When the first attack on an aid convoy to provoke outrage came out, I saw someone put it best: there is a difference between "war is chaos, and no matter how hard we try, some incidents regrettably occur" and "our rules of engagement are designed in such a manner to make these incidents almost certain." And the IDF... is pretty clearly in the latter category.
> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.
Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.
The only clarity here is in the eyes of those who made their decision in advance and are cherry picking. Yes- There have been quite a few incidents but the percentage is still small. There were also many friendly fire incidents. All of these happen in every war. The difference is this war is being put under a microscope and there are powerful actors trying to push a narrative.
It is the nature of how Hamas wages war in Gaza that is driving the assumptions here and the consequences. Not the "instilling via training".
> It is the nature of how Hamas wages war in Gaza that is driving the assumptions here
When the bad guys use human shields, it’s on the “good guys” to somehow resist the “good guy” urge to blow the whole city up.
Hamas has killed something in the order of 800 idf soldiers during this conflict, if we exclude the ones killed on oct 7th. In that same time at least 75,000 palestinians have been killed - most of which were women and children. So, unless you’re saying this is a justified collective punishment for oct 7th, what on earth are you possibly referring to? Hamas isn’t “waging war” in any real sense.
I think he's saying that this is par for the course for asymmetric conflicts with deeply rooted insurgent groups.
So if you are going to say the handling of this conflict has more to do with Israeli training/mindset/etc and is not related to the type of conflict, do you have other armies in mind that have fought similar conflicts and done better?
Battle of Fallujah? The war against ISIS in Iraq in the 2010s?
Before the most recent invasion of Gaza started, there was an interview with an Israeli general about the imminent invasion. And when the question came up about what lessons Israel was drawing from other urban conflicts like the Battle of Fallujah, the response was a very indignant we-don't-need-to-learn-anything. Small wonder that the IDF claims to have achieved unprecedentedly low civilian casualty ratios in their invasion of Gaza when in reality, they're commensurate with WW2 ratios and well above the urban assaults of the US's Iraq War.
Which one? There was five, and they generally were pretty bloody.
For the second battle of Fallujah (seems like the one you are talking about), US estimated that most civilians had already left the city. However that is somewhat disputed with some people claiming usa used that as an excuse to claim everyone left in the city was a combatant.
To quote the guradian:
> Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men "of fighting age" from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They leveled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population".
Another guardian quote:
> "There were American snipers on top of the hospital shooting everyone," said Burhan Fasa'am, a photographer with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation. "With no medical supplies, people died from their wounds. Everyone in the street was a target for the Americans."
To quote from the human rights section of the article "Iraqi government forces and paramilitary militias have tortured, arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared and executed thousands of civilians who have fled the rule of the Islamic State militant group", which doesn't sound great.
So i think it raises the question of if the Americans were really better than the Israelis or just better at the PR game.
This list seems to include people who were journalists but weren't killed while acting in the capacity of a journalist (as far as i can tell). If this is how you define journalist then world war 2 was certainly much much deadlier for journalists. To put it bluntly, i have my doubts that its making an apples to apples comparison with other conflicts.
The post used the phrase "all known conflicts in the history of the world". Is world war 2 not a known conflict?
I do not know how many journalists were killed in most conflicts. I do know more than 242 were killed during world war 2, so on its face the claim seems false that it is the deadliest war for journalists in the history of the universe.
The only way their claim can possibly make sense is if they are using different definitions between wars. I'm assuming that to give them the benefit of the doubt. The only alternative explanation i can see is they are straight up lying.
I don't know enough to verify related claims, like deadliest for journalists post world war 2. However given the source seems to be blatently incorrect, i'm not really inclined to believe them on related claims.
It takes like 30s of reading to figure out their criteria: an average of 13 journalists per week. That is the number they are usung to compare conflicts. Do you know how many journalists were killed on average per week of ww2? Because unless you know, you are just denying based on vibes i guess? When I google it the number that comes up is 69 - so unless ww2 was a lot shorter than i remember, fewer than 13/week seem to have been killed - at least by the records we have.
