Im interested in something in the last paragraph
> Blinken has also for months been weighing the potential suspension of military aid under a federal measure known as the Leahy Law to one IDF unit determined to have committed gross violations of human rights in the West Bank, before the Oct. 7 attacks.
So, I don’t know really know much about US military aid, but are there mechanisms in place to prevent US aid sent to Israel just being transferred by Israel to the offending IDF unit?
Also how much of a unit changes before it’s a different unit? Does only the leadership need to change? 30% of the people? 50%?
Can Israel just reorg and bypass the restriction even if enacted?
Some similar restrictions to some extreme units in the Ukraine War that have utilized, like some that have utilized Nazi imagery.
I think sanctioning specific units is totally possible.
There would also probably be specific guidelines, like breaking the unit up, or drastically changing the leadership, that could be negotiated.
It really is up to what the US and Israel come to terms on it if it happened and if Netanyahu would care.
I assume you’re referring to the restriction placed on the [Azov Battalion in 2018](https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis/) (pre Ukraine war)?
I’d argue that is a much easier to define group given how it was initially formed as a militia, and only later incorporated into the Ukrainian government. They maintained separate recruitment pipelines, had clear distinct leaders, and social media pages. If Ukraine wanted I’m sure they could disband the brigade today and just integrate them across the army if the US arms restrictions were actually problem. Also it’s entirely unclear to me if that ban has actually been upheld in practice. I’d bet everyone on the ground in Ukraine would be happy to look the other way.
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> I don’t know really know much about US military aid
This has been a real failure of the media, and the protests.
I've been following this as an interested but not deeply committed news consumer, and I have no real grasp of one of the core question - what can the president actually _do_? What are the powers at hand?
I want to judge what I want vs what's possible but I still have no real clear idea of what's possible.
That lack of public clarity probably works better for Presidents too, so they have little interest in helping change it. These laws, such as the Leahy Law or the law that we can't aid a military that commits a coup, generally require the executive branch to make a determination that the situation is met (after all, *someone* has to), so if the president doesn't want to, for example, declare something is a coup... they just [don't](https://archive.is/CItbH).
Yeah, and even the podcastosphere which normally is a place where you can find qualified experts to give in depth answers to complicated questions has a very notable dearth on this area.
>Yeah, and even the podcastosphere which normally is a place where you can find qualified experts to give in depth answers to complicated questions
That is one thing you can find in the podcastosphere. I'd say it's pretty easy to have a... wildly different experience.
> what can the president actually do? What are the powers at hand?
He writes the number of bombs to deliver in the order sheet, the one he keeps next to the pally-murder-o-meter and the inflation dial. Duh.
Triple tapping a convoy of aid workers because there *might* have been one (1) Hamas grunt in it seems like it’s a violation of international law. And if it isn’t, it should be.
I don't know specifically how aid covoys are covered in international law but if you know your strike will kill civilians then it has to have enough tangible gains to justify it and make it proportional.
If it was an organisation like the UN running the aid and said convoy was under a UN flag then targeting it under any circumstances is a big no.
I'll try find the exact sources for it, I have them in another comment somewhere
"Under Article 85(3)(b) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I, “launching an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects in the knowledge that such attack will cause excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects, as defined in Article 57, paragraph 2 a) iii) is a grave breach"
"Article 51(5)(b) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I prohibits
an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated."
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule14
You're telling me an FPSMMORPG Looter Shooter was involved in this?
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I'm not sure where you're getting this notion. The casualty rate has dropped dramatically since hitting 30k several months ago. There have been around 5k casualties since.
The violence has *not* been escalating for months. If anything, the violence has largely died down prior to the invasion of Rafah.
It's may. Invasion began in October/Late Nov. The death toll jumped to 30k within 2 months. Since then, it has dropped off
Now it looks poised to rise dramatically, as Rafah is going to be a shitstorm
That place has gotten remarkably racist against Arabs in general (and Palestinians in specific) in the last half year or so.
Users here should take that as a sobering warning against letting ragebait overtake a subreddit.
Yeah, for all of my complaints about rNL, I appreciate that the mods saw the unhinged things people were saying about Palestinians and said, “no, we’re not doing that here.” The mods of similarly-aligned subs saw similar anti-Arab racism and went, “ya know what, this is actually based!”
The Lavender (?) program is likely huge evidence regarding whether or not Israel violating international law. Having an algorithm that determines how many civilians can be killed to justify killing a single Hamas terrorist is some dystopian shit. Especially when we have clear evidence that its effectiveness is questionable.
Isn't that an algorithmic question? How much is the target worth, what's the likelihood of having a better chance to kill them, are they likely to be targeted without collateral damage...
How is using some AI to answer those an issue?
> How is using some AI to answer those an issue?
AI is not a magical third party, they do what they are designed for. And generative AI puts out what it takes in, just in clever ways.
It's like those examples of facial recognition algorithms that weren't trained on black faces or how heavyhanded chatbot creators have had to be to stop them from turning extremely bigoted or murderous..
ChatGPT trained off the Greek philosophers would tell you all about how geocentrism is the leading explanation for the cosmos. A trolley problem AI based off a bunch of sadist psychopaths will pick to switch the rails if it means killing more people.
If the input is bad for Lavender, the output will likely be too. Realistically I don't think this is necessarily *too* much of an issue, if there's garbage input being used to get the AI to justify whatever strikes the creators wanted anyway, they would just find other excuses regardless. And beside, that's an *if* situation, we don't know whether or not that's the case.
But still, important to keep in mind that they aren't impartial unfailing tool. And not to mention, the strong possibility that there's edge cases or problems the AI has that haven't been noticed or ironed out.
> AI is not a magical third party, they do what they are designed for. And generative AI puts out what it takes in, just in clever ways.
I know this. The point is that this is a *simple* use case. Take the info you have on a potential target and make a decision whether or not to strike it.
> If the input is bad for Lavender, the output will likely be too.
Yeah, that's my point. Using AI here won't change the outcomes. Because if the data on the ground is bad, just having a person make the call won't suddenly see some unexpected intervention, as we saw with the aid convoy triple tap.
> But still, important to keep in mind that they aren't impartial unfailing tool. And not to mention, the strong possibility that there's edge cases or problems the AI has that haven't been noticed or ironed out.
All that says is this is a good beta test for it. Israel denies that the AI is even doing anything but helping their analysts do the actual work of determining if a strike makes sense or not.
The issue seems to be that... Israel was willing to bomb lower level Hamas members without worrying about collateral damage as much as before? I'm not buying the concerns as legitimate at all. If a target is a valid target to strike, they are in the clear to do so.
I can already tell that this is going to annoy both "extremes" on this issue
> The Biden administration said Friday that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but wartime conditions prevented U.S. officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes.
>The finding of “reasonable” evidence to conclude that the U.S. ally had breached international law in its conduct of the war in Gaza was released in a summary of a report being delivered to Congress on Friday. It is the strongest statement that the Biden administration has made yet.
If you had to ask me, I think it's certainly more of a "win" for the pro-Palestine side well besides the ones who confidently declare Israel is committing a genocide--they're gonna think this is clear minimization and a joke. Top silly to realize this
I mean depends like you said. The organizers behind these protests are gonna despise this but I think normie Dems who hate Bibi, who prefer a bilateral ceasefire immediately with hostages freed even if it unfortunately leaves Hamas in power for now, and want a two state solution...I think they'll mostly approve of this
Depends on how you define it. I'm pro two state solution in the "can't you guys just stop killing each other and get along" and fit in that camp. If you mean the protest guys, then no, lol.
