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Comment by tkel

4 days ago

If I were Israel, I would have not invaded Gaza, which would have resulted in far fewer civilian casualties, and also would have ended the strikes by Hezbollah.

Also, if you look at the data on attacks by Israel against Lebanon, they are disproportionate, Israel launching 10x more airstrikes, even going so far as to level entire city blocks of apartment buildings in Beirut. I remember just on the first day of attacks by Israel against Lebanon, over 1000 civilians were killed. Also Israel refuses to vacate southern Lebanon after a ceasefire agreement, and continues to violate the ceasefire. Just in the last 24h, Israel has bombarded 4 different locations in Central Lebanon with airstrikes. If I were Israel, I would simply stop acting as a fanatic aggressor with no regard for human life.

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tkel

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tptacek  4 days ago

The military dynamics of the Israel and Hezbollah conflict are an indictment of Israeli's Gaza campaign. When Israel is clear-eyed, strategic, and effective at confronting a serious military adversary, it looks like the Hezbollah conflict: ultra-targeted rapidly disabling strikes. That Israel instead systematically leveled an entire civilian metropolitan area to combat Hamas makes the the claims about the Hezbollah strike more damning, not less.

  • sporkxrocket  4 days ago

    Actually it's Hezbollah that has been practicing very targeted, military only strikes against Israel. Israel on the other hand has killed thousands of Lebanese people and displaced over a million. That's just since the Oct 7th attacks. Prior to that Israel carpet bombed Lebanon on multiple occasions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...

    • tptacek  4 days ago

      This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.

      I don't know how far off we are on our assessment of current Israeli governance, but I'd bet it's not as far as you think we are. But I'd also guess we're wildly far apart on Hezbollah, which, along with Ansar Allah in Yemen, are some of the most amoral and illegitimate military forces on the planet.

      Unfortunately, Hezbollah was, up until 2024, waging a largely PR-based war on Israel (their "puppet" adversary; their true adversary was Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, where they spilled more blood and lost more men and materiel than in every conflict they've had with Israel over the last 20 years), and people have --- for understandable reasons --- antipathy towards Israeli leadership. So Hezbollah, like the Houthis, have a western cheering section, made up almost entirely of people who have chosen not to understand anything about what makes either organization tick.

      You can come up with lots of military atrocities committed by Israel, because Israel has in the Gaza conflict committed many atrocities. None of it will legitimize the IRGC's Shia-supremacist totalitarian occupation of Lebanon or their genocidal occupation of Yemen. The civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the real military fronts in the last 2 decades) claimed an order of magnitude more lives than anything Israel did, which is truly saying something given the horrifying costs of Israel's botched, reckless, amoral handling of Gaza.

      6 replies →

  • newspaper1  2 days ago

    Israel has killed at least 83 people since the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon. They are terrorists.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/28/how-many-people-has...

    • tptacek  2 days ago

      I'm not interested in litigating this claim because it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it helps, you can be as angry at Israel as you'd like without getting much flak from me (I'm angry too), just as long as we don't get to the "enemy-of-my-enemy" stuff that legitimizes Hezbollah.

      I don't think "terrorist" is a useful label for either side. It wasn't "terrorism" when Hezbollah besieged Madaya; they did that as a military force.

      1 reply →

underdeserver  3 days ago

> If I were Israel, I would have not invaded Gaza

During the war Israel was attacked from the territories of Gaza, Lebanon, the west bank, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. All of these were unprovoked, except maybe Iran. All by parties openly calling for Israel's destruction.

Gaza had invaded Israel, killing 1200 and kidnapping 250.

What do you think the above attackers would do if Israel showed there was effectively no retaliation for doing something like that? You are asking Israel to commit suicide.

> If I were Israel, I would simply stop acting as a fanatic aggressor

Israel was attacked first by each and every party above (except maybe Iran), beginning with the Hamas attack.

> with no regard for human life.

In nearly every bombing in Lebanon, and most bombings in Gaza, Israel preceded the attacks with leaflet, social media posts, and phone calls calling people to leave the area. It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history. How does that show no regard for human life?

  • sporkxrocket  3 days ago

    Israel has been attacking Palestinians and its neighbors since its inception. They are the aggressors and always have been.

    > It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history.

    False.