I said that the nature of journalism has changed since ww2, because there’s a lot more citizen-journalism - which probably means there are more journalists around to be killed today than during most conflicts in history. So it doesn’t actually surprise me that the highest number would be from a conflict post-2010.
Yeah - for example Abdullah Ahmed Al-Jamal was killed because he was holding three hostages in his apartment, yet he was included in the list of "journalists killed" anyway.
> the Israeli military killed at least 276 people and injured over 698
Or if you don’t want to believe anybody but the IDF, “The Israeli military acknowledged fewer than 100 Palestinian deaths”
In order to what? What was the cause of the murder of 276 (or 100) people?
To rescue 4 hostages.
Well, I should say more likely in retribution for the holding of those hostages… the air strikes that killed the majority of people appear to have happened AFTER they had extracted the hostages.
The 276 figure is a claim from Hamas. I don't think they regularly make up casualty numbers, but they certainly did in the Baptist Hospital case, where they initially claimed Israel killed "at least 500" before it became clear it was actually a PIJ rocket. It's highly plausible that they made another exception to their usual casualty reporting process for this embarrassing incident.
Even if we accept the claim at face value, it's just a total. It includes Hamas fighters who were trying to kill fleeing hostages and their rescuers, and anyone killed by them.
In any case, Israel has a responsibility to try to rescue its citizens that were kidnapped. The moral culpability for collateral damage lies with the terrorists who kidnapped and held civilian hostages, and then fought to prevent their rescue, not with the rescuers.
If some terrorists kidnapped several American citizens on US soil, and the US determined that any rescue plan would risk disproportionate harm to the country that kidnapped them, would you expect the US to just give up and ignore the hostages?
> The moral culpability for collateral damage lies with the terrorists who kidnapped and held civilian hostages, and then fought to prevent their rescue, not with the rescuers.
So, if your neighbour kidnaps a canadian citizen, and mark carney blows up your entire neighbourhood - that’s on your neighbour? Really? You believe that? Like, yeah - we would all wish our neighbour hadn’t kidnapped someone, but i’m pretty sure the moral culpability for murdering an entire neigbourhood is on the ones who sent the bombs.
But ok - the moral culpability is on the kidnappers. Let’s roll with that. So by that logic, it seems like israel is responsible for everyone who was killed on oct 7th. I mean, they were holding thousands of palestinian civilians without charges prior to the attacks. That seems like, again by your logic, that it justifies the killing of israeli civilians
So pick one: oct 7th was israel’s fault and hamas is culpable for the deaths that have followed, OR oct 7th was hamas’ fault, and israel is culpable for the deaths that have followed.
Oct 7th and the deaths that followed both being on hamas is not a logically consistant position.
In this scenario it would not be some random Canadian doing the kidnapping, it would be a team of soldiers under official orders from our president. So Carney can't collaborate with Trump to surgically rescue the Canadians, because Trump was the one who had them kidnapped in the first place, and is actively holding them hostage.
In that case, yes absolutely, I'd put the blame squarely on Trump if Canadian rescuers operated in my neighborhood, and it got destroyed during the fighting as US soldiers tried to prevent the hostage rescue.
> holding thousands of palestinian civilians without charges
Every country on the planet detains suspects before formal charges are filed. But sure, we can assume Hamas had some valid casus belli, it doesn't really change things.
> it justifies the killing of israeli civilians
Nothing justifies targeting civilians. Hamas didn't incidentally harm some civilians while attempting to free prisoners, they went out of their way to systematically kill, rape and kidnap as many Israeli civilians as possible.
Well I am glad we can agree on that, at least. When the israeli missles were aimed at the apartment blocks, during the raid we are discussing, that was quite literally targeting civilians. And I agree it was un-justified. As was the distruction of all the hospitals in gaza. As was the attacks on clearly marked aid convoys. As was the numerous air strikes on tent cities. Because all of these are targeting civilians, quite literally putting them in the cross hairs and firing, and as you said - nothing can justify that.