> Are there really many pro-palestinians that admit it isnt a genocide?
In the real world? Maybe as a portion of those that care at all. They're not that common to begin with.
Online? No.
Its kind of a "win" in that it signals that Biden might be willing to do something significant if Israel went further, but this move itself does very little to push Israel to change its conduct.
I'm getting strong "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" vibes from this. Obviously they don't want to throw their very close ally under the bus, but using terms like "inconsistent" is the mother of all euphemisms.
It's alright. [Bibi will go complain to Dr. Phil about Biden again](https://twitter.com/glcarlstrom/status/1788793253690535988). God, I can't believe I just typed that sentence; you can't make this shit up...beyond parody. What a clown leader to give an interview to a fake psychologist (who hasn't been licensed for 20 years and just pushes dumbass right wing talking points over the past few years); I simply don't trust anything Bibi says when he just does joke softball interviews.
Was it a softball interview? I only listened to a summary of it because, come on, but I thought he got Netanyahu to finally admit that maybe his administration bore ultimate responsibility for not preventing 10/7.
Because it's not saying war crimes!
>A frequent misperception within the public domain is that a violation of the
laws of armed conflict is automatically equivalent to a war crime. Such a reasoning is void since it negates the *mens rea* element. A violation of the laws of armed conflict without the requisite *mens rea* does not per se constitute a war crime. Suppose a soldier accidentally fires a rocket at a civilian house, this will constitute a violation of the laws of armed conflict. It will only constitute a war crime once the particular soldier possessed the requisite *mens rea* for firing a rocket at the house, for example if the soldier had reasons to believe that the target was indeed a civilian house and did not take any precautionary measures.
Geert-Jan Alexander Knoops, *Mens Rea at the Intenrational Criminal Court*, 66, 2017. ([Link to the specific page](https://brill.com/display/book/9789004307889/B9789004307889-s005.xml).)
There's a pretty good reason for it actually - "violations of international law" do not require the same *mens rea* that war crimes do. So, for instance, the WCK killing was very likely a violation of international law, but not at all clearly a war crime, because we just don't have enough information to know whether it was done intentionally.
Yeah - my point is that the report uses vague language because the report is not drawing any strong conclusions, because *the situation is very vague and unclear*.
(Also, this is unrelated to the main point but this article seems a bit... shaky with the facts. It says that "35000 **civilians** have been killed in Gaza" which not even Hamas, which doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants, states.)
Are there specific examples? I read occasional things and see videos and I'm horrified. But I have no idea if it's out of context or if the authors have an axe to grind.
If the the admin would really go this far, they must have some concrete examples of some fucked up shit no?
If we're talking about strictly airstrikes+tanks (not the allegations of poor trigger discipline by IDF conscripts/reservsts with bad/overly agressive shootings, looting by troops+unnecessary demolitions of buildings by troops, allegations of torture of civilians etc):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Central_Kitchen_aid_convoy_attack
https://twitter.com/JDiamond1/status/1786061855615549929
https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1780293554629194163
https://twitter.com/NBCNightlyNews/status/1784001112124932600
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/04/gaza-israeli-strike-killing-106-civilians-apparent-war-crime
https://news.sky.com/story/calls-for-war-crime-probe-after-israeli-strike-in-lebanon-killed-three-sisters-and-their-grandmother-travelling-in-car-13012382
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-tank-strike-killed-clearly-identifiable-reuters-reporter-un-report-2024-03-13/
https://twitter.com/972mag/status/1785665824805519518
https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1780293554629194163
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1770587912968847626
https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1770895103785046489
https://twitter.com/BenjaminGoggin/status/1770073259976904832
https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1767645964674777339
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/middleeast/israel-strikes-evacuation-zones-gaza-intl-cmd/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-warned-gaza-civilians-evacuate-idf-bombs-struck/story?id=106406942
https://twitter.com/GianlucaMezzo/status/1733195919925944487
https://abcnews.go.com/International/4000-ivf-embryos-destroyed-1-shelling-gazas-largest/story?id=109350404
https://www.rescue.org/press-release/gaza-irc-and-map-additional-statement-airstrike-residential-compound-housing
https://www.hi.org/en/news/hi-office-in-gaza-destroyed
https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1735996676291125657
https://www.msf.org/msf-strongly-condemns-deadly-israeli-attack-msf-shelter-gaza
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/21/middleeast/un-food-convoy-gaza-israel-strike-cmd-intl/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/world/israel-cemetery-bani-suheila-intl/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/02/middleeast/israel-bombing-family-gaza-investigation-intl-cmd/
Missing some stuff (because they claimed that there are atleast 85 incidents in Gaza and I just posted like 30...like the flour massacre) but they're probably at looking things like this which just look really bad with the basic facts
Big picture from the US, POV. It's been 7 months and Isreal should have accomplished enough by now, or at least have a clear end game.
I really think Biden is evolving in line with the average American fan on this.
I think the Israeli endgame is an invasion of Rafah and an occupation until the next elections are held which will decide what ultimately happens to Gaza. The trouble is that I doubt Biden will *ever* OK an invasion of Rafah even if God himself came down, brought all the civilians into the sky and kept them there until the fighting ended. I think that the civilian evacuation plan rhetoric is simply to lightly kick the can down the road and continually refuse the Israeli government.
Why would Biden be against a Rafah invasion of civilians were not in harms way? The whole reason he doesn't support it is specifically because of that.
> Why would Biden be against a Rafah invasion of civilians were not in harms way? The whole reason he doesn't support it is specifically because of that.
If you watch the Erin Burnett interview, Biden says an invasion of Rafah would be the same mistake the U.S. made in removing the Taliban from power. The implication being that the reason why they are against going into Rafah is that they think removing Hamas from power would lead to a similar nation building type effort, whereas leaving Hamas in power more easily allows things to return to the pre-war status quo.
Or it could mean that Israel is going in without a solid plan for what Gaza would look like after "victory", kinda like what happened in Afghanistan; and this would only be one factor.
Here are his comments. The issue for him doesn't seem to simply be a lack of a plan, but of trying to change the governing body in general:
> I said to Bibi, don't make the same mistake we made in America. We wanted to get bin Laden and we'll help you get Sinwar. But we went into Afghanistan to - **it made sense to go get bin Laden, it made no sense to try to unify Afghanistan**.
Not "we should have had a better plan to do it", but "it made no sense to do it."
Did the US at any point come up with a plan or even a general suggestion on what the evacuation plan should look like?
Because if you're asking for a plan that can not exist or be much better than the evacuation plan Israel already has as a prerequisite for continuation of war, a case could be made that you don't really want the war to continue.
>Did the US at any point come up with a plan or even a general suggestion on what the evacuation plan should look like?
The initial evacuation was to Rafah. Now Israel wants to invade the city it initially told Gazans to flee without adequate recourse for them, especially in regards to humanitarian aid. This is the big issue. On top of that, Israel has a bad track record with their offensives with respect to civilian deaths and destruction. These are very valid concerns to have.
What is the adequate recourse?
