EPTThings Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine - Page 57
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland11926 Posts
On October 19 2023 20:47 Magic Powers wrote: We're spending too much time talking about what would be a serious war crime if the strike came from Israel? I have to strongly disagree. We should talk about this as much as is necessary to get to the truth and then propagate that truth until no one can reasonably deny it, regardless of what the truth is. If it was Hamas, that needs to be widely known. If it was Israel, that needs to be widely known. No compromises. I mean it wouldn't be the first israeli war crime or the first lie by Hamas. The event has special influence in terms of the timing of Biden's visit, other than that it's kind of par for the course. | ||
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Excludos
Norway7944 Posts
On October 20 2023 00:49 ChristianS wrote: Did you read the bit I wrote about using common sense? If an apartment building got leveled and they say 80 people died, you don’t have to trust them to know it’s unlikely that number is inflated by 10x. As for the bit about “legitimate targets,” how is anybody supposed to know what the IDF considers a “legitimate target”? They’re just reporting body counts. That is actually quite unlikely. Despite all efforts to twist otherwise, there is no indication that the IDF haven't been continuously knocking on roofs before letting the actual bombs go. They have every reason to do so, after all, as it's their excuse for indiscriminately bombing civilian buildings to a lower international backlash. If I got a firecracker on my roof, you could be sure I would be anywhere else within the next 5 minutes at most. Those buildings you see collapse could very well have anywhere from zero to the claimed 80 people inside them. We simply have no idea, and Hamas have every reason to inflate those numbers as much as possible. Judging by how they reported the hospital numbers, inflated by seemingly up to 1000x, I'm choosing to believe Hamas-reported numbers should be taken with about just the same amount of salt as Russia does with theirs. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
On October 20 2023 01:47 Excludos wrote: That is actually quite unlikely. Despite all efforts to twist otherwise, there is no indication that the IDF haven't been continuously knocking on roofs before letting the actual bombs go. They have every reason to do so, after all, as it's their excuse for indiscriminately bombing civilian buildings to a lower international backlash. If I got a firecracker on my roof, you could be sure I would be anywhere else within the next 5 minutes at most. Those buildings you see collapse could very well have anywhere from zero to the claimed 80 people inside them. We simply have no idea, and Hamas have every reason to inflate those numbers as much as possible. Judging by how they reported the hospital numbers, inflated by seemingly up to 1000x, I'm choosing to believe Hamas-reported numbers should be taken with about just the same amount of salt as Russia does with theirs. …1000x? So you think 0.5 people died? IIRC Bellingcat is reporting they’ve seen video showing a couple dozen corpses from the event. I haven’t seen the video, nor do I wish to, but this is getting straight up denialist. I don’t understand the “don’t worry, they’re warning people before doing strikes thing.” Why are they even doing the strikes if everybody who could be killed in them is being warned in advance to evacuate? The apartment building itself isn’t a combatant, presumably they’re dropping the bomb because there’s somebody inside they want to kill. Maybe in a few cases they have reason to believe a building holds important and impossible-to-move assets (a hidden weapon factory, for instance) but that’s surely the exception, not the rule. All evidence I’ve seen is that people are mostly not complying with the “evacuate within 24 hours or else” orders, because there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop bombing in those 24 hours, nor that the place they evacuate to will get any fewer bombs. I mean the IDF was bragging about having dropped an unprecedented 6000 bombs in just a few days, and I’m supposed to believe every one of those bombs was preceded by evacuation warnings with designated evacuation sites, sufficient time for an evacuation, and a guarantee the evacuation sites wouldn’t be hit? That the death total is as likely to be 100 as 2000? Come on, man, this is absurd. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28556 Posts
On October 20 2023 02:17 ChristianS wrote: …1000x? So you think 0.5 people died? IIRC Bellingcat is reporting they’ve seen video showing a couple dozen corpses from the event. I haven’t seen the video, nor do I wish to, but this is getting straight up denialist. I don’t understand the “don’t worry, they’re warning people before doing strikes thing.” Why are they even doing the strikes if everybody who could be killed in them is being warned in advance to evacuate? The apartment building itself isn’t a combatant, presumably they’re dropping the bomb because there’s somebody inside they want to kill. Maybe in a few cases they have reason to believe a building holds important and impossible-to-move assets (a hidden weapon factory, for instance) but that’s surely the exception, not the rule. All evidence I’ve seen is that people are mostly not complying with the “evacuate within 24 hours or else” orders, because there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop bombing in those 24 hours, nor that the place they evacuate to will get any fewer bombs. I mean the IDF was bragging about having dropped an unprecedented 6000 bombs in just a few days, and I’m supposed to believe every one of those bombs was preceded by evacuation warnings with designated evacuation sites, sufficient time for an evacuation, and a guarantee the evacuation sites wouldn’t be hit? That the death total is as likely to be 100 as 2000? Come on, man, this is absurd. Overall I totally agree with you. The Palestinian overall death count from 6k bombs is not 100, and claiming that they're seemingly inflating it by 1000x is actually a much bigger inflation than what Hamas seems guilty of. But prior to a ground invasion I'm guessing you can make the argument that destroying the houses has some intrinsic value because otherwise they'd be a good place to house combatants. Of course, I think the element of it just being collective punishment is just as valid. The 'Gaza will be a city of tents, there will be no buildings' quote right after Hamas' attack is imo pretty clearly motivated by a desire for vengeance. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
