Things Aren’t Peaceful in Palestine - Page 58

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.

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.

On October 20 2023 05:48 KwarK wrote:
Biden has given significantly less than full backing. He has moved forces into the area as a measure to limit escalation by Iran etc. to calm the overall situation while simultaneously talking down Israel’s more extreme rhetoric. The stance on the deadline to evacuate northern Gaza, for example, where the government described Israel’s demands as unreasonable or the work being done to restore supplies and utilities.

Biden’s foreign policy is and continues to be his strength. He blends “you’re my friend and obviously I have your back” with “but as a friend I need to be honest with you about this”. Under his leadership the direct application of US force has been extremely rare but the US has been far from disengaged globally. The presence of US forces act as a calming measure to hot heads who might otherwise do something stupid.

Terrified by constant bombings all around her and with food and water running out, American Maha Barakat said Sunday that her desperate attempts to flee Gaza have been met with frustration and confusion.

Barakat said U.S. State Department officials have contacted her twice, telling her they are doing all they can to get her and other U.S. citizens out of Gaza.

"They kept saying the opening will happen on short notice and this freaks me out," Barakat said. "Like, what do you mean, short notice? There are hundreds of Americans here and it will take hours to get everyone out."

Barakat said she couldn't risk just getting into her car and driving to the southern border without some solid assurances that she would be allowed to cross.

"I only have enough fuel in my car for one trip," Barakat said.

Retreating back to the Gaza neighborhood she has been residing in, Barakat said she is staying in a place with 50 other people, including children "who keep crying and screaming with every bomb."

"We ran out of water. We ran out of cooking gas. Cars are running out of fuel," Barakat said over a spotty WiFi connection, her voice fading in and out as she spoke to ABC News. "We hardly managed to secure drinking water enough for the night."

On October 20 2023 06:19 GreenHorizons wrote:

He's still struggling to get Israel (one of the US's closest allies) to let US citizens (not talking about prisoners of Hamas) out of Gaza.


abcnews.go.com

Israel is basically using US citizens in Gaza as hostages denying them food, water, or egress and Biden has thus far failed to get them to stop.

On October 20 2023 06:33 KwarK wrote:

Israel famously doesn’t control Gaza. I suspect the state department are hard at work trying to get them out though. What would you have him do? He’s walking a narrow line. It’s not like he can ask Israel to go extract them, nor demand that countries not invade anywhere that Americans might be for fear of harming them.

On October 20 2023 04:49 ChristianS wrote:

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.

On October 20 2023 06:50 GreenHorizons wrote:

Tell Israel to establish a safe (from Israeli bombings) path to an Israeli controlled crossing for American citizens to pass through would be the simple answer.

Then they could say "hey travel this road at this time to arrive at the border by X and be escorted through it by Israel." Instead of "try you luck dodging Israeli bombs on your way south where you'll find more bombs and less resources. Once you're there, wait until the 5th time we say you'll be able to safely pass through the Gaza border and you may or may not find out we again failed to secure your escape from Israel's bombs and depriving you of basic necessities like food and water".

On October 20 2023 06:59 ChristianS wrote:
Sure, those both seem trivially true. Although “controlling land” is a weird metric to use.

On October 20 2023 07:00 KwarK wrote:

You want all the Americans in Gaza to gather in one place that is outside of western control? Surely you understand that this whole crisis started by Hamas killing civilians to provoke a military overreaction.

And you want Israel to agree to not bomb a place where Americans are when they’re currently controlled by Hamas, a group infamous for using human shields?

I think we should leave this one with the state department. They’re actually pretty good at getting Americans home.

On October 20 2023 07:25 Mohdoo wrote:


I felt like one point we agreed on before was that the goal of preventing Hamas from operating as the government of Gaza is acceptable and a worthwhile goal to have. Did I misunderstand you?

The reason it is phrased as controlling land is that any time anyone says "wipe out Hamas", there is a reflexive "well actually terrorism will always exist". In pursuit of avoiding that noise, I made sure to be specific that the actual goal is to prevent Hamas from having a staging ground that can be used for its military goals. And that means preventing it from controlling/governing land.

So far, we have agreed on the following 3 assumptions:

0) Preventing Hamas from controlling land can be reasonably held as a core objective by Israel (assuming you confirm your support of this in subsequent replies)

1) Hamas uses residential houses for things like tunnels, weapons, and military supplies

2) It is not possible for Israel to prevent Hamas from controlling land without killing non-combatants and/or bombing houses

***************

So based on these, we are left with a situation where some non-zero amount of non-combatants are guaranteed to be killed if Israel tries to prevent Hamas from controlling land, right? How do we decide how many non-combatant deaths are acceptable?

