Over 100 Israelis have died and more than 900 were injured after rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas militants, Israeli officials said Saturday.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 198 were killed in Gaza and at least 1,610 were injured Saturday in retaliatory attacks from Israel.
“We are at war. We will win,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.
The Israeli Defense Forces earlier declared “a state of alert for war,” according to a statement issued by the IDF.
“Over the past hour, the Hamas terrorist organization launched massive barrages of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and its terrorist operatives have infiltrated into Israel in a number of different locations in the south,” the IDF said early Saturday.
They are a victim of bullying when they’ve been under decades of illegal occupation. Hamas is an awful organization, but it was only formed as a result of ongoing brutal oppression. When you keep punching someone in the face, sooner or later they’ll start punching back, and sometimes they’ll fight dirty. That doesn’t make them good, but the bully is still the one who kicked things off in the first place and the one who should be first and foremost held responsible for the situation they created.
Hamas individual victims get my full sympathy; they’re victims of both Hamas and Israel. Israel as a state does not - without their brutal oppression, extensive war crimes, and apartheid regime, there wouldn’t be any Hamas in the first place.
What if the bully went up to someone and said “I’m going to fucking kill you” and then tried to kill them using all means possible all because the bully and the other person exist in the same area? Only Palestine and Hamas before now were the ones saying the Jews deserved death AND acted upon it multiple times. I had sympathy for their plight until they indiscriminately killed people who had zero interaction with their problems. I’m sure those thai workers and rave tourists, massacred, raped, killed and kidnapped has a lot to do with the fucking situation between Israel and Hamas/Palestine. Israel isn’t clean, but in 1 day and 1 act became the cleaner of the 2 in non Arab public perception.
This sentence alone shows your complete and utter lack of understanding of the situation and the history that has led to it.
Jewish population in 1917 was 8%, but 1936 that was 28%. In 1948, during the Nakba, it jumped from 32% to 82%. Palestinians were the indigenous people of Palestine until the Zionist movement INTENTIONALLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY took over, killed, burnt down, and destroyed not only men women and children, but every facet of Palestinian culture they could.
They shut Palestine out of negotiations and diplomatic channels, and ran straight-up propaganda campaigns in America to convince numbskulls like you who believe the slant they hear on Fox news about how Hamas are just terrorists.
Hamas actually attempted to be a legitimate government that played by the rules, as did the PLO. They were backstabbed, lied to, led on, and ignored by US, UN, Israel, Britain, etc.
You can have sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people while condemning actions taken by militants. Nuance is possible here.
And yet the Palestinian population grows each year.
Wow it’s almost as if Palestinians want to return to their fucking homes that they were forced out of, Jesus what a shocker, zomg
Nice “whatabout”, but the bully here is the party that engaged in an illegal occupation, the crime of apartheid, and extensive war crimes (annexation through settlement of occupied territory) in the first place. That you try to redefine away the fact that Israel created this situation in the first place borders on apartheid-apologism. It’s exactly the same tactic used by supporters of South African apartheid to dismiss the situation in South Africa whenever the ANC carried out a violent operation, and it was apologism for oppression then, and it is apologism for oppression now.
Nah fam, if you want to play that game Arabs invaded Jewish communities that had settled there during the muslim conquests, that’s over 2,000 years of illegal occupation. If you’re fine with that, you should be fine with Israel taking back their land at the “edge of a sword”.
Also it’s funny to hear you say killing innocent people not involved with the conflict is “apartheid apology”
Only one party is currently illegally occupying land they have legal claim to and engaging in the crime of apartheid. Only one party is engaged in fighting against an illegal occupier. That you choose to argue in favour of the apartheid regime engaged in an illegal occupation says enough.
Do they have a legal claim to it? If they stole the land it shouldn’t matter how long ago it was right? That’s the Palestinian logic I’m seeing.
Who? Israel? No, they do not have a legal claim to the occupied areas, or they wouldn’t be occupied. Both irrespective of the occupation, the crime of Apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome statute.
The Israeli Supreme Court has ever since 1967 consistently accepted the Israeli government’s own contention that the territories are occupied, and not part of Israel proper, because if they were part of Israel, then Palestinians affected by Israeli oppression would have far stronger legal claims.
