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!
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"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.
