UN peacekeepers injured by Israel

From Al Jazeera, below. I imagine it’s still quite scary to be lightly wounded in a rocket strike.

Eight UN peacekeepers wounded in southern Lebanon

Eight Austrian soldiers belonging to the peacekeeping group the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) were lightly wounded in a rocket strike on Camp Naqoura near the Israeli border.
“We condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms and demand that it be investigated immediately,” Austria’s Defence Ministry said in a statement, adding it’s unclear where the attack came from.
None of the soldiers needed urgent medical care, it said. UNIFIL has faced a series of Israeli attacks on its peacekeepers. The Israeli government has demanded that UNIFIL leave its positions in Lebanon, an order the UN force has refused.

Just appalling. I am beyond fed up that Biden is doing fuck all to pull Israel back.

@israelilefty I think if you engage with social media at all you need to set boundaries to protect your own mental health and you need a high degree of scepticism. Toxic emotional arguments are bad for the mental health, but algorithmic echo chambers are bad for the soul. We live in a digital age though like it or not. I have a small notebook in which my grandfather transcribed by pencil the graveside speeches of those executed in the 1916 rising against the British in Ireland.In the absence of television or radio or photocopiers, that is how people shared that type of thing. Now we have on-line publications that can amplify propaganda from both sides of any situation. Do you challenge it or let it go? If everyone lets it go, then it becomes the accepted truth- look at the impact of Joan Peters’s book for instance and that was pre-internet.

Thomas Friedman has an in depth knowledge but I think he sees himself as a policy influencer more than a commentator or analyst. Of course maybe that’s a good thing?

I hope you and yours are staying safe during this terrible time

@Kindatired I think that you missed Haviv Rettig Gur's point. He is not talking about the right of people to call out atrocities, or of the value of objectivity, or even of drawing inward rather than looking outward. There are certainly important insights from well informed people outside the conflict like (say) Thomas Friedman of the NYT, which I think should receive far more attention. What Rettig Gur is against is spending his own time engaging in the highly emotive online arguments which are often fuelled by people who are not only outside the region but also lack the background insights, languages etc to be able to clearly read the situation, and often either intentionally or unintentionally participate in making the discussion divisive and emotionally charged, while not taking the responsibility to become better informed and consult reliable sources.

Thanks Easter, I saw that this morning and came here to post it. You beat me to it. The attacks on UN facilities and personnel are certainly provoking as well as being illegal. I wonder if the goal is to try and get the UN to fire back if fired on?

Thank you, those words are wise

This is wisdom!

Rather than draw in, Christians are encouraged to look outward towards those who are suffering the most . Many posters in these threads were educated in a culture of social justice and liberation theology. We see the children of Palestine as part of our human family, even if we are not devout or are agnostic or atheist at this point. Our world view dictates that we bear witness, that we offer peacekeeping. Many Jewish people also strive to heal the world as a way of serving God- @israelilefty you are one of them and are very inspiring.

Very few people think that the conflicts in the Middle East are simple. But equally,those at the coal face from any tradition can only truly see the conflict through their own personal lens and they lack objectivity .On an emotional level they can only acknowledge the aspects of the situation that affect them personally and then they fit their narrative to their emotions. Their leaders exploit and amplify nthis for political and personal gain.

So people who live thousands of away, not only have a right, but a duty to call out the atrocities inflicted on the civilian population. If 10 Israeli children a day were losing a limb as was the case in Gaza in the 3 months from last October to January , the world would not stay silent.
If Israel has a problem with peacekeeping, then it needs to ask for peace enforcement, not attack Unifil forces.

@Scirocco About those people (and they exist in great numbers on the internet on both sides) - I want to cite a wise post I happened to see on Twitter yesterday by Haviv Rettig Gur (havivrettiggur). Quoted here in full. I have to say, it really clarified for me something I have felt for a long time, which is that while I have all the time in the world for meaningful conversations with people who are willing to take the time to engage with reasonable sources and to acknowledge that there is complexity behind the news - I no longer have time to listen to or argue with people who are basically there to get an emotional kick out of righteous anger, especially when they live thousands of miles away from the actual conflict, speak neither language and are not willing to distinguish between reliable sources and propaganda. I know that the knee jerk reaction is to respond and call out - but it's ultimately just feeding and enabling trolls.

Here's the tweet:

This Yom Kippur was a very useful one for me. I thought a lot about the past year and reached some decisions that were meaningful for me. Some were big, some small. Two small ones of relevance to Twitter:

1. I’m going to converse a bit less with the big wide world and more with Jews and Palestinians. What they think matters infinitely more to my children’s future than the moral entertainment the world uses us for. I’m tired of investing time and thought in outsiders’ feelings about my existence.

1. If you tweet at me that you “ain’t reading all that,” you’ll get blocked. If you tweet at me crazy antisemitism, you’ll get blocked. If I write about religion and you respond with abuse surrounding the war, you’ll get blocked. It’s already begun, and my Twitter feed is already more interesting and useful for it. If you don’t want to read me, if you don’t think I can teach you or learn from you, if you can’t speak on topic so you sound off on whatever else crosses your internet-addled mind, that’s all fine. I just don’t want to be an enabler of your anger addiction and poor emotional regulation.

