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mitztronic posted:What type of evidence would be required to “prove” that Hamas is using civilian infrastructure? It sounds like there is no possible evidence, as anything against Hamas is going to come from the IDF. See, this is a good example of what I'm talking about. From the very beginning, you're asking the wrong question. Instead of the question that really gets to the heart of the actual ethical questions at play, you're asking a question that sounds similar but differs in some very important ways. And that's not really an accident - a big part of Israeli propaganda against Hamas involves purposely blurring and smudging these ethical factors in order to trick people into confusing them. For example, when the IDF says that "a Hamas terrorist cell was identified using an ambulance", you take that as evidence that Hamas was up to nefarious ends. But the IDF doesn't actually say how Hamas was "using" the ambulance or what they were "using" it for. They don't say how many people were in the ambulance. They don't say whether any civilians were in the ambulance. They don't say whether any wounded people are in the ambulance. And these are all very important omissions. For someone who has already been primed with a certain image of Hamas thanks to Israeli propaganda, the natural assumption is that a team of heavily-armed Hamas fighters hijacked the ambulance, kicking out all the paramedics and stealing the ambulance themselves for some nefarious military ends. But the IDF doesn't actually say that. And because what they did say was so vague, their statement would still be just barely in the range of "technically true" even if there were just two heavily-wounded Hamas clerks sitting in the back of that ambulance being tended to by real paramedics. Israeli propaganda primes us to think that the presence of a Hamas member near civilians should be automatically presumed to be bad regardless of the details and specifics of the circumstances. They so often cite Hamas members being in ambulances or seen at hospitals as evidence of nefarious Hamas intent. But there's fundamentally nothing wrong with soldiers being at a hospital or in an ambulance. Wounded or sick military personnel are perfectly within their rights to ride in a normal civilian ambulance to a normal civilian hospital to get treated by normal civilian doctors. As far as international law is concerned, wounded or sick soldiers are treated as noncombatants, unless they're actively engaging in hostilities despite their injuries. They are free to seek treatment from civilian medical personnel in civilian medical facilities, and in fact civilian medical personnel are obligated to care for injured soldiers equally and impartially, without regard for their military status or which side they might be on. And if you shed your preconceptions and look closely, Israel never actually specifically accuses the "Hamas terrorists" of engaging in hostilities. They simply remind us that Hamas are "terrorists", and leave it up to our imagination what they might be doing by "using" and "operating within" an ambulance: https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1720510816930157050
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Nov 8, 2023 20:25
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Ironically the Sartres quote is applicable to the Israeli government's use of language.Jean-Paul Sartres posted:Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:28
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No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand. Is the position of folks like Selec that the IDF manufactures questionable evidence to justify their attacks on suspected Hamas targets with an IDGAF attitude to being mistaken or collateral damage? Or is the position that the IDF actively picks targets to kill civilians en masse and that the Hamas target angle is entirely a smoke screen? There is a petty wide gulf between the two stances imo. Edit: for clarity I fall under the first camp without giving the IDF a moral pass on their actions.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:43
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MikeC posted:No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand. I’d lean towards the former—they may have bad intel, or a standard of evidence similar to Obama-era Military Aged Male for counting anybody in a demographic cohort who died in a drone strike as a militant. Probably both. But I also do think they specifically target some high value civilians, like journalists, who they see as “not really civilians” due to their role in making the IDF’s life harder.
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Nov 8, 2023 20:46
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MikeC posted:Is the position of folks like Selec that the IDF manufactures questionable evidence to justify their attacks on suspected Hamas targets with an IDGAF attitude to being mistaken or collateral damage?