And since we can easily point to this hospital dumpster fire as an indication Hamas will not hesitate to fabricate numbers and situations beyond reason, and we already agree Israel can't be trusted either, what do we do?

It sounds like the conclusion you reach is that Israel needs to stop doing what they are currently doing, right? I'm sorry if this sounds accusatory or anything, but I feel like I actually don't understand your thought process.

Israel apparently adopts a highly unusual view of LOAC that would allow greater license to destroy an entire residential apartment building in which an enemy military facility is found — and to do so without the standard proportionality analysis. The generally accepted view is that an attack on a civilian apartment building in such cases must consider whether the civilian infrastructure that is expected to be destroyed is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage (ICRC, United States, International Law Association; ICRC report surveying States’ views and leading scholarship). The outlier position adopted by Israel is that “as a matter of law, the building is a single military objective, and therefore damage to other parts of the building need not be considered as collateral damage” (Merriam & Schmitt 2015; Eli Bar-On 2021). This conception of the rule does not appear to include a limiting principle that would apply to other civilian objects, including medical facilities, houses of worship, schools, and the like.

On October 20 2023 10:11 ChristianS wrote:

I only mentioned that “controlling land” is a weird metric to use because it’s not really possible to take control of territory by bombing alone. Like, if Hamas controls a particular neighborhood, how many bombs do you have to drop to say they no longer control it? Infinite? Even if you level every building they still “control” the square footage, don’t they?

I think you’re largely reinventing the wheel here. If you peruse an article like this one do you find yourself asking different questions? For instance, by normal rules of there’s an apartment building with 200 people in it, but you think it might have an entrance to a Hamas tunnel system in the basement, you would normally weigh the military advantage of cutting off access to that tunnel entrance against the collateral damage of likely killing most of those 200 people. However:


As I understand that quote, by the normal analysis you might say “200 is a lot of dead civilians, and they could probably regain access by just clearing some rubble, so it fails the proportionality test.” But Israel would say “Tunnel in the basement? Well, that means the whole building is a valid military target, so there’s no collateral damage at all!” For all the times people level the “human shield” criticism at Hamas for hiding their operation amidst the city (therefore increasing the collateral damage when their valid military targets get hit) it’s worth noting that Israel is also painting with a pretty broad brush in designating “valid military targets.”

If we assume 100% of all houses bombed were occupied by people who intended to kill an Israeli the next day, we would all agree it is entirely appropriate to bomb those houses.

On October 20 2023 10:20 Salazarz wrote:


No, we would not 'all agree' that it is appropriate, what kind of psycho bullshit assumption is that? They're living in a ghetto ran by radical terror group and cut off from virtually all 'normal' interactions of the modern civilized world, obviously they fucking hate the people who bear at least a significant portion of responsibility for their situation, that doesn't mean it's acceptable to just kill them all.

I'm pretty sure most folks in North Vietnam would kill an American if they had an opportunity to do so, that doesn't make the bombing campaigns and indiscriminate strafing of their villages any less of a disgusting war crime.

When you create an oppressed minority that hates their stronger neighbor, the 'appropriate' response isn't to oppress them even harder until their hate for you reaches a level sufficient to justify straight up exterminating the whole lot, it's to figure out a way to ease the tensions and co-exist with as little violence as possible.

On October 20 2023 10:11 ChristianS wrote:

I only mentioned that “controlling land” is a weird metric to use because it’s not really possible to take control of territory by bombing alone. Like, if Hamas controls a particular neighborhood, how many bombs do you have to drop to say they no longer control it? Infinite? Even if you level every building they still “control” the square footage, don’t they?

I think you’re largely reinventing the wheel here. If you peruse an article like this one do you find yourself asking different questions? For instance, by normal rules of there’s an apartment building with 200 people in it, but you think it might have an entrance to a Hamas tunnel system in the basement, you would normally weigh the military advantage of cutting off access to that tunnel entrance against the collateral damage of likely killing most of those 200 people. However:


As I understand that quote, by the normal analysis you might say “200 is a lot of dead civilians, and they could probably regain access by just clearing some rubble, so it fails the proportionality test.” But Israel would say “Tunnel in the basement? Well, that means the whole building is a valid military target, so there’s no collateral damage at all!” For all the times people level the “human shield” criticism at Hamas for hiding their operation amidst the city (therefore increasing the collateral damage when their valid military targets get hit) it’s worth noting that Israel is also painting with a pretty broad brush in designating “valid military targets.”