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Notes -
The big trend with the GWB was the abolishment of the rules of war. There were no prisoners of war, only terrorists who can be tortured in any which way. There can be no negotiation because the enemy are terrorists and are just fundamentally evil. Pashtuns can't have any reason to oppose the Afghan government.
Palestinians are completely justified in having armed resistance and participating in an armed conflict. They are not terrorists, they are armed combatants participating in an armed conflict. There is no special terrorist clause in the Geneva convention.
Israel is an occupying force and is responsible for the people they are occupying. Israel is clearly trying to depopulate Gaza in order to steal the land.
Were the people captured while acting as uniformed members of a recognized belligerent state's regular military? If not (and not within a few closely-associated civilian professions like military sutlers and contractors), they're not legally POWs under the Geneva Conventions. And even then, the Convention does not bar prosecution of POWs for acts which contravene the laws of war, such as indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
They absolutely can - they're just not POWs when they're captured fighting out of uniform, or attacking civilians; they're insurgents/terrorists.
Sure, that's a moral claim. They can fight if they want to. But if they choose to fight, they then can't complain about the consequences of the other party fighting too.
They are not fighting in uniform so as to readily distinguish themselves from the civilian population, and are engaging in indiscriminate attacks against civilians.
No, there is a specific definition of who gets protection under the convention as a lawful combatant. Hamas and Hezbollah fighters do not qualify.
Low-effort mindreading.
No? It is an explicit, stated goal in many places and by many officials, including ones who are presently in power. There's no shortage of evidence to support the idea that many high-ranking Israelis believe that their territory ultimately covers the areas laid out in their religious scriptures. This is something that even pro-Israeli partisans will agree is their ultimate goal and something they're actively working towards - you don't need to read somebody's mind when they actively and loudly tell you what they intend and why.
Are you refering to calls from "the river to the sea" (the Jordan and the Mediterranean) respectively?
There are actually some Israelis who have used that phrase and they'd count, yes.
Some Palestinians too which was kind of my point.
If we are going to condemn the Jews it seems only fair to condemn the Muslims too. You wouldn't want to be seen as taking sides in a religious dispute would you?
Who cares? Palestinians saying that they want their land back isn't actually germane to the topic at hand, which is that when people say that Israel wants to depopulate them and take the land they aren't actually engaging in mindreading.
"If we're going to condemn the nazis and their plan to exterminate the jews, it seems only fair to condemn the jews too." No? I have no problems saying that I think the Israeli state is a racist ethnostate engaging in ethnic cleansing, and I don't think that my tax dollars should support it. I don't think that it qualifies as a religious dispute either - if the entire Israeli population saw the light of Allah, recited the shahada and converted to Islam overnight(or vice versa) I doubt it would make much of a difference.
How can it not be germane when it's one of the core points of contention?
The Gaza strip is the product of an armistice between Isreal and Egypt, the West Bank a product of an armistice between Isreal and Jordan, if might makes right why doesn't it make right here? If it doesn't make right, what are you so bent out of shape about?
Because this is a conversation on a specific subtopic - do Palestinian territorial ambitions matter in a larger context? Of course they do. But we're not having that conversation - we're talking about whether or not Israel wants to dispossess them and settle their lands, and whether or not Israelis have made statements to that effect in public. If you've got a good explanation for why Palestinian desires matter at all in this specific context then feel free to explain, but I don't think it'd change the actuality of the Israeli perspective on this either way.
When did I say that? My criticism was about not wanting my tax dollars to support them - it doesn't matter how mighty a given foreign military is, I still don't think they should get any of my government money.
I am? News to me.
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Yeah I mean Churchill wrote about this stuff when talking about the Americas. The reality is that this is what settler colonialism is. But I don’t have a problem with the existence of the United States or Australia, and I think it clearly obvious that the primary reason people care about Israel doing what it does is that the Ummah has both more members and more supporters than the Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians did.
Like, yes. The settlement of North America was a great thing for humanity. The settlement of Australia was a great thing. The settlement of Israel is a great thing. There is no injustice done when a more capable tribe replaces a less capable one. That is history.
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And this is why there's always a distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Palestinians might have very good reasons to go to war, but they also break the rules of war seemingly as a hobby.
The question of what makes a terrorist isn't whether they're right to start a war, it's how they conduct themselves in one. Palestine has been breaking pretty much every rule, at every opportunity. Fighting from sanctuaries, fighting without identifiable uniforms, attacking targets with mass civilian casualties being the entire strategic point.
No, but there are clauses for unlawful combatants, which "terrorist" is a normie-comprehensible shorthand propaganda term for. Palestine fights its fights via unlawful combatants all the time. And unlawful combatants have very little in the way of protections, because they undermine everything else in the rules of war.
