naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.
Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).
The narrative around this is already forming and I suspect that we will never be free of knowing that Israel for sure bombed a hospital (maybe they did).
This will be a major inflection point in this war. Causalities are approaching 1000 people (started at 500, now at 800)
Edit: here’s also why I’m so suspicious of this. If it’s true that Israel bombed this hospital, it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them. The 10/7 Hamas attacks were terrible. This is just as bad. Pull our aircraft carriers back, no aid, nothing. Still send in some bad hombres to get our citizens out, but other than that Israel is on its own, and I don’t want to hear any ridiculous moralizing from any us politician ever again.
Edit2: There are allegedly demonstrations happening in several countries now. Extremely dynamic news environment. Nobody knows wtf is going on. Israel is starting to get their narrative together about the cause of this, but it's way too late for them to get ahold of it.
This matches up with the very first video of the rocket hitting the hospital, and answers why the guy filming was filming (because there were a bunch of rockets going overhead)
Does anyone know of a video of a Hamas rocket landing from a ground POV? The sound of the hospital blast is identical to a JDAM missile sound, but I want to hear if a Hamas rocket sounds similar.
Intercept of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a separate organization of Hamas.
I know, since these orgs are currently co-operating a lot of people are going to consider it inconsequential which specific organization did it (if we believe the Israeli narrative), but it's still the sort of a minor thing that sticks to my craw.
There was a lot of videos floating around supposedly of the aftermath. Really makes it feel like this was an actual, coordinated effort to rile up the Muslim world, and that it worked. Damn.
It's rather amazing that the entire world was ultra eager to believe an unvalidated report from a Palestinian spokesperson that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and 500+ people died.
With priors like these, Israel's at a significant disadvantage in the information war here.
Tentatively, I can maybe chalk it up to "If it bleeds, it leads." A hospital blowing up and killing 500 people is a hell of a story regardless of which side caused it, you get a lot of clicks/eyeballs publishing that.
And my priors are that Israel's weaponry is MUCH more likely to cause that sort of devastation than Palestine's.
In fact, I remember thinking "it's pretty freaking implausible that a rocket just happens to blow up a hospital and kill hundreds RIGHT when Hamas needs a massive PR win."
But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.
Turns out the simple explanation was the true one: It didn't.
But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.
Perhaps a result of my own ignorance with respect to explosives and my observation of 9/11, I find this surprising. I would have thought that it wouldn't take much to take down a building, even one as big as a hospital, as long as it hit the load-bearing parts, and I figured that hitting those load-bearing parts wasn't particularly unlikely in the crapshoot of battle. I suppose buildings, possibly especially in Gaza, must be hardier structures than I'd initially thought.
(Properly constructed) Buildings don't want to fall down; the bigger they are the less they want to fall.
It takes a truly stupendous explosion to actually level a building. The thing that really fucks up a structure is water or fire damaging the footings/weakening enough of the steel that it starts to get wobbly; then the buildings own weight.
That's why bursting/firebombing mix is the trad way to destroy a city: The bursting bombs blow open lots of shit and spread burnable material; the firebombs set everything off and start a firestorm that kills lots of people and makes buildings unsafe after the fact.
That's why houses get totalled by even medium fires, actually.
Structural steel is amazingly strong stuff. I’d expect skyscrapers like the WTC to be the upper end of vulnerability, if only because of the lower cross-section.
Oh yes, I remember being in grade school when that happened. I suppose 9/11 must have left a bigger impression on me (which is probably unsurprising), because I recall being impressed that the building was still standing and seemed mostly fine except for that 1/3 that was obliterated.
My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.
And the whole problem is that a rocket without a decent guidance system is probably not going to hit the loadbearing structural elements by chance.
I'm going to try to find a source on the lack of destruction from the rockets but uh, googling "Palestine Rocket" won't be helpful right now for obvious reasons.
Edit: Here's a source from 2009. Capabilities could have changed since then but I doubt it.
Hamas has done some development over the last decade, both with newer and heavier variants of the homemade Qassam, and with more imports with much larger payloads. I don't know enough on the matter to say whether the larger payloads of a Fajir5 or M302 could take down a building without being a golden bb, but they're large enough to start hitting the 'evacuate nearby barricaded structures' part of the ATF bingo card.
My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.
Thanks for the link, and this is also a very good point. If buildings were as fragile as I'd believed, I would expect to hear about buildings being leveled all the time both by terrorists and by armies. The fact that such events are notable rather than banal was a sign that I could have noticed.
The best way to level a building, short of a nuke, is to fill it with an explosive mixture and ignite it. But that's hard to do with a missile, a bit more practical for a terrorist, and eminently achievable for someone working on natural gas lines without knowing what they're f---ing doing (usually trying to steal gas).
Even ‘reputable’ News sources like the BBC were leading with ‘Israeli strike on hospital kills 500’, kind of wild. Maybe there will be an internal inquiry there.
One would hope. Both this and the Ukraine conflict have been an absolute embarrassment of just uncritically rereporting straight up propaganda, not only from whoever is considered on "our" side but on any side. MSM has been little better than internet sewer of social media, probably because thats where the journalists hang out and get their information and the only thing that matters is producing more "content" and being first.
I wonder how it feels to work at these places? Are people not ashamed?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
Ioper 1yr ago
Are people not ashamed?
If anyone in a mainstream media organisation was capable of being ashamed their coverage of the Trump years would have led them to resign already anyway.
Okay yeah, I believe the IDF now. I wouldn’t put it past them to hit a hospital if they thought it was an important target, but I don’t think they’d bomb a parking lot full of civilians.
Also looks small, as others have noticed. This looks like an explosion that killed 20 people, not 200.
Fires and especially fuel fires can be more deadly than they look at first glance, particularly in crowded areas or if people were sleeping in the cars, or if people were trampled trying to escape.
But yeah, even if I'd put higher than twenty in the realm of the possible -- if people were actively sheltering in the cars, I could see mid-fifties at the higher end of the plausible -- there's no way this was anywhere near the sort of humanitarian disaster that was getting publicized the previous night. Still bad, but duplex-fire rather than Grenfell. I'd expect Hamas to exaggerate casualty counts, but this isn't even the sort of thing you could squint at and pretend it sounds legit.
This is... actually less ground impact than I expected just given the videos of the initial impact. More evidence in favor of a rocket breakup, I guess, along with either a 'golden bb' hitting some fuel storage (though it's not in the impact crater?) or a lot of unused rocket fuel being left.
Whatever the casualty count was (and it could still be pretty bad - the parking lot was reportedly packed), the initial claim from Hamas was very obviously bullshit simply from how quickly it came out.
Yeah, and Hamas has a tendency to make pretty dubious claims for casualty counts even when they've had enough time to count bodies.
(along with a tendency to conflate military, combatant, and noncombatant injuries and fatalities)
This is bizarrely blatant even compared to the typical stuff, though. Similar in scale to the Jenin "massacre" (West Bank, rather than Gaza), but Jenin took some effort to disprove and a lot of the formal structure for reporting didn't have any way to check. Some media groups are going to provide cover anyway, I guess?
There's a photo of some burned cars in a parking lot. Which is rather unrelated to any claims of a bombed hospital with 500 dead. There certainly weren't hundreds of bodies piled onto the burned part of that parking lot.
Also, there is no meaningful crater, not all windows are blown out of nearby buildings or cars, etc... I have a really hard time seeing this being the aftermath of a targeted missile strike, this looks like the aftermath of what was mostly a fire.
This doesn’t seem to correspond to the claimed body-count nor the explosion videos, which seemed massive. So Hamas was lying about the deaths, that makes sense, but the videos seemed real enough - so what gives? I’m honestly confused now.
The larger munitions (MK84s have 2000 lbs warheads) do have a certain cinematic sense to them in real-time. They're not really bright in the way movie explosions, are, though, and to the extent that there are flashes at all they're vastly outweighed by the dust kicked up. A number of videos with slow-motion cameras (MK82s have 500-pound warheads) from test fires do look more cinematic, but it's important to keep in mind that those blasts are over in tenths of a second, and at real-time unless they drop at a shallow angle you're going to catch them primarily by the dust clouds.
((I'll skip over some weirder configurations, like inert bombs or naval mines.))
The trick's that the fire and heat, barring some very specialized cases like explosions in an enclosed area or secondary explosives, are generally not the main source of damage for detonations. What kills and destroys is the pressure wave. The fire and heat is usually remnants of remaining explosive material that didn't burn off before the pressure wave overtook them.
FEMA has a good document (cw: probably will get you Put On a List) on this from a Blue Team perspective trying to reduce harm, and also what sort of buildings are more or less vulnerable to explosives. Chart 4-11 gives a (very approximate) point for where concrete columns fail. Unfortunately, it's harder to predict for buildings as a class; most modern buildings are designed to require near-complete failure of all main supports to collapse rather than merely being unsafe, but sometimes you'll find a dumb decision come in that lets sections peal off from relatively minor hits. Older US residential buildings are often more vulnerable due to the frame structure leaving the building vulnerable to hits on one or two major supports, while contrast Australia, where cinderblock and concrete everything means buildings often will stay up. I dunno Israeli architecture but I'd expect it tends to the latter side.
I don't trust aljazeera.com to truthfully show only relevant photos. I don't usually just flatly disbelieve like this, but for them, evidence and statements are worthless. Maybe those are kids injured in this rocket crash, maybe those are unrelated photos deceitfuly added to an article to mislead us.
As someone mostly ignorant of media from the Middle East, I had had the impression that Al Jazeera was a fairly dependable news organization, but certainly the past few days have severely changed this view.
One was seeing a commentator state as fact that Joe Biden uncritically announced after he was fooled into believing that an AI-manipulated photo of a puppy was actually a photo of a baby burnt by Hamas on 10/7. This is obviously false if you've seen the pictures in question, as there is no credibility to the idea that the picture showing the puppy was the original photograph - both the context clues and the actual image quality make it clear that there is no way that the real location had a real puppy in that spot. If Biden was deceived into falsely believing horrors committed by Hamas, it wasn't through this particular claimed manipulation. Yet this claim was stated as fact and unchallenged.
Another was seeing a video title of theirs about this incident, where they made unqualified statements that an Israeli strike hit a hospital and killed 500 people. Even before I did any investigation, I was skeptical just from 500 people being killed in one shot that's like 1/5 of the total number of Palestinians killed from the counterstrikes by this point, and merely finding and counting that many bodies seems likely to take some time. Then, every additional piece of evidence threw doubt on the cause of the attack, and so every news organization would at least have the responsibility to put qualifications, like "sources from Palestine/Gaza/Hamas/Israel/etc. say" or "possibility of" or the like, but there was nothing like that.
Good news is, I wasn't getting much of my news from Al Jazeera anyway, so I won't have to change my news consumption practices much, but it's disappointing, because I was hoping for a good news source with a heavy anti-Israel bend.
I had had the impression that Al Jazeera was a fairly dependable news organization
It is on topic not concerning Israel etc. For example it is likely to be fairly trustworthy or at least not blatantly biased when reporting on some Poland vs Germany spat.
But they will happily lie to run propaganda against Israel or in support of their funders.
Isn’t the fact they look the same the counter to the steelman type arguments that Palestinians should fight for their land - blood and soil type arguments. Especially Mizrahi Jews they share a lot of the same genetic ancestry. They just have a different faith but are significantly the same people. Israel isn’t the all European Jewry like they were in the past. Which seems to be an issue shared in all the conflicts today. Russians and Ukraines are nearly the same yet they kill each other.
As has been stated before, a lot of Palestinians are fighting for a specific piece of land that their family formally owned at some time and which was taken from by settlers at some very specific date.
Most Palestinians aren’t the descendants of Ottoman smallholders, it’s unlikely the above is true given the way land ownership worked in the late empire.
I don't get what you are arguing. Neither Russians and Ukrainians, nor Jews and Arabs, fight over genetically substantiated claims to the land. Well, there is some of that – Russians appeal to the absence of genetic ethnic uniqueness to downplay Ukrainian claim to sovereignty, Ukrainians appeal to evidence for the opposite, Arabs call Jews «Poles», Jews insist that Palestinian Arabs are just generic Arabs and don't get to claim a special state – but that's a side show. Jews, whether Ashkenazim or not, think they are entitled to the land based on their religion. Palestinians don't care about Fst distance to Mizrahim, they are a separate people. Humans don't explicitly think about objective genetic similarity as a basis for cooperation or enmity, only weird Western racists do.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
HlynkaCG 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Why is no one talking about it being a Christian-run hospital. That's at least an interesting wrinkle in my opinion. Christians have to be getting run roughshod in the crossfire.
Here is a Christian organization and its beneficiaries, the target of the most brazen escalation since the opening salvo, and we have Muslims and Jews pointing fingers at each other.