This last one is a surprisingly difficult decision for me. It goes against my basic understanding of what teaching is: Everyone can grow and learn. All things worth saying are worth saying to everyone. But I’ve become convinced that online abuse is something truly sinister: A waste of time. Judaism teaches that time is sacred. The Sabbath, wrote Heschel, is the Jewish cathedral. With the exception of one small sacred space in Jerusalem, sanctity is nearly always given to time, not to objects or places. This is an idea that lies at the core of our mental world: You don’t waste time. Judaism also teaches that your soul is shaped by what it consumes through eye, ear and mouth. This too is a fundamental tenet. If you consume anger from your surroundings, your inner life will become angry. If you listen to lies, you’ll start telling them and seeing them everywhere. It warps your soul and your worldview. Dishonest people assume that everyone else is dishonest too. In a similar vein, if you consume pornography you’ll sacrifice some of your capacity for intimacy. If you eat without intent, you’ll eat badly. And so on.

Guard what your soul consumes, the Sages teach, lest that thing consume you in return. And so I’m going to try to be more intentional, more curating and careful of what I consume and what I dispense. I’ll mostly fail, of course, especially at the start, but that’s the goal. To focus on the wise, not on the self-important and enraged, on Palestinians and Jews, the actual protagonists of this moment, and not on the emotional addictions of spectators who are not. Sorry if you find yourself blocked in the near future. Be assured you’re not missing much. Take your revenge on me by reading a good book. That’ll show me.

@israelilefty unfortunately a lot of people, on here, on other social media sites, in the UK media and in public here, do still firmly dispute the health ministry casualty figures, dismissing them as exaggerations and lies. They also tell us that the footage of what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is faked, calling it "Pallywood". They tell us that our loved ones aren't dead, that our loved ones haven't experienced life-changing injuries. And if they do grudgingly accept that someone we knew died, they tell us they were probably Hamas anyway.

Fwiw the health ministry figures are cited in the Israeli media also. I don’t see anyone serious disputing them now. The main dispute is about the proportion of combatants vs non-combatants, because Hamas does not release figures of combatants killed. The proportion of non-combatants killed is significant to the claims of genocide against Israel. Until a few months back the health ministry figures significantly undercounted the proportion of men of fighting age in the overall figure. The revised figures I believe are generally held to be accurate, but there is still dispute over the number of combatants among the men and 17-18 year old boys.

I did see someone on this or another thread claim that Israel did not publish figures distinguishing between soldiers and civilians who were killed and among the hostages. This is not the case. As soon as deaths are announced they are clearly announced as soldiers, and a separate tally of military deaths is kept and frequently published. With the exception of one hostage whose identity was not revealed for some time, lists of the hostages published in Israel have always listed personal details including whether they were serving as a soldier.

Yes,

Scientists are closing in on the true, horrifying scale of death and disease in Gaza
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/scientists-death-disease-gaza-polio-vaccinations-israel
Excerpt:
They estimate that about 186,000 total deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza, which is roughly 7.9% of its population, by mid-June 2024. This high number is despite various ceasefire agreements over the past six months. If deaths continue at this rate – about 23,000 a month – there would be an additional 149,500 deaths by the end of the year, some six and half months from the initial mid-June estimate. Using the method, the total deaths since the conflict began would be estimated at about 335,500 in total.
335,500 Palestinian deaths in total by the end of the year.

@1dayatatime
I believe the figures.
I have spoken to a medic who has seen the scale of civilian casualties firsthand.
I have seen the size of the little bodies- they would be very small to be terrorists.There are a lot of verified images, a lot of eye witness accounts. There are lists of people, their names. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/17/gaza-publishes-identities-of-34344-palestinians-killed-in-war-with-israel
These people had extended family, social media accounts. Some of them have family here in Ireland .

There is no history of the health ministry inflating the numbers of dead people.
When they have categorised them into males , females etc the numbers add up- there was no significant discrepancy , just Israeli propaganda surrounding uncategorised deaths.
I have looked at a lot of the before and after images in the New York Times which specialised in this type of journalism. There’s no concern that the death figures are being inflated.
I have read the reports in reputable medical journals where excess deaths were modelled and I think the modelling was fairly good- it’s got a lot better since covid generally.
Israel is not at all transparent about how many IDF were killed or taken hostage on 7/10 and Israeli propaganda is considerably greater.

I think that it’s disrespectful of the dead to deny the numbers at this point- even Israeli propagandists have given up fighting the overwhelming evidence
How many people do you think have died? Like where would you put the decimal point? Do you really think people living in tents packed so closely can not die in great numbers when a 2000 pound bomb is dropped on them?

Israel are trying to get the UN out of Gaza and Lebanon. I wonder why 🤔

@Dulra

Because of posters claiming the IDF account of what happened as lies when it was largely the same as the UN account - unless those posters are claiming both the IDF and the UN are lying.

In addition there was a poster falsely claiming that this was a chemical weapons attack!

So why did you bring it up in the first place? I was merely pointing out whose account I would trust