Not really, they are engaged in classic guerilla warfare. They are far, far more well behaved than the "moderate jihadists" that the US and Israel supported in Syria. They are fighting a cleaner war than Israel.
Under traditional international law, it's illegal to engage in "classic guerrilla warfare" if by that you mean "not wearing uniforms" or "wearing the uniforms of the enemy," which are both traditional guerrilla war tactics. (The latter was a big sticking point during the US Civil War, as Confederates would sometimes wear captured uniforms.)
I'd need to dig more into how this applies in the Israel/Palestine conflict (especially given Palestine's ambiguous status), but the whole "not wearing uniforms" was something which lots of combatants in the GWOT did. There's a reason that, AFAIK, none of the people who were getting waterboarded were surrendered Iraqi POWs was because the people who were getting waterboarded weren't part of a traditional lawful combatant and thus arguably not protected by the laws of war – my understanding is that that was the logic used by the GWB administration.
I'm not saying waterboarding was the correct decision, but there was a legal reasoning behind the decisions the Bush administration made. They didn't just decide "well we don't have to obey the law because our enemies are evil."
NB, there's provisions in the Geneva Convention, IIRC, for spontaneous resistance to an occupying force.
Technically the rule doesn’t say uniforms, does it? It says ‘recognizable emblem’.
I believe the standard is that combatants must "clearly identify themselves as such"
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I believe something like a green cloth armband fits the standard, for pseudo-militaries that can't do better
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Yes, I believe that's the case in modern international law.
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This was notably the case in the Winter War in 1939 when Finland was so poorly resourced that many soldiers couldn't be equipped with proper uniforms. They used their own clothes and were only provided with a belt and a hat with the official emblem sewn on.
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Right, that provision provides as follows:
ART. 4. — A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
...
6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory who, on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.
Hamas and Hezbollah emphatically do not qualify under this paragraph, as they are pre-existing organizations which do organize themselves into regular units, e.g. Hamas's "Qassam Brigades" and Hezbollah's various specialized units such as the "Radwan Force," yet still engage in combat without uniforms or otherwise making themselves distinct from civilians, among other violations. Also, they aren't spontaneously taking up arms because they're drawing from long-established and disguised central arms depots, in a conflict they started.
Yeah, it seems like the clear implication here is that such forces are supposed to convert themselves into regular armed units in a timely manner. So in the GWOT context, it seems very clear that insurgents operating 5 years into the war, dressing like civilians, hiding their weapons, and not conducting themselves as a "regular armed unit" aren't conducting themselves as expected by the laws of war.
And from the context of Hamas and Hezbollah, it seems to me that (for the reasons you describe) there's no excuse for their forces not to conduct themselves as regular armed units (to whatever extent that they do so) except that it's inexpedient for them, which isn't a justification under the laws of war.
(I should note that I'm not necessarily claiming the Geneva Convention is 100% aligned with morality – there might be instances were guerrilla warfare, like spying, is morally acceptable. But if you're a spy, and you get caught, and executed, you can't very well complain about it – you knew the risks when you signed up. I'm hardly a fan of Hamas or Hezbollah, but my fact claims about the customs of war are just that.)
Right; the Geneva Conventions aren't meant to turn men into angels. They're supposed to be clear rules of the road so that everyone knows what to expect if they behave in a particular way. If people elect not to behave in the specified ways, they don't get the benefit of those clear rules. It's really simple at root.
Remember also that the Geneva Conventions are from a time when war was still something peer nations did.
The world has changed, as has the ways wars are fought- Hamas operates the way it does to exploit the fact that everyone else in the West adheres to obsolete and incorrect ideas of what modern warfare is and are very uncomfortable with reality (example: are women who make weapons for men legitimate military targets?).
Ironically Hamas has done what liberal Westerners only ever dreamed of- they made the average Palestinian women just as capable a fighter as the average Palestinian man (with respect to how their enemy limits itself).
I dunno. Some of the international customs, though, for instance around executing people out of uniform, not conducting false surrenders (and respecting noncombatant status of POWs) predates the Geneva Conventions considerably. The Civil War, for instance, is full of screeching about international law – the North threatened to hang Southern privateers as pirates, for instance, under the logic that the Confederacy wasn't a real state. And guerrilla combat was part of the Civil War (and many wars before that).
Even during the Second World War – which was the birth of the modern Conventions – partisans and guerrilla fighters were very commonplace. So while I agree that the world has changed – it might not be the world the Conventions anticipated – a lot of these problems are very old and in fact predate modern international laws.