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Nov 8, 2023 20:49
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MikeC posted:Is the position of folks like Selec that the IDF manufactures questionable evidence to justify their attacks on suspected Hamas targets with an IDGAF attitude to being mistaken or collateral damage? Or is the position that the IDF actively picks targets to kill civilians en masse and that the Hamas target angle is entirely a smoke screen? There has been regular and clearly provided evidence that they have targeted civilians. Broadly in the cutting off access to water and food or the bombing of critical infrastructure with no clear military value, as well as specifically in the targeting of civilian journalists. This doesn't mean every bombing is just them looking to massacre as many civilians as possible, but it is clear that the IDF does both - they bomb targets they vaguely suspect might be used by Hamas and manufacture evidence poorly after the fact, but also they do sometimes bomb targets with the specific intention of harming all civilians in Gaza. e: HRW report on the use of collective punishment by the Israeli government against Palestinians in the West Bankt his year and a UN press release about Israel's use of collective punishment back in 2020. It's been their MO for years now. 2e: And for something more recent, a UN tweet and Al Jazeera story on the bombing of bakeries in Gaza. TGLT fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:00
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MikeC posted:No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand. I think the IDF very deliberately chooses to bomb civilian infrastructure and apartments to prevent people from being able to return to the area and live there, which they perceive will make a military occupation easier.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:18
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MikeC posted:No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:21
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Panzeh posted:I think the IDF very deliberately chooses to bomb civilian infrastructure and apartments to prevent people from being able to return to the area and live there, which they perceive will make a military occupation easier. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/foreign-minister-at-wars-end-not-only-will-hamas-be-gone-but-gazas-territory-will-shrink/ They absolutely want those people gone forever, so they can take some of the land, make the prison smaller (if they can't force them all into Egypt which Egypt is not keen on).
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Nov 8, 2023 21:21
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Likud's charter states that they intend for Israel to control all of the area from the Jordan River to the sea, so presumably they are bombing civilians in order to clear the way for this project.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:23
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MikeC posted:No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand. Neither. You present that as a binary with only two options, but there's quite a bit of ground in between. My position is that Israel (much like pretty much any military with an advanced air force) greatly prefers using airstrikes over riskier ground operations, but there are very few legitimate Hamas military targets that can actually be targeted by airstrikes. So when there's a political need to be seen doing something against Gaza, the IDF intentionally takes an extremely liberal interpretation of what might constitute a legitimate target, in order to ensure that there's plenty of opportunities for them to make a big visible boom for the voters watching back home. Moreover, Israel actively pursues a policy of collective punishment toward Gaza's civilian population, seeking to erode Hamas' domestic support by making clear that it will continue to harshly oppress Gaza as long as Hamas is in control there, so collateral damage isn't something they're particularly trying to avoid. As such, even if a target doesn't have any real direct military value, destroying civilian buildings and infrastructure still contributes toward this ongoing policy of collective punishment, especially paired with the tight Israeli control over supplies for rebuilding. Because both of the above are war crimes (even bombing urban areas at all is highly discouraged by international law), the IDF has a strong incentive to mislead about them. Taking advantage of the fact that Americans and Europeans are both quite used to our own countries doing similar things against insurgent groups, they use many of the same rhetorical tactics that the US used to defend drone-bombing weddings in the Afghanistan countryside.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:24
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I dunno how to post videos from reddit but there was a video there (https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17og235/hamas_shooting_at_idf_forces_from_sheikh_hamed/) of Hamas soldiers firing on IDF soldiers from a hospital Collapsing Farts fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:25
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MikeC posted:No dog in this war but I just want to ask about the extreme denial about anything and everything the IDF says. You are not going to get proof after the fact when the bomb got dropped about whether or not a Hamas bunker is there. Nor is Hamas ever going to admit they operate under a hospital and that they gambled the hospital would stay the IDF's hand. They keep putting out fake phone calls and a really bad CGI supervillain lair as "evidence" and did not see 10/7 coming so I find any of their claims of intelligence a bit suspect.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:30
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Collapsing Farts posted:I dunno how to post videos from reddit but there was a video there [combat footage link edited out] of Hamas soldiers firing on IDF soldiers from a hospital. You have to place this in context of those tunnels and civilian housing being inside a hyperdense strip of land with multiple millions of people in it who physically cannot leave because there's a border fence enforced by tanks and airstrikes. It would be more strange to me if there were tunnels not next to civilian housing given the dimensions of the Gaza Strip, which..covers an area roughly the size of Manhattan, the Bronx and Hoboken, New Jersey, combined. 