I think because it’s in no one’s interest to say it’s Christian. Muslims want to be sympathetic to Palestine and distancing themselves from the hospital by saying it’s Christian does nothing for them. Israel wants Europe and the US on its side, so saying it’s Christian does nothing for them.
Here's the wiki. I mean I understand the initial skepticism—literally no one is mentioning this. There was a brief edit battle to get the first sentence to say "aka Baptist Hospital," but a power user reverted it.
The hospital has been in operation since 1882 and was founded by the Church Mission Society of the Church of England. Later, the hospital was managed between 1954 and 1982 by the Medical Mission of the Southern Baptist Church, known then as the Baptist Hospital (Arabic: المستشفى المعمداني). Since 1980, the hospital has been run by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem. It is supported by international charities such as Embrace the Middle East.
Israel doesn't have a history of lying about this sort of thing. If they did it, I might expect some deflection of blame in some other way, but not outright denial that they did it -- firm evidence of the providence of the missile will come out in time.
Are you trying to make my point for me? Israel admits attacking the USS Liberty, but there's some dispute over the circumstances ... exactly what I claim would happen if Israel did in fact attack the hospital.
Huh? You posted this as if this article is definitive proof that Israel lies. Was there nothing newer than 55 years old? And all the official data in that article is consistent with a mistake that they immediately acknowledged and apologized for. The rest is a speculative conspiracy theory which, while not impossible, requires both a conjured motive for Israelis to intentionally attack their most important ally and a perfect coverup lasting for two generations.
Are you used to being in some bubble where "everyone knows" that Israel likes to intentionally attack US ships and hospitals, so this link is the kind of "gotcha!" you were hoping for? Or were you just hoping nobody would actually click it?
The linked Wikipedia article says: "two hours after the attack began, Israel informed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv that its military forces had mistakenly attacked a U.S. Navy ship"
Without knowing anything else it does seem that Israel indeed doesn't lie about this sort of thing.
it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them
I don't understand a lot of things in life - and thoughts like these rank among the top.
Israel is surrounded by people's who all basically want them destroyed. One group decided to invade them and kill (1000, 1200?) of them and take hostages. Said people store munitions in hospitals and schools.
By every conceivable human metric that isn't of the last 50 years, Israel has the absolute human right to completely glaze everything around them until they are happy and secure.
But they don't. They hold back. Always. For decades.
And you're upset they blew up a hospital ... Or didn't.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
Mihow 1yr ago
By every conceivable human metric that isn't of the last 50 years, Israel has the absolute human right to completely glaze everything around them until they are happy and secure.
But they don't. They hold back. Always. For decades.
The problem with this statement is that while this would be fine using the human metrics of the past, the last 50 years actually took place in the last 50 years as opposed to during the Bronze age. If you actually want to adopt the standards of the Bronze Age then Israel simply does not exist, because the holocaust would have been just as fine by those standards as the proposed "glazing" of everything around them. It is solely due to the growing understanding of humanity that genocide is a great wrong that Israel and the Jewish people exist in the first place, and Israel demonstrating that they don't actually care about the evils of genocide, they just want to be wearing the boot rather than under it, is enough to make a lot of people reconsider their support. Don't forget the precedent your support of these actions sets either - even just advocating for the nuclear genocide of the Arab world is enough to permanently destroy your credibility when it comes to condemning racists or white nationalists, who are in many cases less extreme in their policy recommendations.
even just advocating for the nuclear genocide of the Arab world is enough to permanently destroy your credibility when it comes to condemning racists or white nationalists, who are in many cases less extreme in their policy recommendations.
I think we should be a bit more clear here: until they are happy and secure.
They are not secure because the people around them want them dead. The people around them constantly kill them, want to kill them, pray to kill them, hope to kill them, etc
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
Mihow 1yr ago
Affixing "until they are happy and secure" to the end of the statement does absolutely nothing to change the thrust of my argument or weaken the point at all. If your standard for moral condemnation is that you have to wait for the white nationalists to be "happy and secure" in their position then you're still going to be ok with them wiping out every single jew in their countries (they wouldn't be happy without that of course).
Israel doesn’t exist as restitution for the Holocaust. It exists because influential British Jews persuaded the UK to grant them the territory and then settled and defended it by force. In other words, it exists because it was able to exist, just like every other polity in history. If Israel was reparations for the Holocaust then it should be German soldiers preparing to invade Gaza now, but of course it is not.
The standards of history show that, whatever our current moral judgment of the Holocaust, these events still happen and bullshit morality arguments by an “international community” that doesn’t really care don’t matter, and that is what - primarily - motivates Israel’s defense. The US can afford to claim that it really is about bringing LGBT rights to Afghanistan or whatever, everyone else accepts the eternal realities of geopolitics.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2rafa 1yr ago
Israel doesn’t exist as restitution for the Holocaust.
I never claimed this. I was talking about a comparison to a hypothetical world where Bronze-age norms held sway - and in that world there wouldn't be an Israel because nobody would have bothered to stop the holocaust, nor would the few remaining jews have been able to convince the UK to make Israel instead of New Outremer. No Bronze-age nation would ever give a hostile ethnic group a bunch of land, lots of money etc. Hell, they wouldn't even do the same for cousins from a different village!
The standards of history show that, whatever our current moral judgment of the Holocaust, these events still happen and bullshit morality arguments by an “international community” that doesn’t really care don’t matter,
South Africa. If you flout the conventions of the international community, they have more than enough power to make your lives miserable and crater your economy. North Korea is still standing, but I don't think they're a particularly good model for a society. And remember, these same moral judgements that condemn Israel for wanting to exterminate the Palestinians are the same moral judgements that condemn people who want to exterminate the jews. Destroying those norms and indicating that they have no validity or power, at least in my opinion, would not be terribly great for the jewish people.
It's a human right to destroy millions of your neighbors? Well that's new.
Israel has created their enemies, instead of making peace with them, or coming to an agreement, they escalate, bully, and oppress. Hopefully we will see how their hubris and chutzpah will be rewarded. Unfortunately they will also drag the US with them to this lesson.
Negotiate with Hamas and make peace including concessions. Probably something like recognizing Palestine, ending settlements, respecting borders, ending blockades and embargo, whatever it takes I guess.
The concessions Hamas asks for are “go back to Europe or the sea”. They will only agree to a tactical truce, this is their raison d’être. They don’t want to create an independent state, and they could have done this for about two decades now if they did. There’s nothing to recognize in Gaza. Ending the blockade will mean more weapons in the hands of genocidal maniacs. So now what?
Hamas is the no negotiation political party in Palestine. They are very explicit about that. It's leaders are happy to siphon off billions and live the good life in Qatar and the rank and file soldiers are so ideologically captured they don't know anything except killing Jews and political dissidents.
"Israeli military officials, for their part, say the reality of the strikes is substantially more complicated and claim Hamas’s maintenance of military operations inside civilian institutions precipitate such attacks.
“Hamas chooses to use these protected areas for military purposes in order to shield itself from IDF strikes,” the Israel Defense Forces said this week. “And to draw international condemnation of Israel if the IDF is forced to respond."
Not evidence one way or another, but hiding weapons caches and personel in schools, mosques and hospitals seems to be Hamas' method of operation as is the Israeli response to not incentivise civilian shields in this way.
It seems that Hamas wins either way by doing this. Either they successfully use civilian shields or Israel gets bad press by striking these sorts of targets.
Doesn't Hamas put bases under hospitals specifically because of this? The two options are either to never bomb hospitals and hence to accept Hamas as the leader in-perpetuity of the region, or to give every available warning to the population to evacuate and then bomb the terrorist base...
The hospital is in Northern Gaza, dead center of the region that was given a "24 hour" evacuation notice a few days ago now. The evacuation notice specified that hospitals should also be evacuated. If this was Israel, they might be "softening up" northern Gaza for their ground offensive, or they might have been returning counterbattery fire without restrictions, since civilians are to have left the area.
With Biden visiting Israel tomorrow (in ~12 h?), presumably to talk Israel down from a ground invasion, leadership on the Israeli side might benefit from a rapid escalation of violence, and leadership on the Hama side would benefit from a rapid escalation in civilian casualties. Good for both sides no matter who did it.
The fact that there does not seem to be a clear video makes it less likely to me that it was an Israeli strike. Israel tends to either record its own strikes, or provide enough warning that journalists are already pointing their stabilized camera tripods in the right direction from a safe distance. In contrast, Hamas strikes and false flags like yesterday's "airstrike" on the evacuation routes tend to come without warning, and videos tend to show only the aftermath. But it is also possible Israel has gunsight footage of the whole thing and it will be released 5 to 10 years from now.
All the casualty numbers are claimed by Gazan authorities, who are probably exaggerating. Yesterday's Israeli hit on a UN school where 4000 people were sheltering only killed four people, and we're supposed to believe that 800 people died when a bomb hit a courtyard? I guess it is possible the bomb was fragmentary and there was no cover, but something seems off. I'm not sure if high casualty numbers would shift the blame toward Israel (more likely to have large bombs) or Hamas (not Israeli MO).
Edit: Wikipedia says the summit with Joe Biden has been cancelled, but Manifold is 98% pretty confident that Biden is still going to Israel.
Yeah, this doesn't look good for the Israelis at all (assuming we don't get good evidence this was a Hamas self fuck up). They should have gone in boots on the ground earlier. Yes tons of Israelis would have died in direct combat, but one benefit of that is that this sort of stuff which stops people around the world from thinking that you are the "good guys" doesn't happen, and they need to win the international sentiment war if they want to eradicate Hamas. Letting that sore fester long term will be even worse for Israel than the short term cost of lancing the boil.
Does Israeli even have the numbers for a ground attack without significant initial strikes? Sure they have 500k soldiers but I’m guess that’s like their entire 20 something population. There are only 15 million Jews in the world.
How many would they lose if they just went in with small arms and didn’t take advantages of their long distinct fires? 100k? Then they still need an army for future needs?
Sure the west can do war without losing a lot of lives but that’s because we evacuate and use fires first.
My expectation is that IDF will absolutely blow a bunch of innocent civilians up by accident at some point, but this seems way too soon. Seems more plausible that some terrorists firing janky weapons at Israel accidentally shot themselves in the foot hospital.
Sorry, bunch there was not scaled properly. I meant "IDF will absolutely blow up hundreds of innocent civilians in a single strike by accident at some point"
What are the odds that Israel hit it, but it was an accident?
I concur that intentionally leveling a hospital is just about the worst possible PR. And also that nothing about the Israeli strategy has suggested that they would think it a smart move. But here we are. I’m going to place my bets on a misfire (excusable) or a mistaken target (not so much).
I think that it's possible Hamas was launching rockets near the hospital and the IDF Air Force hit it after seeing a rocket launch from that location, not realizing its a hospital, or realizing too late.
If you look at the video of the one explosion close up, its way larger than any rocket we've seen Hamas launch in this conflict. Pretty clear its a JDAM IMO. Takes a lot of hoop jumping to conclude otherwise.
There's allegedly been at least a couple Fajar-5s launched already, which at 175-200kg payload could pretty easily do that, and the R160s are bigger. And there's supposedly texts from PIJ committing to the use of one just before this launch. The explosion isn't really what's weird, so much as the extremely high casualty numbers, but a bomb in the wrong enough place can do that.
Separately, there's no way the IDF was unaware there was a hospital here. It's a big hospital, and it's been there for freaking ever. If the IDF is firing off JDAMs at hotspots without crosschecking a zone map, that's just culpability with extra steps. Maybe some sort of technical error with the JDAM guidance system, but this sorta distance is margin-of-WWII-era aiming tech.
I saw a video from a couple days ago, which I am too lazy to lookup, in which a plane - or drone - targeted and bombed a source from a rocket launch from overhead. The scenario I am picturing is something like that, a quick trigger pull on a rocket launch source in the middle of the night with lights off or something. It's plausible that a shot from the hip like that could have been done. I imagine the operators and pilots are quite trigger happy at the moment over Gaza. Maybe they don't even have to ask a command chain for a decision like that.
Seems to be videos now or it being a Hamas misfire. That seems far more likely since their qassams are pieces improvised water pipes turned into rockets.
I think it's too large for Qassams without a secondary explosion; depending on model they're usually 5-20 kg TNT- or ANFO-shrapnel mixes, plus whatever fuel was left over. This card is absolutely inappropriate for comparison, but it's the sort of thing that the ATF doesn't shoot people for talking about, and I don't think it gives anywhere near the boom present there.
That said, there's other which less commonly-used payloads, and they range from 100lbs-300lbs, often of better high explosives without as much (or any) mixed-in shrapnel.
There's always the possibility of a golden BB: even a small warhead can cause tremendous damage if it hits the wrong place. Hospitals will naturally have people in fairly close quarters in an environment like this, as well as a lot of oxygen tanks and fuel moving around. It doesn't look like secondary explosives, but sometimes that's hard to identify.
Rumors on Twitter are that it was a test of a special longer range missile that exploded the fuel all at once. Not saying they’re necessarily true, but that could explain it if so.