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Yes, and the traditional penalty for guerillas, francs tireurs, and partisans is summary execution without benefit of trial.
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How do you figure that? Was October 7 a clean act?
Yes, they attacked military outposts engaged in acts of war against them. That a few drugged out hippies were still partying the next day and got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly is unfortunate but the civilian casualty rate was still well under what many other military operations have.
"Drugged out hippies" is unnecessarily inflammatory and derogatory, and while you can feel how you feel about your outgroup, you need to inject some civility into how you describe people, whether you feel civil towards them or not.
"Got blasted by the IDF" is a claim that contradicts pretty much all reporting (and my own lying eyes, since I saw the videos) on the events at the Nova music festival. I'm aware there are claims that civilians were accidentally killed by the IDF on October 7, and probably this did happen, but your description is such an extraordinary and inflammatory claim that the requirement to Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be applies here.
Generally, your participation in this thread is bad. It's bad because once again you can't contain your hatred of Jews, which leads you to write inflammatory polemics that contribute nothing but seething and spittle.
Because hating Jews and siding with Hamas is not against the rules, we've given you a lot of slack, but you still do not get to write posts about how your enemies have it coming as you make up fictional narratives, and you have been warned before and last time you were told you'd start earning tempbans.
Banned for three days. When you come back, if you want to write Israel Delenda Est posts, you need to put more effort and a lot more civility into them.
Seeing as how Functor is getting banned and won't be able to provide any evidence, I'd like to share this report which provides evidence for his claims: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-directive-kidnap-hamas-gaza-hostages-idf/104224430
The ABC is a major, mainstream media organisation and this reporting includes quotes from multiple Israeli news sources as well. He's straightforwardly correct when he says "got blasted by the IDF who started firing indiscriminantly" and this is the view of multiple Israelis, not just internet nazis. To be perfectly honest I find it a bit ironic, given that when functor said "is unfortunate but the civilian casualty rate was still well under what many other military operations have." he was actually trying to defend the IDF - only to get accused of hating jews and siding with Hamas even as he tried to defend their actions while stating a view which seems to be common knowledge among Israelis themselves.
I think the mention of "drugged out hippies getting blasted" refers to people at the Nova music festival. The source you provided does not seem to mention the Nova music festival even once. It only talks about IDF firing on vehicles retreating back towards Gaza after the attack, and a firefight between IDF and terrorists holding hostages. So it seems that the user Functor is actually straightforwardly incorrect here.
I was under the distinct impression that at least some of the hostages were taken from the Nova music festival. Of course there are other reports which claim that the IDF did fire upon the music festival, but Haaretz has a paywall up and so I can't actually verify the original source.
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So going door to door and executing civilians is actually "attacking military outposts"? Or was that also the IDF?
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I don't think underaged suicide bombers is anyone's idea of "classic" guerrilla warfare.
That is two attacks in 15 years, both rather small.
Wikipedia reports a lot more than that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups
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Have they done so yet in this war? All the Wiki examples are from decades ago.
Not that I'm aware of. But I don't think this is to Hamas and co.'s credit: I just think the security apparatus Israel installed in response to suicide attacks have been effective enough to essentially nullify it as a tactic. Perhaps they've tried doing it in Gaza to attack IDF troop patrols, but I haven't heard anything to that effect.
This article from December last claims that terrorists have blown themselves up in Gaza to attack the IDF, but doesn't specify the perpetrators' ages.
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Given events, how does an Israel act upon and within Gaza if its goal is its security and not stealing land?
Like the British in Northern Ireland who managed to diffuse the situation. It is the only realistic long term plan for Israel.
I think that’s a bit unrealistic given the size of the area in question. Israel as a whole is the size of New Jersey, so any armed action in that limited space is going to be pretty brutal simply because of the population density and the fact that everything is with missile range. There aren’t even good natural boundaries. Ireland was separated from Britain by a sea, and most of the British and Irish for that matter were well outside the zones where the fighting was happening.
They are locking them in to tiny area and bombing them. They should take in the civilians from the area they are bombing. Also there are far less destructive ways to fight than blasting a city from the air. The UK didn't blast entire districts of Belfast.
And put them where exactly? Again, this is a very small densely populated country with only deserts in between cities. And given that Israel doesn’t trust them to not try to attack their citizens when removed (unless we’re talking camps, which is probably not going to work) there’s not much to do with Gazans.
And why should they leave their homes with no guarantees that they’d ever see them again? Trust is gone here. Even before the bombings started, the dominant idea is that Israel will take their land. Even if given an order to leave, who’s leaving? Who’s going to leave Gaza and expect to take Israel at their word that once Hamas and the tunnels are gone, the Gazans will be allowed to return home?
