dying.
But Israel is clearly taking action here and thus has to consider the effect of those actions.

As I said it doesn't affect the if, but it could be used to justify the why.

Also the stated aims of the IDF does not line up particularly well with statements from right wing politicians.
I know the excuse is that these are individuals and they don't share the aims of Israel as a state.

But that is also weak because they often have senior positions, are in the ruling coalition, face very little pushback and politicians are above the military in the chain of command.

I think it can be argued that there is intent to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza (by transforming the majority into diaspora and killing the rest) even if it's a side effect of destroying Hamas.

On September 03 2026 13:05 PremoBeats wrote:


The incident you remember is horrific but I think the comparison to wars in the early 2000s misses important context.
Just think about how many Iraqis or Afghans had smart phones with serious cameras and bandwidth to broadcast 24/7 from a war zone…
We also know from a shit ton of cover ups from these wars, without the public being primed to watch every misstep.

Do singular units fuck up? Sure. Does the IDF uncover all of these fuck ups in its entirety? Impossible. But does it always have to be a cover up conspiracy? Not if you take into account the thousands of incidents that are reported in such a chaotic conflict, especially with an enemy that doesn’t distinguish its fighters from civilians and is known for using the most underhanded tactics.

So several reasons can lead to the impression that the IDF lied more than to these conflict zones
- in relation more incidents are reported, which are buried in far away regions in bigger conflict zones and in ones that are not nearly as well reported on as this conflict
- More incidents occur because the enemy uses tactics, that were not used in Afghanistan and Iraq / there are circumstances unique to Gaza
- You’ve got the highest ratio of aid workers and journalists of any modern conflict in an extremely densely populated area, some of whom are proven to the public to have worked with Hamas; others only on account by the IDF.
But I wouldn’t understand why the IDF should bomb a vehicle with 4 journalists simply to lie about them being Hamas. Or the incident you mentioned. What exactly would be the benefit of that except the whole world having more fodder to question their methods?

A rather logical explanation could simply be: a legitimate or mistaken strike / attack occurs -> information is incomplete / the personnel reporting the incident want to save their asses cause they realized they fucked up -> commanders make an initial attribution that seems plausible -> institution has an incentive to defend its personnel and has limited resources to deal with all incoming incidents -> an incorrect explanation gets presented publicly -> later evidence contradicts it
So a top-down conspiracy isn’t by far the only explanation.

Plus, you don’t mention the counter-examples where the IDF actually admitted that something went wrong.
It could very well be that the IDF is actually doing better if we look purely at contextual explanations for the fuck ups but to make a qualitative statement, we’d need to know how many incidents are reported and how many of them turn out to be correct, which is actually impossible. The necessary data to calculate how frequently those accounts are false relative to the number of controversial incidents and military operations is simply not available.




How many fallacies without actually addressing the issue you yourself brought up are you able to compress into two sentences?
Jankisa:





I think your points are pretty valid and especially the collective evidence of rhetoric from officials and the scale of destruction could lead to a genocide verdict. But - I know it must be unnerving to read - I have to come back to intent. Article II reads:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”
So intent to destroy is the essential additional element. All the 4 following points are not genocidal with intent to destroy in whole or in part. You can kill, cause serious bodily or mental harm, bring about atrocious conditions of life and even prevent births without it being genocide if there is not intent to destroy the group in whole or in part.
The acts in Article II aren't independently genocide; they become genocide when accompanied by the specific intent required by the Convention.
That at least is my understanding from having gone into several cases and distinguishing the verdicts.

So to come back to your question: “If you have a national group, drive them from their territory and prevent any way of forming a state, effectively making them into a stateless diaspora, is that a genocide since it's that groups identity?”
Not necessarily. Suppose, hypothetically, Israel permanently prevented Palestinian statehood, annexed the West Bank and Gaza, and expelled Palestinians into neighboring countries.
That could potentially involve: forcible transfer, persecution, apartheid, unlawful annexation, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and potentially other international crimes.
But it wouldn't automatically be genocide.

For genocide, you still need the crucial element: intent to physically or biologically destroy the protected group, in whole or in substantial part.

“Then the actions Israel has conducted would qualify if there is intent (or at least knowing that the actions would lead to it and still doing it).”
As I understand it, for genocide, knowledge that one's actions will cause the physical destruction of a group is not, by itself, equivalent to the specific intent to destroy that group. The two concepts need to be legally distinguished. Knowing that your actions will result in someone's death is not necessarily the same as intending to kill them. The former can certainly be evidence of the latter, depending on the circumstances, but it doesn't automatically establish it. If I knowingly undertake an action that will result in someone's death, that doesn't automatically mean that my purpose was to kill them.





And you seriously think that's the underlying motive of successive Israeli governments, across multiple levels of military command, over the course of several generations? That they're deliberately trying to keep Gazans alive as a renewable supply of victims so they can repeatedly inflict suffering on them?
I think you found a new legal criminal category in international law that is even harder to prove than genocide!

On September 03 2026 22:13 WombaT wrote:

They killed people, buried them, lied about what happened and were only exposed when somebody went back in and got a phone recovered which exposed the lies

Various Western militaries may be complicit in atrocity but they don’t go around doing things like that.

There are undoubtedly good people in the IDF, at various levels of seniority but institutionally there’s a very good reason nobody trusts the IDF line anymore, if they ever did.

On September 03 2026 21:32 PoulsenB wrote:
I don't think the suffering Gaza civilians care about the legal distinction you wrote. From their point of view it's the exact same situation, nobody's thinking "fortunately they are not genociding us, they are only starving us all to death to gain leverage against hamas".

On September 03 2026 22:13 WombaT wrote:

They killed people, buried them, lied about what happened and were only exposed when somebody went back in and got a phone recovered which exposed the lies

Various Western militaries may be complicit in atrocity but they don’t go around doing things like that.

There are undoubtedly good people in the IDF, at various levels of seniority but institutionally there’s a very good reason nobody trusts the IDF line anymore, if they ever did.

On September 03 2026 22:22 LightSpectra wrote:
For reference, here's the U.N.'s definition of "genocide": https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: 1] Killing members of the group; 2] Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3] Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4] Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5] Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

I don't see any serious person denying Israel has done all five of these things to Palestinians in cases that are clearly not direct self-defense (and by "direct" I'm discounting the reasoning of "so many Palestinians want all Jews dead that their complete subjugation/eradication is itself self-defense").

On September 03 2026 23:31 Ryzel wrote:
To have a serious conversation with someone with an opposing viewpoint on this issue, you need to find common ground by answering one question:

Does it bother you that Palestinians are dying and/or being forcefully relocated?

No gotchas, “yes, but…” answers are fine, not a trick question. There’s plenty of room for discussion branching from there, but if two people don’t share the same (honest) answer to that question then their arguments (and time) are wasted on each other.

On September 03 2026 20:06 PremoBeats wrote:
The examples given demonstrate that a person can be criminally responsible for causing a death withouth specifically intending that death... but that actually is a perfect example for my distinction.
Through willful neglect one can committ a warcrime (like collective punishment via withheld food aid) but you need dolus specialis (the intent to destroy, not simply neglect) to prove genocide.

"But Israel is clearly taking action here and thus has to consider the effect of those actions."
True, that is perfectly reasonable take in regards to war crimes or crimes against humanity, which I am on board with.
And I guess I don't have to repeat for the x-th time what still needs to be demonstrated on top for it to classify as genocide.
Scenario A: We will deny food to Gaza because widespread civilian suffering will pressure Hamas into surrendering.
Scenario B: We will destroy these civilians as members of their national group.
They are legally important distinctions.