Everyone on twitter does 10 different routines of 5 dimensional hyperspace mental gymnastics at the same time. That a bunch of team A are doing it doesn't really prove anything, because teams B-Z also are. Better to focus on good arguments.
Maybe, I'm skeptical by nature especially from a conflict and alleged atrocity such as this. The photos to me could also fit the signature of an Air Burst JDAM. If you had a target - or group of targets - in an open area like a parking lot, using an air burst munition makes the most sense and causes the most damage. However I am not an expert.
Maybe I'm skeptical or biased but I still don't buy it. Which begs the question if these photos sway the Arab powers and their people one way or the other.
"JDAM" is a really broad category (if you really want to be technical, it's the guidance kit rather than the weapon system), but at least common ones are 200 lbs to 1000 lbs of high explosive. That's... really not consistent with what we're seeing here, even in airburst configuration, nor was the videos.
Similarly, the impact pattern just isn't anything like you'd expect from an airburst; things are pushed away from the impact site, not crumpling from a big overpressure wave, not just in the cars immediately around the impact site but also nearby roof tiles or building windows.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.
Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).
It'll be awhile before we know with any certainty who bombed the hospital, if ever. But the reasons you listed are not very convincing that Israel did not do it. There's numerous potential points of failure in the kill-chain that could result in an own-goal for the Israelis. Israel had been lobbing thousands of explosives into buildings in Gaza for the entirety of last week, so it's a prime environment for those fuck-ups to occur. I think it's more likely that it was bombed by Israel, but also probably unintentional.
It doesn’t look anything like the blast of a Palestinian missile. Israel gains the infliction of terror on a population seeking shelter that they want to displace as much and as fast as possible. Hamas has never shown an interest in bombing their own hospitals (in this scenario they want the population to stay in Gaza), but Israel has attacked hospitals before and recently attacked a border crossing.
The discourse coming out of Israel has been extremist lately, with Netanyahu calling this a battle between “the children of light and the children of darkness”.
So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters. Then they decide to throw a missile at a hospital and kill 1500+ civilians at the same time, because? If the response is to hasten civilian departure / ethnic cleansing, then there’s a whole escalation hierarchy that doesn’t involve that level of bad press.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
2rafa 1yr ago
So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters.
Considering the counterfactual...
Over 12,000 Hamas rockets have been fired in the past 15 years, killing a total of 33 Israelis. What are the chances that a single "malfunctioning" Hamas rocket killed 800+ people? It happened to fall on a weapons cache? What are the chances of that?
It seems more likely this is the case of a weapon working extremely effectively as it was engineered. That means the two most likely possibilities are a Hamas false flag or Israeli strike... Betting markets seem to buy into the Israeli story, I can't wrap my mind around the unlikelihood of a rocket with such a poor mortality track record malfunctioning and then hitting what was possibly the most vulnerable space in Northern Gaza...
The “surgical” strikes have already killed journalists and innocent civilians. But also: are you sure there will be bad press? We will have to wait and see what kind of propaganda Israel cooks up. Already they posted on Twitter, then deleted, a video “proving” that it was Hamas who launched the attacks.
Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?
I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
I thought it was 40 children killed and it seems like at least one child was in fact beheaded? Have you seen the footage? I thought the kid burnt alive while still holding the teddy bear was pretty bad imho.
Islamic extremists absolutely would do that. These same ones shot up a whole music festival and murdered innocent children and took toddlers as hostages. But we are supposed to believe killing babies is too far? There is almost no amount of savagery by Islamic extremists that should shock you at this point, especially after ISIS, but here we are I guess.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
2rafa 1yr ago
It's fair to withhold judgment as I'm sure we'll get more information. But the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty shows they are capable of engaging in apparently insane behavior and then getting away with it with implausible and disproven denials.
Just a note for the "Israel wouldn't do something with so much political downside" perspective.
Still finding the casualty count weird. We knowwhat happens when a Scud hits a crowded and ill-armored building, and almost all of the arms involved here are sub-Scud payload-wise. I'd expect hospital patients to be more vulnerable than soldiers, but this much more? Maybe if something big on the ground cooked off.
A possibly-intercepted SCUD crashing into a building? I could see that being on the low end, and it still inflicted ~130 casualties. If the hospital were significantly more densely populated than a 100-man barracks and mess hall, maybe the figures make more sense.
I’m seeing a 600kg payload for a SCUD and no idea of what weapons the IDF is deploying.
I'm not sure if the Iron Dome interceptor -- and the bright rocket flare is definitely an interceptor -- that's the focus of the first fifteen seconds of these videos is related, or just what distracted the cameramen before a separate rocket launched into the disaster.
EDIT: strike that, I'm not convinced the prolonged rocket flare and airborne detonation is proof it was an interceptor. Hassams don't act like that, even during the ascent phase, but some of the longer-range rockets might./EDIT
I don't do rocket science, but in the general aviation world the rule of thumb for freefall is 3-10 seconds per 1000 foot drop, and napkin math for a powered-but-sub-mach rocket gives a limit of almost a second per 1000 foot distance. It's possible that the Iron Dome interceptor EDIT: or an internal failure /EDIT damaged a guidance surface without breaking up the rocket's motor or general structure, and then you get close to normal (or even higher) speed but a wildly wrong direction. That's... not impossible, although I'd be weirded out by the multiple detonations, but there's a lot of OSI people giving it credence so what do I know.
IF the IDF is telling the truth, which isn't a given, it's possible that the second flash of light while the cameramen are looking upwards at the interceptor was a separate launch, which misfired into far too shallow an angle or with partial motor failures, and the near-instant impact is the rocket working up to speed and hitting the ground. But they're really too close in time for the claimed rocket trajectory. Maybe a motor failure and detonation in mid-air for the first flash shortly after launch, then the payload impacted on a ballistic trajectory?
Dunno. It's pretty far outside of my field of focus.
EDIT: and to be clear, I don’t think Hamas has or even wants SCUDs specifically; they’re just about similar in yield to the upper bound of known rockets in the Strip, which we have a known mass casualty incident.
It appears they zoom in on a rocket that gets intercepted or fails mid-air. A flash from below is seen, then zoom out, then what is supposedly the hospital explodes.
If this video is indeed of the hospital explosion, then I don't see any way that this could be anything other than a Palestinian misfire.
I mean, what's the alternative? That an (apparently very large) Palestinian missile failed just above that hospital and then right when you would expect the debris to fall to the ground, just coincidentally at that point an IDF bomb crashes into the hospital? What are the odds!
If this was the Israelis, they clearly weren't planning on owning it... how insanely lucky for them then that a Palestinian rocket failed just above that hospital seconds before they blew it up. "Well Shlomo, glad that rocket failed exactly when and where it did, I honestly had no idea how we were gonna spin this."
that video is strange. the rocket somehow morphs into an interceptor, and then the payload lands on the hospital?
here's a sync of a video recorded from the ground, and the al jazeera footage: https://is2.4chan.org/pol/1697578222179044.webm - there's clearly an initial flash before the main explosion, perfectly in sync, in both videos, so it seems likely that this was the explosion. the al jazeera video is at 7 pm israeli time, which is earlier than any news report i've seen of it.
that video looks plausible, and is taken directly from the livestream so unlikely to be doctored - one rocket noticeably goes in a different, lower direction from its compatriots, disappears, and you can see a bright flash ten seconds later at 20:00:11 that could be the explosion from the ground, followed by a zoom in on something on fire. bbc first reported it at 20:25 israel time. al jazeera first reported it at 19:49 israel time, so that would make the video irrelevant. another issue is that the timestamps from that livestream are all different. israel also updated that tweet without the video, so something fucky's definitely going on.
I’m 90% sure there was a weapons cache on the premises. There are only so many giant hospitals in Gaza, and Hamas’s only winning weapons are human shields and international sympathy. We know Hamas has other “dual-purpose” hospitals, why not this one too?
I’m not sure I buy the narrative that it was a Palestinian rocket that set it off though. Seems almost too perfect.
The wording on this tweet makes me think it was a Palestinian rocket intercepted by the Iron Dome close to the hospital. Which would be a huge cluster**** for everyone however you split it.
The pro Israel argument is that the hospital had ammo storage under it. This doesn't make sense though because there doesn't seem to be a secondary explosion.
The whole thing seems weird as hell to me. Definitely will be adjusting my priors as this shakes out.
You've got to love the way that Trudeau quote is phrased, the snarky, "just be a decent person" style of tone that scrubs the incident of any context or dispute. It's genuinely hard to believe that someone could fail to understand that such a rule isn't actually tenable.
Whichever way this one swings, one thing I noted that almost as soon as info on this dropped on my TL, I also started seeing pro-Israelis going "Actually Hamas did it! No Israeli aircraft on the region!" which is, like, how the hell do you know this?
Whichever conflict, whichever atrocity, it will always pay for partisans of whichever side to go start going "actually it was the other guys who did it! It's been proven!" as soon as there's news of their side potentially committing an atrocity. Seen it plenty of times during Ukraine war, seen it in other contexts (I'm not sure I've seen many right-wing terrorist shootings in Europe or elsewhere where there weren't immediate chan posts going "The shooter was a Muslim and shouted Allahu Akbar, eyewitnesses saw it!" when there were news of it happening, for example), seen it in this war.
Whichever conflict, whichever atrocity, it will always pay for partisans of whichever side to go start going "actually it was the other guys who did it!
This conflict started with one side publically committing atrocities on social media, so forgive me for not treating the two sides as equally likely to commit atrocities.
It's quite possible it's unintentional rather than an IDF hit or a false flag; Hamas has been firing a lot of rockets out, and especially as they move to older ammo they're going to have their already-high misfire rate increase, and some of the bigger rockets don't die easy after an intercept.
The numbers are also... weird, either way. Neither the typical IDF nor the typical Hamas impactor have the sort of dispersal or energy payload that you'd expect to kill a hundred people in a single strike, even assuming tightly clustered beds and the sort of nearby flammables common to hospitals (eg, oxygen tanks, fuel reserves).
I have seen theories that the hospital was used by Hamas to store other explosive devices, hence the bigger impact than we could expect.
It also appears that a great number of children were sleeping in the courtyard - their parents might have sent them to sleep there as a safe haven. Whoever is at fault, this is a monumental tragedy and will be one for the history books.
It's interesting reading A.Vorobey (old rationalist blogger, Soviet-Israeli Google SWE, epistemic minor league, math, poetry, puns, very much the same Jewish Rationalist stock our community ultimately descends from, except with biological children) these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified (he's not very connected to its more virile, younger side). Here he is from October 13, independently making the comparison to Dresden:
In a nutshell, for those who really want to understand, I don't have time for arguments or careful framing with all the references:
The Israeli army has dropped 6000 bombs since the start of the war, and a report from the army says it's about 4000 tons. I first estimated from at 1000 tons, using a typical 500 lb bomb size I saw somewhere, but I may have been wrong about that. The argument works with both the 1000 ton estimate and the 4000 ton estimate.
According to Wikipedia about 4000 tons were dropped on Dresden Feb 13-15, 1945 and casualties are estimated at 25,000 to 100,000. I believe that the fact that Gaza has less than 2000 casualties shows - in this comparison - that Israel bombs selectively, on buildings and targets known to be Hamas-related. Surely sometimes mistakes and innocent casualties happen. The Dresden development was apparently (can be verified) much less crowded than Gaza.
Further, I have come across the following convincing evidence that we are nevertheless trying to avoid civilian casualties: 1) a general warning at the beginning of the war telling residents of different neighborhoods in Gaza which areas to move to for safety; 2) although we announced that we were eliminating the need to practice "knock on the roof", in some cases it has been documented in recent days, the army seems to be using it according to circumstances; 3) there have been examples of calls/texts to residents of a particular high-rise before a missile 4) we have not just sent a warning to residents of northern Gaza to temporarily move to southern Gaza, but are expending considerable effort to make them aware of it, including thousands of fliers in Arabic printed and dropped from airplanes.
People who find a moral equivalence between thugs entering a peaceful village and killing everyone in the streets and in their homes, women, the elderly and children, and the army bombing terrorist targets in dense urban environment and, despite considerable efforts to avoid it, killing civilians in the process, are scum.
I suppose that with all those qualifiers about density and scum all it will be no great shame indeed if a hospital or two is vaporized. Or, indeed, if any other necessary price is paid. After all,
Shylock may have his pound of flesh but only if he doesn't spill a drop of blood.
Israel may defend itself, but only if no civilian is harmed.
In other words:
Shylock does not get his bond.
Israel may not defend itself.