On October 20 2023 03:18 JimmiC wrote: The official reason is that there is rockets inside, or entrances to the tunnel system. There is also instances where the goal is to kill combatants which I think people think is OK? But I'm really not sure because many people (and Hamas's numbers) are not separating the civilian casualties from the legitimate kills on the combatants. Any number any of us pulls out would be a complete assumption based on our own biases and assumptions. All we really know is it is not 0 and it is not 100%. I’m pretty sure you’d be offended if I pulled this kind of line with the Oct 7th attacks. “Israel says 1600 people died, but of course they’re a motivated actor in this, we don’t know for sure that the terrorists didn’t drop off the hostages before going back to Gaza. So really, the only deaths we know for sure are the ones directly documented on video, and even those might have been deepfaked by the IDF to form a casus belli.” That’s fucked, right? Totally inappropriate to stop and insist on ironclad peer-reviewed audit-trailed evidence to believe in a demonstrable ongoing humanitarian tragedy. I don’t know what the right line between healthy skepticism and JAQ-off denialism is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not “All we can say is it’s not 0 deaths and it’s not 2 million, anything else is bias and speculation.” As I understand it, laws of armed conflict would normally require a proportionality test of expected military advantage gained versus collateral damage inflicted on non-combatants. Also as I understand it, the IDF is officially on record against any proportionality test, essentially saying if they have reason to believe a lawful target is present they’re in the clear no matter the humanitarian cost. But it’s not usually as simple as “as long as the goal was to kill combatants it’s OK.” | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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GreenHorizons
United States22692 Posts
In this widely circulated picture you see 50+ people in the blast area barely taking up any space + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/231018123108-01-israel-gaza-101823-gaza-city.jpg?q=w_1110,c_fill/f_webp) Also Israel doesn't provide any meaningful justification for its specific bombings. It's not like they provide even something as simple as the Hospital rocket radar picture showing "hey they were launching rockets from here then we bombed it". Basically the only people that know whether any given Israeli bombing is targeting innocent civilians or Hamas are the Israelis ordering them. Even that might not be true given Israel's use of AI to pick targets. We don't have to look further than the evidence Israel provided to the public to rationalize flattening the AP office in Gaza to understand they don't need (or maybe have) any for a given bombing. EDIT: Should keep in mind Israel considers depriving millions of innocent people food, water, medicine, etc "targeting Hamas". | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28556 Posts
But I see no reason to doubt that 2600+ palestinians had died from Israeli retaliation 4 days ago - before the alleged hospital bombing. These numbers are from the Palestinian ministry of health, Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, not from Hamas. Additionally, if we look at the numbers from say, the 2014 Gaza war, which is probably the best precedent we have, we can see that the Gaza Health Ministry (which is Hamas-appointed) and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs have fairly similar casualty numbers - 2310 vs 2125. Now, those two differ in who they define as civilians and who they define as combatants - Gaza Health Ministry claims 70% civilians and , IMFA claims 36% civilians, 44% combatants and 20% 'uncategorized (males aged 16-50)'. However, United Nations Human Rights Committee also chimes in- giving 2251 casualties and 65% civilians as their tally. Imo, they should be considered the most trustworthy actor, and their numbers are actually closer to the Gaza Health Ministry numbers than they are to the IMFA numbers. So yes, we should not assume that Hamas is a trustworthy actor, but we also shouldn't assume Israel is, and while this hospital attack stuff is still way up in the air (even if I agree it at least seems unlikely to have been an Israeli air strike), I really don't think there's generally any precedent for claiming that Hamas tends to just make up numbers. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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ChristianS
United States3187 Posts
