Hamas’s Qassam Brigades has threatened to execute Israeli captives if Israel continues to bombard and kill civilians in Gaza.
“Any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives in our custody, and we will be forced to broadcast this execution,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’ Qassam Brigades.
“We regret this decision but we hold the Zionist enemy and their leadership the responsibility for this,” he said.
It’s great both sides of this conflict have so much respect for protecting the lives of civilians. Ugh. I wish the leaders of Hamas and Bibi’s reactionary government were the ones that would actually suffer the consequences of this war.
This conflict benefits the most: Russia and China (by having US distracted) and Bibi (by having previously divided Israelis united behind him)
Iran too. I’m sure they weren’t too happy with the impending Israeli-Saudi rapprochement. This at a minimum will significantly complicate that.
Wouldn’t this whole thing just be a huge problem for him tho? After Israel is done, I would think that the government would start getting really uncomfortable questions from the people. Like wtf was the military and the intelligence doing.
A segment of the populace will definitely be feeling that, but remember what happened in the US after 9/11? There weren’t a lot of calls to figure out how intelligence failed so spectacularly because the sabre-rattling government came out in full force, and the country (almost) united against Islamic terrorism. Those who aren’t overtly political or who don’t follow politics too closely will only see that Bibi has reacted with as much force as possible, which plays into his strongman vibe and may even win his party an election in their own right, without having to coalesce with the other parties. After the clusterfuck of elections they’ve been through recently, this could be what seals another decade of Likud rule.
So while the US is “distracted”, Russia and China do what? Steal the pie from the windowsill?
We stop backing Ukraine, we start backing Israel. Ukraine loses billions in funding, which helps Russia. The better off Russia is the larger ally China has.
Yes, I think Israel can handle Hamas on their own, but Hezbollah is looking if there is an opportunity for them. I think that’s why US Navy is there to discourage them.
That’s rich.
You just killed civilians, what evidence is there to conclude you wouldn’t kill those ppl anyway.
Both sides of this conflict have done so much horrific shit, you can’t trust any of them.
I dunno, the internet has told me that Israel is just as bad. I definitely remember when the IDF took a bunch of civilian women and children as hostages and then announced that it was going to livestream their murder.
Oh wait.
There are no good guys in that conflict.
Only bad guys and victims.
Hamas being terrorists doesn’t make it OK for Israel to be committed to genocide any more than Israel’s existence as an ethnofascist apartheid state makes in OK for Hamas to be bombing proms.
Both organizations are making it impossible for Palestinians to live peacefully.
Snark aside, I do completely agree, and there’s a lot that I would criticize Israel for. That list does not, however, include mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of random civilians.
Rape and kidnapping maybe not but did you just say that Israel hasn’t been murdering Palestinians? Or are you saying they’ve never murdered more than 200 at once
It does include apartheid, genocide, belief in racial superiority and murdering journalists though. We can’t equate what one side has done with the other as one side has generally held all the power while one side has been persistently oppressed. Also, it’s pretty hard to say whether mass murder, rape and kidnapping civilians is as bad as, worse than, or better than genocide.
The Israeli government regularly commits atrocities and crimes against humanity. Hamas regularly commits atrocities and crimes against humanity. There are no good guys here, just bad guys in charge being funded and goaded by other bad guys and innocent civilians being needlessly murdered.
If Israel were committed to genocide there would be no Palestine. It is their historical sensitivity to genocide and limitations placed on them by international law and foreign pressures that imposes on them very different standards of behavior in this war. If they operated by the same set of rules that Hamas does, this conflict would have been over long ago.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.
One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-account
Israel does not perform atrocities like this. This wasn’t collateral damage, this wasn’t an attack on a valid military target, it was intentionally kidnapping, raping, and murdering civilians. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to swallow the, “both sides are equally bad,” narrative. I had a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian situation before, it is quickly evaporating.
Israel has turned Gaza into an open air prison. Today Bibi announced the blockade would become total, including food, water, and medicine, which sure sounds like a path to genocide, but I’ll save that criticism until it actually plays out. In general, Israel is an apartied state. Hamas is a bunch of murderous terrorists committing war crimes, doing far more harm to their supposed cause than good. This attack will result in far more of their people suffering. But they count on that, hate within the Palestine community in Gaza is what gives them political power, so the civilians Isreal is currently killing will just continue to fuel the cycle of violence.
Everyone sucks here, Hamas sucks way way way more, but that doesn’t make Israel “good”. If you compare Nazi Germany to apartied South Africa, the former is going to win the evil country contest everytime. But that doesn’t make apartied South Africa good. If it wasn’t for the Book of Revelations, America (it’s government and it’s people) would care as much about this conflict as it does about various civil wars and genocides happening all over the world, which is to say not at all (unless oil or other natural resources are imperilled).
I’m not denying that some of this is factual reporting, but that particular source can be very biased with respect to Israel.
Overall, we rate Tablet Magazine as right-center biased based on an editorial bias that moderately favors the pro-Israel nationalist right. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to the promotion of conspiracy theories despite a clean third-party fact check record.