Only abstract rights for Jews, and no "Christian" love.
these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified
I really appreciated watching him reach his limit of rationality. Seeing his old Ukrainian school bombed by Russian troops affected him emotionally, but he still held on and stuck to "here's what Ukrainian sources say, here's what Russian sources say, here's what I can reasonably discard, here's what's left and that why I on balance support Ukraine". But Hamas has struck (literally) too close to home, so Anatoly switched to "I am an Israeli Jew, of course I support IDF in their heroic struggle against Palestinian terrorism", no rationalization or evaluating if the CTO brings two sides closer to a peaceful resolution needed.
I appreciate this looks like a neat story, but FWIW that's not how it looks from my perspective. I was firmly and openly on Ukraine's side from the beginning (before my school was bombed), I'm even more obviously on Israel's side, but I do try to avoid descending into propaganda on both. In particular, I don't think I affirmed any factual claims favoring "my side" if I didn't feel they were strongly supported by rational standards. This actually didn't work out very well for me so far with Hamas, as the reality turned out to have been worse than I'd assumed, three or four times. E.g. I felt it was very likely that beheaded babies were a throwaway rumor that caught fire and blew up massively for obvious reasons, but after a few days more solid (if not ironclad) support for some beheaded babies appeared (I do not want to go evaluate this more closely).
The degree of emotional involvement is very different, to be sure.
orthoxerox
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anatoly 1yr ago
I think the following passage irked me the most (I don't know if you still blog in English, translation mine):
I consider people that can draw a moral equivalence between thugs that enter a peaceful settlement and kill everyone in the streets and in the homes, women, elders and children, and an army that bombs terrorist targets in a high-density environment and, despite significant efforts to avoid it, kills non-combatants as collateral damage, to be vile scum.
You have to make this comparison at some point. The moral weight of collateral damage might be low, but it's not zero. Sooner or later you have to stop and look at the result:
your enemy has killed a thousand innocent people in a killing spree, you have killed a thousand innocent people in precise surgical strikes because your enemy used them as human shields, but also completely destroyed the enemy
your enemy has killed a thousand innocent people in a killing spree, you have killed ten thousand innocent people in precise surgical strikes because your enemy used them as human shields, wounded another hundred thousand, destroyed the property of another million, but the enemy is still alive, well and plotting retaliation
Drawing moral equivalence in the first example can't be justified, but I don't think that everyone who says "both sides resort to what is effectively terrorism to achieve their goals" in the second example is vile scum, on the contrary, someone who defends the outcome as necessary and inevitable is.
Of course, the real result (both the expected and the actual) will be somewhere between these two.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
orthoxerox
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anatoly 1yr ago
The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
I feel sort of bad about my sneer, Hamas really did an unusually repulsive thing, even by the standards of terrorist acts, and he is still commenting more tepidly than, say, most Ukrainians do wrt Russians. But yes, refreshing to see such clarity.
An interesting coincidence, as I just looked at the Motte for the first time in a year or so, on a whim. Some notes:
obviously I think it'll be a great shame if a hospital or two is vaporized; I am squeamish, as you say.
approximately zero people here in Israel think we bombed a hospital on purpose, even if it was us who did it (and I really don't know). This includes the people who are calling to bomb Gaza into the stone age and at least rhetorically disclaim any concern over any civilian casualties. They, too, don't believe the army would do it even if they, at least rhetorically, would.
given the pattern of bombings and casualties so far, and given the pro/contra incentives on our side (a weaker argument), I tentatively feel a detached rational non-Jewish non-Israeli observer ought to be able to recognize the "Israelis did it on purpose" theory as very unlikely, if not stupid.
if we did it (a big if), it's got to be by mistake. That'd be very tragic, but yeah, consistent with what I wrote on Oct 13, not quite so evil as the Oct 7 massacres. Very different league.
"any other necessary price" is doing a lot of dirty work in your comment, and isn't really how I feel about it, or most Israelis I know. Why would I bother to think about and collect evidence that we're trying to avoid civilian casualties, if I didn't care about it at all and considered whatever happened "a necessary price to be paid"? For brownie points?
On one hand I agree that this event might not even be the IDF's work (in fact this seems more likely now), and if it were IDF, there may be some sort of error (a spectrum of possible error/indifference options). There really isn't a compelling reason for the IDF to vaporize hospitals, from what we know. And on the surface of it, bombarding a mass of civilians is not so nasty as boasting of creatively butchering them… (or is it? Does it make moral sense to feel very differently?)
I wanted to make the comment to the effect that the most bloodthirsty Zniks were/are also uniformly denying Bucha and other more straightforward war crimes of Russia in another war you cover, as if Russian Armed Forces were inherently more squeamish than them; and it'll be ironic to see the same transpire here. But – sure, IDF to Israeli citizens really is not what RAF is to Russian ones.
On the other, I laugh at the handwringing about unwillingness to accept any "necessary" price. Your normal writing reminds me of that piece by Sam Kriss:
Liberal Israelis are obsessed with this idea: of being a normal country, like Denmark, maybe, or New Zealand. A Jewish state, but not a Jew among states, some special case sequestered in its own private ghetto and subject to different rules. A normal country is at peace with its neighbours and itself. In a normal country, you can hang out on the beach and eat falafel and spraypaint angry messages about veganism in a gentrifying downtown neighbourhood. In a normal country, political disputes are about normal things: the tax rate, the health system, the trains. It’s there in the stuff you hear from Israel’s advocates abroad. Why are you singling out this country, when you should be criticising China or Iran instead? How would you expect any other country to respond to Hamas and its rockets? Because that’s what they want to be. Not a messianic hope. Not a light unto the nations. Not a sign of the End Times. Just a normal country, like anywhere else.
[…] Outside Israel, coverage tends to focus on what this new government might mean for the Palestinians. Even for the most committed Zionists in the diaspora, Israel means the opposite of Palestine. But within Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are simply not a political object. All the major parties agree; the occupation will continue indefinitely. Why bother even talking about it? It hardly matters now; Israel hasn’t really depended on Palestinian labour since 1992, and a big chunk of Palestinian capital ends up being invested in Palestine’s only real growth industry, which is the construction of Jewish settlements.
Only echoes survive. I found myself thinking a lot about the last line of that graffitied manifesto. ‘Go VEGAN_._’ So many liberal Israelis have started veering heavily into their veganism. They have the sense that something terrible is happening, that their ordinary consumer lives are structured by a great hidden cruelty, invisible behind concrete walls, unspoken, unacknowledged, something that seems to very faintly mirror the darkest episodes in recent Jewish history. Something is giving them the guilt. And so they decide that it’s the animals. All those harmless cows and sheep, funnelled into the slaughterhouse to meet the shochet’s knife.
But of course you're more self-aware than those NPCs:
мирных палестинцев, которые станут невольными жертвами этой войны, мне жаль, но если нужно выбирать сторону, то для меня выбор очень легкий, мое сердце с израилем. не только потому, что с этой страной меня связывает множество нитей, но и потому что я малодушно стараюсь ставить на победителя, когда он очевиден.
и это как раз тот случай.
I think what repulses me about Kriss (besides his deformed face, his lisp and his molesting a girl on a bus while telling her she should have sex with him because when his parents he would inherit their medium sized house in a nice London suburb) is this annoying, pusillanimous nature to his handwringing. I don’t think it’s particularly Jewish either, it’s not quite Woody Allen neuroticism, it’s more just this general worship of the weak and rejection of any duty or loyalty to the decisions, collective, of his people - even as he identifies with them, and this, this privileged man unwilling to consider what the price of civilization actually is, or has been.
You were discussing some settler shooting at Palestinians a few days ago, I remember the footage was from B’t selem, funded by Soros via the NIF, the charity itself led by an LGBT activist (whose last job was in fact as head of an LGBT group). This may be how gentile whites feel toward Robin DiAngelo or their other DEI types (I dislike them, and to some extent I hate them and am even scared of them, but I don’t feel a visceral disgust in the same way). Maybe you feel this way towards some Russians, I’m not sure, “our people have enough enemies shouting the bailey to your motte, they do not need your help”.
I think that both charity to the weak and the army boot stepping on the unreasonable rabble are the costs of civilization. Both the existence of Soros and the unapologetic violence of IDF.
Israeli settlers are, in my eyes, no better than Chechens expelling Russians from their homes after the fall of local secular religious cult. Brute assabiyah and Bronze Age greed hiding behind the alleged spiritual superiority do not a civilization make. I don't care if they're marginally better behaved than a people on the chopping board of history: it is not their achievement, and I can all too plainly see how any people can be likewise degraded to the point of their victims, becoming «fair game».
At some point whites have alleged that nobody ever is. I think it's a flimsy claim, perhaps just the cry of the guilty consciousness of recent colonizers and genociders. But if there were an objective progression in the ordeal of civility, I suppose it would lie in the direction of the state pretending that this claim is ironclad and its violators are defectors. Even if your state is all based and ethnonationalist as heck.
Han Chinese got Xinjiang all sorted out. Israelis will probably get Palestine all sorted out. As you know, I'm bearish on the former and bullish on the latter. Neither look like the civilization to me. Just alien civilizations on wholly alien trajectories. And those from those civilizations who react to those philosophies like whites do seem more human than the rest.
People who find a moral equivalence between thugs entering a peaceful village and killing everyone in the streets and in their homes, women, the elderly and children, and the army bombing terrorist targets in dense urban environment and, despite considerable efforts to avoid it, killing civilians in the process, are scum
Israelis totally did do massacres of civilians and terrorism way back when, did they moraly improve or do they just no longer need such crude desperate measures? Who knows.
We did it a bit, Deir Yassin is the most famous incident. But: 1) we stopped back in the 50s; 2) it was on the level of "dozens of men in the same village captured by our soldiers during active war", not hundreds or thousands including women and children; 3) people who did it hid it from their superiors and the public, they didn't boast of it proudly. The modality of "go around a village or a town and just indiscriminately murder everyone, sometimes gruesomely" is something different altogether, and I don't think we did it at all after Biblical times.
Israel has the benefit of a working government and strong institutions, which allows them to have an army to do their dirty work and leave the hands of the civilian settlers who enjoy the fruits of conquest and polite, institutionalized slaughter without blood directly on their hands.
Right. The problem with a rule of "You can't bomb anything that's got a red crescent on it" is obvious. The problem with trying to fix that with a rule of "You can't bomb anything that's got a red crescent on it except in various circumstances " is the rule swallows the exceptions.
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Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
A Gazan hospital has been hit, allegedly by a missile, allegedly by an Israeli missile: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/least-500-victims-israeli-air-strike-hospital-gaza-health-ministry-2023-10-17/
Here is why this seems incredibly unlikely to me:
Israel gains nothing from this.
Israel loses a lot from this.
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.
Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).
The narrative around this is already forming and I suspect that we will never be free of knowing that Israel for sure bombed a hospital (maybe they did).
This will be a major inflection point in this war. Causalities are approaching 1000 people (started at 500, now at 800)
Edit: here’s also why I’m so suspicious of this. If it’s true that Israel bombed this hospital, it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them. The 10/7 Hamas attacks were terrible. This is just as bad. Pull our aircraft carriers back, no aid, nothing. Still send in some bad hombres to get our citizens out, but other than that Israel is on its own, and I don’t want to hear any ridiculous moralizing from any us politician ever again.
Edit2: There are allegedly demonstrations happening in several countries now. Extremely dynamic news environment. Nobody knows wtf is going on. Israel is starting to get their narrative together about the cause of this, but it's way too late for them to get ahold of it.
Edit3: allegedly a video of both the initial rocket launch, as well as the explosion: https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1714379242983846126
This matches up with the very first video of the rocket hitting the hospital, and answers why the guy filming was filming (because there were a bunch of rockets going overhead)
Does anyone know of a video of a Hamas rocket landing from a ground POV? The sound of the hospital blast is identical to a JDAM missile sound, but I want to hear if a Hamas rocket sounds similar.
"JDAM missile" isn't a thing, JDAM is a guidance package attached to a bomb.
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What's this about a "JDAM missile" sound from the video? I heard something that sounded a lot like a missile launching, but JDAMs don't have engines.
The bottom link in this comment is a pretty good match for the sound: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/149933?context=8#context
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IDF says this is an intercept of Hamas: https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1714548529538953637
Guy on the intercept say the rockets were being shot from a cemetery behind the hospital.
Intercept of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a separate organization of Hamas.
I know, since these orgs are currently co-operating a lot of people are going to consider it inconsequential which specific organization did it (if we believe the Israeli narrative), but it's still the sort of a minor thing that sticks to my craw.
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https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1714525590873575600
Photograph of the aftermath in the daytime.
Yeah this basically confirms the Israeli story.
There was a lot of videos floating around supposedly of the aftermath. Really makes it feel like this was an actual, coordinated effort to rile up the Muslim world, and that it worked. Damn.
It's rather amazing that the entire world was ultra eager to believe an unvalidated report from a Palestinian spokesperson that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza and 500+ people died.
With priors like these, Israel's at a significant disadvantage in the information war here.
American media organizations shamed themselves uncritically repeating an unverified claim as fact. Which is indeed bad news for Israel.
