Comment by ceejayoz

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many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil).

Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.

This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.

But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.

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(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.

(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).

People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.

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It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.

IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.

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Tens of millions protested the US response.

Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.

You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.

Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".

This is a fair criticism of the U.S., though I'll also point out that millions of Palestinians have lived out their entire lives under occupation now, and history didn't start on October 7. To me, all of the evidence going back to 1948 points emphatically to genocide.

Also, I'm not clear on whether there was a precursor to 9/11 comparable to Israel's response to Gaza's 2018 non-violent protest, the Great March of Return.

>the local indigenous people called Palestinians

While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.

Obviously Palestinians were displaced and that needs to be addressed, but ethnic cleansing is a tough sell. Their population has multiplied by 20x since then.

Arabs are not indigenous to Palestine. Palestine was Roman when it was colonized by the Arabs. Before Palestine, Judea was a Jewish state which was colonized by the Romans.

Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?

For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.

The correct answer is: because the Biden administration told them there were no red lines. Israel is completely dependent on the US, Reagan picked up the phone and got them to stop bombing Lebanon in 1982. As Israel continued to ramp up the atrocities, they discovered that nothing would cause them to lose patronage from the US.

Because there were children to starve. Brown children.

We should stop using this term terror/terrorist, it's lost any meaning. If Hamas are terrorists because they're terrorizing Israeli population then so are Israelis' IDF or whatever force kills other country's population. And the list extends beyond that. To paint a resisting force/army as terrorists is just charged language to emotionally manipulate and pollute discourse. It would be more useful to put in balance what each side is fighting for.

Netanyahu is very clearly on the record supporting and defending a policy of allowing Qatari money into Hamas‑run Gaza, including publicly defending those payments to his own party as a way to keep Hamas and the PA separated.

There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.

Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.

There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.

To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.

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It's a bit more complicated: the peace deal Trump got passed through the Security Council did create a board in charge of monitoring some aspects of the Gaza process (I'm not sure on the exact details) so there is a real UN body in the mix.

Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking.

There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.

> There was a second part to that which is "and surrender".

Honest question. Why should they surrender?

> Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.

A complete and utter inversion of reality.

First page of Google results for: Israel ceasefire violations

“How many times has Israel violated the Gaza ceasefire? Here are the numbers: Since the ceasefire took effect, Israeli attacks have killed at least 615 Palestinians and injured 1,658.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/11/how-many-times-has...

“UN experts urge States to act as Israeli violations threaten fragile Gaza ceasefire” https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/11/un-experts-u...

“Israel has violated ceasefire 47 times and killed 38 Palestinians” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/israel-has-vio...

“Fact Sheet: Israel’s History of Breaking Ceasefires” https://imeu.org/resources/resources/fact-sheet-israels-hist...

Actually a large number of those 1200 were killed by Israeli incendiary rounds fired from helicopters due to Operation Hannibal. It’s why the estimates kept getting rounded down from an initial 1500, because many of the bodies were too badly incinerated to be counted accurately.

If they wanted to go after Hamas, why did they employ methods of combat that were guaranteed to affect civilians, like cutting off the entire strip from food supply?

Or the massacre that this thread is about for that matter?

Cool, now justify the things happening in the west bank. Israel so peaceful, coexists with neighbors.

The issue isn't whether or not Israel started it. It's the genocide they did once it started.

Civilian deaths have continued https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-31/israel-strikes-gaza-h...

It's one of my favourite documentaries, almost as good as The Death of Yugoslavia.

For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE

The Act of Killing is near the top of my list of underappreciated films. Permanently haunting.

Thanks for sharing! I will definitely give this a watch.

I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.

Pictures of a basically untouched hospital. The destruction is way overstated.

And let's look at the numbers. Hamas numbers are fantasy but let's pretend they're accurate. ~70k. I have not seen anyone contesting the Israeli database being combatants. ~9k. Note that even granting the most extreme claims this is still better than what western powers typically do--and it's in an unevacuated urban environment which is the worst case.

It was "reported that", doesn't make it so. And note that one of the reasons noted was "lack of fuel". Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.

Why do you say it's a lie that they lose their protected status? Read what Geneva actually says.

And I note yet another reference to "proportionality" as if it's some magic spell. Such usages imply the actions are not proportionate--but that is never actually addressed. Underwear gnome logic.

Citing chapters in Geneva is not a rebuttal. "Geneva" is yet another magic spell. I'm reminded of the repeated denials by Hamas of bunkers under the main hospital. And Israel came out and said there's no question they exist as we built them. Israel is very big on civil defense.

Night, not illuminated. And note that your summary of Israel's conclusions does not say whether the people actually were non-combatants.

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There's no sleight of hand, just a horrifying reality. It's not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Civilians from Gaza participated in October 7 and poll after poll shows broad palestinian support for the destruction of Israel.

Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.

I feel like there were a few one sided wars we’re forgetting about… This is also a strange advocacy for British or Ottoman rule. Maybe you’re right, if the Israelies acted like their colonial forebears there would be less violence.

If you play with fire you might get burned.

Hamas and friends understand this and rely on western morality to protect them from complete annihilation. They may have miscalculated how often you could kick the dog before it bit back.

This, of course, cuts both ways.

Lack of fuel doesn't mean it was bombed or destroyed.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144722

> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement

I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)

This is a common excuse, but The Truth is Israel doesn't care they're housing anything in the basement, they'll bomb it anyway. The ethnic cleansing agenda is plainly obvious at this point. In fact they seem to prefer having Hamas in predictable places, easier to take out and a convenient excuse to cull a few hundred of a superfluous population -- the Palestinian birth rate is way above that of Israelis. The operational reality is that Hamas is simply the best advertisement for the political hacks in charge of Israel, the system perpetuates itself because the current situation provides leverage for both ruling parties. And it turns out when you have two antagonistic death cults, people die. Solution: don't get born a Palestinian in Israel? Depressing.

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I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.

For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?

Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?

This is an important distinction. Anti-Israeli propaganda keeps echoing the false narrative of all hospitals having been totally destroyed.

The truth is that out of the 36 hospitals operating before the conflict 19 are still operational. That's a pretty far cry from 95%. There used to be 3000 hospital beds available and now there are 2000. There are also an additional 13 field hospitals.

That's a very different story (keeping in mind that Israel has taken control of large areas and any hospital that used to be there wouldn't be in use either).

Given the scale of the war and the documented use of hospitals for military purposes we have to expect there will be some impact:

- https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....

- https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/

- https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-bord...

As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.

It could not be more clear - https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144

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There are modern European states refounded after the Allies pursued a deliberate and calculated policy of ethnic cleansing to ensure Germans would never be a problem again - in some cases going from 25% of the population prewar to 1% afterwards, with mass violence and rape included. Ethnic cleansing is only really frowned upon when you lose, or when you win so hard it's a convenient virtue signal and disapproval doesn't threaten the status quo.

Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.

I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.

Yes, it's specific. It's also a fact that is in direct contradistinction to the OP's claim.

Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).

Finally, a refutable claim. Can you name me a hospital in Gaza that didn't have a Hamas presence?