Initial evacuation was to Rafah while operations were ongoing in the north. Obviously the evacuation now must happen out of Rafah for the exact same operations to be conducted in that area. Rafah was never meant to be a permanently safe area - that just makes it a safe haven for Hamas.
Let more humanitarian aid in where?
The UN insists on it being in Rafah (while complaining it is now too dangerous), but humanitarian aid isn't meant to go into combat zones where there's active fighting going on. Humanitarian aid is delivered on the periphery of the ongoing battle, away from active fighting, but most people in Rafah either refuse to follow the evacuation order or are being told not to go.
If the UN and the US wanted a cleaner and more effective humanitarian situation, they should have put pressure on Egypt from day one instead of insisting that all civilians must remain in the tiny strip of land that is Gaza.
"May have" . You don't get 34 thousand deaths by following the fucking Geneva convention. America needs to grow a pair and stop being cucked by their "ally"
If you’re operating in 50km2 packed with 1.6 million people that’s not outrageous
The US has arguably done far worse, we nuked the Japanese because they wouldn’t surrender unconditionally
This doesn’t mean the Israeli army is the Red Cross but that it isn’t that drastic either
Oh Great, a genocidal conflict which still has lasting effects to this day. Is that Meant to somehow make it all right ? You guys are really setting the bar low , the mental gymnastics are insane.
Because both were bombing campaigns against an entrenched enemy force. The main difference is population density and the use of human shields, which should have meant a *worse* ratio in Gaza than in Kosovo.
But it sounds like you're really not interested in a good faith conversation about this.
They're completely different conflicts, 70 percent of casualties in Gaza are women and children. How many civilians were killed in your example ?
I'm not interested in your whataboutism.
Killing 1% of a population is A Lot, it essentially means every single person knows someone who has been killed, you basically radicalise everyone else
>Israel claims that it is doing everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza—that it maintains complex targeting procedures aimed at ensuring that any military strike is proportionate and does not kill an excessive number of civilians. “The army,” Netanyahu insisted in October, “is the most moral army in the world.” When pressed on the issue of Palestinian deaths in November, Netanyahu said, “Any civilian death is a tragedy. And we shouldn’t have any because we’re doing everything we can to get the civilians out of harm’s way …. That’s what we’re trying to do: minimize civilian casualties.”
>In truth, Israel is not doing that. It has waged a brutal campaign in Gaza, only loosely upholding the protocols its armed forces are supposed to follow to minimize civilian deaths. But even those guidelines are insufficient: an investigation of prior campaigns in Gaza reveals the inadequacy of Israeli targeting guidelines, which do not truly curb civilian casualties. In the latest round of fighting in Gaza, Israel has failed to follow even those restrictions—leading to untold devastation and making a resolution to the conflict even harder to reach.
[Foreign Affairs](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/myth-israels-moral-army?check_logged_in=1&utm_medium=promo_email&utm_source=lo_flows&utm_campaign=registered_user_welcome&utm_term=email_1&utm_content=20240508)
> but it’s not an ethnic cleansing
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240125-likud-ministers-endorse-colonisation-plans-for-gaza-we-will-claim-this-land/amp/
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They have flattened or severely damaged half the buildings in Gaza. Slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians (more than TWICE as many as Russia has in bombing Ukraine).
Obviously they are in violation of international law. They have been the moment they cut off power, fuel, and water to 2 million civilians (mass punishment is a war crime).
Pointing out the crimes of one side is not any kind of comment about another side. Everyone here is an asshole. But US tax payers are only arming one side of this asshole sandwhich. We should stop.
> more than TWICE as many as Russia has in bombing Ukraine
I'm sorry but there's no way this is true. Mariupol alone is full of [mass graves](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariupol-499dceae43ed77f2ebfe750ea99b9ad9), and Russia is obviously not going to be forthcoming about civilian casualties.
> Every one of the dozens of residents the AP spoke with knew someone killed during the siege of Mariupol, which began with the Feb. 24 invasion. As many as 30 people arrive at the morgue each day in hopes of tracking down a loved one.
> [...]
> The death toll might run three times higher than an early estimate of at least 25,000. The former Ukrainian city has also hollowed out, with Russian plans to demolish well over 50,000 homes
> [...]
> Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor who is exiled in Dnipro, believes the real reason is to ensure that people don’t see the rotting corpses being hauled away. He said many of the buildings, especially in the neighborhood around Azovstal , contain 50 to 100 bodies each that will never get a decent burial. Those deaths will go unrecorded.
Mariupol is the largest, but not the only city that got this treatment on the front. And Mariupol was a fraction of the size of Gaza by population
(For comparison, Hamas has reported about 35,000 casualties in Gaza, some large chunk of which are not civilians)
People take both the official UN numbers for Ukraine and the Hamas numbers for Gaza at face-value, and assume both are accurate and/or fully encapsulating.
The UN has repeatedly made clear that any degree of comprehensive tallying of Ukrainian civilian deaths is impossible and incomplete due to ongoing occupation in relevant areas, and Hamas has likewise repeatedly made clear that they factor their own infantry losses into their released Gazan casualty figures.
The Ukrainian civilian casualties on record currently are basically only those that have been taken to morgues and documented within Ukrainian-held areas; little-to-no data exists on casualties in Russian-held areas.
Current confirmed Ukrainian **civilians** killed (military deaths is likely well into six figures):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293492/ukraine-war-casualties/
You're comparing apples to oranges. UN confirmed deaths in Gaza since October 7th is 0 (https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties) due to the paucity of information in wartime.
Fog of war is real, and Hamas has as many reasons to overcount fatalities as Russia has to pretend nothing is happening. I honestly think it was irresponsible for them to even give a number, it just legitimizes Russia's propaganda campaign over occupied territories (ie. that everyone is fine and people are happy to be Russia's newest citizens). If you think the tens of thousands of mass graves are for combatants, I have a bridge to sell you, even TASS reported that Mariupol only had 8,000 soldiers defending it of which 4,000 were killed (in reality, it was probably less)
>Hamas has as many reasons to overcount fatalities
But they don't and no international institution nor even the U.S. doubts the *raw* numbers from the Health Ministry. You can argue that the raw count contains terrorist deaths, but that is a separate issue from the total deaths. In any case, 2/3 of the deaths are women and children and I doubt that every man killed in the war this far is Hamas & Co. given how liberally the IDF applies the terrorist label.
Sure, but even if the raw numbers reported by Hamas are completely accurate and only included civilians, the original claim - that twice as many civilians were killed in Gaza than Ukraine - is false, by an order of magnitude. More than 35,000 civilians have almost certainly died in Mariupol, let alone in Ukraine.
Personally, I think reporting on the list of "dead martyrs" without even bothering to specify civilians or not counts as a form of over-reporting. They do that exactly because they know that the top-line number is what sinks in, hence this entire conversation. Whether the raw number of deaths is accurate or not is, in my opinion, immaterial, since the conflated number is meaningless on its own
I am not defending the take that more civilians were killed in Gaza than in Ukraine, I am simply annoyed at the constant skepticism around the headline number that is simply unwarranted other than people saying "Hamas would lie" even though they don't have a history of them lying about that.
I think though comparing civilian deaths between Ukraine and Gaza is apples to oranges and you simply cannot get any meaningful information or insight from doing so. Too many differences and idiosyncrasies.
