Hamas has called on Palestinians to stay in their homes after Israel issued sweeping evacuation orders for almost half of Gaza’s more than 2.3 million people ahead of an expected ground offensive.
The Hamas authority for refugee affairs today told residents in the north of the territory to “remain steadfast in your homes and to stand firm in the face of this disgusting psychological war waged by the occupation”.
Translation: “If all the civilians leave, we won’t be able to use them as human shields anymore.”
Edit: It’s also true that Israel has made it extraordinarily difficult to leave. They are not the good guys, here. But there are no good guys here except for the civilians, and we know Hamas is a terrorist organization that is perfectly willing to use them as human shields.
There’s nowhere for them to go…
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and Israel just told them to fit in half as much space at a time when they have no fuel, water, or electricity.
It’s fucking impossible. And if they actually move, the Palestinians are smart enough to know they will never be able to access that land again.
Hell, Hamas is the only ones with the resources to move
You think Israel will just stop and leave the Southern half?
Even if they did, they’re keeping the northern part and annexing it.
But more likely they’ll be invading the southern half immediately after taking the north.
They can’t even leave Gaza, because Israel is attacking the exit to Egypt.
Stop acting like them moving is in any way a valid option. They are literally fucked no matter what they do. And it’s been like this for a long long time.
Have you thought that perhaps Israel could just not bomb a civilian area?
I’d argue that not leaving would hopefully discourage bombing the entire area and 2 million people losing their homes.
Israel “we’ll do it anyway”
Who’s the bad guys here?
Yes, but that’s only the convenient half for the pro-Israeli media.
The inconvenient other half is that they have blocked EVERY possible exit from Gaza, including telling the Egyptians to not allow anyone out.
So, no food, fuel, electricity, medicine, water, or shelters. One of the MOST densely populated regions in the whole world, and they were just expected to what? Walk down the strip to sit in the ‘safe’ bombed out rubble?
Would they be allowed a “right of return” afterwards?
No good options for those residents. So you can use this to rightfully condem Hamas because it suits their political objectives, but that doesn’t change the fact about the rest of what I’ve laid out.
So what would you do? Stay in your home and risk death? Or become homeless and only have a marginally less chance of death?
Question: is it actually true that Israel doesn’t want Palestinians to leave via the southern border to Egypt? I’ve heard on the news twice (BBC Hardtalk and somewhere else I can’t recall now) that the opposite is true. From what I’ve heard, Israel wants the Palestinians to leave, but Egypt does not want to allow them into their country because it would be a huge burden to feed, house, and police a million+ angry refugees.
It also makes more sense from Israel’s point of view to get the Palestinians out of Gaza. Israel’s greatest danger is, and always has been, the opprobrium of the international community if they kill too many civilians. It would be a huge victory for Israel if the civilians all leave, which is why Hamas wants them to stay!
Israel just want all Palestinian land, no matter how. If they leave, great. If they’re all dead, fine. All they care about is the land. Of course Israel would prefer them to just leave and not be their issue anymore, but they caused the issue driving Palestinians into Gaza in the first place, and could just as easily let them out again.
Answer:
Israel keeps saying it’s open, but bombed it three times in 24 hrs too…
Israel on Tuesday dropped bombs next to the only border crossing allowing civilians to flee Gaza after the Israeli military directed Palestinians, looking to escape air strikes in the war against Hamas, toward the crossing.
Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an IDF spokesman, urged Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip for Egypt early Tuesday, with the Times of Israel reporting he said: “Rafah crossing is still open. Anyone who can get out, I would advise them to get out.”
This airstrike was the third Israeli attack on the crossing in the last 24 hours and consisted of four missiles, Al Jazeera reported, citing officials from the local Egyptian group, Sinai for Human Rights.
So the crossing is open on the Egypt side, but complete rubble and inaccessible on the Palestinian side
The Egyptian side of the crossing is open, but the Palestinian side is “non-functional” following multiple Israeli airstrikes earlier this week, a senior Jordanian official told CNN Thursday, adding that “the Jordanians and Egyptians are waiting for security clearance from the Israelis to allow (aid) trucks to cross without threat of another airstrike.”