On October 20 2023 04:00 JimmiC wrote: If Israel had said 5000 civilians died by the hand of Hamas, but it turned out that 1600 people died because Israel dropped one of their own missiles on their own hospital I would not be offended by it being brought up at all. As much as everyone wants to strawman into a position I do not have and have been clear to not have. I guess since you want to keep thinking Israel is so evil, or maybe it is just me that making up a position I have and arguing against that is a lot easier. I'm not sure what you can't comprehend. Feel free to answer how many of the casualties so far in Palestine are combatants? You are treating the numbers like zero not me. I'm not saying no one died, I'm saying some were justifiably killed in the same way that some Russians are being justifiably killed every day. You do not have to convince me that Israel has many bad actors and has done awful things, that is part of your version of my believes and not my actual ones. I have made no judgement calls on whether or not Israel has had an appropriate response or not. this JAQing you keep talking about is the guaranteed massive genocide that Israel was going to do on Palestine which as of yet has not happened. Compared to everyone's predictions (which were talked of as fact) the Israeli response has been small. This hospital attack was a chance for everyone who hates Israel to go "see they are the worst". All the talk of the MSM bias for Israel all has not happened, they all ran with the Hamas story, just as they had in the past when Israel lied. Now since it was just a errant rocket from Hamas, where is the massive outrage about them? Is it because they didn't mean to? A couple pages ago all I was reading about was how it was no different that Israeli's don't mean to kill civilians and it is the same as if they did it on purpose. A lot people who are very reasonable on a whole host of other topics are completely biased and unreasonable on this one. I think the positions I attributed to you were more or less quotes? But I have no desire to strawman you into a position you don’t believe. I’m not quite sure what to do with it, though, when you don’t actually correct me on specific positions, you just generically complain about being strawmanned. While I try to read people’s posts carefully and understand what they are saying before responding, I freely admit that despite those efforts it’s not uncommon that I later realize I at least partially misunderstood. But what else can I do? I don’t think I’m incorrect to say you were arguing that we can’t trust the Palestinian health ministry’s casualty numbers, based primarily on the fact that their initial estimate about the hospital strike (when they presumably still thought the whole hospital had been blown up) was ultimately off by a factor of ~10. Now, I don’t think it would be responsible to generalize that as a correction factor on all their subsequent estimates, but you also didn’t argue for that. But neither do you think we can look at the strikes being done and the infrastructure damage and use common sense to assess whether the numbers sound reasonable; instead, you think that “All we really know is it is not 0 and it is not 100%” (100% of what, I’m not really certain). The Economist estimates that 11,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed (4.3% of total). If we assume that each building had an average of 5 people in it, and only 10% were killed (I’d consider those extremely generous assumptions) that’s still ~5500 deaths. If we assume an average of 2 occupants and 10% lethality that’s 2100, a bit above the upper limit of the “100 to 2000” range you floated. If each building averaged just a single occupant and lethality was just 1% that’s 110 deaths, still slightly over your low estimate. 1% chance of a single death is probably not far off from the lethality of controlled demolitions in peacetime, not mass bombing campaigns in war zones. Do you see why I might consider this “well nobody can really know casualty numbers, could be 100, could be 2000” rhetoric borderline offensive? Meanwhile you’re fairly fixated on number of combatants killed. Can you tell me how you think anyone would know that? What even counts as a “combatant” right now? There’s no ground invasion yet, and Palestinians don’t have means to shoot down bombers. Some number of guys are firing rockets into Israel; those guys are presumably combatants, although they’ve probably gone to ground by the time bombers can get there. Otherwise, what are we talking? Anybody who hypothetically would take up arms if/when the ground invasion starts? Anybody with “ties to Hamas” (in which case, how the hell are we defining that)? Anybody who tells a pollster they support Hamas? Obviously it’s worth trying to figure out how many “Hamas operatives” (for lack of an operational definition) are getting killed in all this, but it’s not really relevant to your skepticism about overall casualty numbers. And realistically, it’s going to be pretty difficult to get any real information about it for the foreseeable future. | ||
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Jockmcplop
United Kingdom9343 Posts
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Dan HH
Romania9015 Posts
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/gallant-says-idf-ground-offensive-in-gaza-will-be-coming-soon/ Given the strong reaction to the hospital story and how much more visceral material a ground invasion will provide, the chances of this conflict being contained aren't looking great. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21352 Posts
On October 20 2023 04:53 Dan HH wrote: Is there any country nearby that would actually consider interfering tho? Hasn't Israel shown time and time again that they can take on (almost) everyone if need be?The Israeli defense minister pretty much confirmed today that the ground invasion is going ahead. And the foreign minister made a similar comment yesterday. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/gallant-says-idf-ground-offensive-in-gaza-will-be-coming-soon/ Given the strong reaction to the hospital story and how much more visceral material a ground invasion will provide, the chances of this conflict being contained aren't looking great. Countries will huff and puff but I question if anyone is willing to go to war with Israel. | ||
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Blitzkrieg0
United States13132 Posts
On October 20 2023 05:02 Gorsameth wrote: Is there any country nearby that would actually consider interfering tho? Hasn't Israel shown time and time again that they can take on (almost) everyone if need be? Countries will huff and puff but I question if anyone is willing to go to war with Israel. You can't win a war against a nuclear power. | ||
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ZeroByte13
744 Posts
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Elroi
Sweden5585 Posts
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