Israel - Palestine Discussion | Post Respectfully | Discuss more, tweet less

Wibble said:
So what is? They use tunnels but not the tunnels Israel claim?
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Its clear Hamas use tunnels, this is hardly something that warrants disputing, nor has anyone disputed it here to my knowledge. What is though are these notions that they conveniently tie into some form of HQ or base of operations in or under hospitals, schools or whatever civilian infrastructural targets Israel deems fair game in their bombing campaign. Throughout this campaign the Israelis have wheeled out what can only be described crude and quite frankly fabricated tidbits of 'evidence' to justify the collateral, and time after time they're easily debunked, and not in an David Icke sense either. Just look at the countless examples in this thread where the Israelis have tenuously used any form of Arabic logbooks or notes found scattered as some form of Jihadist intel when anyone who can read Arabic could easily debunk it. Is it impossible Hamas have these structures below hospitals? Of course not, we know what Hamas are. But considering Israel's history of distorting or flat-out fabricating the truth, its hardly outrageous to meet their claims with anything but scepticism or incredulity.

The danger here is these tunnels are used as a greenlight for Israel to bomb anything and anywhere. All they have to do is roll out the same incohesive footage of ruins followed by close ups on menacing looking Arabic text devoid of context and then conveniently cutting to actual footage of tunnels. Heck they've justified bombing ambulance convoys under the pretence they were targeting embedded Hamas commandos, only to fail to confirm or deny they had succeeded. Do you not see the worrying precedence set here?
 
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Al-Shifa hospital is the one that has been on the news recently.

The IDF was denying that they were attacking this hospital or putting it under siege as recently as three days ago: "There is no shooting at the hospital and there is no siege."

This was happening at the same time as a MSF surgeon was reporting that a sniper had attacked 4 patients at the hospital. A journalist from Al Jazeera was reporting that the IDf were "attacking and destroying the front gates of the main medical complex", " people are really trapped right now by Israeli forces who are stationed in different sectors encircling the entire place."

The same journalist reported that the solar panel system at the hospital had been attacked by the Israelis. This claim was also denied by the IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari: "We didn’t attack, to the best of my knowledge, solar panels in the Shifa hospital." That's the same guy from the video about the other hospital from a few pages ago.

The IDF were also claiming that hits on the hospitals were from Palestinians: "The analysis conducted by the IDF's operational systems indicates that sabotage elements fired rockets targeting the IDF forces operating near Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City."

The director of the hospital says the claim that the hospital is cover for a Hamas command center is "utter lies;" an Al Jazeera corresponding asked staff and they said nobody had seen a Hamas member at the hospital for years.

On Saturday it was reported that two babies had died after the incubators had to be shut down. The director denied claims that Israel was offering help to transport the remaining babies: "I offered this to them [the Israeli army]. I offered to evacuate the babies to safe places, using ambulances, but they did not answer." An IDF spokesman then claimed that "the staff of the al-Shifa hospital has requested that tomorrow [Sunday], we will help the babies in the paediatric department to get to a safer hospital. We will provide the assistance needed." The babies are still at the hospital.

The hospital was also in the news recently because Israel attacked an ambulance that belongs to the hospital. An IDF spokesperson said that they saw "terrorists using ambulances as a vehicle to move around. They perceived a threat and accordingly we struck that ambulance." Human Rights Watch interviewed witnesses and examined photo and video, concluding that there was no evidence the ambulance was being used for military purposes. The Washington Post also said "the dead and wounded visible in the videos reviewed by The Post included women and children and no weapons or individuals wearing military clothing could be seen."

Believe whatever you want to believe about what's going on here.
 
Indonesia's Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, MER-C, funded and built a 9 million dollar hospital in Gaza, the Indonesia Hospital. The construction was done between 2012 and 2015 and coordinated by MER-C. The grand opening was in 2016, it was inaugurated by the vice-president of Indonesia. The hospital was transferred to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in 2016. Some MER-C volunteers still remain there.

You can see a timeline of the project in this link. They were doing a second-phase construction of the hospital a few years ago.

Daniel Hagari, the IDF spokesman from the video earlier, claimed a few days ago that "Hamas systematically built the Indonesian Hospital to disguise its underground terror infrastructure."