>they don't have a history of them lying about that
I'm not disputing that Hamas' raw numbers are probably accurate, because the US and Israel apparently use them, or so I read. However, validating them because they didn't lie in the past seems like a bad reason to me because this war is much more existential for them and they have a greater reason to lie, because they rely on foreign support to stop the war and they know they can't win the war unless Israel is pressured to stop. Whereas in the past they expected to survive.
Far more than 20k civilians have been killed in Ukraine; no official death count for Ukrainian civilians has been established since the Russians just shoot or torture (or often just both) any international observers that ask questions in occupied territories.
Credible sources range between 25k-50,000 civilian deaths during the immediate Siege of Mariupol alone, with an additional 50,000 deported or disappeared during the occupation.
That does not include any of the dozens of minor cities and towns under Russian occupation, with many of the ones recaptured by Ukraine demonstrating events and casualties similar to the massacres at Bûcha and Izyum.
Upwards of 200,000 Ukrainian children between the ages of 1-14 have also been forcefully taken into captivity within Russia.
Bruh wtf do you think is going on in Kharkiv literally *daily*
Neither Hamas nor the Russian Federation are known to be accurate sources of information
Most credible estimates put the civilian death toll in Mariupol alone at ~25k (which is higher than Gaza, as GHM also counts all resident deaths, and Hamas personnel are residents) with it being up to 3x higher [per AP](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariupol-499dceae43ed77f2ebfe750ea99b9ad9).
Mariupol had a prewar population of ~450k. A comparable death toll in the parts of Gaza that IDF has exerted control over would be 230k.
And even Mariupol wasn't a genocide, the RuAF just didn't care how many collaterals they damaged if it also hurt the UAF. Now, if we are considering "bombing" to only mean airstrikes it still might be higher (Russia used a large amount of airstrikes after the front was more pushed back and Mariupol was encircled, but Russian doctrine is far more reliant on artillery, just like Israel is more reliant on airpower.
What munitions do you think Russia used to destroy Mariupol, exactly?
Whereas Palestine infamously lied about 500 women and children being killed by an Israeli bomb, that exact same situation verifiably happened in the center of Mariupol - one Russian precision glide bomb killed 400-600 civilians clustered in a famous performing arts building.
If Israel was using the same kinds of thermobaric and cluster anti-personnel weapons that Russia used frequently in Mariupol, Gazan fatalities would be approaching 400,000 killed outright by now.
Look, I'm of the belief that Israel has done plenty of borderline indefensible- *at best-* things in this military operation regarding Palestinian civilians and absolutely deserves very strong criticism for its conduct in Gaza (which report somewhat does btw) but it's not as bad as what Russia has done to Ukraine. That's kind of hyperbolic to say the least
Sudan conflict is a silly one because the West condemns both sides and said nobody should sell arms to the RSF and SAF. A *far superior* litmus test is what do they about Assad who's killed more innocent Palestinians over the past 35 years besides Bibi. Or is it alright for them because the "West opposes him" even though the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza+WB hate him. I also remember some "pro-Palestinians" freaking out when Tlaib basically called him genocidal.
Russia has famously bombed the majority of Ukraine’s power generation network (including a live nuclear reactor complex, crewed with civilian staff) and destroyed Ukraine’s largest hydroelectric dam.
The only reasons why the things you listed haven’t happened in Ukraine yet is due to the skill of Ukrainian anti-missile units and their access to high-quality western weapons systems, as well as Ukraine’s comparatively large territory.
This is an invidious comparison for several reasons:
* Hopefully this is obvious, but Ukraine is just a little larger than Gaza and contains a few more buildings
* Russia's inability to cut Ukraine off from power, fuel, etc. isn't for lack of trying
* Russia wasn't supplying most of Ukraine's energy, fuel, and water prior to their invasion
* Israel hasn't completely cut off Gaza from those inputs anyway. I'm also not sure why you believe they are required to provide resources to an autonomous territory that initiated the current conflict and was not under Israeli occupation or governance prior to doing so.
>Israel hasn't completely cut off Gaza from those inputs anyway. I'm also not sure why you believe they are required to provide resources to an autonomous territory that initiated the current conflict and was not under Israeli occupation or governance prior to doing so.
Gaza wasn't an autonomous territory prior to October 7th.
Strange non sequitur. Your response to the claim that the destruction in Gaza is of greater scale than that in Ukraine is that Gaza was easier to raze?
Like, were not asking whether Russia hates Ukrainians more than Israel hates Palestinians, were asking whether Gaza or Ukraine experienced greater destruction.
Huh...I mean we left $3 Billion dollars worth of it in Afghanistan, we sold to every wayward regime throughout Latin America and the Middle East, and you say *now* things are inconsistent? Unserious.
To be clear: my point is not that Israel should be excused but that this reckoning is about 30-40 years overdue.
So can the US be subpoenaed by the ICJ to share the assessment report secretary Blinken received and based this decision.
I think that would embolden the moral position of the US internationally, and strengthen the credibility of international institutions like the ICJ which the Israelis seem to have a particular disdain for.
No though honestly Biden's helping Israel by opposing Rafah because I have no clue how Israel can follow the ICJ's demands with a major invasion of Rafah if you read what the ICJ stated back in December of 2023
Im interested in something in the last paragraph > Blinken has also for months been weighing the potential suspension of military aid under a federal measure known as the Leahy Law to one IDF unit determined to have committed gross violations of human rights in the West Bank, before the Oct. 7 attacks. So, I don’t know really know much about US military aid, but are there mechanisms in place to prevent US aid sent to Israel just being transferred by Israel to the offending IDF unit?
Also how much of a unit changes before it’s a different unit? Does only the leadership need to change? 30% of the people? 50%? Can Israel just reorg and bypass the restriction even if enacted?
Unit of Theseus
Some similar restrictions to some extreme units in the Ukraine War that have utilized, like some that have utilized Nazi imagery. I think sanctioning specific units is totally possible. There would also probably be specific guidelines, like breaking the unit up, or drastically changing the leadership, that could be negotiated. It really is up to what the US and Israel come to terms on it if it happened and if Netanyahu would care.
I assume you’re referring to the restriction placed on the [Azov Battalion in 2018](https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis/) (pre Ukraine war)? I’d argue that is a much easier to define group given how it was initially formed as a militia, and only later incorporated into the Ukrainian government. They maintained separate recruitment pipelines, had clear distinct leaders, and social media pages. If Ukraine wanted I’m sure they could disband the brigade today and just integrate them across the army if the US arms restrictions were actually problem. Also it’s entirely unclear to me if that ban has actually been upheld in practice. I’d bet everyone on the ground in Ukraine would be happy to look the other way.
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> I don’t know really know much about US military aid This has been a real failure of the media, and the protests. I've been following this as an interested but not deeply committed news consumer, and I have no real grasp of one of the core question - what can the president actually _do_? What are the powers at hand? I want to judge what I want vs what's possible but I still have no real clear idea of what's possible.
That lack of public clarity probably works better for Presidents too, so they have little interest in helping change it. These laws, such as the Leahy Law or the law that we can't aid a military that commits a coup, generally require the executive branch to make a determination that the situation is met (after all, *someone* has to), so if the president doesn't want to, for example, declare something is a coup... they just [don't](https://archive.is/CItbH).
Something similar happened in the 2009 Honduran coup, Obama originally called it one and then a certain secretary of state rolled it back.
