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The chorus of skeptics here should look at past events. The Israelis shoot children all the time. They even manage to get off in court after shooting a child in the back.
Can you even imagine what would happen if a white US police officer mag-dumps a 13-year old black girl for walking into a 'security area'? She was 70 m away when she was first shot. Heading away from the army camp and 'security area'. The soldier runs out to follow her and confirm the kill, as per procedure.
The officer who shot the girl is then acquitted of any malpractice in court.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/24/israel
I think leftists would undergo some kind of super-saiyan transformation upon hearing such a case, especially when the transcript has these extremely villainous lines. This is what actual systemic racism looks like, when you blow people away with impunity and get off in court.
That was 2004. In 2018 they shot and killed another 35 children peacefully protesting in Gaza, amongst others. There are probably many more cases that I haven't heard of, these are the two that immediately come to mind.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition
The base assumption should be that of course the Israeli army is shooting children. They did that before October 7th. They did that 20 years ago. Of course they're doing it today. There is a great deal of hatred in this part of the world. There is a reason people join Hamas, taking on roles with a pretty poor life expectancy and few perks.
I don't believe in a global crusade against every bit of unfairness in the world but the whole 'Israel is so noble and innocent' angle needs to be shut down.
Usually kill-on-sight zones are in military bases behind fences and extensive signage. They're not on the edge of refugee camps, places you'd expect civilians to be walking around.
Yeah, the posts on Philadelphi were pretty crazy. Rafah is split by the Egypt-Gaza border, so any kind of physical barrier there has to be right against the city - a pain for both the residents and the soldiers in the posts. It’s also a damned-if-you-do, dead-if-you-don’t situation, as we can see today, since leaving the area unmonitored just makes weapons smuggling into Gaza very very easy (but having settlers there was pure insanity).
IDF is back in the same spot now, and I hope we’ve learned our lessons from last time. Everything 1 km from Philadelphi needs to be razed.
BTW, you can see a bit of what Girit (badger) was like at the time here.
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I don't think the skeptics (hi) doubt that Israelis sometimes do awful things, including shooting children. Or that we believe Israel is noble and innocent.
I do tend to believe that their enemies are among the worst in a generally shitty part of the world. And that people who bring up cherry-picked and carefully described incidents taking anything critical of Israel at face value, and then extrapolate to generalizations about how this is just typical Jewish behavior, do not, in fact, actually care in the slightest about alleged dead Palestinian children, but are happy to invoke dead children if it presents another opportunity to talk about how Jews are lizard-people.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Israel, but it's hard to take them seriously from someone known to hate Jews. I mean, if suddenly you're willing to call interviews by the NYT asking people in Gaza if the Israelis are committing war crimes "high quality evidence" you can surely see why this prompts some see skepticism.
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