One of the engineers from the project had to come out and state that "it is structurally impossible for RSI to have a tunnel. I supervised the development of RSI from start to finish."
The chairman of MER-C says: “We deny Israel's accusations. The building in the video circulating on social media which is accused of being an Indonesian Hospital is not an Indonesian Hospital building. This is a pre-condition for Israel to attack the Indonesian Hospital."

Believe whatever you want to believe about what is going on here.
 
Wibble said:
Haven't they? Or just is locations that make Hamas look bad?

Odd that people don't want to recognise that many players in all this are utter cnuts.
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Yes. Almost nobody disputes that Hamas uses tunnels.

I personally imagine they do also place important structures near civilian infrastructure as well.

What is being disputed here is whether or not the videos above prove that Hamas places headquarters and arms depots etc under hospitals. The video above does not prove this. That may be exactly what Hamas are doing. But that is not what that particular video proves.

This is important because it's being used as justification for heinous attacks on a hospital even by people who are otherwise quite reasonable.

This does not mean that people think there aren't tunnels (in fact Hamas openly say they use tunnels so it's not some grand conspiracy). This does not mean that people think Hamas are good guys in this conflict.
 
2cents said:
Thanks, interesting read, and I especially agree with the assessment that Hamas’ goals on 7th October were quite rational and logical, as they always have been, although I think he overstates Shatz’s supposed neglect of this point. Much of the account of Israeli policies is on point I think.

I have some points of disagreement. The 2006 Hezbollah War and Dahiya doctrine seems an arbitrary point from which to embark on an assessment of the evolution of Israeli military doctrine, and by extension the military context in which Hamas is forced to operate to produce a moment like 7th October. Hamas had been targeting civilians with suicide bombs for over a decade before then, and while there was also a logic to those actions, and a particular military context, it wasn’t just liberal Western intellectuals who pointed out how damaging the campaign was. Here’s the greatest Palestinian intellectual of them all, Edward Said, writing in 2002 (this book, p. 185):

"If there is one thing that has done us more harm as a cause than Arafat’s ruinous regime, it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain, no one has been able to say."​

And earlier, in 1994 (this book, p. 111):

"As to Hamas and its actions in the Occupied Territories, I know that the organization is one of the only ones expressing resistance and that the kidnapping of the soldier of an occupying army is morally less unacceptable than abducting or killing civilians riding a bus. Yet for any secular intellectual to make a devil's pact with a religious movement is, I think, to substitute convenience for principle. It is simply the other side of the pact we made during the past several decades with dictatorship and nationalism, for example, supporting Saddam Hussein when he went to war with "the Persians." A second, perhaps even more important, point is that, as resistance, such actions do us little good, and except for the intifada, resemble far too much the whole history of Palestinian resistance, full of loss, individual heroism, and no coordinated strategic goal. Bombing civilian buses, on the other hand, is criminal and useless."​

There's a casual dismissal of such excesses in the piece that, to me, suggests an unwillingness to interrogate the links between this violence and the nature of Hamas as a movement beyond a context entirely determined by Israeli policies. It's unfortunate that the author doesn't really make any distinction between Hamas and the broader Palestinian national movement and resistance, or acknowledge that, while there may be a logic to Hamas actions that defies Western conceptualizations of the movement as barbaric or, more charitably, purely driven by revenge and despair, such actions may still remain disastrous for the Palestinians.

With that in mind, I am completely skeptical about the prospect of a Hamas-led Palestinian resistance emerging as the vanguard of a global movement for "a broader human horizon" or "universal struggle", whatever that may mean. That is too much of a burden for any national resistance movement to carry, and the language seems to belong to the heady revolutionary days of the late 60s and 70s. It's certainly not a mission that Hamas has ever seriously proclaimed.
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As always, superb post.
 
Wibble said:
Seriously? Nobody doubts that Hamas widely use tunnels. Why dispute such a thing?
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Are you not a scientist, why would you believe anything without the proper proof? I personally believe essentially nothing from either side until it has been properly vetted from multiple sources that I personally believe to be unbiased(or attempting to be so).
 