“Israel are the good guys because the international community has stopped them from completing the genocide at a quick pace”
God I really hope a ethno state claims your own land as theirs, puts you in an open air prison as it gradually steals pieces of it for its owns settlers year after year, denies you food and medicines. Shoots women, children, medics and reporters in your community.
Remember when terrorists attacked the USA, UK, France and Spain?
And then we decided to commit war crimes and deprive civilians of water, electricity and food, while destroying their houses?
Oh wait, we didn’t.
We actually tried to win hearts and minds while targeting just the terrorists.
Didn’t work out, but we didn’t become vicious war criminals against poor innocent civilians who just happened to be ethnically related to the terrorists.
Israel is not deserving of support by the civilized world.
lmao what hearts and minds do you expect to win out of a population who has religious beef with you? A population who would gladly wipe you out if they could?
Nah, Israel needs to be able to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the name of peace, so that Palestinians can find their peace elsewhere.
Um, Iraq and Afghanistan? We absolutely DESTROYED ALL of Iraq’s infrastructure in like a week and then GW flew out to an aircraft carrier with a banner that said “Mission Accomplished”.
Then we spend the next 20 years kicking in doors and killing civilians cause reasons.
Then we bail and leave all the dudes that helped us out behind so they can pay the price for helping the enemy…good times…
Israel is not deserving of support by the civilized world.
Totally agree but just like the drug commercial in the '80s…“I learned it from watching you!”
Rest assured, I understand the mess fairly well. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Middle East and know several Palestinians and Israelis.
There’s quite a lot that I’d strongly criticize Israel for, but intentional murder and rape of civilians is something that can never be justified, no matter how much critical theory you read.
I love this take because it implies that Palestinians, on their own, are incapable of self-determination and self-governance without degenerating into raping, slaving, barbarians, thereby justifying the existence of Gaza and Israel’s actions; yet, this is presented earnestly, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, and with the veil of being in some way pro-palestinian.
You know as well as I do that the IDF has never done anything like what happened on Saturday. Kidnapping children? Shooting random people waiting at a bus stop? Slaughtering 200 people at a festival? Taking a hundred hostages and then threatening to murder them while live streaming it?
Israel has done a lot of shit, and deserves criticism for all of it, but it has not done anything comparable to this.
They have regularly and repeatedly carried out air strikes targeting civilian infrastructure with no evidence of military targets.
There are multiple reports from multiple years of IDF soldiers killing children, including the recent video of soldiers killing a young boy in front of a cheering crowd.
What about all the videos of the things IDF has done to people in the West Bank? Countless reports of women being raped before being thrown from their homes, and their family members being shot for resisting having their land stolen from them.
Yes, what happened the other day was terrible. But it’s not unilateral, Israel has committed war crimes against Palestinians for decades. Just because they have been spread out instead of all happening on one day does not make them better.
The equivalency discussions are all BS.
Terrorist attacks targeting civilians are bad.
Also, indiscriminate bombing killing civilians is bad.
A civilized world really shouldn’t condone either. And one doesn’t justify the other.
Flying planes into civilian buildings killing thousands wasn’t an appropriate response to their government supporting tyrants who tortured and killed dissidents. (Also, probably not a good idea to support tyrants.)
The hundreds of thousands of civilians who died in the middle east in response to those attacks shouldn’t have had to pay the price on such an attack even if their country had had anything to do with it in the first place.
The only appropriate “both sides” in these kinds of situations is the capacity to have empathy and regret over the suffering that occurs to normal people trying to live their lives on both sides of the conflicts.
Unfortunately a lot of what I’m seeing online these days is the logical equivalent of “Bin Laden was justified in 9/11 because the US’s foreign policy caused the suffering of many in the middle east.” Logic I happen to think is pretty disgusting personally, just as I’ve also always found dismissal of civilian suffering in broader military responses reprehensible.
Not a lot of countries have clean hands to be pointing fingers with, but the only way we move towards a world with less blood on our collective hands is by unequivocally pointing to human rights abuses where they occur and saying “this is not okay.”
Not “this is okay because so and so bombed a city block first and wasn’t touching black while saying I’m rubber and you’re glue.”
No - targeting or indiscriminately killing civilians is not okay - full stop.
And if one’s attitude about the civilian deaths of one group of people is anything less than that, they might just be a bit racist towards that group of people, and may want to reexamine how they look at fellow humans and the degree to which minor differences in skin color or religion or ancestral identity outweighs the commonality of the human experience of pain, suffering, and loss.
TL;DR: It’s perfectly appropriate to recognize that the Palestinian people have suffered injustice and mistreatment while also recognizing that a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians is repugnant. The mental gymnastics to recognize the former and not the latter is pretty gross though, and honestly every time I see it (and frequently these days) I can’t help but think it probably really does boil down to racist assholes using false equivalency to justify their bigotry.
Just your typical 80 yr occupation with no real options to even become a state, I mean how bad could that be right?
Except that Oslo accord that they walked out on, and that fact that this is happening in the Gaza strip, a section of Palestinian controlled land with the 1967 borders, a foreign and maritime border and had all Jewish residents (including those that predated the 1948 beginning of hostilities) evicted, often an gunpoint and has had autonomy for nearly two decades now right? Besides that option.
It’s time to free Palestine from this planet.
