"But Israel gave them prime waterfront land!". A life in Gaza thread.

You actually think this is an independent or reliable source of information? Really?

"Also note: the number of Palestinians killed does not include the 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast, as the source of the projectile is in dispute. However, much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, and experts are still looking into the ."

https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/charts/

Slight problem with your rhetoric here, the Israeli airstrikes of Gaza predate Hamas coming to power by FIVE YEARS and the Israeli blockade of Gaza predates Hamas coming to power by TWO YEARS.

You have a chicken and egg logic fail. The blockade was implemented in 2005 but was advertised as only temporary, in 2007 after Hamas came to power this was then admitted to be a permanent blockade. The first airstrike by an F-16 on a residential apartment block was in 2002.

Bullshit.

Sharpeville wasn't in the US. And the ANC were certainly calling for armed struggle. Not sure I'm engaging with someone who clearly knows so little about the history of resistance.

Absolutely, which I why I vehemently condemn Hamas for not only breaking the ceasefire on 7 October, but also for purposely targeting young civilians at a music festival. There was no indication that Israeli troops were present, so this was a war crime.

Oops. SA autocorrected to US for some reason

so you're basically exposed your own glaring hypocrisy. @Hippyhippybake

You can't condemn war crimes and justify them at the same time.

Yes I do condemn war crimes but the commitment of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the destruction of Israel and the murder of all Jews means that Israel can justify to itself this sort of horrible destruction in the name of self defence. It is clearly not analogous to Tiananmen Square or Sharpeville as the protestors weren’t calling for the murder of Chinese or US citizens.

Which protests are we talking about here? The ones being carried out the world over calling for cease fire and against genocide? To be fair I don't think that the UN give a flying f*ck about the protests. I'd guess they are a bit more concerned with Israel's war crimes and mass slaughter.

So it is the children’s parents fault that IDF soldiers shot and killed them, knowing that they were children and part of a peaceful protest? And when did these parents vow to destroy Israel? And what about the fact that not one single IDF solider or Israeli civilian was attacked or killed? It sort of indicates to me that the UN report was correct that the protesters were unarmed and of no threat to life to any IDF soldier. Which seems to indicate these protesters were not people who have vowed to destroy or murder anyone.

Your comments are high on rhetoric and low on evidence. Do you agree with Lieberman then that there are no innocents in Gaza, that every man, woman and child is connected to Hamas?

The UN did describe the protesters as peaceful. I cut and paste from their comments in the HRW report.

Please answer my question, do you condemn war crimes?

@TutuDesi France don’t need to do any of that because the UK isn’t committed to achieving its destruction and the murder of all its inhabitants.

You think the punishment for protest against a repressive violent regime should be death?

I assume you feel the same way about the Sharpeville massacre and Tiananmen.

do you condemn war crimes?

Yes a truly horrible event but who would encourage or even allow their children to take part in a protest right on the border of a fearsome military power who they have vowed to destroy? Even the UN didn’t describe the protests as peaceful.

The UK gets quite a substantial amount of electricity from France and Norway, and if they turned off our supply would you blame them or our own government for not providing our energy security? But, but, Israel.

Well, France doesn’t have a land, sea and air blockade around us. Nor do they control the number of jobs we can have at a rate of 5,000 jobs per 1 million people. Nor does France regularly bomb our power plant and refuse the fuel needed to run its generators.

Note for example even though IDF shot 1,619 Palestinian children with live ammunition (not rubber bullets, but real bullets) participating in peaceful protests in 2018/19 killing 46 of them (and this has been investigated and declared a war crime by the UN), no Israeli person, IDF soldier or civilian was killed in retaliation. Not one.

Then more Palestinians were killed in 2020, 2021,2022….still no retaliation.

This is what the UN Secretary General meant when he said that the 2023 attack did not happen in a vacuum.

@usernamealreadytaken do you condemn war crimes?

I think we are beyond that. The right of Israel to exist is unassailable. Israel isn’t going anywhere. It’s under the wing of the most powerful nations on Earth. The question for this century and the root of the past 23yrs of conflict is Palestine’s right to exist as a state.

Israel and Palestine agreed they both had a right to exist in 1993, but then once the Israeli PM had been assassinated by a right wing Zionist, and a new PM installed Israel reneged on Oslo. Now we have had a succession of Israeli PMs & officials that have declared either that Palestine has no right to exist as a State and/or that Palestinian people do not exist. Hamas then came into power and made it mutual- as we are being shown we have no right to exist, then neither do you have a right to exist.

Who is actually murdering whom though? It’s one thing to claim self-defence, but it’s another to kill nigh on 10,000 people, 4,000 of whom are children due to a fear of being murdered for being Jewish.

I am Jewish btw- I get the fear, but religiously and ethically fear doesn’t excuse killing children nor does it excuse the Defence Minister Lieberman saying things in 2018 like You have to understand, there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone has a connection to Hamas. in response to criticism regarding IDF shooting and killing peaceful protesters, including children along the inside of the Gaza wall.

”For much of 2018 and 2019, Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of the fences separating Gaza and Israel responded with excessive lethal force to weekly “Great March of Return” demonstrations for Palestinian rights on the Gaza side.[10]Israeli snipers killed 214 Palestinian demonstrators, including 46 children, many of them more than one hundred meters away.[11] Israeli forces shot 619 children with live ammunition at the demonstrations in 2018, and injured more than 1,000 children at the demonstrations in 2019.[12] Some protesters tried to breach the fences or threw rocks at Israeli forces, but the vast majority of casualties posed no imminent threat to life. A UN Commission of Inquiry concluded Israeli forces shot at “unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are.”[13] In May 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected petitions by human rights groups against the military’s live-fire orders during the demonstrations, without applying the clear standard on the use of lethal force set out in international human rights law, and substantially deferring to the government’s discretion.[14]”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/12/israel-submission-un-committee-rights-child

Such a telling graphic! thank you for sharing.

They likely would as it’s an annual thing for Israel to do airstrikes and incursions to destroy civilian infrastructure and farms. Pretty much since the ink dried on the Oslo Accords. I agree not as many would have died, but the trend is pretty obvious that Palestinians are killed by Israel regardless of whether they kill any Israelis when you look at the conflict over the past 23yrs. It’s when there is a bit of retaliation that Israel then inflicts an ever increasing escalation.

2000-2012 infographic from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israelgaza-violence-timel_b_2178903

Also this one from 2000 to 31st October 2023
https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/charts/

more on deaths
https://israelpalestinenews.org/palestinian-resistance-launches-surprise-attack-on-israel-updates-to-come/

We are quickly approaching 10,000 dead due to IDF war crimes in the last three weeks alone. As bad as Hamas was/is, the scale of their repression is dwarfed by that of the Israeli government.