IDF: Whoops, tee hee.
Compared to dumping white phosphorus over hospitals and refugee camps, killing 2 (?) children during an attack that targeted hundreds/thousands is many orders of magnitude more precise. I hate dead innocents as much as anyone, but you gotta admit the pagers were effective and included way less collateral damage than the methods Isreal has employed in recent history.
The point of the post isn’t to praise the pagers attack. It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
That comes down to how often Hamas orders things that can reasonably have small bombs put inside them on a large scale and that Hamas are expected to have on their person’s most of the time, how secure their supply lines are, how paranoid they are about looking for that kind of thing, that sort of thing. It involves a lot more moving parts and rare opportunities than just dropping some bombs.
but you gotta admit the pagers were effective and included way less collateral damage than the methods Isreal has employed in recent history.
Do you admit that mass gas chambers are an effective way to kill people ?
If my goal was to kill exclusively enemy combatants and leave all civilians alone, it would be pretty effective to round them up and gas them, yes. I’d rather do that than indiscriminate fire.
You do realise targets in Gaza and targets in Lebanon are not the same? On one hand you have fighters shielding themselves behind civilians and dont even know what a pager is and why they would use it, on the other hand you have political and operative leaders on these fighters that need these pagers to stay low profile and untaped…
On one hand you have fighters shielding themselves behind civilians
You’re right, this is disgusting…
And this is too. Do these people have no morals? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/23/human-shielding-in-action-israeli-forces-strap-palestinian-man-to-jeep
The practice is said to be so routine that Israeli soldiers have a name for the human shields, who are referred to as shawish – informal slang for a low-ranking soldier – and the process was described by several witnesses.
Palestinian civilians, mostly young men, are picked up by Israeli soldiers, dressed in Israeli army uniforms, then sent into tunnels and damaged houses ahead of Israeli forces, soldiers told Haaretz and Breaking the Silence.
Their hands are tied together and a camera is attached to their bodies as they go in.
Holy fuck that’s disgusting
That’s not really true unless you believe IDF propaganda
Security
Israel does justify the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice. See: The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948, the Transfer Committee, and the JNF which led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate, before the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948: Plan Dalet, Declassified Massacres of 1948, and Details of Plan C (May 1946) and Plan D (March 1948) . Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967: Haaretz, Forward; while the peace process was exploited to continue de-facto annexation of the West Bank via Settlements (Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ). The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.
The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.
- Avi Shlaim
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
State violence – official and otherwise – is part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The regime treats land as a resource designed to serve the Jewish public, and accordingly uses it almost exclusively to develop and expand existing Jewish residential communities and to build new ones. At the same time, the regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves.
The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence. Settler violence sometimes precedes instances of official violence by Israeli authorities, and at other times is incorporated into them. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.
Civilian Deaths and Human Shields:
Israel does deliberately targets civilian areas. From in general with the Dahiya Doctrine to multiple systems deployed in Gaza to do so: ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy. When it comes to Israeli Soldiers and Civilians, there is also the use of the Hannibal Directive, which was also used on Oct 7th.
Hundreds of Genocide Scholars have described this ethnic cleansing campaign as genocide because of the deliberate targeting of children/civilians and expressed intent by Israeli officials: “A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza, 800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza , Law for Palestine Releases Database with 500+ Instances of Israeli Incitement to Genocide – Continuously Updated.
On the subject of Human Shields, there are some independent reports for past conflicts of Hamas jeopardizing the safety of civilians via Rocket fire in dense urban areas, two instances during Oct 7th, but no independent verification since then so far. None of which absolve Israel of the crime of targeting civilians under international law:
Intentionally utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain areas immune from military attack is prohibited under international law. Amnesty International was not able to establish whether or not the fighters’ presence in the camps was intended to shield themselves from military attacks. However, under international humanitarian law, even if one party uses “human shields”, or is otherwise unlawfully endangering civilians, this does not absolve the opposing party from complying with its obligations to distinguish between military objectives and civilians or civilian objects, to refrain from carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, and to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects.
Additionally, there is extensive independent verification of Israel using Palestinians as Human Shields: IDF uses Human Shields, including Children (2013 Report), and in the latest war Israel “Systematically” Uses Gaza Children as Human Shields, Rights Group Finds