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Tentatively, I can maybe chalk it up to "If it bleeds, it leads." A hospital blowing up and killing 500 people is a hell of a story regardless of which side caused it, you get a lot of clicks/eyeballs publishing that.
And my priors are that Israel's weaponry is MUCH more likely to cause that sort of devastation than Palestine's.
In fact, I remember thinking "it's pretty freaking implausible that a rocket just happens to blow up a hospital and kill hundreds RIGHT when Hamas needs a massive PR win."
But I also couldn't imagine a Hamas rocket leveling a building even with a direct hit.
Turns out the simple explanation was the true one: It didn't.
Perhaps a result of my own ignorance with respect to explosives and my observation of 9/11, I find this surprising. I would have thought that it wouldn't take much to take down a building, even one as big as a hospital, as long as it hit the load-bearing parts, and I figured that hitting those load-bearing parts wasn't particularly unlikely in the crapshoot of battle. I suppose buildings, possibly especially in Gaza, must be hardier structures than I'd initially thought.
(Properly constructed) Buildings don't want to fall down; the bigger they are the less they want to fall.
It takes a truly stupendous explosion to actually level a building. The thing that really fucks up a structure is water or fire damaging the footings/weakening enough of the steel that it starts to get wobbly; then the buildings own weight.
That's why bursting/firebombing mix is the trad way to destroy a city: The bursting bombs blow open lots of shit and spread burnable material; the firebombs set everything off and start a firestorm that kills lots of people and makes buildings unsafe after the fact.
That's why houses get totalled by even medium fires, actually.
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Another comparison. >2500 lbs of explosives basically scooped 1/3 of the building away, but the rest stayed up.
Structural steel is amazingly strong stuff. I’d expect skyscrapers like the WTC to be the upper end of vulnerability, if only because of the lower cross-section.
Oh yes, I remember being in grade school when that happened. I suppose 9/11 must have left a bigger impression on me (which is probably unsurprising), because I recall being impressed that the building was still standing and seemed mostly fine except for that 1/3 that was obliterated.
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IIRC the 9/11 impacts would not have brought down the towers without the subsequent fires (from lots of aviation fuel) weakening the building frame.
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My priors are based on the fact that I've never heard of a rocket fired by Palestine doing any significant damage to a structure upon impact.
And the whole problem is that a rocket without a decent guidance system is probably not going to hit the loadbearing structural elements by chance.
I'm going to try to find a source on the lack of destruction from the rockets but uh, googling "Palestine Rocket" won't be helpful right now for obvious reasons.
Edit: Here's a source from 2009. Capabilities could have changed since then but I doubt it.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/08/06/rockets-gaza/harm-civilians-palestinian-armed-groups-rocket-attacks
Hamas has done some development over the last decade, both with newer and heavier variants of the homemade Qassam, and with more imports with much larger payloads. I don't know enough on the matter to say whether the larger payloads of a Fajir5 or M302 could take down a building without being a golden bb, but they're large enough to start hitting the 'evacuate nearby barricaded structures' part of the ATF bingo card.
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Thanks for the link, and this is also a very good point. If buildings were as fragile as I'd believed, I would expect to hear about buildings being leveled all the time both by terrorists and by armies. The fact that such events are notable rather than banal was a sign that I could have noticed.
The best way to level a building, short of a nuke, is to fill it with an explosive mixture and ignite it. But that's hard to do with a missile, a bit more practical for a terrorist, and eminently achievable for someone working on natural gas lines without knowing what they're f---ing doing (usually trying to steal gas).
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Even ‘reputable’ News sources like the BBC were leading with ‘Israeli strike on hospital kills 500’, kind of wild. Maybe there will be an internal inquiry there.
One would hope. Both this and the Ukraine conflict have been an absolute embarrassment of just uncritically rereporting straight up propaganda, not only from whoever is considered on "our" side but on any side. MSM has been little better than internet sewer of social media, probably because thats where the journalists hang out and get their information and the only thing that matters is producing more "content" and being first.
I wonder how it feels to work at these places? Are people not ashamed?
If anyone in a mainstream media organisation was capable of being ashamed their coverage of the Trump years would have led them to resign already anyway.
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Okay yeah, I believe the IDF now. I wouldn’t put it past them to hit a hospital if they thought it was an important target, but I don’t think they’d bomb a parking lot full of civilians.
Also looks small, as others have noticed. This looks like an explosion that killed 20 people, not 200.
Fires and especially fuel fires can be more deadly than they look at first glance, particularly in crowded areas or if people were sleeping in the cars, or if people were trampled trying to escape.
But yeah, even if I'd put higher than twenty in the realm of the possible -- if people were actively sheltering in the cars, I could see mid-fifties at the higher end of the plausible -- there's no way this was anywhere near the sort of humanitarian disaster that was getting publicized the previous night. Still bad, but duplex-fire rather than Grenfell. I'd expect Hamas to exaggerate casualty counts, but this isn't even the sort of thing you could squint at and pretend it sounds legit.
This is... actually less ground impact than I expected just given the videos of the initial impact. More evidence in favor of a rocket breakup, I guess, along with either a 'golden bb' hitting some fuel storage (though it's not in the impact crater?) or a lot of unused rocket fuel being left.
Whatever the casualty count was (and it could still be pretty bad - the parking lot was reportedly packed), the initial claim from Hamas was very obviously bullshit simply from how quickly it came out.
Yeah, and Hamas has a tendency to make pretty dubious claims for casualty counts even when they've had enough time to count bodies.
(along with a tendency to conflate military, combatant, and noncombatant injuries and fatalities)
This is bizarrely blatant even compared to the typical stuff, though. Similar in scale to the Jenin "massacre" (West Bank, rather than Gaza), but Jenin took some effort to disprove and a lot of the formal structure for reporting didn't have any way to check. Some media groups are going to provide cover anyway, I guess?
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Is there any confirmation of the casualty numbers?
From whom? There is no possible trustworthy source here. No pictures (I'm aware of) show anything like the scale claimed though.
I dunno, video footage of a couple hundred bodies? Red Crescent Society? I'm perfectly happy to accept dubious evidence as useful.
There's a photo of some burned cars in a parking lot. Which is rather unrelated to any claims of a bombed hospital with 500 dead. There certainly weren't hundreds of bodies piled onto the burned part of that parking lot.
The main buildings of the supposedly bombed hospital are visible in that photo.
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Also, there is no meaningful crater, not all windows are blown out of nearby buildings or cars, etc... I have a really hard time seeing this being the aftermath of a targeted missile strike, this looks like the aftermath of what was mostly a fire.
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As a comparison, pictures from car bomb in Mogadishu, October 2022, which killed around 100: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/29/1132604501/somalia-mogadishu-car-bombs-civilian-casualties
July 2016 bombing in Iraq, ~300 dead + 300 injured: https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/07/middleeast/iraq-baghdad-bomb-toll-rises/index.html
Compared to these two, the Gaza photo looks way less severe.
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This looks... very minor. Was it just a fuel fire?? Were the videos fake?
Wouldn't be the first time videos from some entirely different incident were (re)used for propaganda purposes.
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This doesn’t seem to correspond to the claimed body-count nor the explosion videos, which seemed massive. So Hamas was lying about the deaths, that makes sense, but the videos seemed real enough - so what gives? I’m honestly confused now.
Twitter speculation is that these rockets were fuel-heavy since they were supposed to hit very distant targets.
Also makes sense given how much was damaged by fire versus wrecked by the blast.
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Real explosions don't look like movie explosions. The layman perception of what big explosions look like comes largely from fuel fires for special effects.
Oh, wow. That’s very informative, thank you.
But then, there were other videos which supposedly showed JDAM explosions that looked quite cinematic.
(It’s also my understanding that JDAM is a conversion kit rather than an actual weapon’s name, so I’m taking it with a huge dose of skepticism)
The larger munitions (MK84s have 2000 lbs warheads) do have a certain cinematic sense to them in real-time. They're not really bright in the way movie explosions, are, though, and to the extent that there are flashes at all they're vastly outweighed by the dust kicked up. A number of videos with slow-motion cameras (MK82s have 500-pound warheads) from test fires do look more cinematic, but it's important to keep in mind that those blasts are over in tenths of a second, and at real-time unless they drop at a shallow angle you're going to catch them primarily by the dust clouds.
((I'll skip over some weirder configurations, like inert bombs or naval mines.))
The trick's that the fire and heat, barring some very specialized cases like explosions in an enclosed area or secondary explosives, are generally not the main source of damage for detonations. What kills and destroys is the pressure wave. The fire and heat is usually remnants of remaining explosive material that didn't burn off before the pressure wave overtook them.
FEMA has a good document (cw: probably will get you Put On a List) on this from a Blue Team perspective trying to reduce harm, and also what sort of buildings are more or less vulnerable to explosives. Chart 4-11 gives a (very approximate) point for where concrete columns fail. Unfortunately, it's harder to predict for buildings as a class; most modern buildings are designed to require near-complete failure of all main supports to collapse rather than merely being unsafe, but sometimes you'll find a dumb decision come in that lets sections peal off from relatively minor hits. Older US residential buildings are often more vulnerable due to the frame structure leaving the building vulnerable to hits on one or two major supports, while contrast Australia, where cinderblock and concrete everything means buildings often will stay up. I dunno Israeli architecture but I'd expect it tends to the latter side.
Thank you so much for this! I’ve been around guns for a while, but never had any experience with anything explody.
So now it does make sense to me that most of the spectacle in the videos was fuel being dispersed and lit up.
By the way, Israeli and Arab architecture really is much more heavy on the cinderblocks and concrete- wood isn’t used that often at all.
Well, their area is fairly short on wood and forests.
Though Europe is also using wood on much lower scale for home construction than USA, as far as I know. Mostly for different reasons.
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I don't trust aljazeera.com to truthfully show only relevant photos. I don't usually just flatly disbelieve like this, but for them, evidence and statements are worthless. Maybe those are kids injured in this rocket crash, maybe those are unrelated photos deceitfuly added to an article to mislead us.
As someone mostly ignorant of media from the Middle East, I had had the impression that Al Jazeera was a fairly dependable news organization, but certainly the past few days have severely changed this view.
One was seeing a commentator state as fact that Joe Biden uncritically announced after he was fooled into believing that an AI-manipulated photo of a puppy was actually a photo of a baby burnt by Hamas on 10/7. This is obviously false if you've seen the pictures in question, as there is no credibility to the idea that the picture showing the puppy was the original photograph - both the context clues and the actual image quality make it clear that there is no way that the real location had a real puppy in that spot. If Biden was deceived into falsely believing horrors committed by Hamas, it wasn't through this particular claimed manipulation. Yet this claim was stated as fact and unchallenged.
Another was seeing a video title of theirs about this incident, where they made unqualified statements that an Israeli strike hit a hospital and killed 500 people. Even before I did any investigation, I was skeptical just from 500 people being killed in one shot that's like 1/5 of the total number of Palestinians killed from the counterstrikes by this point, and merely finding and counting that many bodies seems likely to take some time. Then, every additional piece of evidence threw doubt on the cause of the attack, and so every news organization would at least have the responsibility to put qualifications, like "sources from Palestine/Gaza/Hamas/Israel/etc. say" or "possibility of" or the like, but there was nothing like that.
Good news is, I wasn't getting much of my news from Al Jazeera anyway, so I won't have to change my news consumption practices much, but it's disappointing, because I was hoping for a good news source with a heavy anti-Israel bend.
It is on topic not concerning Israel etc. For example it is likely to be fairly trustworthy or at least not blatantly biased when reporting on some Poland vs Germany spat.
But they will happily lie to run propaganda against Israel or in support of their funders.
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Isn’t the fact they look the same the counter to the steelman type arguments that Palestinians should fight for their land - blood and soil type arguments. Especially Mizrahi Jews they share a lot of the same genetic ancestry. They just have a different faith but are significantly the same people. Israel isn’t the all European Jewry like they were in the past. Which seems to be an issue shared in all the conflicts today. Russians and Ukraines are nearly the same yet they kill each other.
As has been stated before, a lot of Palestinians are fighting for a specific piece of land that their family formally owned at some time and which was taken from by settlers at some very specific date.
Most Palestinians aren’t the descendants of Ottoman smallholders, it’s unlikely the above is true given the way land ownership worked in the late empire.
I can't possibly know what the actual ratio is, I just said that "a lot" of them are.
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I don't get what you are arguing. Neither Russians and Ukrainians, nor Jews and Arabs, fight over genetically substantiated claims to the land. Well, there is some of that – Russians appeal to the absence of genetic ethnic uniqueness to downplay Ukrainian claim to sovereignty, Ukrainians appeal to evidence for the opposite, Arabs call Jews «Poles», Jews insist that Palestinian Arabs are just generic Arabs and don't get to claim a special state – but that's a side show. Jews, whether Ashkenazim or not, think they are entitled to the land based on their religion. Palestinians don't care about Fst distance to Mizrahim, they are a separate people. Humans don't explicitly think about objective genetic similarity as a basis for cooperation or enmity, only weird Western racists do.