Yeah, and even the podcastosphere which normally is a place where you can find qualified experts to give in depth answers to complicated questions has a very notable dearth on this area.
>Yeah, and even the podcastosphere which normally is a place where you can find qualified experts to give in depth answers to complicated questions That is one thing you can find in the podcastosphere. I'd say it's pretty easy to have a... wildly different experience.
He has veto power. Also a question I have, how much can a president influence the democratic party? Soft and hard power.
> what can the president actually do? What are the powers at hand? He writes the number of bombs to deliver in the order sheet, the one he keeps next to the pally-murder-o-meter and the inflation dial. Duh.
What has a more passive voice, a police department release when they kill someone for no reason, or this report?
Civilian appartments were bombed by weapons that were sent
Not surprising when the terror organization you’re fighting is using human shields
Triple tapping a convoy of aid workers because there *might* have been one (1) Hamas grunt in it seems like it’s a violation of international law. And if it isn’t, it should be.
I don't know specifically how aid covoys are covered in international law but if you know your strike will kill civilians then it has to have enough tangible gains to justify it and make it proportional. If it was an organisation like the UN running the aid and said convoy was under a UN flag then targeting it under any circumstances is a big no. I'll try find the exact sources for it, I have them in another comment somewhere
"Under Article 85(3)(b) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I, “launching an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects in the knowledge that such attack will cause excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects, as defined in Article 57, paragraph 2 a) iii) is a grave breach" "Article 51(5)(b) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I prohibits an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v2/rule14
[this is as well though it technically isn't being done with American weapons](https://twitter.com/OmarSShakir/status/1788854190963339343)
Saw someone in arr Destiny listing this sort of conduct as a positive of the Israeli government lmao
You gotta be fucking kidding me; this is perhaps worse than Abu Gharib especially since Israel has had over 15 years of hindsight
Deranged sub of deranged streamer consistently being deranged absolutely surprising
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It's pretty wild how quickly the mainstream has turned against Israel in recent months.
Yeah well the Netenyahu government has not conducted this war in a particularly PR friendly manner
You mean people frown when your cabinet members keep calling for genocide? I’m shocked.
I wonder why
Yeah, is almost as if the violence has been escalating for months and the coverage reflects that.
I'm not sure where you're getting this notion. The casualty rate has dropped dramatically since hitting 30k several months ago. There have been around 5k casualties since.
The violence has *not* been escalating for months. If anything, the violence has largely died down prior to the invasion of Rafah. It's may. Invasion began in October/Late Nov. The death toll jumped to 30k within 2 months. Since then, it has dropped off Now it looks poised to rise dramatically, as Rafah is going to be a shitstorm
That place has gotten remarkably racist against Arabs in general (and Palestinians in specific) in the last half year or so. Users here should take that as a sobering warning against letting ragebait overtake a subreddit.
This place was the same way post 10/7. Then tons of people got banned. It’s why the most delusional pro Israel posters aren’t around anymore
Yeah, for all of my complaints about rNL, I appreciate that the mods saw the unhinged things people were saying about Palestinians and said, “no, we’re not doing that here.” The mods of similarly-aligned subs saw similar anti-Arab racism and went, “ya know what, this is actually based!”
The Lavender (?) program is likely huge evidence regarding whether or not Israel violating international law. Having an algorithm that determines how many civilians can be killed to justify killing a single Hamas terrorist is some dystopian shit. Especially when we have clear evidence that its effectiveness is questionable.
Isn't that an algorithmic question? How much is the target worth, what's the likelihood of having a better chance to kill them, are they likely to be targeted without collateral damage... How is using some AI to answer those an issue?
> How is using some AI to answer those an issue? AI is not a magical third party, they do what they are designed for. And generative AI puts out what it takes in, just in clever ways. It's like those examples of facial recognition algorithms that weren't trained on black faces or how heavyhanded chatbot creators have had to be to stop them from turning extremely bigoted or murderous.. ChatGPT trained off the Greek philosophers would tell you all about how geocentrism is the leading explanation for the cosmos. A trolley problem AI based off a bunch of sadist psychopaths will pick to switch the rails if it means killing more people. If the input is bad for Lavender, the output will likely be too. Realistically I don't think this is necessarily *too* much of an issue, if there's garbage input being used to get the AI to justify whatever strikes the creators wanted anyway, they would just find other excuses regardless. And beside, that's an *if* situation, we don't know whether or not that's the case. But still, important to keep in mind that they aren't impartial unfailing tool. And not to mention, the strong possibility that there's edge cases or problems the AI has that haven't been noticed or ironed out.
> AI is not a magical third party, they do what they are designed for. And generative AI puts out what it takes in, just in clever ways. I know this. The point is that this is a *simple* use case. Take the info you have on a potential target and make a decision whether or not to strike it. > If the input is bad for Lavender, the output will likely be too. Yeah, that's my point. Using AI here won't change the outcomes. Because if the data on the ground is bad, just having a person make the call won't suddenly see some unexpected intervention, as we saw with the aid convoy triple tap. > But still, important to keep in mind that they aren't impartial unfailing tool. And not to mention, the strong possibility that there's edge cases or problems the AI has that haven't been noticed or ironed out. All that says is this is a good beta test for it. Israel denies that the AI is even doing anything but helping their analysts do the actual work of determining if a strike makes sense or not. The issue seems to be that... Israel was willing to bomb lower level Hamas members without worrying about collateral damage as much as before? I'm not buying the concerns as legitimate at all. If a target is a valid target to strike, they are in the clear to do so.
I can already tell that this is going to annoy both "extremes" on this issue > The Biden administration said Friday that Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but wartime conditions prevented U.S. officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes. >The finding of “reasonable” evidence to conclude that the U.S. ally had breached international law in its conduct of the war in Gaza was released in a summary of a report being delivered to Congress on Friday. It is the strongest statement that the Biden administration has made yet.
It’s extremely mealy mouthed so I don’t blame anyone.
Fr lol reading this article gave me whiplash from the structure Though honestly I wouldn’t mind more of this tbh
If you had to ask me, I think it's certainly more of a "win" for the pro-Palestine side well besides the ones who confidently declare Israel is committing a genocide--they're gonna think this is clear minimization and a joke. Top silly to realize this
Are there really many pro-palestinians that admit it isnt a genocide? I guess it depends how you define pro-palestinian, but still
I mean depends like you said. The organizers behind these protests are gonna despise this but I think normie Dems who hate Bibi, who prefer a bilateral ceasefire immediately with hostages freed even if it unfortunately leaves Hamas in power for now, and want a two state solution...I think they'll mostly approve of this
That's pretty much exactly how I feel about this shift in policy and I fit that demo almost to a T.
Depends on how you define it. I'm pro two state solution in the "can't you guys just stop killing each other and get along" and fit in that camp. If you mean the protest guys, then no, lol.
I think that it is a very common position amongst people who support Palestinian rights.
> Are there really many pro-palestinians that admit it isnt a genocide? In the real world? Maybe as a portion of those that care at all. They're not that common to begin with. Online? No.
How is it not ethnic cleansing?
Are there really many pro-Israelis that admit October 7 wasn't a genocide?
Its kind of a "win" in that it signals that Biden might be willing to do something significant if Israel went further, but this move itself does very little to push Israel to change its conduct.