So if you want to argue that the occupied territories belong to Israel, you’re arguing against the position of both Israel the state and the Israeli Supreme Court.
See “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012
I’m simply applying the logic the Palestinians apply. There were ruins of a 2000 year old Jewish temple and a 1500 year old mosque in the region. Guess which one is older. I’d also feel more empathy for the apartheid conditions if Palestinians would stop electing a political group who’s stated goals are the deaths of every Jewish person. And as I said it’s comical you keep saying I support apartheid policies by simply stating killing, raping, torturing, kidnapping, and forcing innocent people to be used as human shields is fucking wrong and deplorable no matter what side does it. If Ukraine starts liquidating Russian cities and raping, torturing, kidnapping, and using innocent’s as human shields I’d say the same fucking thing to them and pull my support. If this is how Palestine wants to do things I shed no tears as they are destroyed. “By any means” works both ways.
This might be relevant if it was a Palestinian state imposing apartheid on Israel. If so, they would be equally worthy of condemnation irrespective of who had which historical claim to what land.
But they are not, so bringing it up is yet another attempt at victim-blaming.
Had Israel stopped at a point of doing the bare minimum to secure its legally recognized borders, or indeed the borders they themselves recognize, and attempted to avoid oppressing innocent civilians for decades, there’d likely still be conflicts, but then Israel would have something of a moral leg to stand on. They have not. They do not. As it is, they are occupiers, as recognized by their own government and their own courts.
Hamas didn’t even exist until a couple of decades into the oppression. It was formed as a result of the failure of PLO to get Israel to the table, so this is blaming the victims again for responding to decades of Israeli unwillingness to end their oppression.
Also, notice how in contrast to your repeated talk of the Palestinians as a unified group while assigning blame, not once have I tried to blame the Israeli people as a whole for Israel’s actions, despite the fact that a majority of them have elected governments in every single election for the entire existence of their state that have continued a policy of illegal occupations and apartheid?
I stand by that. Just like the Palestinian people as a whole can not be judged for the actions of Hamas, neither can the Israeli people as a whole be judged for the actions of the Israeli state.
Are you going to do the same, or are you going continue to assign collective blame to people including the millions on either side who have no power whatsoever to influence the actions of any of the belligerent parties and/or who oppose them? Including the millions in the West Bank who are largely cut off from even being able to intervene in what goes on in Gaza due to Israeli apartheid policies beyond the control of Palestinians in the West Bank.
When you criticise only specific and limited outcomes of the oppression rather than the oppression itself, then, yes, it’s natural to presume you’re fine with the oppression. Notice how even here you only express opposition to the killing of innocents, and not against the imposition of apartheid or the illegal occupation that created the conditions for it over multiple generations.
If your support for opposition to oppression is contingent on the oppressed doing no wrong, then you’re really just looking for any excuse to side with the oppressors.
My support for the Ukranian people, as for the Palestinian people is unconditional. That does not mean I support every action made on their behalf. I do not. That does not mean there aren’t actions I find deplorable. It does not mean I don’t sympathise with innocent victims.
It does mean that in an asymmetric fight the oppressor is the only side that has the choice of ending the oppression, and until they do they have no moral standing to complain when some of their victims lash out in desperation - the oppressor is ultimately always the culpable party for every consequence of their oppression.
Anything else is to create an incentive for oppressors to be extra brutal in order to provoke an extreme response, knowing that if they do, they’ll have people like you ready to dismiss the plight of the entire oppressed population because some of them were pushed into a level of desperation where they’ve gone too far.
That “game” of which you speak is an appeal to privilege in its most obscene form: claiming an ancestral myth that allows you to impact extreme violence against other humans whose only crime is being born into the wrong bloodline.
It’s 2023 CE out here but some cultures are pretending it’s 2023 BCE
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No, Israel does that. They just use dog whistles. But they ABSOLUTELY do that.
11,000 Palestinians killed by Israelis since 2000. 1,500 Israelis killed by Palestinians. (Prior to current events)
Actions speak too.
How many wars has Israel started with Palestine versus how many wars has Palestine and Co started with them?
I’m not your research assistant, but the book 100 Years War on Palestine can give you some much-needed perspective.