Do you have some source expanding on that? It is kind of funny (for multiple reasons) if true.
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Those photos are incredibly tame compared to the videos. It’s gruesome.
The entire situation is heartbreaking.
...and a cynic might suspect intentional.
The cynic in me thinks that Hamas would do this to themselves, on purpose.
The consequentialist math might work. How many (Palestinian) lives are saved by avoiding an Israeli invasion? More than 500?
You are not wrong
Why is no one talking about it being a Christian-run hospital. That's at least an interesting wrinkle in my opinion. Christians have to be getting run roughshod in the crossfire.
Here is a Christian organization and its beneficiaries, the target of the most brazen escalation since the opening salvo, and we have Muslims and Jews pointing fingers at each other.
I think because it’s in no one’s interest to say it’s Christian. Muslims want to be sympathetic to Palestine and distancing themselves from the hospital by saying it’s Christian does nothing for them. Israel wants Europe and the US on its side, so saying it’s Christian does nothing for them.
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Because to bleed is to live
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It was built by Christians but was it still run by them?
Here's the wiki. I mean I understand the initial skepticism—literally no one is mentioning this. There was a brief edit battle to get the first sentence to say "aka Baptist Hospital," but a power user reverted it.
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Yeah, this is absolutely a humanitarian disaster, regardless of the underlying cause.EDIT: Nope, apparently not! It's still bad, but it looks like duplex-fire bad rather than Grenfale-disaster bad.
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Israel is alleging it was a mis-fired Hamas rocket that hit the hospital. [https://v.redd.it/l1aidkvb4uub1]
Israel doesn't have a history of lying about this sort of thing. If they did it, I might expect some deflection of blame in some other way, but not outright denial that they did it -- firm evidence of the providence of the missile will come out in time.
Israel doesn't lie about this sort of thing?
Are you trying to make my point for me? Israel admits attacking the USS Liberty, but there's some dispute over the circumstances ... exactly what I claim would happen if Israel did in fact attack the hospital.
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Huh? You posted this as if this article is definitive proof that Israel lies. Was there nothing newer than 55 years old? And all the official data in that article is consistent with a mistake that they immediately acknowledged and apologized for. The rest is a speculative conspiracy theory which, while not impossible, requires both a conjured motive for Israelis to intentionally attack their most important ally and a perfect coverup lasting for two generations.
Are you used to being in some bubble where "everyone knows" that Israel likes to intentionally attack US ships and hospitals, so this link is the kind of "gotcha!" you were hoping for? Or were you just hoping nobody would actually click it?
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The linked Wikipedia article says: "two hours after the attack began, Israel informed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv that its military forces had mistakenly attacked a U.S. Navy ship"
Without knowing anything else it does seem that Israel indeed doesn't lie about this sort of thing.
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I don't understand a lot of things in life - and thoughts like these rank among the top.
Israel is surrounded by people's who all basically want them destroyed. One group decided to invade them and kill (1000, 1200?) of them and take hostages. Said people store munitions in hospitals and schools.
By every conceivable human metric that isn't of the last 50 years, Israel has the absolute human right to completely glaze everything around them until they are happy and secure.
But they don't. They hold back. Always. For decades.
And you're upset they blew up a hospital ... Or didn't.
The problem with this statement is that while this would be fine using the human metrics of the past, the last 50 years actually took place in the last 50 years as opposed to during the Bronze age. If you actually want to adopt the standards of the Bronze Age then Israel simply does not exist, because the holocaust would have been just as fine by those standards as the proposed "glazing" of everything around them. It is solely due to the growing understanding of humanity that genocide is a great wrong that Israel and the Jewish people exist in the first place, and Israel demonstrating that they don't actually care about the evils of genocide, they just want to be wearing the boot rather than under it, is enough to make a lot of people reconsider their support. Don't forget the precedent your support of these actions sets either - even just advocating for the nuclear genocide of the Arab world is enough to permanently destroy your credibility when it comes to condemning racists or white nationalists, who are in many cases less extreme in their policy recommendations.
I think we should be a bit more clear here: until they are happy and secure.
They are not secure because the people around them want them dead. The people around them constantly kill them, want to kill them, pray to kill them, hope to kill them, etc
Affixing "until they are happy and secure" to the end of the statement does absolutely nothing to change the thrust of my argument or weaken the point at all. If your standard for moral condemnation is that you have to wait for the white nationalists to be "happy and secure" in their position then you're still going to be ok with them wiping out every single jew in their countries (they wouldn't be happy without that of course).
The crud of your point has seemingly little to do with my thoughts.
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Israel doesn’t exist as restitution for the Holocaust. It exists because influential British Jews persuaded the UK to grant them the territory and then settled and defended it by force. In other words, it exists because it was able to exist, just like every other polity in history. If Israel was reparations for the Holocaust then it should be German soldiers preparing to invade Gaza now, but of course it is not.
The standards of history show that, whatever our current moral judgment of the Holocaust, these events still happen and bullshit morality arguments by an “international community” that doesn’t really care don’t matter, and that is what - primarily - motivates Israel’s defense. The US can afford to claim that it really is about bringing LGBT rights to Afghanistan or whatever, everyone else accepts the eternal realities of geopolitics.
I never claimed this. I was talking about a comparison to a hypothetical world where Bronze-age norms held sway - and in that world there wouldn't be an Israel because nobody would have bothered to stop the holocaust, nor would the few remaining jews have been able to convince the UK to make Israel instead of New Outremer. No Bronze-age nation would ever give a hostile ethnic group a bunch of land, lots of money etc. Hell, they wouldn't even do the same for cousins from a different village!
South Africa. If you flout the conventions of the international community, they have more than enough power to make your lives miserable and crater your economy. North Korea is still standing, but I don't think they're a particularly good model for a society. And remember, these same moral judgements that condemn Israel for wanting to exterminate the Palestinians are the same moral judgements that condemn people who want to exterminate the jews. Destroying those norms and indicating that they have no validity or power, at least in my opinion, would not be terribly great for the jewish people.
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It's a human right to destroy millions of your neighbors? Well that's new.
Israel has created their enemies, instead of making peace with them, or coming to an agreement, they escalate, bully, and oppress. Hopefully we will see how their hubris and chutzpah will be rewarded. Unfortunately they will also drag the US with them to this lesson.
What do you propose Israelis do, that doesn’t condemn us to total destruction?
Negotiate with Hamas and make peace including concessions. Probably something like recognizing Palestine, ending settlements, respecting borders, ending blockades and embargo, whatever it takes I guess.
The concessions Hamas asks for are “go back to Europe or the sea”. They will only agree to a tactical truce, this is their raison d’être. They don’t want to create an independent state, and they could have done this for about two decades now if they did. There’s nothing to recognize in Gaza. Ending the blockade will mean more weapons in the hands of genocidal maniacs. So now what?
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Hamas is the no negotiation political party in Palestine. They are very explicit about that. It's leaders are happy to siphon off billions and live the good life in Qatar and the rank and file soldiers are so ideologically captured they don't know anything except killing Jews and political dissidents.
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Okay, let's say Israel does all of that but then Hamas just keeps attacking all the harder. Then what?
Obviously peace would be ideal, but it takes two sides to make peace, and I've seen no sign Hamas are interested.
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War - it takes war.
And the longer Israel diddles, the longer the suffering before the cleansing spirit of war.
I wish war was never invented. I wish it were obsolete now. But it was, and it isn't.
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Hamas wants the complete destruction of Israel. There are no concessions for that. It's like Jews making concessions to the Nazis.
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In this WaPo article from 2014, this sort of strike and international condemnation seems par for the course.:
Not evidence one way or another, but hiding weapons caches and personel in schools, mosques and hospitals seems to be Hamas' method of operation as is the Israeli response to not incentivise civilian shields in this way.
It seems that Hamas wins either way by doing this. Either they successfully use civilian shields or Israel gets bad press by striking these sorts of targets.
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Doesn't Hamas put bases under hospitals specifically because of this? The two options are either to never bomb hospitals and hence to accept Hamas as the leader in-perpetuity of the region, or to give every available warning to the population to evacuate and then bomb the terrorist base...
Normally a warning is given, making it so much less likely to actually be an Israeli attack.
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Just to play devil's advocate on both sides:
Edit: Wikipedia says the summit with Joe Biden has been cancelled, but Manifold is 98% pretty confident that Biden is still going to Israel.
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Yeah, this doesn't look good for the Israelis at all (assuming we don't get good evidence this was a Hamas self fuck up). They should have gone in boots on the ground earlier. Yes tons of Israelis would have died in direct combat, but one benefit of that is that this sort of stuff which stops people around the world from thinking that you are the "good guys" doesn't happen, and they need to win the international sentiment war if they want to eradicate Hamas. Letting that sore fester long term will be even worse for Israel than the short term cost of lancing the boil.
' we should kill our own people easier so some perpetually online dudes and fake politicians don't get mad at us ' isn't sound warfare strategy.
Israel should bomb every single possible target that holds terrorists or terrorists adjacent merchandise and see what happens after a year.
Except now all their neighbors are rallying around a common cause, so guess that isn't sound warfare strategy either.
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Does Israeli even have the numbers for a ground attack without significant initial strikes? Sure they have 500k soldiers but I’m guess that’s like their entire 20 something population. There are only 15 million Jews in the world.
How many would they lose if they just went in with small arms and didn’t take advantages of their long distinct fires? 100k? Then they still need an army for future needs?
Sure the west can do war without losing a lot of lives but that’s because we evacuate and use fires first.
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My expectation is that IDF will absolutely blow a bunch of innocent civilians up by accident at some point, but this seems way too soon. Seems more plausible that some terrorists firing janky weapons at Israel accidentally shot themselves in the
foothospital.At some point? They've been leveling buildings by the dozen. You can be pretty sure innocent civilians have already been caught up in this.
Sorry, bunch there was not scaled properly. I meant "IDF will absolutely blow up hundreds of innocent civilians in a single strike by accident at some point"
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What are the odds that Israel hit it, but it was an accident?
I concur that intentionally leveling a hospital is just about the worst possible PR. And also that nothing about the Israeli strategy has suggested that they would think it a smart move. But here we are. I’m going to place my bets on a misfire (excusable) or a mistaken target (not so much).
I think that it's possible Hamas was launching rockets near the hospital and the IDF Air Force hit it after seeing a rocket launch from that location, not realizing its a hospital, or realizing too late.
If you look at the video of the one explosion close up, its way larger than any rocket we've seen Hamas launch in this conflict. Pretty clear its a JDAM IMO. Takes a lot of hoop jumping to conclude otherwise.
There's allegedly been at least a couple Fajar-5s launched already, which at 175-200kg payload could pretty easily do that, and the R160s are bigger. And there's supposedly texts from PIJ committing to the use of one just before this launch. The explosion isn't really what's weird, so much as the extremely high casualty numbers, but a bomb in the wrong enough place can do that.
Separately, there's no way the IDF was unaware there was a hospital here. It's a big hospital, and it's been there for freaking ever. If the IDF is firing off JDAMs at hotspots without crosschecking a zone map, that's just culpability with extra steps. Maybe some sort of technical error with the JDAM guidance system, but this sorta distance is margin-of-WWII-era aiming tech.
I saw a video from a couple days ago, which I am too lazy to lookup, in which a plane - or drone - targeted and bombed a source from a rocket launch from overhead. The scenario I am picturing is something like that, a quick trigger pull on a rocket launch source in the middle of the night with lights off or something. It's plausible that a shot from the hip like that could have been done. I imagine the operators and pilots are quite trigger happy at the moment over Gaza. Maybe they don't even have to ask a command chain for a decision like that.
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Seems to be videos now or it being a Hamas misfire. That seems far more likely since their qassams are pieces improvised water pipes turned into rockets.
Are those missiles large enough to do this kind of damage?
I think it's too large for Qassams without a secondary explosion; depending on model they're usually 5-20 kg TNT- or ANFO-shrapnel mixes, plus whatever fuel was left over. This card is absolutely inappropriate for comparison, but it's the sort of thing that the ATF doesn't shoot people for talking about, and I don't think it gives anywhere near the boom present there.
That said, there's other which less commonly-used payloads, and they range from 100lbs-300lbs, often of better high explosives without as much (or any) mixed-in shrapnel.
There's always the possibility of a golden BB: even a small warhead can cause tremendous damage if it hits the wrong place. Hospitals will naturally have people in fairly close quarters in an environment like this, as well as a lot of oxygen tanks and fuel moving around. It doesn't look like secondary explosives, but sometimes that's hard to identify.
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Rumors on Twitter are that it was a test of a special longer range missile that exploded the fuel all at once. Not saying they’re necessarily true, but that could explain it if so.