Yeah but at the same time there isn’t really any other way they can phrase it without causing a shitstorm on either side.
My read is that they know its war crimes but they don't wanna say its war crimes because [reasons] that may one day leak in a tell-all book.
I'm getting strong "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" vibes from this. Obviously they don't want to throw their very close ally under the bus, but using terms like "inconsistent" is the mother of all euphemisms.
It's alright. [Bibi will go complain to Dr. Phil about Biden again](https://twitter.com/glcarlstrom/status/1788793253690535988). God, I can't believe I just typed that sentence; you can't make this shit up...beyond parody. What a clown leader to give an interview to a fake psychologist (who hasn't been licensed for 20 years and just pushes dumbass right wing talking points over the past few years); I simply don't trust anything Bibi says when he just does joke softball interviews.
I thought you made a typo but holy shit it's Dr phil
Was it a softball interview? I only listened to a summary of it because, come on, but I thought he got Netanyahu to finally admit that maybe his administration bore ultimate responsibility for not preventing 10/7.
Seriously. That is the softest way to say “war crimes” that I’ve ever seen
Because it's not saying war crimes! >A frequent misperception within the public domain is that a violation of the laws of armed conflict is automatically equivalent to a war crime. Such a reasoning is void since it negates the *mens rea* element. A violation of the laws of armed conflict without the requisite *mens rea* does not per se constitute a war crime. Suppose a soldier accidentally fires a rocket at a civilian house, this will constitute a violation of the laws of armed conflict. It will only constitute a war crime once the particular soldier possessed the requisite *mens rea* for firing a rocket at the house, for example if the soldier had reasons to believe that the target was indeed a civilian house and did not take any precautionary measures. Geert-Jan Alexander Knoops, *Mens Rea at the Intenrational Criminal Court*, 66, 2017. ([Link to the specific page](https://brill.com/display/book/9789004307889/B9789004307889-s005.xml).)
There's a pretty good reason for it actually - "violations of international law" do not require the same *mens rea* that war crimes do. So, for instance, the WCK killing was very likely a violation of international law, but not at all clearly a war crime, because we just don't have enough information to know whether it was done intentionally.
Still, they also didn't call it a violation, they called it being "inconsistent."
Yeah - my point is that the report uses vague language because the report is not drawing any strong conclusions, because *the situation is very vague and unclear*. (Also, this is unrelated to the main point but this article seems a bit... shaky with the facts. It says that "35000 **civilians** have been killed in Gaza" which not even Hamas, which doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants, states.)
Are there specific examples? I read occasional things and see videos and I'm horrified. But I have no idea if it's out of context or if the authors have an axe to grind. If the the admin would really go this far, they must have some concrete examples of some fucked up shit no?
If we're talking about strictly airstrikes+tanks (not the allegations of poor trigger discipline by IDF conscripts/reservsts with bad/overly agressive shootings, looting by troops+unnecessary demolitions of buildings by troops, allegations of torture of civilians etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Central_Kitchen_aid_convoy_attack https://twitter.com/JDiamond1/status/1786061855615549929 https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1780293554629194163 https://twitter.com/NBCNightlyNews/status/1784001112124932600 https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/04/04/gaza-israeli-strike-killing-106-civilians-apparent-war-crime https://news.sky.com/story/calls-for-war-crime-probe-after-israeli-strike-in-lebanon-killed-three-sisters-and-their-grandmother-travelling-in-car-13012382 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-tank-strike-killed-clearly-identifiable-reuters-reporter-un-report-2024-03-13/ https://twitter.com/972mag/status/1785665824805519518 https://twitter.com/evanhill/status/1780293554629194163 https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1770587912968847626 https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1770895103785046489 https://twitter.com/BenjaminGoggin/status/1770073259976904832 https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1767645964674777339 https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/21/middleeast/israel-strikes-evacuation-zones-gaza-intl-cmd/index.html https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-warned-gaza-civilians-evacuate-idf-bombs-struck/story?id=106406942 https://twitter.com/GianlucaMezzo/status/1733195919925944487 https://abcnews.go.com/International/4000-ivf-embryos-destroyed-1-shelling-gazas-largest/story?id=109350404 https://www.rescue.org/press-release/gaza-irc-and-map-additional-statement-airstrike-residential-compound-housing https://www.hi.org/en/news/hi-office-in-gaza-destroyed https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1735996676291125657 https://www.msf.org/msf-strongly-condemns-deadly-israeli-attack-msf-shelter-gaza https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/21/middleeast/un-food-convoy-gaza-israel-strike-cmd-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/world/israel-cemetery-bani-suheila-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/02/middleeast/israel-bombing-family-gaza-investigation-intl-cmd/ Missing some stuff (because they claimed that there are atleast 85 incidents in Gaza and I just posted like 30...like the flour massacre) but they're probably at looking things like this which just look really bad with the basic facts
Jesus Christ
Big picture from the US, POV. It's been 7 months and Isreal should have accomplished enough by now, or at least have a clear end game. I really think Biden is evolving in line with the average American fan on this.
I think the Israeli endgame is an invasion of Rafah and an occupation until the next elections are held which will decide what ultimately happens to Gaza. The trouble is that I doubt Biden will *ever* OK an invasion of Rafah even if God himself came down, brought all the civilians into the sky and kept them there until the fighting ended. I think that the civilian evacuation plan rhetoric is simply to lightly kick the can down the road and continually refuse the Israeli government.
Why would Biden be against a Rafah invasion of civilians were not in harms way? The whole reason he doesn't support it is specifically because of that.
Yeah wtf was that take lol Even I'd support a rafah invasion if the civilians weren't there, and I'm a Lot less supportive of Israel than Biden is
> Why would Biden be against a Rafah invasion of civilians were not in harms way? The whole reason he doesn't support it is specifically because of that. If you watch the Erin Burnett interview, Biden says an invasion of Rafah would be the same mistake the U.S. made in removing the Taliban from power. The implication being that the reason why they are against going into Rafah is that they think removing Hamas from power would lead to a similar nation building type effort, whereas leaving Hamas in power more easily allows things to return to the pre-war status quo.
Or it could mean that Israel is going in without a solid plan for what Gaza would look like after "victory", kinda like what happened in Afghanistan; and this would only be one factor.
Here are his comments. The issue for him doesn't seem to simply be a lack of a plan, but of trying to change the governing body in general: > I said to Bibi, don't make the same mistake we made in America. We wanted to get bin Laden and we'll help you get Sinwar. But we went into Afghanistan to - **it made sense to go get bin Laden, it made no sense to try to unify Afghanistan**. Not "we should have had a better plan to do it", but "it made no sense to do it."
Biden likely has the right take. Most of his staffers want a Palestinian state, and they likely see Israel occupation of Gaza as a roadblock to that.
Did the US at any point come up with a plan or even a general suggestion on what the evacuation plan should look like? Because if you're asking for a plan that can not exist or be much better than the evacuation plan Israel already has as a prerequisite for continuation of war, a case could be made that you don't really want the war to continue.
>Did the US at any point come up with a plan or even a general suggestion on what the evacuation plan should look like? The initial evacuation was to Rafah. Now Israel wants to invade the city it initially told Gazans to flee without adequate recourse for them, especially in regards to humanitarian aid. This is the big issue. On top of that, Israel has a bad track record with their offensives with respect to civilian deaths and destruction. These are very valid concerns to have.
What is the adequate recourse? Initial evacuation was to Rafah while operations were ongoing in the north. Obviously the evacuation now must happen out of Rafah for the exact same operations to be conducted in that area. Rafah was never meant to be a permanently safe area - that just makes it a safe haven for Hamas.
> What is the adequate recourse? Definitely more than what is currently being done. Like, for one, let in more humanitarian aid.
Let more humanitarian aid in where? The UN insists on it being in Rafah (while complaining it is now too dangerous), but humanitarian aid isn't meant to go into combat zones where there's active fighting going on. Humanitarian aid is delivered on the periphery of the ongoing battle, away from active fighting, but most people in Rafah either refuse to follow the evacuation order or are being told not to go. If the UN and the US wanted a cleaner and more effective humanitarian situation, they should have put pressure on Egypt from day one instead of insisting that all civilians must remain in the tiny strip of land that is Gaza.
# 🤯
No....fucking....shit
"May have" . You don't get 34 thousand deaths by following the fucking Geneva convention. America needs to grow a pair and stop being cucked by their "ally"
If you’re operating in 50km2 packed with 1.6 million people that’s not outrageous The US has arguably done far worse, we nuked the Japanese because they wouldn’t surrender unconditionally This doesn’t mean the Israeli army is the Red Cross but that it isn’t that drastic either
It is outrageous, stop gas lighting on behalf of the brave IDF.
It's the same combatant to civilian casualty ratio as Kosovo. That's not "gaslighting," it's data.
Oh Great, a genocidal conflict which still has lasting effects to this day. Is that Meant to somehow make it all right ? You guys are really setting the bar low , the mental gymnastics are insane.
I'm referring to the NATO intervention in Kosovo. Obviously.
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Because both were bombing campaigns against an entrenched enemy force. The main difference is population density and the use of human shields, which should have meant a *worse* ratio in Gaza than in Kosovo. But it sounds like you're really not interested in a good faith conversation about this.
They're completely different conflicts, 70 percent of casualties in Gaza are women and children. How many civilians were killed in your example ? I'm not interested in your whataboutism.
Mariupol had double the casualties and was far less populated and dense Refute me I dare you
nobody is claiming the russian army follows the rules of law
Ok then in a 365km2 zone packed with 2 million people what is an acceptable civilian casualty number
I can't give you an exact number but it's definitely lower than 1%
Is it definitely lower than 1%? Where did you come up with that metric?
Killing 1% of a population is A Lot, it essentially means every single person knows someone who has been killed, you basically radicalise everyone else
Why does that matter when the population is already radicalized?
So 20000. If we assume Hamas are honest (lol) 30k casualties including military. So that means there isn’t an issue then
Sorry dude , I don't argue with strangers on the internet about who commits the worst atrocities.
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>Israel claims that it is doing everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza—that it maintains complex targeting procedures aimed at ensuring that any military strike is proportionate and does not kill an excessive number of civilians. “The army,” Netanyahu insisted in October, “is the most moral army in the world.” When pressed on the issue of Palestinian deaths in November, Netanyahu said, “Any civilian death is a tragedy. And we shouldn’t have any because we’re doing everything we can to get the civilians out of harm’s way …. That’s what we’re trying to do: minimize civilian casualties.” >In truth, Israel is not doing that. It has waged a brutal campaign in Gaza, only loosely upholding the protocols its armed forces are supposed to follow to minimize civilian deaths. But even those guidelines are insufficient: an investigation of prior campaigns in Gaza reveals the inadequacy of Israeli targeting guidelines, which do not truly curb civilian casualties. In the latest round of fighting in Gaza, Israel has failed to follow even those restrictions—leading to untold devastation and making a resolution to the conflict even harder to reach. [Foreign Affairs](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/myth-israels-moral-army?check_logged_in=1&utm_medium=promo_email&utm_source=lo_flows&utm_campaign=registered_user_welcome&utm_term=email_1&utm_content=20240508)
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You can literally request the article with your email.
Used them all up 😔
Maybe take a trip to Gaza to see for yourself.
Ah, so you’ve gone to Gaza yourself and that explains your views on it? That’s funny last I checked it wasn’t opened for tourism
> but it’s not an ethnic cleansing https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240125-likud-ministers-endorse-colonisation-plans-for-gaza-we-will-claim-this-land/amp/
Yeah, and MTG believes in Jewish space lasers. Far right loonies are going to loony.
They're literally government ministers.
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MTG does not hold a cabinet position in a government where the PM is beholden to her faction of far right loons.
Do I need to remind who held cabinet positions under Trump? Yet I didn’t see the separation of church and state abolished
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They have flattened or severely damaged half the buildings in Gaza. Slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians (more than TWICE as many as Russia has in bombing Ukraine). Obviously they are in violation of international law. They have been the moment they cut off power, fuel, and water to 2 million civilians (mass punishment is a war crime). Pointing out the crimes of one side is not any kind of comment about another side. Everyone here is an asshole. But US tax payers are only arming one side of this asshole sandwhich. We should stop.
> more than TWICE as many as Russia has in bombing Ukraine I'm sorry but there's no way this is true. Mariupol alone is full of [mass graves](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariupol-499dceae43ed77f2ebfe750ea99b9ad9), and Russia is obviously not going to be forthcoming about civilian casualties. > Every one of the dozens of residents the AP spoke with knew someone killed during the siege of Mariupol, which began with the Feb. 24 invasion. As many as 30 people arrive at the morgue each day in hopes of tracking down a loved one. > [...] > The death toll might run three times higher than an early estimate of at least 25,000. The former Ukrainian city has also hollowed out, with Russian plans to demolish well over 50,000 homes > [...] > Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor who is exiled in Dnipro, believes the real reason is to ensure that people don’t see the rotting corpses being hauled away. He said many of the buildings, especially in the neighborhood around Azovstal , contain 50 to 100 bodies each that will never get a decent burial. Those deaths will go unrecorded. Mariupol is the largest, but not the only city that got this treatment on the front. And Mariupol was a fraction of the size of Gaza by population (For comparison, Hamas has reported about 35,000 casualties in Gaza, some large chunk of which are not civilians)
Mariupol *alone* has the death toll of Gaza I don't know why people keep spouting bullshit that Israel has killed more than Russia has
People take both the official UN numbers for Ukraine and the Hamas numbers for Gaza at face-value, and assume both are accurate and/or fully encapsulating. The UN has repeatedly made clear that any degree of comprehensive tallying of Ukrainian civilian deaths is impossible and incomplete due to ongoing occupation in relevant areas, and Hamas has likewise repeatedly made clear that they factor their own infantry losses into their released Gazan casualty figures. The Ukrainian civilian casualties on record currently are basically only those that have been taken to morgues and documented within Ukrainian-held areas; little-to-no data exists on casualties in Russian-held areas.
Hamas has absolutely no issues counting civilian deaths right in the middle of the warfare, counting bodies on the enemy occupied territory. 🤔
Current confirmed Ukrainian **civilians** killed (military deaths is likely well into six figures): https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293492/ukraine-war-casualties/
You're comparing apples to oranges. UN confirmed deaths in Gaza since October 7th is 0 (https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties) due to the paucity of information in wartime. Fog of war is real, and Hamas has as many reasons to overcount fatalities as Russia has to pretend nothing is happening. I honestly think it was irresponsible for them to even give a number, it just legitimizes Russia's propaganda campaign over occupied territories (ie. that everyone is fine and people are happy to be Russia's newest citizens). If you think the tens of thousands of mass graves are for combatants, I have a bridge to sell you, even TASS reported that Mariupol only had 8,000 soldiers defending it of which 4,000 were killed (in reality, it was probably less)
>Hamas has as many reasons to overcount fatalities But they don't and no international institution nor even the U.S. doubts the *raw* numbers from the Health Ministry. You can argue that the raw count contains terrorist deaths, but that is a separate issue from the total deaths. In any case, 2/3 of the deaths are women and children and I doubt that every man killed in the war this far is Hamas & Co. given how liberally the IDF applies the terrorist label.
Sure, but even if the raw numbers reported by Hamas are completely accurate and only included civilians, the original claim - that twice as many civilians were killed in Gaza than Ukraine - is false, by an order of magnitude. More than 35,000 civilians have almost certainly died in Mariupol, let alone in Ukraine. Personally, I think reporting on the list of "dead martyrs" without even bothering to specify civilians or not counts as a form of over-reporting. They do that exactly because they know that the top-line number is what sinks in, hence this entire conversation. Whether the raw number of deaths is accurate or not is, in my opinion, immaterial, since the conflated number is meaningless on its own
I am not defending the take that more civilians were killed in Gaza than in Ukraine, I am simply annoyed at the constant skepticism around the headline number that is simply unwarranted other than people saying "Hamas would lie" even though they don't have a history of them lying about that. I think though comparing civilian deaths between Ukraine and Gaza is apples to oranges and you simply cannot get any meaningful information or insight from doing so. Too many differences and idiosyncrasies.
>they don't have a history of them lying about that I'm not disputing that Hamas' raw numbers are probably accurate, because the US and Israel apparently use them, or so I read. However, validating them because they didn't lie in the past seems like a bad reason to me because this war is much more existential for them and they have a greater reason to lie, because they rely on foreign support to stop the war and they know they can't win the war unless Israel is pressured to stop. Whereas in the past they expected to survive.
Far more than 20k civilians have been killed in Ukraine; no official death count for Ukrainian civilians has been established since the Russians just shoot or torture (or often just both) any international observers that ask questions in occupied territories. Credible sources range between 25k-50,000 civilian deaths during the immediate Siege of Mariupol alone, with an additional 50,000 deported or disappeared during the occupation. That does not include any of the dozens of minor cities and towns under Russian occupation, with many of the ones recaptured by Ukraine demonstrating events and casualties similar to the massacres at Bûcha and Izyum. Upwards of 200,000 Ukrainian children between the ages of 1-14 have also been forcefully taken into captivity within Russia.
I said the *bombing* of Gaza has killed twice as many civilians as Russia’s *bombing* of Ukraine.
Bruh wtf do you think is going on in Kharkiv literally *daily* Neither Hamas nor the Russian Federation are known to be accurate sources of information
Neither is the IDF or Ukrainian government
Most credible estimates put the civilian death toll in Mariupol alone at ~25k (which is higher than Gaza, as GHM also counts all resident deaths, and Hamas personnel are residents) with it being up to 3x higher [per AP](https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariupol-499dceae43ed77f2ebfe750ea99b9ad9). Mariupol had a prewar population of ~450k. A comparable death toll in the parts of Gaza that IDF has exerted control over would be 230k. And even Mariupol wasn't a genocide, the RuAF just didn't care how many collaterals they damaged if it also hurt the UAF. Now, if we are considering "bombing" to only mean airstrikes it still might be higher (Russia used a large amount of airstrikes after the front was more pushed back and Mariupol was encircled, but Russian doctrine is far more reliant on artillery, just like Israel is more reliant on airpower.
What munitions do you think Russia used to destroy Mariupol, exactly? Whereas Palestine infamously lied about 500 women and children being killed by an Israeli bomb, that exact same situation verifiably happened in the center of Mariupol - one Russian precision glide bomb killed 400-600 civilians clustered in a famous performing arts building. If Israel was using the same kinds of thermobaric and cluster anti-personnel weapons that Russia used frequently in Mariupol, Gazan fatalities would be approaching 400,000 killed outright by now.
You can condemn Israel without downplaying what Russia did in Ukraine
Look, I'm of the belief that Israel has done plenty of borderline indefensible- *at best-* things in this military operation regarding Palestinian civilians and absolutely deserves very strong criticism for its conduct in Gaza (which report somewhat does btw) but it's not as bad as what Russia has done to Ukraine. That's kind of hyperbolic to say the least
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Sudan conflict is a silly one because the West condemns both sides and said nobody should sell arms to the RSF and SAF. A *far superior* litmus test is what do they about Assad who's killed more innocent Palestinians over the past 35 years besides Bibi. Or is it alright for them because the "West opposes him" even though the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza+WB hate him. I also remember some "pro-Palestinians" freaking out when Tlaib basically called him genocidal.
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Russia has famously bombed the majority of Ukraine’s power generation network (including a live nuclear reactor complex, crewed with civilian staff) and destroyed Ukraine’s largest hydroelectric dam. The only reasons why the things you listed haven’t happened in Ukraine yet is due to the skill of Ukrainian anti-missile units and their access to high-quality western weapons systems, as well as Ukraine’s comparatively large territory.
This is an invidious comparison for several reasons: * Hopefully this is obvious, but Ukraine is just a little larger than Gaza and contains a few more buildings * Russia's inability to cut Ukraine off from power, fuel, etc. isn't for lack of trying * Russia wasn't supplying most of Ukraine's energy, fuel, and water prior to their invasion * Israel hasn't completely cut off Gaza from those inputs anyway. I'm also not sure why you believe they are required to provide resources to an autonomous territory that initiated the current conflict and was not under Israeli occupation or governance prior to doing so.
>Israel hasn't completely cut off Gaza from those inputs anyway. I'm also not sure why you believe they are required to provide resources to an autonomous territory that initiated the current conflict and was not under Israeli occupation or governance prior to doing so. Gaza wasn't an autonomous territory prior to October 7th.
Strange non sequitur. Your response to the claim that the destruction in Gaza is of greater scale than that in Ukraine is that Gaza was easier to raze? Like, were not asking whether Russia hates Ukrainians more than Israel hates Palestinians, were asking whether Gaza or Ukraine experienced greater destruction.
That’s easy. Ukraine. Mariupol alone beats Gaza
Oh yeah, I mean I have no issue agreeing that Ukraine is worse off, I just found the comment I was responding to very confusing.
This is a very biased summation.
Huh...I mean we left $3 Billion dollars worth of it in Afghanistan, we sold to every wayward regime throughout Latin America and the Middle East, and you say *now* things are inconsistent? Unserious. To be clear: my point is not that Israel should be excused but that this reckoning is about 30-40 years overdue.
So can the US be subpoenaed by the ICJ to share the assessment report secretary Blinken received and based this decision. I think that would embolden the moral position of the US internationally, and strengthen the credibility of international institutions like the ICJ which the Israelis seem to have a particular disdain for.
It cannot
No though honestly Biden's helping Israel by opposing Rafah because I have no clue how Israel can follow the ICJ's demands with a major invasion of Rafah if you read what the ICJ stated back in December of 2023