This is the reality of what Israel is doing (part 3)

They had a BBC news report from Gaza last night covering an American doctor who had volunteered there. It was extremely distressing to be honest I couldn't really watch the footage of the sick and malnourished children it was heartbreaking. The footage though of the area was just devastation nothing but rubble for miles and miles. There is literally nothing left, the only option is to bulldoze everything away and start again. I don't think the buildings could even be salvaged everything will have to be raised to the ground

Buildings have become mere structures.
The houses that are still standing, their walls demolished, stand as testimony to the life that used to be.
More than 70% of homes across Sector #غزة were destroyed or damaged.

https://twitter.com/UNNewsArabic/status/1784305219775451221

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/twilight-zone/2024-04-28/ty-article-magazine/.premium/palestinian-released-from-israeli-prison-describes-beatings-sexual-abuse-and-torture/0000018f-15e9-d2e1-a7df-15efb6590000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Twitter

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/some-us-officials-say-internal-memo-israel-may-be-violating-international-law-2024-04-27/

Some US officials say in internal memo Israel may be violating international law in Gaza

Netanyahu is stressing
Haaretz analyst Amos Harel writes that the Israeli government is working under the assumption that the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, may this week issue warrants for the arrest of Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblogentry/report-israel-us-working-to-prevent-icc-arrest-warrants-against-netanyahu/

I’m a bit late today, but thank you Bernie Sanders. Thanks for speaking sense, thanks for spelling it out clearly.

The blame for this situation doesn’t solely lay with one person or one particular group. It’s going to be like the Swiss cheese model isn’t it, all the holes lined up.

That was in response to KestrelMoon:

KestrelMoon · Today 17:34

“ScrollingLeaves · Today 11:59

I was not ‘blaming Israel’ for the Hamas invasion.

I was questioning the IDF/Netanyahu’s need to kill 34,000 Palestinians mainly women and children in order to defend themselves against Hamas, instead of having done something basic like defending the border and listening to intelligence about impending attacks on that border. Everyone knows something went badly wrong there”.

Your comment sounded like it was putting blame on Israel for October 7th. You said in addition to questioning the death toll that:

“What Israel needed were minds that were capable of taking all sorts of prior threats they had been warned about seriously, and then they could have easily stopped the Oct 7 invasion.”

that was the sentence that I felt crossed a line into victim blaming.

Morally the blame for Oct 7 is all Hamas’s. They alone invaded, massacred, raped, captured people including women children and old men. They alone are holding people hostage.

Practically speaking, the Israel government and defence taking warnings* of Hamas plans seriously might well have lead to the Israeli defence forces being able to prevent the Oct 7 attack.

The victims are the female surveillance soldiers, the people of the kibbutz, the Nova Music festival goers, and the IDF soldiers who came to their defence. They are obviously not to blame in any way at all.

(*Warnings from female surveillance soldiers and also from a high ranking female security officer.)

Re: blaming the government of Israel, this is a headline from the Jewish Chronicle from January.

Nova festival massacre survivors sue Israeli army over failures to prevent Hamas atrocities
Survivors are seeking £44 million in damages after ‘incomprehensible’ security failures

Re: blaming the government for the death or capture of the undefended surveillance women (barely women,really girls) at the border, this is from The Times of Israel including what one of them, Roni Eshel’s, father said:

Roni was considered missing for more than a month, as her parents begged publicly and desperately for information. On November 9, the IDF finally confirmed that she had been killed during the initial attack.

She had been in the army for a year and two months and had warned her superiors numerous times that Hamas terrorists were studying the border in preparation for something unknown, her father has said in multiple interviews.

Fifteen surveillance soldiers were killed on the Nahal Oz base on October 7, and six were taken hostage. One of the abducted soldiers, Cpl. Ori Megidish, was rescued by the IDF in late October, but the other five remain in captivity, their condition unknown.

“Five hostages, such precious and wonderful girls, are there right now,” Eyal told Channel 12 of his late daughter’s fellow soldiers and the country’s failure to protect them. “The time has come to make changes in the chain of command.”
Eyal said he wished he didn’t have to issue that kind of criticism, but that it was unavoidable. “It hurts, it really hurts.”
www.timesofisrael.com/oct-7-radio-transmission-by-slain-surveillance-soldier-roni-eshel-aired-for-first-time/

Re: Women surveillance being ignored:
This is just a few paragraphs from a long and detailed Haaretz article you can read on archive ph with the headline:

”The Women Soldiers Who Warned of a Pending Hamas Attack – and Were Ignored”

A month before the war, there was an apparent change of approach among some spotters: A senior officer from the Gaza Division came to the operations room on one of the bases along the Gaza border in order to talk about the sector, so one of the spotters decided to tell him exactly what was on her mind.

“I told him there was going to be a war and we’re simply not ready,” she says, recalling the conversation. “That what’s happening with Hamas along the border fence is not normal. That they’re mocking the IDF, that our hands are tied and we’re not even [firing] warning shots.”

The response of the senior officer was to ask for her name, to regard her with admonishing eyes and to “put her in her place” for having the temerity to address him directly rather than going through the proper channels.