So Israel carried out some airstrikes at the same time that Hamas fighters were trying to kill the fleeing hostages and their rescuers, but you're claiming that the two were unrelated? Israel wasn't targeting the terrorists trying to kill them, but murdering unrelated civilians just for fun in the middle of the rescue operation? Any evidence behind this extraordinary claim?
We only have their word they were “under fire”, and no idea if the shots were coming from in the building.
Like the journalist and his family who were killed. Did they have weapons, were they a threat to the soldiers in any way when they were killed? Afaik the idf doesn’t even claim any about that. For all we know they were also being held there against their will - unlikely, but why would i carry water for a gov that’s shown it doesn’t mind killed 100-300, including 3 of their own, to extract 3 people.
> There were three hostages in his father’s apartment. He was also staying there, but the home belonged to his father.
Does it matter who owns the apartment? It seems likely based on this description he could be deemed as participating.
Like in normal domestic law, if someone is kidnapped, and the fbi raids the apartment where the kidnapped person is being held, i imagine everyone living in the apartment is going to jail. Who owns the apartment isn't really relavent.
> Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise
All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.
I'm trying to say this dispassionately because I'm aware that people get defensive, but lets say that you have to fight some enemy but they present as the most vulnerable of a population, how can you fight them without looking awful?
Though "it's complicated" is not, by itself, a conclusion - and neither is "better training" a sufficient answer to a problem this structurally difficult."
> All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.
So let me check this reasoning: if there was a single US soldier in the WTC towers, the 9/11 attacks were justified because the soldiers were hiding among the civilians?
Or if Hamas killed a single israelian soldier in their horrendous attacks in private homes, then it's justified because there were soldiers in those houses?
Or if the israelian reservists have their weapons at home and can be called upon directly from home to action, does that mean Iran or Hamas are justified at flattening residential buildings in Israel because those could host soldiers?
You've collapsed two meaningfully different things into one: 'soldiers exist near civilians' and 'soldiers deliberately operate from within protected populations as a systematic tactic.' Your three examples all illustrate the first. I was describing the second. These are not the same argument, and treating them as equivalent doesn't advance the discussion.
I have conflated those two, but my main point is the monstrous, one-sided destruction Israel has caused in Gaza is a clear proof Israel has gone way, way, way into the genocide territory and not just into the "hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians and after considering the international laws for such cases SOME civilians were killed".
Israel demonstrated complete disregard for human life for the sake of expediency to say in a gentle way, but in a harsher way, you could say the aftermath and details that are emerging point to malicious collective punishment.
The scale of the destruction doesn't retroactively validate the tactics that made it more likely. 'It got very bad' is not a justification for abandoning the framework that might have contained it.
Also trying to speak dispassionately: If your enemy presents as the most vulnerable as the most vulnerable of a population, shouldn't that be an indication that you're colonizing? That you're squeezing so hard, oppressing so vehemently that an entire people become your enemy? Or the entire people were your enemy the whole time.
How could Israel be "colonizing" Gaza when they've repeatedly tried to hand it off to other governments? They offered it back to Egypt after the six-day war (Egypt refused), and included it in several offers which would have created a new Palestinian state, and finally failing that, unilaterally withdrew in 2005. They removed all Jewish settlements, which is literally the opposite of colonizing.
"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority."
"My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage."
"Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators."
"This is equally true of the Arabs. Our Peace-mongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us their claim to priority in Palestine. ... We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies. To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism, in return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system."
"All Natives Resist Colonists. There is no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes. But that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jealously, and which even the Papuans will never sell. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised."
"This Arab editor was actually willing to agree that Palestine has a very large potential absorptive capacity, meaning that there is room for a great many Jews in the country without displacing a single Arab. There is only one thing the Zionists want, and it is that one thing that the Arabs do not want, for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews; and a minority status is not a good thing, as the Jews themselves are never tired of pointing out. So there is no "misunderstanding"."
"This statement of the position by the Arab editor is so logical, so obvious, so indisputable, that everyone ought to know it by heart, and it should be made the basis of all our future discussions on the Arab question. It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's.
"Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed. "
"We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism. Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."
"In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just ,or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative. We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality."
> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.
Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.