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Nov 8, 2023 21:31
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man if you're going to say you've seen 'countless videos' you really better have loving anything at all to back that up instead of whatever the gently caress weak rear end poo poo that post was.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:32
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edit: nevermind. Shouldn't respond to just asking questions people.
The Sean fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:34
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Collapsing Farts posted:I dunno how to post videos from reddit but there was a video there of Hamas soldiers firing on IDF soldiers from a hospital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9bFKyr6j9k If it's this footage, then at least to the tunnel that opening looks to be a hatch for a water reservoir. Now admittedly this is Al Jazeera talking about a Qatari funded hospital, but the construction photos provided seem to back them up. I suppose you could argue it's been expanded on since then maybe? But it doesn't seem like a slam dunk. The second video is a bit confusing visually to me what it's supposed to be documenting e: actually pretty sure this quote "They launch rockets on Israel 75 meters from a hospital." is about a different hospital, which again leaves me confused what exactly the second video is supposed to be documenting The third video is kinda contextless but I guess it might show what is being claimed, at least? TGLT fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:37
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Collapsing Farts posted:I dunno how to post videos from reddit but there was a video there (https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17og235/hamas_shooting_at_idf_forces_from_sheikh_hamed/) of Hamas soldiers firing on IDF soldiers from a hospital The staff of the hospital are saying this is not correct. I cant make out anything from that video either tbh . quote:Another official at MER-C said there was no tunnel under the hospital and that its fuel tank and power generators are kept in separate nearby buildings for security reasons. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/indonesia-group-denies-hospital-used-by-hamas-network-2023-11-06/
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Nov 8, 2023 21:38
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Groovelord Neato posted:They keep putting out fake phone calls and a really bad CGI supervillain lair as "evidence" and did not see 10/7 coming so I find any of their claims of intelligence a bit suspect. This really needs to be posted here: https://x.com/israel/status/1722323218428551235?s=61&t=fWsm-upldseXptBaVlet9Q
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Nov 8, 2023 21:39
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https://twitter.com/Israel/status/1722323218428551235 Don't worry guys, Israel "intercepted" a "phone call" between "Hamas Operative and a Gaza Strip Resident" and they totally admit that they're hiding in ambulances to get around. edit: Beaten to the post
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Nov 8, 2023 21:40
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:This really needs to be posted here: Christ I didn't even see this one. They can't help themselves.
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Nov 8, 2023 21:44
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So weird how Hamas was using entirely encrypted means of communicating before 10/7 but now they just regularly have phone convos about how evil and bad they are
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Nov 8, 2023 21:48
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Brucolac posted:This is bizarre. Why on earth would Israel want to make Oct-7 look more like a military operation? Due to mandatory conscription in Israel for both men and women, many Israeli adults are formally military retirees. International law stipulates that after servicemen are demobilized, they regain their protected civilian status, which means deliberately killing them is generally still considered a war crime. Edit: here's a breakdown of the number of killed as first responders / in the first counter-attack: https://www.timesofisrael.com/authorities-name-44-soldiers-30-police-officers-killed-in-hamas-attack/ Rukeli fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 21:49
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Reddit now claims that American an MQ-9 Reaper aircraft was taken down above Yemen by Huthi rebels  [edit]oh whoops, wrong thread
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Nov 8, 2023 21:52
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Israel knows that people dont know arabic and won't go to actual arab people to translate or ask if this is real or fake. They rely on spewing out enougb bullshit that people catch and hold on to at least one lie and run ans defend that wholeheartedly.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:13
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Collapsing Farts posted:I dunno how to post videos from reddit but there was a video there (https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17og235/hamas_shooting_at_idf_forces_from_sheikh_hamed/) of Hamas soldiers firing on IDF soldiers from a hospital That sure is a blurry black-and-white aerial video of some unidentifiable black poo poo flying out of the windows of some building, with lots of jump cuts that almost hide the fact that it's just going splat on the ground with no apparent explosion or anything, being posted by some random-rear end Redditor on r/CombatFootage. And if that's being fired at Israeli troops as the video claims, then where's the Israeli troops? What were they doing there? It doesn't look like the mystery projectiles are going beyond the grounds of whatever building that is, so are Israeli forces on the hospital grounds? I can't find any reports of Shiekh Hamad Hospital or the area around it being attacked or occupied by IDF ground forces, though Qatari news has complained that the hospital's been damaged by Israeli bombing and claimed that Gazan officials have invited international inspectors to come see the hospital for themselves. I don't place much value on the Qatari reports, honestly, their bias is very obvious, but apparently the IDF had a firefight at a hospital and literally nobody noticed except the IDF themselves, who didn't bother sending any cameras along with the ground troops that went to the hospital?
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Nov 8, 2023 22:15
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Collapsing Farts posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17og235/hamas_shooting_at_idf_forces_from_sheikh_hamed/ Seems like a cool subreddit  At any rate it still seems unclear to me that this footage shows what it purports to show. For all I can tell it looks like something hitting the hospital since those black shapes definitely aren't bullets. Are they supposed to be rockets? TGLT fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 22:23
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HonorableTB posted:You have to place this in context of those tunnels and civilian housing being inside a hyperdense strip of land with multiple millions of people in it who physically cannot leave because there's a border fence enforced by tanks and airstrikes. It would be more strange to me if there were tunnels not next to civilian housing given the dimensions of the Gaza Strip, which..covers an area roughly the size of Manhattan, the Bronx and Hoboken, New Jersey, combined. From the recent videos it appears Hamas fighters choose to fight in civilian clothes, so that's not very helpful either.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:24
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This reminds me of the aftermath of 10/7 where a bunch of celebrities were posting "footage" from Gaza that turned out to be footage from the current conflict but were from years ago. Like "cool, here's a video on reddit. Since it's labelled as 'hamas attacks idf' and there are nondescript images then that description must be correct."
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Nov 8, 2023 22:24
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TGLT posted:Seems like a cool subreddit
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Nov 8, 2023 22:27
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Rukeli posted:Due to mandatory conscription in Israel for both men and women, many Israeli adults are formally military retirees. I still can't understand why that choice was made. Including the ranks of retired/inactive service people makes it a really unclear piece of propaganda.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:31
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DelilahFlowers posted:With that kind of cultivated userbase, any video from there is suspect tbf it is definitely a video the IDF published claiming that. But even in that presentation they just sort of say it and very quickly move along to I guess claiming that the Indonesian hospital was actually built specifically to provide cover for a Hamas outpost based on a picture of... some fields outlined in red?
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Nov 8, 2023 22:36
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DelilahFlowers posted:Israel knows that people dont know arabic and won't go to actual arab people to translate or ask if this is real or fake. They rely on spewing out enougb bullshit that people catch and hold on to at least one lie and run ans defend that wholeheartedly. Along those lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hd6JGX8gwE IDF releasing a video of a very real Hamas person saying that Hospitals are honeycombed with tunnels and every citizen is seen as a human shield.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:44
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Brucolac posted:Thanks for providing that list. It's unclear to you because you're overanalyzing it. Propaganda isn't generally made for people who are going to carefully scrutinize each and every word of it. The original tweet with all those names in tiny, tiny text paired with a tweet about how they've been brutally murdered? That's not made with the expectation that somebody's going to zoom in on it and actually look at the names. It's made with the assumption that people will just glance at it and pass it around, in which case it's actually better if there's more words so it looks like the list is longer. As for the more detailed list in the post you quoted, I'm just going to quote one of the more detailed obits in that list to set the mood here: quote:Col. Roi Levy, 44, the commander of the Multidomain Unit, also known as the “Ghost” Unit, from Shavei Tzion You see how they're framing it? The soldiers that were killed were brave heroes that died in action, selflessly throwing themselves in against impossible odds to save the civilians from the vast terrorist horde. They present it as if Hamas was solely targeting civilians, and therefore any military deaths were the result of soldiers forcing themselves in between the terrorists and the civilians in order to save the latter from the former. Israeli propaganda relies heavily on being able to influence the narrative from the beginning with biased framings like this, so that even if inconvenient facts come out later, the audience is mostly tempted to fit those facts into the preconceived notions they've already established.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:59
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One thing I haven't seen from this conflict, which I think is a huge gaping hole, is testimony from people - civilians - living in Gaza saying things like "I saw the hamas go into a hole in the ground with guns" or "when we dug through the rubble we found big bombs" or anything like that. Gaza has 2 million people in it and it would be ludicrous to believe that every single one of them like hamas and what's happening, they are not all hamas operatives, operating under some strict military code to not speak. I do not think its unreasonable to expect this sort of information to come out in this situation.
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Nov 8, 2023 22:59
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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/8/investigation-disproves-israel-claim-of-hamas-tunnel-under-gaza-hospital Al Jazeera investigative journalism outs Israel as lying about the latest hospital claims. I dont believe a single thing the IDF claims, they have fabricated so much evidence that its impossible at this point to believe them on anything. And even if all of this were true, what is hamas suppose to do? Palestinians are fighting for their very survival, and the world doesnt care. The displacement and deaths of two million people is on the line if the IDF achieves its objectives, and we are arguing about international law that cant be enforced and so effectively might as well not exist anyways.
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Nov 8, 2023 23:05
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Groovelord Neato posted:And of course it doesn't matter if Hamas or anyone else was using civilian buildings that does not allow the IDF to destroy them from the air killing dozens of innocent civilians. You might not agree that it is right, but those are the internationally accepted rules. The exception to this is incendiaries, which you cannot use among civilian populations even to hit military targets, and iirc hospitals with wounded soldiers/personnel in uniform working in care roles inside, so not that it matters because lol Israel is breaking those rules anyway.
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Nov 8, 2023 23:17
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Tuna-Fish posted:The laws of war are actually pretty clear that you are specifically allowed to do that. The basic idea is that targeting civilians on purpose is not allowed, but collateral damage, or civilians killed alongside legitimate military targets you strike, are fine. The thinking is that in those cases, the death of the civilians is the fault of the military personnel who chose to place themselves in the vicinity, not the people doing the shooting, and also to discourage taking human shields. Not entirely. There's also the principle of proportionality which prohibits attacks against military objectives that are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
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Nov 8, 2023 23:22
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Tuna-Fish posted:The laws of war are actually pretty clear that you are specifically allowed to do that. The basic idea is that targeting civilians on purpose is not allowed, but collateral damage, or civilians killed alongside legitimate military targets you strike, are fine. The thinking is that in those cases, the death of the civilians is the fault of the military personnel who chose to place themselves in the vicinity, not the people doing the shooting, and also to discourage taking human shields. This is entirely incorrect btw. quote:Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, investigated allegations of war crimes during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and published an open letter containing his findings. A section titled "Allegations concerning War Crimes" elucidates this usage of military necessity, distinction, and proportionality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Col...teral%20damage. levelling the block you thought Hamas might have fired from ten minutes ago does not meet this standard, neither does saturation bombing a refugee camp to kill a single commander. punishedkissinger fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 23:23
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Tuna-Fish posted:The laws of war are actually pretty clear that you are specifically allowed to do that. The basic idea is that targeting civilians on purpose is not allowed, but collateral damage, or civilians killed alongside legitimate military targets you strike, are fine. The thinking is that in those cases, the death of the civilians is the fault of the military personnel who chose to place themselves in the vicinity, not the people doing the shooting, and also to discourage taking human shields. As others have pointed out it isn't and even if it was why would I care? The rules are a joke nobody follows them. When I say "allow" I mean morally as they are not justified in doing so. Brucolac posted:Thanks for providing that list. Can help muddy the waters when trying to figure out how many casualties were legitimate targets as opposed to innocent civilians. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 23:41
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