Israel is telling them to do something that’s literally impossible.
The inconvenient other half is that they have blocked EVERY possible exit from Gaza, including telling the Egyptians to not allow anyone out.
Er… that’s not true. They were initially telling Palestinians to go to Egypt. Egypt does not want them in the Sinai and told Israel to provide safe passage through Israel.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rafah-border-gaza-egypt-israel-1.6994234
Yes, it’s true that Egypt does not want to allow a mass exodus of refugees.
It’s also true that Israel has been bombing that area as well.
So not sure what your point is.
In this case staying put will likely save more lives than trying to move 40k people per hour within 24 hours.
Not even Hamas themselves are saying they were doing it in order to prevent loss of lives during the evacuation.
Israeli translation: if you don’t get the fuck out so we can capture and resettle half your city we are more than happy, to commit mass murder instead.
to commit mass murder instead.
Mass murder like attacking a festival and killing 260+ people?
Gaza is more densely populated than LA and they have no electricity, water, or fuel.
The only exit is thru Egypt, and Israel keeps blowing it up.
Even if the message got to everyone, there’s no way people could do what Israel told them.
Israel knows this. They weren’t trying to “help” by announcing they’re going to flatten half of Gaza, they want to cause panic and riots.
In this specific case isreal asked residents of Gaza city, a subpart of the Gaza strip to move to a more southern position in the Gaza strip. Like asking people to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn because they are going to blow up Manhattan. People are capable of moving within the Gaza strip. That doesn’t mean there will be housing for them however.
That doesn’t mean there will be housing for them however.
Or food… Or water…
Or shelter for a few days from now when Israel starts bombing the southern half.
All this is doing is motivating residents of Gaza to pick up arms against Israel.
Which a cynic would say is exactly what Israel wants
Like asking people to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn because they are going to blow up Manhattan
Even if this analogy was representative, this would ALSO be a complete mess to try and do and that’s in a city with working roads, fuel, transportation options, easy access to telecoms/information, and support personnel. Even with all that, it would not be possible to do in 24 hours.
I don’t think the analogy helped
And then they bomb and target those places specifically. Israel is staging a genocide. This statements are just lip service to pretend that they are following some formalism of humanitarian law.
Some things to consider:
- Check out some maps of Israel-Palestine over time and tell me whether fleeing Palestinians will ever get their homes back
- Gaza has no bomb shelters. The best they have are their own homes, and hospitals – which are already overrun with local populations, let alone migrant populations, and are being targeted by Israeli air strikes
- Israel is using white phosphorous against a territory which, if considered a country on its own, would be the third-most densely populated in the world
- Supplies of food, water, electricity, and fuel have been cut off, so people who leave their local support systems have no chance of acquiring vital supplies
- There is no exit. Sea has a permanent blockade. The only airport has been a crater since 2001. There are two ground crossings (Israel and Egypt), and the Egyptian one has been repeatedly closed due to Israeli missile strikes – after Israel advised civilians to go there.
- Israel is already targeting evacuating convoys
- Earlier this year, displacement from the war in Sudan was repeatedly called a “crisis” by relief orgs when it reached a displacement of 1 million people in a country of 45 million, one month after fighting began. We’re talking about 1 million in a territory of 2.3 million, in 24 hours
Check out some maps of Israel-Palestine over time and tell me whether fleeing Palestinians will ever get their homes back
Did you notice how the Gazan border in 1967 was the SE as it was in 2005? What did the map look like in 1990? Is the reason you didn’t include that map is that it would have shown a return of land in the Gaza strip done so without a war by Israel to demonstrate that peace based on the 1967 borders could function. I also noticed your maps ignored the Sinai, another example of where Israel has shown a willingness to give up land for peace.
If there was a realistic shot that return land won in warfare would lead to lasting peace, Israel would do so.
I know we’re all fighting but I think this guy has a point.
I’m pretty sure Israel and Palestine were closer to peace in 94 than they ever have been but then Zionists assassinated Rabin.
After that Actually kinda the whole time the US and UK refused to work with Hamas and in 97 they declared Hamas a terrorist organization.
I mean Hamas clearly is a terrorist organization. How many raped corpses do they have to drag through the streets to prove it?
They care enough about peace to give land back in pursuit of it. There are multiple political parties in Israel. The ones that engineered the Gazan deal got voted in because the majority of Israeli’s wanted to create a peace deal based on the 1967 borders. And the coalition they put together didn’t have the political power to unilaterally do it all at once a after the PLA pulled out of the Oslo Accords. So, they hung their hat on establishing peace in the Gazan strip in a manner that could be a model for the establishment of peace across the region. In the same way that they dismantled settlements and returned oil installations in the Gazan strip to Egypt in search of lasting peace; they did the same to the Palestinians in the Strip.
But unlike Egypt, Gazans responded with neverending war.
Boy, the AI was drinking when it made that summary.
I was reading through it carefully for the issues till I got to the bit where it was explaining unrelated headlines. After that it started to spit out… whatever this was:
The draw on Wednesday night ended a long stretch without a winner of the top prize and brought news media to Midway Market and Liquor in Frazier Park, a community of 2,600 residents about 75 miles north of Los Angeles.
Who the hell is still defending Israel after this declaration to eradicate Palestinians in Gaza?
if your government invade and kill civilians in any country that have a strong army you gonna have a bad time. how do you think Canada would answer this?
and the USA? the Germans?
Imagine a country has blockaded all of your borders. No one can leave, your power plants cant import fuel, not even humanitarian aid is allowed in, and people are dying as a result. You want them to just wait for a slow death?
this shitty false dichotomy again, the options aren’t just dying or murdering civilians, but I would rather just die than murder random civilians in a party anyway
I’m not sure it is reasonable to “defend” either side at this point. There are radical and moderate, innocent and guilty, peaceful and violent, reasonable and unreasonable people in both Palestine and Israel, and peace proposals have been made and rejected many times. I doubt many people outside of the situation have unlimited support for either side since both sides have committed atrocities.
I would guess that most observers realize that decades of alternating peace and war in Israel have shown that no lasting peace is possible until one side leaves.
After watching this conflict for 40 years, I have empathy fatigue. I don’t really care who wins anymore, but this region has been a powder keg for too long. I also don’t care whose “fault” it is anymore. All parties have to leave that behind and get to practical solutions. 75 years of unresolved active conflict is just too long.
Israel is too powerful. It will not be moved or defeated, and another all-out war by another coalition of Arab states will hurt the Palestinians as much as the Israelis. Nor will Israel ever allow the “right-of-return” of millions of Palestinians to Israel proper because then the Jews would be demographically overwhelmed. Therefore, the most practical, peaceful and humane, if not the most just or fair, solution is for most Palestinians to be properly re-settled outside of Israel, far from the Israeli border, where they can start new lives.
I think your sentiment is specifically against arabs. Would you be suggesting people like ukrainians to abandon their country to end the war that another, larger country started?
I love how so many people think the answer to the displaced Palestinians issue, is to evict every Israeli out of the middle East and displace a whole new generation of people. Coexistence is the only path forward but it isn’t going to happen with natanyahu and Hamas in charge. The young people need to be given charge of their future
No, it has nothing to do with my having a preference for Jews over Arabs, or Ukrainians over Russians, for that matter. If Ukraine and Russia are still fighting and disrupting the region after 75 years, I would say the same thing. In fact, it is sad to say, but most experts think that Ukraine will probably have to trade away some territory for peace. My point is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for 75 years and won’t be settled peacefully as long as Israelis and Palestinians occupy the same land, so some other solution is necessary.
So… In this case, Hamas is Russia and Israel is Ukraine. Hamas is the one who started the latest attack.