RedDevilQuebecois said:
And they still resist the idea of accepting Palestinian refugees. That is why I scoff at the BS coming out from the mouths of those Middle Eastern governments on their "support" for Palestinians. If they care one bit about civilians, they better find a way to support their most urgent needs now and then keep the political games for later.

In comparison, a tiny nation named Macedonia (now North Macedonia) took a large chunk of Kosovar refugees (132,500 according to MSF back in April 1999) even though they were friendlier to Serbia than most other nations in the Balkans were during the late 1990s.
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How many Palestinian refugees live in the tiny nation named Lebanon? Jordan?
 
Real Name said:
Names of the terrorists on the paper is the best bit. Apparently its days of the week. That's so hilariously bad.
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They played part of that video on BBC news last night. Despite saying they couldn’t verify the authenticity of the video, it feels really dishonest to even play this kind of stuff if it’s so easily refutable.
 
Wibble said:
Haven't they? Or just is locations that make Hamas look bad?

Odd that people don't want to recognise that many players in all this are utter cnuts.
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Hamas just killed hundreds of innocent jews, it doesn't need anything to look bad.
 
flameinthesun said:
The world is changing, whether for good or bad I have no idea. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that change only moves forward not backwards. This will now be the status quo until things change again.
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i dont disgree, the die has been cast. hospitals, women, children, injuried, sick, elderly, schools, universities, places of worship, UN designated facilities are all now targets of modern warfare. It shouldnt be this way...
 
Wibble said:
So what is? They use tunnels but not the tunnels Israel claim?
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It's fairly simple. Everyone knows Hamas use tunnels but Israel justify bombing hospitals, schools and refugee camps with the justification that their are Hamas tunnels underneath. Now as someone who obviously cares about the Human species and since many innocent children and women are dying because of the bombing, since many people are dying because of this you would've thought that their would be some sort of incremental evidence to support their claims not just their word and some dodgy video claiming that this is a Hamas tunnel with a piece of paper with days of the week on it claiming to be terrorist names found.

You would also think that even if they were using tunnels underneath, a state with as much power as Israel would care more about other humans as to not bomb those places and find other means of taking care of Hamas without the damage to innocent civilians. Since, I'm sure if Hamas were hiding underneath a hospital in Israel their actions wouldn't be the same.
 
Faktisk.no, a fact checker owned by some of the biggest media companies in Norway, has attempted to verify the IDF's claims about Sheikh Hamad Hospital being connected to Hamas tunnels. Specifically, the claim is that they have uncovered a hatch at the hospital. You can use Google translate if you're interested in details: https://www.faktisk.no/artikler/z8214/nei-dette-beviser-ikke-hamas-tunneler

Headline says "No, this doesn't prove Hamas tunnels". They show that the hatch, and whatever it leads to, was built at the same time as the hospital, and is drawn on the building plan/blueprint.
 
It seems the problem wasn’t electricity/fuel shortage. They only need non-Hamas incubators. The Israeli liberators are bringing them now.


 
harms said:
It's not news — Smotrich is a horrendous human being and one who doesn't hide his own views on the matter.
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What worries me is that he's allowed to utter his disgusting rethoric without any meaningful pushback in a country that is the land of a people that mightily suffered from the exact same genocidal pieces of fecal matter. What worries me even more is that he's the Finance Minister of said country that describes itself as a democracy. What truly terrifies me is that no government in the West, not a single one, calls him out or that government on it.

This apathy and willful blindness will bite us all back in the arse.
 
Raoul said:
No, I don't think so. There are occasional exaggerations and clumsiness in some of the Israeli releases, but they are ultimately incentivized to put out accurate information since they know not doing so will result in more damage than benefit to their objectives. The same can be applied to Hamas when it comes to casualty figures. I previously was highly skeptical of their numbers but have since concluded that as long as the numbers are not absurd, that they are more likely accurate than not. I think we have to be careful to fall into the trap of always only believing one side in this dispute, and should instead be considering what both sides are saying.
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This is an utterly mental take. They've been caught lying on so many occasions that you can't truly believe this.
 


A march calling for genocide. Some guy was saying he doesn't want more bombs falling down on Gaza and the crowd chanted for no ceasefire.
 
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