“He said to me, ‘I’ve been in the sector since 2010. I was a commander here, an intelligence officer, I know Gaza inside-out, and I’m telling you that everything’s fine. You’re here only six months and I’ve been here 12 years. I know the sector like the back of my hand.”

The Times of Israel
https://www.timesofisrael.com/surveillance-soldiers-warned-of-hamas-activity-on-gaza-border-for-months-before-oct-7/

Re Warnings of a highly respected female military intelligence officer having been ignored, excerpt from The Guardian:

The source of the warning is a highly respected career military intelligence NCO identified in Israeli media reports as V who warned her chain of command during the summer that Hamas was planning a large-scale incursion
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-military-had-warning-of-hamas-training-for-attack-reports-say

Not related with thread but day after this jas happened

ISRAELI MINISTER HAIM BITON IN A CAR ACCIDENT MAKING IT THE SECOND IN 2 DAYS AFTER BEN GVIR’S ACCIDENT

Your comment sounded like it was putting blame on Israel for October 7th. You said in addition to questioning the death toll that:
“What Israel needed were minds that were capable of taking all sorts of prior threats they had been warned about seriously, and then they could have easily stopped the Oct 7 invasion.”

that was the sentence that I felt crossed a line into victim blaming.

Exactly this.

I have posted this link on other threads too. I like it’s simplicity and clarity. Short essay from Rabbi Lara Haft
“At this year’s seder, the same war criminals who have forced Palestinian families to flee their homes will lift up their matzah and wax poetic about the Israelites’ rush to escape Egypt. The same politicians who have manufactured a famine in Gaza, leading millions to the brink of starvation, will proudly declare: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
https://jewschool.com/let-all-who-are-hungry-come-and-eat-174209

I was not ‘blaming Israel’ for the Hamas invasion.

I was questioning the IDF/Netanyahu’s need to kill 34,000 Palestinians mainly women and children in order to defend themselves against Hamas, instead of having done something basic like defending the border and listening to intelligence about impending attacks on that border. Everyone knows something went badly wrong there.

Absolutely.

Very brave indeed, and an example of what following the best kind of religious beliefs means when put into practice.

@ScrollingLeaves and @SammyScrounge

Please do not blame Israel’s IDF for Hamas’ attack on IDF and innocent civilians or blame Hamas for Israel’s retaliatory 200+ days of attacks on Hamas and innocent civilians.

They both chose this war.

Both groups are also responsible for any criminal actions that they have done during their decades long armed conflict between each other. It all hopefully will result in war crime prosecutions and punishments against both Hamas and IDF leaders who gave the orders for war crimes and against the on the ground armed fighters who did war crimes.

I saw the other day that a senior military from idf had resigned because of what happened on 7-10

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-intel-chief-aharon-haliva-announces-resignation-over-october-7-failures/amp/

@ScrollingLeaves those female soldiers recognised something was going on, escalated their concerns, and were ignored and left without either backup or the means to defend themselves either through holding their position or withdrawing. Misogyny was a contributing factor to the security failures.

The thing to bear in mind is that Israel only left a few undefended girls to defend the border on Oct 7.

What Israel needed were minds that were capable of taking all sorts of prior threats they had been warned about seriously, and then they could have easily stopped the Oct 7 invasion.
What they did not need to do was slaughter 34000 Palestinians instead.

I think we completely agree. A dehydrated baby forced to live under a sheet of plastic in the hot sun because of the war on Gaza is at more risk to heat stress than a baby in a brick and mortar home with a mum that has breastmilk to feed them.

Yes everything stacked against them in coping with this - tho' these are not unusual summer temperatures in the area - and is an additional 'normal' stressor they don't need

.

This relates to the economy not the Conflict, but I found this conversation between Sanders and Biden interesting at the time after Sanders stepped down from the electoral race. I don't always agree with Sanders but I think it gives a good measure of what a fundamentally decent guy he is. His ideas and intelligence shit all over Biden's IMO.

Destroying the wells and desalination plant as well as blocking aid could be a contributory factor as I read many nursing mothers are losing their milk due to dehydration and famine, and so they cannot feed their babies. Many babies are dehydrated and starving.

Obviously this isn't anything that Israel is doing - but worrying nonetheless with such a vulnerable population - temperature in gaza has been up to 30 degrees this week

Girl dies from 'extreme heat' in Rafah - OCHA

An infant girl has died from extreme heat in Rafah as rising temperatures exacerbate the sanitation crisis for more than 1.7 million internally displaced people lacking adequate shelter and essentials, it has been reported.
**

Bernie Sanders is Jewish btw, for those who don’t know much about him.

”1. His father’s family was wiped out in the Holocaust
Sanders grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as the son of working class Polish Jewish immigrants. His mother was a housewife and his father sold paint. He has said that he was “very conscious as a kid that my father’s whole family was killed by Hitler.”

1. He was a young kibbutznik

1. He’s “proud” to be Jewish but isn’t religious

1. He stands up for Israel; but don’t think he’s an Israeli citizen

1. He’s not a big fan of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu