> How does bulldozing a family home have any affect on a tunnel?
The tunnel entrances and exits are tremendously hard to find. Some of them were located in private residences.
But Israel has an oil & gas industry. They have equipment that can look underneath a quiet city. If tunnel elimination were truly the goal, temporarily displacing the population while clearing operations took place should have been sufficient. As it stands, simply bulldozing over the entrances probably doesn't actually destroy the tunnels. It just hides their entrances.
The problem with Ghaza is, that its the living proof that the peace process never could work. Charon returned it, des-ettlered it, the hippies moved near the border to help, they integrated them into the economy- only to get murdered on the 7th of october.
Not even egypt allows ghazans in- 10.000 euros for one passport is insane. And all those walls and checkpoints. And egypt is pretty islamist itself, so natural ally to hamas and the like.. but they know had that brush with the mb
You neglected to mention the decades-long blockade, or Netanyahu doing everything in his power to keep Hamas in charge. A true "peace process" has never been tried. (Well, except by Rabin, so of course they murdered him)
Or, if you are not a genocidal terror group, you actually go house-to-house and check. Difficult, dangerous, but not a war crime. That's why Mosul isn't a pile of rubble, even though ISIS was more than willing to use booby traps!
---
"We are demolishing more and more homes, they have nowhere to return. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip. Our main problem is in the receiving countries."
> Like when packaged food gets potentially contaminated, you don't test each package for bacteria.
You're comparing wiping out tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian people's lives... to disinfection.
Like yeah, there's plenty of examples of israel's current leaders calling the Palestinian race sub-human, vermin, animal, saying it should be wiped off the earth, etc, but I didn't expect it on HN, JFC.
If you check the parent for this thread, the conversation is about Israel use of bulldozers to flatten Rafah, and the reason they do it is the same reason you toss any possible contaminated food. It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps. Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
Here is a link to the conversation topic to help clear your confusion:
Again, you're comparing the ethnic cleansing of an entire city to "tossing possibly contaminated food".
Take a step back and see the echoes of your words in history.
> It's impractical to check a bunch of empty buildings for booby traps
That's life. That you might find it hard to achieve your military conquest without engaging in ethnic cleansing isn't a legal or moral excuse for perpetrating ethnic cleansing. Find a way that doesn't require ethnic cleansing or pick more realistic military objectives.
> Rafah was evacuated about a year and a half ago.
A forced expulsion of all existing inhabitants of a city without any right of return is commonly called "ethnic cleansing". So is razing the city. It's called that because it is cleansing the city of all people and/or traces of an ethnicity, like israel did here. Both constitute crimes against humanity, regardless of the excuse (the nazis had excuses for their similar crimes too, look how that went for them).
They didn't claim to. They are responding to a claim that all the houses were demolished because they all contained booby traps, because "might contain booby traps" is obviously a legally and morally insufficient justification for demolishing every home in the city and cleansing it of the previous inhabitant race. Your home might contain booby traps, too.
There were weeks of airstrikes by the coalition and then artillery barage("Down Barage").
Basically Mosul was leveled before a single soldier entered it.
Here's historical satellite imagery. Go to 2017-08. You can see Mosul airport and surrounding facilities leveled, immediately adjacent to a city that is obviously a city and not 1) flattened Mosul airport or 2) similar in any way to the Rafah imagery above.
If you are describing Mosul as "leveled" then what adjective do you use to describe Rafah? It cannot possibly be also "leveled" given that vast areas of Rafah are actually a flat pile of rubble and Mosul is clearly a city with a destroyed airport, even in late 2017.
This is a good rebuttal to the claim that no part of Mosul was struck hard or leveled. But nobody claimed that.
From your linked AP article:
"Nearly a third of the Old City [a specific neighborhood] was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by U.N. Habitat using satellite imagery"
From MSF re Rafah:
"Over 15 months of all-out war on Gaza have left 92 percent of housing units and about 70 percent of all structures destroyed or damaged."
So we have 1/3rd of a particularly hard-hit neighborhood destroyed in Mosul versus 70% of the entire city of Rafah.
You are comparing different things. You should be comparing the intensive part of the battle in both cases. Mosul vs. Rafah is a great comparison. The total number of civilians were similar. The number of combatants were similar. Rafah is a lot denser. Israel's war results in significantly less civilian casualties. The allies pounded Mosul with its civilian population with heavy bombardments. The criticism of Israel on this is orders of magnitude higher than any criticism levelled at the allies (well basically none). If you look at why did the allies go to war on ISIS there is nothing even borderline comparable to the Oct 7th attack on Israel from Gaza. Something to ponder.
That Israel kept looking for tunnels and destroying empty buildings for strategic reasons after the battle was over and Rafah was mostly abandoned is not relevant to evaluating the main battle.
That MSF statement is not specifically about Rafah in your link either. It's about the entire Gaza strip. And just like Rafah a lot of the destruction happened in evacuated areas for tactical reasons, searching for tunnels, preventing guerrilla attacks, dealing with booby traps etc. We can argue about the necessity and legality of those but they are a different kind of discussion vs. the main battle portion.
Gaza in total had a population of about 2 million people and about 70,000 casualties. Israel's own estimate in 2025 claimed 8,900 of those were combatants.
Mosul had 1.5 million people at the time of the battle and ~10-20k civilian casualties + ~10-20k combatants.
Hard to do direct comparisons and all the numbers are obviously squishy, but your claim that Israel's war results in significantly fewer casualties seems... dubious at best.
And in any case, we actually know for a fact that Israel's non-combatant casualty cut-off value (NCV) -- i.e. their accepted rate in decision-making -- is several multiples higher than the coalition forces were.
> Peter Gersten, former deputy commander of operations and intelligence for Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, states that “[w]ith Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV value of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero. We ran zero for the longest time.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, when he was head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) during the war against ISIS, would personally be called to authorize an operation with a “high” NCV of 14 or 15.
Re the Jabalia Camp attack:
> Satellite visual analysis of the attack site shows at least five large craters, including two approximately 40 feet wide, consistent with the impact of 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The attack destroyed not just one residential apartment building, but a whole block.
> Even without specific further intelligence, on the basis of this information Israel’s CDE must have resulted in a very high estimate for civilian casualties. Given the location, population spread, and choice of weapons, the actual toll of hundreds of civilians killed or wounded would have been a reasonable expectation.
Over a million people live here. The estimate was that "448 to 593 civilians were killed due to coalition military operations", orders of magnitude less than Israel has killed. Basra was not wiped off the map or seized and annexed by coalition forces while the population was herded into a concentration camp.
It is simply slander against the US military to suggest they have in the 21st century done anything like what the IDF has done in this genocide.
That's kind of what they did. Just in the most heavy-handed indiscriminate way imaginable. But the booby-traps are cleared, and they did use teleoperated robots to do that
Sorry, nearly the entire population of these cities has been displaced, their homes all destroyed (not “damaged” but basically completely razed) and you’re saying it’s not ethnic cleansing because Israel says they will withdraw when Hamas disarms (e.g. when pigs fly)?
> The claim of ethnic cleansing can't be determined now.
When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing what exactly are you pretending to defend?
> There is no evidence right now the displacement is permanent.
All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
> Israel says it will not withdraw until Hamas disarms is where things stand now.
They used to say they would withdraw when the hostages were returned. The goalposts were moved, as is typical.
> But ethnic cleansing is something else. If there are good military reasons to destroy said property then it's also not a war crime.
At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
> At this point there are literally hundreds of accounts of IDF members who were given told quite explicitly that it was an open field for killing with no consequences.
So they're all dead now? Ethnic cleansing complete?
> All of the allies of Likud and the settler movement wants Palestinians expelled.
Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
> When the members of the biggest coalition in the Knesset say openly and proudly that they are doing ethnic cleansing
> So they're all dead now? Ethnic cleansing complete?
That's not an argument.
> Wait, I thought they wanted them murdered in "an open field for killing with no consequences"?
Who made that argument? They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it, although some sure do have murderous beliefs but that's besides the point.
> Then why is it taking so long?
Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them. When they go too fast Western governments get public pressure, when it's slow nothing of importance happens.
Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
> They want to take the land and if means killing anyone in it so be it
They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened? You say, "that's not an argument," but I think it is. If we accept your claims, then it follows that Israel has had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill everyone in Gaza for years (at least).
The fact that they still haven't done that suggests that your claims are false.
> Ben Gvir is on record as saying that it has to be such that the diplomatic consequences don't affect them.
Ah, so it's just international pressure holding them back. Right.
I don't buy it. Israel has hardly shown itself to be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions. And at the end of the day, they are a nuclear power and functionally immune to military threats from rational actors. If the IDF started the genocide tomorrow ain't nobody gonna do shit about it.
Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
> Do you really think about these responses when you asked or do you just make knee-jerk questions of the lowest caliber?
The questions needed to be asked at all because it was your comment that was of the lowest caliber. All smoke and no fire.
> They've had the capability for decades. So why hasn't it happened?
The same can be said for any conflict in which one side has overwhelming capacity and does not choose to engage on it for various reasons. But yes, diplomacy and public pressure actually matter a lot, as evidenced by the fact that Israel spends billions of dollars in state propaganda and funding political campaigns in the West to continue to receive military aid and avoiding sanctions.
You are saying that Israel has shown itself to not be susceptible to international pressure on existential questions yet it engaged for decades in political and diplomatic action to be where it is today; it was not looked at that favorably by Western powers even a few decades backs. And it understands that apartheid South Africa was not on anyone's radar for decades until it was. AIPAC and other lobbying agencies fund hundreds of political campaigns in the US in order for this to happen.
So yeah, if in five years' time the Democratic Socialists end up overtaking establishment DNC Zionists and get their share of power such that they allow BDS to work and stop military aid then Israel is going to have a much more difficult time, as evidenced by their desire to have the US engage Iran without them participating directly because they are not actually as powerful militarily as they project themselves to be.
> Sure there might be sanctions, etc. but there will always be someone willing to work with them. And their foreign military sales make sanctions not exactly straightforward for e.g. Germany.
That works until it doesn't, much like how China did not dominate on renewable energies until it did, or how proprietary Unix dominated the server market until Linux appeared. It takes remarkably little time to turn a country into a pariah state. For the past two decades Germany theorized that economic connections to Russia would prevent them from doing anything stupid regarding Ukraine.
And Israel does not just have to care about external issues. Economic sanctions hit economies hard, and even a recession is enough to turn the tables against candidates during election years, so given that certain political parties are the ones who hold the cards at any time, they are not keen to lose elections.
Also Israel depends very much on its network of high-tech companies, companies that are extremely sensitive to any sort of sanctions regime or any loss of trust such that no amount of lobby money suffices to get profitable military or high-tech contracts.
And once Israel is politically and militarily isolated it becomes a much easier target against rivals in the Middle East, so being politically associated with the West is very much a matter of survival. In this sense they have all the time in the world to perform their campaign of ethnic cleansing to restore Eretz Israel.
None of what I'm saying is speculation, this is very much what political analysts in Israel say and have been saying for decades. The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
> The only difference is that now that liberal Zionism is dead and has been dead since the death of Itzak Rabin and the demographic explosion of the settler movement there's really no one to stop them from proceeding with these plans.
Also it's a self-reinforcing cycle. The far right keeps testing what they can get away with, becoming increasingly emboldened. The leftists are packing up. Those in the middle see global backlash grow and realize there's no going back to pre-2023 world, so they might as well go all-in with the right. Israel is like a heroin addict using the very thing that's destroying them, in order to cope with the damage it already caused. Without intervention it generally doesn't end well.
Heat trigger sensors can be had for a few dollars in China these days. As long as you got a decent electrical engineer and a supply chain... you can probably whip up a working prototype in a day or two.
You're right, that's totally doable.
However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive. It's unlikely an AliExpress package full of PIR sensors is going to make it's way through the blockade.
> However supply chains to that Gaza aren't exactly robust, they can barely get enough food to survive.
Yeah, but guns absolutely can. Iran is pretty good at supplying Hamas with everything they need to maintain control over the population - you might expect that after three years of absolutely brutal warfare Hamas would be beaten into submission, but clearly they are not.
And if the structure isn't actually being used for military purposes they just have to say "oopsie"? It makes sense for occasional houses that are being used for military purposes to be destroyed, but destroying all houses simply due to suspicion seems like too much.
What sicking is people like you throwing the word genocide around not because you have any argument that supports that but because it justifies what you've already decided you want to do to Jews.
Every expert on genocide says it's a genocide, so claiming that I'm throwing it around with no argument is a lie ... in the service of genocide. And I'm Jewish ... there's nothing that I want to "do to Jews", but I would like the state of Israel to stop committing genocide--among other things, it foments antisemitism, which is dangerous to me.
The fact is that the people who respond the way G...1 responded are fundamentally dishonest dimwitted wretches (that was already obvious from his "people idolize Hamas committing crimes against humanity" lie) who hate Palestinians (whom they refuse to distinguish from Hamas, even 3 year olds having their limbs blown off or being buried in rubble ... these sick sociopathic scum will argue that they are future members of Hamas) ... it's about what they want to do to them. These vile scum interpret "it's a genocide" as "I want Hamas to kill Jews" ... what could be more transparently stupid and dishonest?
Personally I haven’t. I know my office is gone. I know the hotel I used to stay in (always fun to wake up seeing a gunboat a couple of miles off shore pointing at you out the window) has gone.
My colleagues have seen these tunnels. At least ore 2023. Israel has denied them entry since then.
Because I can say that both sides are deplorable and wrong? In fact, I can even say they're both deplorable and wrong in uneven amounts, but that both meet the bar of "deplorable and wrong."
You think you have to choose a side between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel? You think you need to send one of them money?
Well I care about it principally because of the degree to which it distorts our politics. The funding is one cause and effect of that distortion but there are others. For example the theological allegiance between US evangelicals and Zionists is a shockingly powerful force in US politics.
But yes the component that morally implicates me personally is the funding and it’d be a big improvement not to participate in it.
Just like I don’t think it’s obvious that we should fund Sinaloa despite them being decidedly less monstrous than New Generation.
Why wouldn’t you answer the question that I asked? Do we need to pick a side in the cartel wars? If no, why is that different?
Israel is the great betrayal. In 1948 it was supposed to become a secular country based on European values not a Jewish theocracy. It is dragging us down and for what?
The power imbalance allows one side to exhibit restraint and use more civilized options. These aren’t actors on the same footing. It’s a nuclear power with a multi billion dollar military against some of the poorest people on the planet.
The words you are looking for are combatants. How does bulldozing a combatants home have any affect on a tunnel? Because it destroys the entrance to the tunnel. There are no innocents in Gaza.
“ There are no innocents in Gaza.” funny, this is exactly what people said to defend what Hamas did on October 7th.
The babies and young children in Gaza are as innocent as they are everywhere else in the world. If you can’t see that, you should reexamine the lens you use to look at the world, it’s distorting things massively.
This is true. Their crime is not having been born a Jew. According to the Torah, the Talmud and the Talakha, shkotzim and shiksim like us must be slaughtered as is the right and the duty of the Chosen Ones to honor G-d.
It seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives, like some kind of deranged Clippy. Talk about loss of perspective.
The link provided in your parent post explicitly says there is no precise definition of “ethnic cleansing”, so I don’t even understand why you’d think the distinction matters.
I will add as a comment—because I can no longer edit the post—that it’s also bonkers how much the upvotes and downvotes are fluctuating on this. I couldn’t care less about the points, but the threshold for a downvote is higher than an upvote so it does show a certain tendency, and it’s disgusting that such a large part of this community values nitpicking of words over empathy and human lives.
Not that that was in question. HN is, after all, in too large a part a reflection of the greedy US tech industry. It has shown time and again that it’s selfishly OK with human exploitation and supremely susceptible to being manipulated by the right amount of technicality while simultaneously arrogantly believing it is immune to being influenced.
Some days I’m truly ashamed of this community and find myself incapable of defending it against the mockery and contempt it receives from the rest of the internet.
> seems bonkers to me that we’re nitpicking what to call a given mass extermination of human lives
The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions [1]. That requires killing with industrial efficiency, something that made it categorically unique from the "wipe out the village" warfare that goes back to, probably, before civilisation. (Chimpanzees do it. To my knowledge, they're the only other species that annihilates versus merely fighting off enemies.)
At lower kill volumes, even in the tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands, the line between conventional warfare done conservatively, conventional warfare done brutally and a process that, if left unhindered, will reach a million-man death toll.
(Then you have the ambiguity, one which does not apply in Gaza, introduced by displacement also being included in genocide and it starts to intersect pretty much perfectly with war.)
If we want these words to keep having meaning, we have to nitpick around their use. Otherwise, overinclusivity will consume them.
Nitpick all you want, but at some point you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place, and whether it's time for the international community to step in. Those approaches aren't mutually exclusive.
> you should also ask why this is being debated so widely in the first place
Because there are lots of wars burning all over the planet. We tried to carve an exception into international law, after WWII, about it being permissible to intervene in the internal affairs of another sovereign state if they're doing genocide. So this is a real debate that should be had. The problem is by practically every definition, there are at least a handful of active genocides happening in multiple theaters around the world.
The abhorrence of genocide is one that needs to be refreshed with action if we're to restore the norm that it's not okay. But to do that, you have to set the new threshold.
I'm not a genocide scholar, so may be way off the mark here, but imagine a language that only has a few 100 native speakers left. There's one person who really hates them, writes in his diary about how he longs for that culture to cease, and then he murders the only remaining historian or language teacher of that group. Is that attempted genocide? A little bit?
My point isn't "yeah it is" because I don't know, but I'm very certain that I'm still closer to whatever the heart of it is, than sheer "kill volume". We already have a word for massacres and mass murder, and genocide usually comes hand in hand with those and many other crimes, but it's not those crimes.
> The OG genocides involved deaths in the millions
So if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide? Seems like a very obtuse understanding of the word, which is also defined in the wiki you linked.
> if less than a million people are killed it's not a genocide?
Nobody said that. OP asked why this is being debated. That's why. It's not clear what generally constitutes a genocide in a way that is separate from warfare in general. (Gaza and Ukraine are simpler, to me, because Russia and Israel explicitly message genocidal intent in a way New Delhi, Beijing and Washington do not.)
I did not. I lamented (it was not a question) that we’re nitpicking (it’s not a debate) the definition, especially when the person in question suggested an alternative which is not defined.
I do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed. If one of those people were in front of you crying for their home and life and asked for your compassion and help in fleeing the genocide, would you turn to them and say “ackchyually, someone on Hacker News said this is merely an ethnic cleansing, you’re on your own”?
> do wonder if you’d care about this conversation if you and your family were the ones being killed
No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
> No. At that point, whether it's a genocide or not is kind of irrelevant. They're being killed. War doesn't need extra bits attached to it to be horrible.
Right. So what I’m saying is let’s have some empathy and compassion for other people. Let’s focus on how horrible it is and what we can do, the same way we would hope others would do for us if we were the ones in that situation.
It's incredibly ambiguous. There are very few sets of people who agree on the list of ongoing genocides, much less historic ones. The only places where there is even a semblance of agreement is in Europe and urban America, and that's largely due to deferral to our institutions.
> There's no ambiguity as to what Israel is doing
I agree. That doesn't mean it's beyond discussion or debate. I think it's a genocide. I also think that term has been mangled, particularly online, to the point that it's virtually meaningless. (One of the problems with the term is it's grammatically odd. A homicide is a completed murder. Attempted murder is different. A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation. But we give the ongoing project the same grammar as, in other cases, an act.)
>A genocide, completed, is an extermination or annihilation.
Which is why zero armenians remain after the armenian genocide
oh wait no nevermind, your definition is just bullshit. Only one set of people define what is or isn't a genocide: historians. The ICC only covers crimes against humanity. Historians are also in wide agreement (except for the Israel aligned ones) that it is a genocide in Gaza.
The legal definition of genocide is precise and includes an element that is often hard to prove: "intent."
Determining whether a situation constitutes genocide is factually and legally complex. It should only be made following a careful and detailed examination of the facts against relevant legislation.
This examination is carried out to establish State responsibility or individual criminal responsibility for the crime of genocide. It must be done by a competent international or national court with jurisdiction to try such cases, after an investigation that meets appropriate due process standards.
Correct. If no such court case has delivered a verdict, then by definition no one can rightly claim genocide has occurred.
As for whats happening, the over represented proportion of male combatant age deaths, the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare, the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians, stopping for polio vaccines, population numbers remaining stable etc puts a question on the "Only Reasonable Inference" standard.
What would you consider a proportionate response given Hamas's initial charter, the rockets fired over the years, the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank and the abhorrent attack of October 7th?
Major General Gholam Ali Rashid—commander of the Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters, which is the highest Iranian operational command level and responsible for all joint operations— expanded on this concept in a May 2024 interview and demonstrated how Iran is continuing to learn from Hamas. Rashid argued that the Hamas attack into Israel in October 2023 highlighted how effective and valuable ground attacks could be.[iii] Hamas’ attack demonstrated, Rashid said, that the Axis of Resistance could destroy the Israeli state by launching surprise attacks from Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank simultaneously—echoing Salami’s comments. Rashid stated that such an attack would need 10,000 fighters from Lebanon, 10,000 fighters from the Gaza Strip, and 2,000-3,000 from the West Bank. Rashid’s interview is particularly noteworthy given his importance in Iranian military decision-making and planning as Khatam ol Anbia Central Headquarters commander.
You know what, it's been a while since I took the piss out of the hasbara, let's have fun.
> the well below average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in complex urban warfare
Ah, yes, the very urban warfare art of bombing hospitals and refugee camps. Very urban. Much warfare. And you also get to claim that the civilians didn't die from the fighting, merely from the starvation!
>the war being in response to an atrocious attack on civilians
Yep. Nothing happened before October 7. 1947 ? Doesn't exist. Nakba? Probably some arab term that means nothing. Close to a century of warfare, torture, humiliation and putting Gazawis into concentration camps ? Naaaah. Hamas is responsible. Bad Hamas.
> population numbers remaining stable
There has been no accurate population counts for three years. But thank you for being so generous and letting palestinians reproduce while you park them in camps. Very kosher <3
>Hamas's initial charter
No shit, the armed resistance group that was formed to resist with arms against an attacker wants the attacker gone ? Silly Hamas. They should have done like Bibi and kept the actual plan quiet in cabinet meetings.
Hint: armed resistance against an occupier is legal and encouraged under international law.
>the rockets fired over the years
Yep. Israel did nothing. Didn't shoot children in the head, didn't regularly murder palestinians in prisons, didn't conduct raids on Palestinian territories or encourage settlers to colonize more. Poor little Israel.
>the IRCG commanders statements about a co-ordinated attack from Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank
You regularly bomb another country, and you think that the other country is in the wrong for finding literally any way to make you eat shit ?
> the abhorrent attack of October 7th
A regrettable event and a needless loss of life. I'm not fully sure it justifies a retaliation that causes fifty times more death, destruction and horror, nor will the tribunal that will judge you for your crimes against humanity.
.. any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (check)
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (check)
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (check)
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (check)
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[8] (check)
Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state and the biggest threat to the stability of the middle east. Whataboutism will not change facts.
Well, Israel certainly doesn't intend to destroy Arabs, Muslims, or brown-skinned people more broadly, and you can't honestly claim "Palestine" is a nation:
- no defined territory--and certainly none widely recognized
- no unique language or ethnicity
- a culture only distinguished from Egypt and the Levant by their penchant for terrorism
- a history that only meaningfully diverged from their neighbors within the last half-century, and which divergence springs entirely from their consistent unwillingness to pursue peace with Israel
So even if Israel had the intent to commit genocide--which, unfortunately[1], they don't--the Arabs in Gaza don't qualify as a distinct group that can be subjected to genocide.
If Colombia had decided to annihilate the FARC, just kill them all--would that have qualified as a genocide, too? It seems to me they meet at least as many tests for nationhood.
Not only tunnels. Almost every house was rigged with explosives, like what happened in Gaza city, entire neighborhoods would explode once the troops arrive. If not rigged then it would be a stash of weapons somewhere in the house or under, you are not going to spend days on each house that is potentially rigged looking for a needle in a haystack.
Unfortunately the worst for Gaza will come after the Israeli elections. Israel has 2 years of politically favorable US president to clear out Gaza City once and for all to correct the mistake of 2005 withdrawal.
An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.
This is despicable, inhumane. It is generational trauma that started with the Nazis, now propagated to the poor souls around the new western colony of Israel.
> An alternative to levelling entire cities to the ground to find tunnels, would be to stop the expanding of the settlers, stop the apartheid within Israel, stop the blockade and starving on Gaza, and try to actually foster peace instead of constant conflict, pain and misery in order to retain power.
Israel left Gaza back in 2005 after forcibly expelling all Jews and only later on only blockaded Gaza due to weapons being smuggled in, so they tried that and it clearly didn't work. It seems unilateral disengagement is simply not a strategy that can be succesful here.
This is such a spin. A 20 year blockade (and allowing Qatar to fund Hamas) leading to the Oct. 7 attack - the justification - for the ongoing atrocities, framed as "unilateral disengagement" that was not successful. Therefore it is the Palestinian's at fault.
It is clear that Israel is the source of violence. Which makes sense, as it is a new Western colony occupying (and constantly expanding) land where people lived for thousands of years, under the justification THAT IT'S IN THE BIBLE.
A religious fundamentalist colony, funded and armed by the west.
> A 20 year blockade (and allowing Qatar to fund Hamas)
The blockade only started after Hamas was elected into power, to reduce their access to more missiles and weapons. The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons. But no matter what Israel does it is accused of being evil - both allowing the money through and blocking it would be considered wrong by the haters.
> a new Western colony occupying (and constantly expanding) land
The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years (with the return of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace).
Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
> The blockade only started after Hamas was elected into power
Israel has been restricting Gaza's economic viability since the 90s, much before the official blockade. (source: UN, wikileaks about Gaza economic policy)
> The money from Qatar was still allowed in for humanitarian reasons
Is this a joke ? The humanitarian Israel that does not let international flotillas with aid reach Gaza ? Or the humanitarian Israel that kills children ?
> The total land under control by Israel has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 50 years
The spin of the century. They gave back uninhabitable desert, while continuing expansion all over Palestine.
> Millions of Arabs have migrated to the West, but only when Jews migrate East are they “vile colonizers”.
Firstly, it has nothing to do with religion. Secondly, migration is quite different than a formation of a military state that constantly occupies land and expands, attacking its neighbours that has been there for millennia.
What they blocked was a sailboat carrying a bag of oranges and anti-Israel activists trying to carry out a media stunt for attention and virtue-signalling.
You obviously have an agenda here and are being disingenuous. I will disengage and leave you spewing your lies.
You have to be very careful when looking at this sort of data, from my understanding UN data only tracks UN 2720 Mechanism aid deliveries. I think you need to look at COGAT data to see total aid deliveries as there are non-UN aid deliveries as well that won't show up in the UN data.
> An Israeli military unit (COGAT) is not a trustworthy source of data for the aid they provide to an area they are actively blockading and starving.
From my understanding no organization other than COGAT even has the ability to track the total aid deliveries, there is no evidence of mass starvation or that COGAT data is unreliable from what I've seen.
> No but it is like taking Russia's word for how many troops they lost.
Russia mostly just doesn't publish those figures at all last I checked. OSINT researchers however following the Russia/Ukraine war will typically use data from Russian, Ukrainian and independent sources where available however so it also wouldn't be advisable to completely ignore the Russian data either. Even extremely biased/limited data can sometimes be used to identify trends, at least for cases where the bias factor tends to be consistent.
Israel also isn't a dictatorship and has what most would consider to be a relatively free press that is not afraid to criticize the government(i.e. Haaretz) so it would be rather difficult for Israel to deliberately publish outright fabricated data on a large scale without getting caught doing so.
I'm also not saying you should blindly trust any specific sources, however much of the COGAT data can also be corroborated via independent sources such as satellite imagery.
Keep in mind it's also not the case that the UN data meaningfully contradicts the COGAT data either, it's entirely possible for both to be reasonably accurate. In general I would say both COGAT and UN data are both likely reasonably accurate once factoring in the published limitations on that data.
The reason the numbers are different is simply because they are measuring different things. In the case of COGAT they generally measure total aid going through border crossings while the UN measures aid reaching only a subset of distributions points within Gaza.
So if you want to estimate per capita food aid going into Gaza you would want to use the COGAT figures since that data is collected at all border crossings and can be used to get a rough per capita figure on aid entering Gaza. On the other hand if you want to measure something like aid reaching UN system aid distribution points within Gaza then you would want to use the UN data.
Attempting to use UN data to calculate per capita food aid going into Gaza would clearly be wrong as the UN's own published data collection methodology clearly shows they are not measuring total aid entering Gaza.
The UN often seems to publish reports analyzing their own data while clearly failing factor in their own published data limitations into their calculations which results in inaccurate conclusions in their analysis. Usually these sort of analysis mistakes are very obvious as the UN generally publishes the math behind their calculations.
You shouldn't blindly discard data simply because you think the source might be biased in one direction, rather you should try to understand the limitations of the data and corroborate it against secondary sources where possibly while also trying to factor in bias where feasible.
Essentially it's not the raw data where there is disagreement, it's the various interpretations of what the data actually means.
> How is comparing a state that is conducting a genocide to another group that did so too against the Jewish people ?
A war is not the same thing as a genocide. The Jews did not start a war with the Nazi's. Hamas started a war with Israel with openly genocidal goals, Hamas simply did not have the military capability to accomplish their genocidal goals.
Edit: I've unbanned the account for reasons discussed downthread, but please stop breaking the site guidelines.
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We've banned this account because it has been using HN primarily (even exclusively?) for political/national/etc. battle for many months. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're for or against. (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(and I suppose I'd better add: (1) yes, this would be the same if the person were arguing exactly the opposite; and (2) yes, I'm sure there are others doing just as badly which we haven't banned yet. If so, the reason is that we haven't seen them yet. We read HN pretty randomly, and can't come close to seeing everything.)
> What about that jameshilliard guy that has tens of flagged dead comments about Israel ?
I think overall most of my comments are positive. Some people seem to flag comments as a way of disagreeing I guess.
> Since 2024, 99% of his comments are political and about Israel.
I don't think that's really an accurate characterization, it's certainly not 99%, are comments correcting factual inaccuracies/misinformation in threads related to Israel considered political just because the surrounding topic is politically contentious?
Most of my comments on threads involving Israel are me just correcting some of the more obvious misinformation/conspiracy theories and/or trying to provide more factual background context/nuance to the discussions. I try not to push a specific political agenda/ideology for the most part. It's not like I'm trying to start political/ideological discussions either, there just seems to be more factual misinformation around topics involving Israel and that happens to be something where I know a lot of the history.
I don't feel comfortable with "what about that X guy" responses to moderation comments, but in fairness the GP has a point: your account has overwhelmingly been posting in political flamewars for quite some time, and that's not allowed here.
I had to go back 79 days and what felt like hundreds of posts to find any exception (something about heat pumps I think!), but then scrolling further back just led through reams more of the same. That means your account is definitely on the wrong side of the "primarily" test (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
To say that you're simply correcting inaccuracies and misinformation doesn't really work because the question of what counts as accurate vs. misinformation is hotly disputed. It is basically the entirety of the battle.
On the other hand, your comments have mostly (though not entirely) been avoiding the more degraded forms of guidelines breakage that people resort to in these threads - things like snark, name-calling, and from there into personal attacks, slurs, and so on. That's good, but it's not enough—if you want to keep posting on HN we need you not to use the site primarily for political battle (broadly construed).
Why ban the other account and not yours? The primary difference is that your account does have a history of using HN as intended. I had to go (too) far back to find it, but it was there. In such a case we prefer to warn first, not ban outright. The other difference is that I saw a lot more cases of the other account breaking the site guidelines egregiously. That combination (no history of using HN as intended + breaking the guidelines egregiously) is what tends to push us across the warn/ban line.
But no—to address the question that people often wonder about—this is not about either person's views about the underlying topic. Moderation would be exactly the same if the positions were flipped, and indeed often has been.
If you looked at the comments of the banned account that were older than a year ago, they were not political.
While jameshilliard has hundreds of comments (in your own words) almost entirely on the topic for the past two years, with a huge number of them flagged/dead.
Ok, if I look back far enough then indeed there are comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43934794 which match your description, so I take your point and have unbanned that account.
> I had to go back 79 days and what felt like hundreds of posts to find any exception (something about heat pumps I think!), but then scrolling further back just led through reams more of the same.
I went and checked myself and it's not exactly quite that bad, I quite regularly comment on posts unrelated to Israel/politics, these are comments of mine newer than 79 days that seem entirely unrelated for example:
79 days ago(the supposedly non-political one you found about heat pumps is quite ironically titled "The politics of air conditioning in Switzerland"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915330
> To say that you're simply correcting inaccuracies and misinformation doesn't really work because the question of what counts as accurate vs. misinformation is hotly disputed. It is basically the entirety of the battle.
I think it's more complex than that, for example in this thread I was pointing out that one shouldn't use UN aid delivery data to justify that sufficient aid is reaching Gaza, because UN aid data doesn't support that conclusion by itself, I then pointed out what data does support the conclusion that sufficient aid is being delivered. So I think there are cases where it's entirely possible to correct misinformation without even challenging the conclusion.:
> On the other hand, your comments have mostly (though not entirely) been avoiding the more degraded forms of guidelines breakage that people resort to in these threads - things like snark, name-calling, and from there into personal attacks, slurs, and so on.
Yeah, I try and avoid that in general.
> That's good, but it's not enough—if you want to keep posting on HN we need you not to use the site primarily for political battle (broadly construed).
I guess the main issue is that I tend to get more replies to my comments in Israel related threads and I get drawn in responding back if I think there's more to be said on the topic, most of my Israel related comments(in terms of absolute numbers) seem be from these super deep back and forth threads and not top level comments.
It's okay to have an agenda, just be honest about it please. Anti-Zionists tend to be pretty open about their agenda: opposing colonialism, ethno-states, genocide etc. It's telling that modern Zionists often seem less willing to express theirs.
Indeed. I'll never forget setting out to find out the origins of terrorism thinking it was Iranian, and finding out it was mostly British and Zionist... and I worked in anti-terrorism and hadn't been taught much of that history...
