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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30377 thread views

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.

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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.

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...

Presumably a rocket just fired is still full of fuel. The aftermath pictures don't show much blast damage, instead it burned out.

What are the chances that a single "malfunctioning" Hamas rocket killed 800+ people?

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.

The only reason Israeli casualties are so low is the Iron Dome, which obviously doesn’t defend Gaza, though.

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?

Track record.

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.

I believe the original claim was there were around 40 children (not babies) killed in the kibbutz, including some babies being beheaded. At least, this is the version I heard first when the story broke (I think it was a British journalist reporting for ITV but I could be misremembering). This got Chinese Whispered into 40 decapitated babies pretty quickly on social media, but I don't think any reputable media made this more exaggerated claim.

I'm still not exactly sure what the truth is - those photos Hlynka posted obviously show some pretty gruesome treatment of those poor children, but it's not clear to me that there was any actual decapitation (though I would rather be decapitated than burnt alive personally).

A "friend of a friend" says their infant nephew had his throat slit. Slit throats turn into decapitations turn into forty decapitated babies

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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”.

An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.

An IDF spokesperson didn't say "40 babies decapitated".

I don't think he was a spokesperson per se, but the report did seem to originate from an Israeli soldier on the ground -- there were pictures of him on Twitter that I saw.

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The initial report was 40 killed babies with some decapitated. The first is undoubtedly true. The second claim seems arguably true.

May I suggest that the argument “not all of the babies were decapitated” isn’t quite the winning argument?

You should read up on atrocity propaganda before you make suggestions about “winning arguments”. Since the Congo Propaganda War of the 1800s nations have used atrocity propaganda to manufacture public support and/or outcry. They do that to win arguments, by creating a sticky grotesque visual image that can be repeated ad nauseam. Like, you know, beheading babies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State_propaganda_war

The initial claim is wrong anyway; there is no evidence of babies decapitated

https://archive.ph/4J92h

No war is fought with bullets and bombs alone. For as long as enemies have taken up arms against each other, propaganda has proven a robust weapon. During the Civil War, Southern printing presses put out materials that claimed Northern victory would lead to “race-mixing” and newspapers portrayed Union soldiers as rapists and thieves. World War I brought the rise of “atrocity propaganda,” which highlights, exaggerates, and sometimes outright fabricates the gruesome acts of violence committed by opposing combatants.

“Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister’s office said that it had confirmed Hamas beheaded babies & children while we were live on the air,” she posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Friday. “The Israeli government now says today it CANNOT confirm babies were beheaded. I needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry.”

There is an enormous emotional difference between a child being shot and a baby being beheaded.

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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.

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.

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.

No but the original claim was 40 killed babies and some beheaded. They produced pictures supporting the number of killed babies and one picture arguably supporting the beheading.

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.

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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