They were pushed into Gaza by militia groups that ethnically cleansed the towns they came from. They can return to the place they were forced out of.
So the towns that got bulldozed to make room for the Jews? The ones Hamas has been shelling daily? I can’t imagine a universe where this works.
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The problem here is that the Good Friday Agreement was possible because the IRA was a defined organization with specific demands that could be negotiated with. There existed a stable equilibrium where all parties got enough of what they wanted that they wouldn't break the agreement.
Both sides of this conflict have factions with maximalist goals that are large enough to veto any compromise. One that they have exercised before on numerous occasions (Rabin's assassination, for instance).
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They could pretty easily have stopped october 7th by just paying attention to the border. Hamas pretended to be beaten by not responding to some Israeli provocations and Netanyahu thought they were done.
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From actual Israeli supporters to transparent pro-Israel astroturfing, the insistence on the 'terrorist' angle is striking. Does this really resonate with American normies?
I would think 'terrorism' a discredited label, counterproductive in most cases, especially in the context of distant desert squabbles. Is it not the 'common sense', dominant narrative in the US that the 2000's were a mistake born out of lies and a hysteria? Of course the actual costs to the Americans were miniscule, practically irrelevant, so I don't expect emotional investment, just disinterest and cautious 'this will not work on me twice' attitude.
Do you really think any sort of organized group is interested in astroturfing themotte? No organization is paying people to type up comments to be read by ~200 people max.
It's not. Terrorism is pretty consistently using violence targetted specifically at civilians in order to enact political change. Hamas sometimes acts like a legitimate military force, but they also do things like cafe bombings and parading kidnapped naked women through the streets. And notably the leadership doesn't disavow those actions and put any fighters who commit acts like that on trial.
I meant internet in general, especially reddit; it was not my intention to suggest 'transparent pro-Israeli astroturfing' is noticeable themotte, just the genuine supporters.
I meant 'discredited' in the sense of 'terrorist' label being a superweapon abused to the point of ineffectuality. I don't really have an opinion on whether you can formulate a useful definition of terrorism, maybe. Issue is, your formulation I think describes Israeli Gaza operation pretty well, but they are a 'legitimate military force'.
I really wish this sort of labeling would be backed up by videos of something resembling a Roman triumph. But I'm guessing you are referring to the non-naked corpse of a woman on the back of the truck clip? I don't think female Israeli corpses are special, and the amount of attention that is being demanded for them and other Israeli victims (in broad Israeli astroturfing) is disproportional, at times downright deranged.
Israel does not kill civilians for the sake of killing civilians. They take out military targets that unfortunately have civilians nearby, because civilians are nearby everything in Gaza.
There's a debate to be had about how many civilians it's justifiable to kill when taking out an enemy leader or military installation. What Hamas does is different, they kill civilians that are nowhere near any military personnel or installations.
https://zoa.org/2023/10/10448582-sickening-video-shows-disgusting-hamas-terrorists-parading-naked-battered-woman-through-streets/
That's a disgusting video. Even more disgusting is that that sort of thing isn't clearly and unconditionally condemned by Palestinian leadership. All people have some members who are disgusting. But good groups will have their leaders disavow disgusting members.
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America is locked in a constant cycle of “regret war now get excited for the next war”. Vietnam was a tragic and pointless waste of life, but the Global War on Terror is an existential necessity, because Saddam has nukes and the Taliban hate us for our freedom. The Global War on Terror was born out of lies and hysteria, but the Ukraine War is an unambiguously righteous cause that justifies unlimited escalation.
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Maybe? Terrorist is obviously something of a rhetorical term, but not many people view the war in Afghanistan that way anyway, and I don't think many came away with the impression that there were not actually terrorists involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
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Terrorism still probably has purchase among boomers who are Israel's biggest fans in the west anyways. But everyone else can just read about what Israelis say amongst themselves and realize that the distinction is meaningless at this point.
“You entered Gaza (after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught) to take revenge — as much as possible. [Against] women, children — everyone you saw. As much as possible. That’s what you wanted,” said Uriah Ben-Natan, the brother of 22-year-old Sgt. First Class (res.) Shuvael Ben-Natan, from the northern West Bank settlement of Rehelim.
Quotes like this put the Onion out of business:
Yeah Israel has a real problem with all these villainous live quotes. 90% of the time they manage to stick to the approved lines: 'we have a right to defend ourselves' 'counter-terrorism action' 'Iraq Iran Iran WMDs, nukes in 6 months' 'human shields'.