Lots of hoop jumping from Zionists on twitter right now.
Not a useful contribution, less of this please.
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Everyone on twitter does 10 different routines of 5 dimensional hyperspace mental gymnastics at the same time. That a bunch of team A are doing it doesn't really prove anything, because teams B-Z also are. Better to focus on good arguments.
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Given the daytime photos released, it seems like they were jumping through the correct hoops.
Maybe, I'm skeptical by nature especially from a conflict and alleged atrocity such as this. The photos to me could also fit the signature of an Air Burst JDAM. If you had a target - or group of targets - in an open area like a parking lot, using an air burst munition makes the most sense and causes the most damage. However I am not an expert.
Maybe I'm skeptical or biased but I still don't buy it. Which begs the question if these photos sway the Arab powers and their people one way or the other.
"JDAM" is a really broad category (if you really want to be technical, it's the guidance kit rather than the weapon system), but at least common ones are 200 lbs to 1000 lbs of high explosive. That's... really not consistent with what we're seeing here, even in airburst configuration, nor was the videos.
Similarly, the impact pattern just isn't anything like you'd expect from an airburst; things are pushed away from the impact site, not crumpling from a big overpressure wave, not just in the cars immediately around the impact site but also nearby roof tiles or building windows.
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It'll be awhile before we know with any certainty who bombed the hospital, if ever. But the reasons you listed are not very convincing that Israel did not do it. There's numerous potential points of failure in the kill-chain that could result in an own-goal for the Israelis. Israel had been lobbing thousands of explosives into buildings in Gaza for the entirety of last week, so it's a prime environment for those fuck-ups to occur. I think it's more likely that it was bombed by Israel, but also probably unintentional.
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It doesn’t look anything like the blast of a Palestinian missile. Israel gains the infliction of terror on a population seeking shelter that they want to displace as much and as fast as possible. Hamas has never shown an interest in bombing their own hospitals (in this scenario they want the population to stay in Gaza), but Israel has attacked hospitals before and recently attacked a border crossing.
The discourse coming out of Israel has been extremist lately, with Netanyahu calling this a battle between “the children of light and the children of darkness”.
You claim Hamas wants their population to stay in Gaza. I ask you why do they want that?
Because they are using them as human shields.
Bingo
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Because if the population leaves then Israel will be able to increase their bombing and displace them permanently
Yep. Hamas wants human shields.
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why?
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So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters. Then they decide to throw a missile at a hospital and kill 1500+ civilians at the same time, because? If the response is to hasten civilian departure / ethnic cleansing, then there’s a whole escalation hierarchy that doesn’t involve that level of bad press.
Considering the counterfactual...
Over 12,000 Hamas rockets have been fired in the past 15 years, killing a total of 33 Israelis. What are the chances that a single "malfunctioning" Hamas rocket killed 800+ people? It happened to fall on a weapons cache? What are the chances of that?
It seems more likely this is the case of a weapon working extremely effectively as it was engineered. That means the two most likely possibilities are a Hamas false flag or Israeli strike... Betting markets seem to buy into the Israeli story, I can't wrap my mind around the unlikelihood of a rocket with such a poor mortality track record malfunctioning and then hitting what was possibly the most vulnerable space in Northern Gaza...
Presumably a rocket just fired is still full of fuel. The aftermath pictures don't show much blast damage, instead it burned out.
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what are the chances that Hamas is lying that 800+ people were killed by this strike?
Yeah, the blast zone doesn't look large enough for hundreds of casualties.
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The only reason Israeli casualties are so low is the Iron Dome, which obviously doesn’t defend Gaza, though.
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The “surgical” strikes have already killed journalists and innocent civilians. But also: are you sure there will be bad press? We will have to wait and see what kind of propaganda Israel cooks up. Already they posted on Twitter, then deleted, a video “proving” that it was Hamas who launched the attacks.
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Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?
Track record.
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I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
I acknowledge that this is now the official narrative, but if it's true where did the corpses come from?
Edit to Add: If you as the "Jew Defender" want to argue that the Jews staged the whole thing make that argument, but make it properly.
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There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
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I am not aware of that and still feel that some babies were beheaded, so idk, update accordingly.
At least one young child was beheaded.
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I thought it was 40 children killed and it seems like at least one child was in fact beheaded? Have you seen the footage? I thought the kid burnt alive while still holding the teddy bear was pretty bad imho.
I guess this got removed from the news cycle once it became obviously absurd: https://theintercept.com/2023/10/11/israel-hamas-disinformation/
If you're going to claim that Hamas' strikes against Israel on Oct 7th are all "disinformation" I gotta ask, where did the corpses come from?
Did they actually produce the 40 beheaded baby corpses? Maybe they turned up since the above article was written and I missed it.
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This is getting to be Alex Jones and Sandy Hooks level denial
Did they actually produce the 40 beheaded baby corpses? I may have missed it in which case I retract my comment.
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Islamic extremists absolutely would do that. These same ones shot up a whole music festival and murdered innocent children and took toddlers as hostages. But we are supposed to believe killing babies is too far? There is almost no amount of savagery by Islamic extremists that should shock you at this point, especially after ISIS, but here we are I guess.
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It's fair to withhold judgment as I'm sure we'll get more information. But the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty shows they are capable of engaging in apparently insane behavior and then getting away with it with implausible and disproven denials.
Just a note for the "Israel wouldn't do something with so much political downside" perspective.
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There are many ways Israel could do this that don't involve something quite so brazen, and without this much political downside.
Maybe they overestimated their mastery of the propaganda engine? https://twitter.com/Seamus_Malek/status/1714369464823857604
No propagandist thinks bombing hospitals is smart, whatever kool aid they’re drinking.
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The IDF is claiming that the hospital impact was from a PIJ rocket (Palestine Islamic Jihad?), with some video showing a failed rocket launch
with the right time stamps(maybe not; see below) as one of many in the salvo. Doesn't make it the truth, especially since it's hard to see what hit where, but video evidence is still worth a bit.Still finding the casualty count weird. We know what happens when a Scud hits a crowded and ill-armored building, and almost all of the arms involved here are sub-Scud payload-wise. I'd expect hospital patients to be more vulnerable than soldiers, but this much more? Maybe if something big on the ground cooked off.
A possibly-intercepted SCUD crashing into a building? I could see that being on the low end, and it still inflicted ~130 casualties. If the hospital were significantly more densely populated than a 100-man barracks and mess hall, maybe the figures make more sense.
I’m seeing a 600kg payload for a SCUD and no idea of what weapons the IDF is deploying.
I'm not sure if the Iron Dome interceptor -- and the bright rocket flare is definitely an interceptor -- that's the focus of the first fifteen seconds of these videos is related, or just what distracted the cameramen before a separate rocket launched into the disaster.EDIT: strike that, I'm not convinced the prolonged rocket flare and airborne detonation is proof it was an interceptor. Hassams don't act like that, even during the ascent phase, but some of the longer-range rockets might./EDIT
I don't do rocket science, but in the general aviation world the rule of thumb for freefall is 3-10 seconds per 1000 foot drop, and napkin math for a powered-but-sub-mach rocket gives a limit of almost a second per 1000 foot distance. It's possible that the Iron Dome interceptor EDIT: or an internal failure /EDIT damaged a guidance surface without breaking up the rocket's motor or general structure, and then you get close to normal (or even higher) speed but a wildly wrong direction. That's... not impossible, although I'd be weirded out by the multiple detonations, but there's a lot of OSI people giving it credence so what do I know.
IF the IDF is telling the truth, which isn't a given, it's possible that the second flash of light while the cameramen are looking upwards at the interceptor was a separate launch, which misfired into far too shallow an angle or with partial motor failures, and the near-instant impact is the rocket working up to speed and hitting the ground. But they're really too close in time for the claimed rocket trajectory. Maybe a motor failure and detonation in mid-air for the first flash shortly after launch, then the payload impacted on a ballistic trajectory?
Dunno. It's pretty far outside of my field of focus.
EDIT: and to be clear, I don’t think Hamas has or even wants SCUDs specifically; they’re just about similar in yield to the upper bound of known rockets in the Strip, which we have a known mass casualty incident.
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This is far closer, from the ground: https://twitter.com/SanaSaeed/status/1714374438475399596
Anyone have comparison videos for what a PIJ rocket sounds like?
edit: found one that's plausibly a match on audio: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JS18N7qMX00
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Al-Jazeera footage with a closer view: https://twitter.com/jconricus/status/1714376318136021443
It appears they zoom in on a rocket that gets intercepted or fails mid-air. A flash from below is seen, then zoom out, then what is supposedly the hospital explodes.
If this video is indeed of the hospital explosion, then I don't see any way that this could be anything other than a Palestinian misfire.
I mean, what's the alternative? That an (apparently very large) Palestinian missile failed just above that hospital and then right when you would expect the debris to fall to the ground, just coincidentally at that point an IDF bomb crashes into the hospital? What are the odds!
If this was the Israelis, they clearly weren't planning on owning it... how insanely lucky for them then that a Palestinian rocket failed just above that hospital seconds before they blew it up. "Well Shlomo, glad that rocket failed exactly when and where it did, I honestly had no idea how we were gonna spin this."
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that video is strange. the rocket somehow morphs into an interceptor, and then the payload lands on the hospital?
here's a sync of a video recorded from the ground, and the al jazeera footage: https://is2.4chan.org/pol/1697578222179044.webm - there's clearly an initial flash before the main explosion, perfectly in sync, in both videos, so it seems likely that this was the explosion. the al jazeera video is at 7 pm israeli time, which is earlier than any news report i've seen of it.
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According to this, the video didn’t have the correct time stamps.
Thanks, updated.
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that video looks plausible, and is taken directly from the livestream so unlikely to be doctored - one rocket noticeably goes in a different, lower direction from its compatriots, disappears, and you can see a bright flash ten seconds later at 20:00:11 that could be the explosion from the ground, followed by a zoom in on something on fire. bbc first reported it at 20:25 israel time. al jazeera first reported it at 19:49 israel time, so that would make the video irrelevant. another issue is that the timestamps from that livestream are all different. israel also updated that tweet without the video, so something fucky's definitely going on.
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I’m 90% sure there was a weapons cache on the premises. There are only so many giant hospitals in Gaza, and Hamas’s only winning weapons are human shields and international sympathy. We know Hamas has other “dual-purpose” hospitals, why not this one too?
I’m not sure I buy the narrative that it was a Palestinian rocket that set it off though. Seems almost too perfect.
The wording on this tweet makes me think it was a Palestinian rocket intercepted by the Iron Dome close to the hospital. Which would be a huge cluster**** for everyone however you split it.
Yes "failed shooting" would technically cover the use of Iron Dome, but make it seem like a malfunctioning rocket in a Motte and Bailey.
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The pro Israel argument is that the hospital had ammo storage under it. This doesn't make sense though because there doesn't seem to be a secondary explosion.
The whole thing seems weird as hell to me. Definitely will be adjusting my priors as this shakes out.
Could the ammo have cooked off, either on its own or because of Hamas’ incompetence/poor quality control?
The videos seem to have audio of a missile of some kind whizzing through the air before the boom.
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This is low-key hilarious. Hamas found the cheat code.
Commit terrorist attack: Western armies hunt you down with the force of 1000 suns.
Commit terrorist attack and hide in a hospital: Western nations will denounce anyone who tries to stop you in the strongest possible terms.
You've got to love the way that Trudeau quote is phrased, the snarky, "just be a decent person" style of tone that scrubs the incident of any context or dispute. It's genuinely hard to believe that someone could fail to understand that such a rule isn't actually tenable.
I despise Trudeau. All of his public statements are tuned for maximum sanctimony.
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Whichever way this one swings, one thing I noted that almost as soon as info on this dropped on my TL, I also started seeing pro-Israelis going "Actually Hamas did it! No Israeli aircraft on the region!" which is, like, how the hell do you know this?
Whichever conflict, whichever atrocity, it will always pay for partisans of whichever side to go start going "actually it was the other guys who did it! It's been proven!" as soon as there's news of their side potentially committing an atrocity. Seen it plenty of times during Ukraine war, seen it in other contexts (I'm not sure I've seen many right-wing terrorist shootings in Europe or elsewhere where there weren't immediate chan posts going "The shooter was a Muslim and shouted Allahu Akbar, eyewitnesses saw it!" when there were news of it happening, for example), seen it in this war.
This conflict started with one side publically committing atrocities on social media, so forgive me for not treating the two sides as equally likely to commit atrocities.
This conflict started approximately a hundred years ago and the Zionists/Israel have commited multiple atrocities during the scope of this span.
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It's quite possible it's unintentional rather than an IDF hit or a false flag; Hamas has been firing a lot of rockets out, and especially as they move to older ammo they're going to have their already-high misfire rate increase, and some of the bigger rockets don't die easy after an intercept.
