Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza for nearly three months has destroyed 70 percent of the homes in the besieged Palestinian enclave, according to the Government Media Office.
No further details were provided but an earlier report said more than 200 heritage and archaeological sites were destroyed in the Israeli bombardment considered the most destructive in modern history.
About 300,000 out of 439,000 homes have been destroyed in Israeli attacks, a Wall Street Journal report said. Analysing satellite imagery, the report added that the 29,000 bombs dropped on the strip have targeted residential areas, Byzantine churches, hospitals and shopping malls and all civilian infrastructure has been damaged to an extent that they cannot be repaired.
“The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden [Germany] and other famous cities that have been bombed,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the history of aerial bombing, told WSJ.
Maybe I’m just getting soft, but I think it’s been pretty wild to watch a government murder tens of thousands of innocents real-time.
Those of us old enough to remember Rwanda have seen it before. I take issue with gov’ts who’ve also seen it before and still do sweet fuck all about it.
Rwanda, Serbia, Armenia, and still ongoing that everyone is ignoring, the Rohingya, Uyghurs and Sudan.
World War 2 also had a little genocide issue…
The big difference is that we were supposed to be above this shit by now after 75 years of “never again”.
Instead we’ve once again stooped down to the same moral level with the Ubermensch trying to expand their Lebensraum shit. And Westen governments are actually supporting it.
When I saw the Uyghur camps I didn’t think “we could do worse than that” was an option.
Russia has murdered almost 20 000 civilians, perhaps around 500 000 soldiers in total (both sides) in its mindless war in Ukraine. Not all of them innocent certainly, but I’d guess at least 90%. And they’re not even trying to protect themselves from anything.
And if you’ve been paying attention, this has been going for almost 2 years now. And still goes on. One best case scenario that Estonia recently presented in a report was that Russia will lose the war in 2 years. So if the rate keeps until then, we’re looking at about a million deaths in total. Granted, Ukraine and Russia’s combined population is a lot higher than the Gaza strip. Senseless deaths still.
You’re seeing the way they can do it
It’s clear that living next to Hamas is unacceptable to Israelis.
They’re going to remove Palestine. Whether Hamas still exists afterward will be irrelevant, except maybe to serve as some nightmare boogeyman that Israel’s leadership can use to justify literally anything.
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as
… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
—[United Nations] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2
If intent to destroy a group is required, how can you call anything a genocide? You’d have to prove that that is their intent, which will be pretty much impossible in the majority of cases.
I assume it works kind of like what’s called “possession with intent to distribute” drugs in the US, which really means possession of a sufficiently large amount to cross some legal threshold. I don’t think most reasonable people would dispute that destroying 70% of the housing shows an intention to make Gaza unlivable.
But in that case any sufficiently destructive attack on a city in a war (e.g. Dresden) would be considered genocide, no?
Is there anything Israel wouldn’t bomb? Just asking questions, here.
Making Gazans homeless stops terrorism how?
Oh that’s easy. You see they let Israeli Banks give all the loans for rebuilding. Then when the Gazans inevitably default because the IDF never left and everyone is still on food aid; they take the property back and sell it to Israelis. Then the IDF kicks them out and deports then under the color of law. Everyone pats each other on the back and they all declare mission Accomplished.
They are creating the next generation of “terrorists”.
I was in the thick of it during the wars in Iraq (06-07) and Afghanistan (09-10) fighting and it was critical we avoid collateral damage to population and structures - you’re absolutely right, it creates terrorists.
When things kicked off in Israel, even the US Administration, states to be careful with strikes. It’s all of the hype surrounding Mossad and Israel’s claim to fame when it comes to counterterrorism, I am shocked that they didn’t utilize more strategic strikes and Special Forces to eliminate Hamas.
I definitely see them in a different light now.
Same here, 03/05 in Iraq and 2012 in Afghanistan. I was absolutely shocked because the place is only 7 miles wide. Their tactics are way overblown for such a small area, and then they seemed to take all the stuff we did in 2003 to mitigate civilian casualties and just toss it in the trash can.