But 10% of the time government officials declare enthusiastic support for torturing prisoners by shoving metal rods up their anuses. Or we see the vigorous anti 'investigating soldiers for rape' protests. Or well-directed music videos where young children sing:
Reminds me a bit of Teufelslied, though it was intended as a marching song and I doubt children got to sing it:
At some point Israel is going to have to take on the villainous role with the face-concealing helmet and the glowing red eyes, accept what they are, what they want and what they'll sacrifice for the path they're on. They can't have it both ways. You can't be both the defender of freedom and justice, the unprovoked righteous who deserves sympathy and aid from others - and also go around burning people's houses down for fun, shooting children in the back as they flee, gunning down unarmed protestors, obliterating your enemies and taking their land.
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Gee, it's almost like the Israelis were angry or something after over a thousand of their countrymen were killed or abducted. Next you're going to tell us U.S. Marines landing on Okinawa had some off-color things to say about Japanese people.
If this is a justification, why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack? There is an obviously truthful reading of the situation, which is that Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out or someone stronger swooping in and separating the combatants, and then there are the two competing narratives that aim to marshal support for one of the sides by selectively word-gaming away the justifications that the other side invokes when turning the ratchet.
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
Settlement expansion, supported by the Israeli state, is essentially enough for me to conclude Israelis were never serious about peace with Palestinians.
Goal always the same - dispossession and/or expulsion. Slowly with settlements, domestic opposition mostly unserious - happy with the end result, only preferring the optics of serious concern and stalwart disapproval. Faster with aerial bombing campaigns.
So the Palestinians get to demand to live in a judenrein society? When did that become a reasonable demand?
This is in transparently bad faith and you're not even making a pretence of trying to argue to understand rather than win. As an honest question, do you actually think that's what mildly_benis was trying to say? That the Palestinians are just antisemites who want to live in a jew-free society, and THAT is the main reason for their opposition to Israeli settlers coming in and settling on their property without compensation?
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If Jewish settlers agree to become Palestinian citizens, obey Palestinian laws, be policed by the Palestinian police, then the Palestinians don't get to demand that.
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I think in a case where this means keeping Jews from coming to them - not even as refugees, but in a settlement campaign under state umbrella - the answer is an unequivocal 'yes, of course'.
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If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7. More were killed by Israel just in 2022, and many more in 2021. I don't think being at a disco festival conveys a uniquely high value to your life, as opposed to, say, just being blown up in your home.
The relevant timeline just around settlements has plenty of evidence to the contrary, including from Israeli sources. Either way, it's easy to offer peace from a position of overwhelming strength.
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
You are the one who started talking about scale, implicitly suggesting that the scale of the Oct 7th attack was what made it sufficient as a justification for Israel killing 43k Palestinians. I just took this implication, as I understood it, at face value. If this is not the argument you intended, then please explain yourself better.
I'm sure the objective of Hamas could also be described by them as the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Palestinians - the Israeli state - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering any individuals that Israel has locked away. Israel says that its mass killings of completely uninvolved civilians are inevitable because it has no better way to break Palestinian organised resistance (Hamas) specifically without putting more of its own people at risk; I'm sure Hamas also sees no better way to break Israeli organised resistance than to spread terror and attack whatever civilians they can get their hands on. If you think it's unfair to demand that Israel restrict itself to surgical operations against Hamas militants that would probably result in 5-10x the military casualties relative to just levelling whole areas, then surely it's also unfair to demand that Hamas restrict itself to surgical operations against the IDF that would probably result in them just getting gunned down ineffectually.
Those seem pretty cherry-picked from the articles. The 2021 article starts with a description of Israeli police sabotaging a religious observance so that it would not disturb a political speech of their PM, and then later of Israel seizing the homes of some Palestinians, which resulted in protests being violently suppressed during which the first deaths occurred on both sides. You (and partially Wikipedia) are doing the same thing here again at smaller scale, taking a fairly uniformly distributed timeline of alternating incidents of Palestinians killing some Israelis and Israelis killing many more Palestinians - inevitably more civilians than militants on either side - and placing arbitrary cutoff points to break the sequence up into single "incidents" that look like they start with Palestinians killing someone and then Israel engaging in totally justified manifold retaliation.
"He randomly punched me, then I broke his arm. Then he randomly punched me again, and I broke his leg in response. Then he randomly kicked me in the nuts for no reason with his other leg. Of course I stabbed his eye out, I mean, who wouldn't? Being kicked in the nuts can have serious consequences and nobody should have to put up with that. What, you say I started it by stabbing him in 1948? Do you realise how crazy you sound, claiming that he has the right to kick me in the nuts over something from 1948? Besides, his dad who was also beating him all the time back in the 1940s said I was free to do to him whatever I wanted!"
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