The numbers are also... weird, either way. Neither the typical IDF nor the typical Hamas impactor have the sort of dispersal or energy payload that you'd expect to kill a hundred people in a single strike, even assuming tightly clustered beds and the sort of nearby flammables common to hospitals (eg, oxygen tanks, fuel reserves).
I have seen theories that the hospital was used by Hamas to store other explosive devices, hence the bigger impact than we could expect.
It also appears that a great number of children were sleeping in the courtyard - their parents might have sent them to sleep there as a safe haven. Whoever is at fault, this is a monumental tragedy and will be one for the history books.
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Israel's ambassador to UK just invoked firebombing of Dresden as a justification, that makes me think they would absolutely blow up a hospital.
It's interesting reading A.Vorobey (old rationalist blogger, Soviet-Israeli Google SWE, epistemic minor league, math, poetry, puns, very much the same Jewish Rationalist stock our community ultimately descends from, except with biological children) these days because he's very squeamish, very eloquent, and fully wed to Israeli culture and currently writes about the horrors of Hamas, how nice are all the people helping tourists, Middle Eastern Castalia blah blah we are fully justified (he's not very connected to its more virile, younger side). Here he is from October 13, independently making the comparison to Dresden:
I suppose that with all those qualifiers about density and scum all it will be no great shame indeed if a hospital or two is vaporized. Or, indeed, if any other necessary price is paid. After all,
We can't have that, can we?
I really appreciated watching him reach his limit of rationality. Seeing his old Ukrainian school bombed by Russian troops affected him emotionally, but he still held on and stuck to "here's what Ukrainian sources say, here's what Russian sources say, here's what I can reasonably discard, here's what's left and that why I on balance support Ukraine". But Hamas has struck (literally) too close to home, so Anatoly switched to "I am an Israeli Jew, of course I support IDF in their heroic struggle against Palestinian terrorism", no rationalization or evaluating if the CTO brings two sides closer to a peaceful resolution needed.
I appreciate this looks like a neat story, but FWIW that's not how it looks from my perspective. I was firmly and openly on Ukraine's side from the beginning (before my school was bombed), I'm even more obviously on Israel's side, but I do try to avoid descending into propaganda on both. In particular, I don't think I affirmed any factual claims favoring "my side" if I didn't feel they were strongly supported by rational standards. This actually didn't work out very well for me so far with Hamas, as the reality turned out to have been worse than I'd assumed, three or four times. E.g. I felt it was very likely that beheaded babies were a throwaway rumor that caught fire and blew up massively for obvious reasons, but after a few days more solid (if not ironclad) support for some beheaded babies appeared (I do not want to go evaluate this more closely).
The degree of emotional involvement is very different, to be sure.
I think the following passage irked me the most (I don't know if you still blog in English, translation mine):
You have to make this comparison at some point. The moral weight of collateral damage might be low, but it's not zero. Sooner or later you have to stop and look at the result:
Drawing moral equivalence in the first example can't be justified, but I don't think that everyone who says "both sides resort to what is effectively terrorism to achieve their goals" in the second example is vile scum, on the contrary, someone who defends the outcome as necessary and inevitable is.
Of course, the real result (both the expected and the actual) will be somewhere between these two.
Haven't blogged in English in years.
If the passage was irksome, it's done its job.
I understand your point. I think it's wrong in a profound way, and I really ought to write a big post about it, but so far it's been eluding me. I also should have phrased the paragraph you quoted a bit better, to sharpen why I think there's no moral equivalence in the specific case we're discussing.
The two outcomes you drew up are how we usually thought about it with individual terrorist attacks coming out of Gaza (or out of the West Bank during the 2nd Intifada for that matter). Downgrade the numbers, say from a thousand innocent people to 5-50. E.g. a suicide terrorist blows up a bus in Tel Aviv in 2001, or a particularly lucky rocket out of Gaza kills a few people in Sderot. In response, the army rounds up some Hamas/Fatah higher-ups, and/or a surgical strike is made, some Hamas VP is blown up, some innocent people die too. If we make too many strikes and kill too many innocent people, the world wags its finger at us for a non-proportionate response. Things quiet down until the next incident.
It's different now, but not everyone's caught on to how it's different. Plenty of people still want to see it as the same thing - perhaps a particularly lucky terrorist attack, more than 1000 victims, wow - so we may be "allowed" to punish Hamas more severely, but surely not to the tune of e.g. 10k civilian victims or more, that's entirely non-proportionate. That's your "second example".
The reason it's different is not (just) that 1300 is a really big number, there's a difference in kind. The logic of attack-response works relatively well for a terrorist attack, which is what, fundamentally? A way of shocking the state/public with violence to get them to agree to something we want, to get them to feel that their way of doing things doesn't grant them the safety they think it does. Possibly also to blackmail them into doing something by threatening hostages. A terrorist attack is finite in scope by design. The terrorists choose the target and kill people to make a flashy point. Oct 7 was different. >2k Hamas militants poured out of Gaza and just started indiscriminately massacring everyone in Israel they could get to (besides some hostages). It wasn't finite in scope. If the army got to them 2 hours later than it did, maybe we'd have 1600 victims and not 1300; some more hours later we'd have 3000 victims, and there's no upper bound due to the Hamas itself. The hostages may be designed to coerce us to do something for them (free the prisoners) but the killings were not designed to coerce us to do anything in particular. They just really really want to murder all of us and got a running start to do as much as they could, until we stopped them. Combine it with the fact that it was planned and executed by a state-level entity (even if Gaza is not officially a state). It wasn't a terrorist attack. It was a massacre that started a war, a war we're fighting for our lives and intend to end with complete destruction of the state-level entity that tried to massacre us.
This is felt very keenly by basically everyone here in Israel. And with a war, the rationale behind a comparison of "they killed 1300, we killed whatever" evaporates. That's not how wars work. Discussing "a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident" sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a "response". It's like if you said in 1941, well, the Japanese killed 2.5k American people at Pearl Harbor, and now the countries are at war. But the US should watch it, because once the no. of the civilian victims in Japan rises too much above 2.5k, maybe 25k or more, that's no longer "proportionate" to the Pearl Harbor attack. The analogy is not great because in PH most deaths were military, but you get what I'm saying, right? This whole line of thinking is absurd. Now it doesn't mean that it makes no sense to discuss civilian victims during the war. There're laws of war, and there's an idea of a disproportionate harm to civilians - but the lack of proportionality here is with respect to the military objectives, not the initial PH incident. You can still discuss whether Hiroshima/Nagasaki were necessary or too cruel etc. if you want, but comparing them to the PH deaths is just bizarrely nonsensical.
That's where we are, except it's worse, because Oct 7 was an indiscriminate massacre way more evil than PH, and we have every reason to believe Hamas wants and aches to do more of those whenever it gets a chance. So we're at war to destroy Hamas, and we do get to be judged by how we treat civilians when Hamas uses them as shields, and if, for example, we were to level a city block w/o warning to take out a single Hamas terrorist and 10k civilians with him, that'd be a pretty clear violation of laws of war and a very evil thing to do. So I'm not giving us carte blanche with respect to civilians and I'm not arguing to just flatten Gaza and kill everyone, and we'd never do it, obviously. But comparisons to the initial massacre in terms of no. of victims just completely miss the point of what's going on.
Maybe it's more obvious when you live in Israel close to Hamas that an attack that is only about getting a higher kill count before you are inevitably killed is something someone would actually plan an execute, but I can't stop thinking that there were additional reasons behind it, just like 9/11 wasn't just about crashing as many airplanes as possible into as many Americans as possible.
I wrote about it elsewhere in the thread, but my working hypothesis is that it's about disrupting the growing learned helplessness of the Palestinians. "You can't do anything against Israel, it can and will bulldoze your olive or orange trees with impunity if you so much as look askance at its settlements, let alone try to fight against them. I guess the only option is to keep my head down and color inside the lines." And then Hamas goes and shows that Israel is not invincible at all, that you can literally bathe in the blood of the innocents if you try hard enough, that like that heron-strangling frog, you should never give up.
There's a comment by @Kinoite in this thread that explains my position better than I could myself. It's a war that also isn't one against a state that also isn't one, depending on what's more convenient. A special military operation, if you want.
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I feel sort of bad about my sneer, Hamas really did an unusually repulsive thing, even by the standards of terrorist acts, and he is still commenting more tepidly than, say, most Ukrainians do wrt Russians. But yes, refreshing to see such clarity.
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An interesting coincidence, as I just looked at the Motte for the first time in a year or so, on a whim. Some notes:
On one hand I agree that this event might not even be the IDF's work (in fact this seems more likely now), and if it were IDF, there may be some sort of error (a spectrum of possible error/indifference options). There really isn't a compelling reason for the IDF to vaporize hospitals, from what we know. And on the surface of it, bombarding a mass of civilians is not so nasty as boasting of creatively butchering them… (or is it? Does it make moral sense to feel very differently?)
I wanted to make the comment to the effect that the most bloodthirsty Zniks were/are also uniformly denying Bucha and other more straightforward war crimes of Russia in another war you cover, as if Russian Armed Forces were inherently more squeamish than them; and it'll be ironic to see the same transpire here. But – sure, IDF to Israeli citizens really is not what RAF is to Russian ones.
On the other, I laugh at the handwringing about unwillingness to accept any "necessary" price. Your normal writing reminds me of that piece by Sam Kriss:
But of course you're more self-aware than those NPCs:
I think what repulses me about Kriss (besides his deformed face, his lisp and his molesting a girl on a bus while telling her she should have sex with him because when his parents he would inherit their medium sized house in a nice London suburb) is this annoying, pusillanimous nature to his handwringing. I don’t think it’s particularly Jewish either, it’s not quite Woody Allen neuroticism, it’s more just this general worship of the weak and rejection of any duty or loyalty to the decisions, collective, of his people - even as he identifies with them, and this, this privileged man unwilling to consider what the price of civilization actually is, or has been.
You were discussing some settler shooting at Palestinians a few days ago, I remember the footage was from B’t selem, funded by Soros via the NIF, the charity itself led by an LGBT activist (whose last job was in fact as head of an LGBT group). This may be how gentile whites feel toward Robin DiAngelo or their other DEI types (I dislike them, and to some extent I hate them and am even scared of them, but I don’t feel a visceral disgust in the same way). Maybe you feel this way towards some Russians, I’m not sure, “our people have enough enemies shouting the bailey to your motte, they do not need your help”.
I think that both charity to the weak and the army boot stepping on the unreasonable rabble are the costs of civilization. Both the existence of Soros and the unapologetic violence of IDF.
Israeli settlers are, in my eyes, no better than Chechens expelling Russians from their homes after the fall of local secular religious cult. Brute assabiyah and Bronze Age greed hiding behind the alleged spiritual superiority do not a civilization make. I don't care if they're marginally better behaved than a people on the chopping board of history: it is not their achievement, and I can all too plainly see how any people can be likewise degraded to the point of their victims, becoming «fair game».
At some point whites have alleged that nobody ever is. I think it's a flimsy claim, perhaps just the cry of the guilty consciousness of recent colonizers and genociders. But if there were an objective progression in the ordeal of civility, I suppose it would lie in the direction of the state pretending that this claim is ironclad and its violators are defectors. Even if your state is all based and ethnonationalist as heck.
Han Chinese got Xinjiang all sorted out. Israelis will probably get Palestine all sorted out. As you know, I'm bearish on the former and bullish on the latter. Neither look like the civilization to me. Just alien civilizations on wholly alien trajectories. And those from those civilizations who react to those philosophies like whites do seem more human than the rest.
Then again I'm also bearish on whites.
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Israelis totally did do massacres of civilians and terrorism way back when, did they moraly improve or do they just no longer need such crude desperate measures? Who knows.
We did it a bit, Deir Yassin is the most famous incident. But: 1) we stopped back in the 50s; 2) it was on the level of "dozens of men in the same village captured by our soldiers during active war", not hundreds or thousands including women and children; 3) people who did it hid it from their superiors and the public, they didn't boast of it proudly. The modality of "go around a village or a town and just indiscriminately murder everyone, sometimes gruesomely" is something different altogether, and I don't think we did it at all after Biblical times.
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Israel has the benefit of a working government and strong institutions, which allows them to have an army to do their dirty work and leave the hands of the civilian settlers who enjoy the fruits of conquest and polite, institutionalized slaughter without blood directly on their hands.
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Highly doubt the ambassador would have any non-public information on this.
I wasn't suggesting that, just gesturing at the depraved thinking at work in that country (Hamas is worse, inb4 someone accuses me of excusing them).
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Hamas uses a different hospital as it's headquarters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_Hospital
It's likely that Israel did bomb the hospital, but because Hamas was using it for something they couldn't ignore.
Right. The problem with a rule of "You can't bomb anything that's got a red crescent on it" is obvious. The problem with trying to fix that with a rule of "You can't bomb anything that's got a red crescent on it except in various circumstances " is the rule swallows the exceptions.
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