Heartbreaking news report from Gaza - Dr receives bodies of her children

@Biscuitsformeandyou

“It comes back to assuming underlying malice and nefarious intent behind pro Israel posters, which is consistent with anti Semitic tropes that have existed for thousands of years.”

I am not sure people meant to suggest underlying malice of pro-Israel posters- they have strong reason to support the state. It’s more of a criticism of a state that is using AI tools and bots to shape a message and of social media platforms that are unable to manage bots adequately. The situation is not unique to Israel- and has been used by other political entities to shape political discourse. We just need to wary of it.

@Biscuitsformeandyou
It comes back to assuming underlying malice and nefarious intent behind pro Israel posters, which is consistent with anti Semitic tropes that have existed for thousands of years.

It’s not the intent behind pro-Israel, it’s the intent behind pro-current policy and actions of the current Israeli government. They are without question deeply inhumane and genocidal. That and pro-Israel are not the same thing, and calling that out is not anti-Semitic, it’s anti- Netanyahu’s, government, its anti- far-right, its anti-genocide by killing of a specific population (Gaza) and destruction of their living habitat (West Bank).

If you take the view that Palestinian lives matter so little and the each potential Hamas soldier should be tracked down and killed, regardless of collateral loss of life- it’s not surprising that a disproportionate number of children are killed.

The manner in identifying targets also used AI tools that were not verified manually.

“Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.”

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for an attack.
“Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole house on its occupants.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

There was another tool supposedly called “Where’s Daddy” which tracked when men returned home before bombing their home and family.

You can see that - although surely not meant intentionally (you would hope)- the final result is the systemic killing of children. We known Palestinians have large families and may live in multi-generational households but no account appears to be made for this.

As for children being shot not once but twice by snipers - this may not be systemic- but seems that there is evidence that some of the IDF soldiers are possibly trigger happy when it comes to Palestinians kids.

Factually wrong.

Ok. I can agree that Israel does social media campaigns and tries to influence opinion although I have no personal experience of it.

I looked up that moovers website and it has had two visits in the past month.

But regardless. Let's agree that there are other websites and apps which are being regularly used to set out the pro Israel narrative. My issue is that you then assume that people like me are following scripts. But the Palestinian movement and Hamas are also amazing at social media, and you assume that pro Palestinian posters are writing authentic heartfelt messages.

It comes back to assuming underlying malice and nefarious intent behind pro Israel posters, which is consistent with anti Semitic tropes that have existed for thousands of years.

The international criminal court believes Israel ARE committing atrocities.

@RandomWordsThrownTogether
Thank you for the link
Here it is without paywall
https://archive.is/999Be

The article gives an account how these tools were used to counteract the claims by a Palestinian teenager that she was sexually assaulted in Israeli custody.

The article suggests that shaping of public opinion is particularly important. No wonder the ADL was worried about TikTok as they clearly couldn’t control the message people are meant to hear.

The difficulty is that the photos coming out of Gaza paint a very clear picture of what Israel’s government has sanctioned and what the IDF has done.

I've asked myself the same question. There's obviously no military benefit. But if you put it together with the extreme rhetoric of some in the Israeli government and things like the announcement of further (government sanctioned) settlements in the West Bank, you start to see how this is being allowed to play out. Coupled with the anger over October 7th, I don't think it's much different to what we've seen in certain other atrocities where there is simply a desire to obliterate the enemy - or the future enemy, as the case may be.

I will listen later today. But I have a question. Why? What would the motive be for the IDF to systematically and randomly murder children?

Not a conspiracy theory - honestly you can not just call anyone who disagrees with the murder of children anti semitic - with the large number of jewish voices worldwide opposed to the genocide you need a new insult. Hasbara was the name given to the social media campaign to defend Israel and the IDF, it is referenced many times by the Israeli media, government officials and also in many academic papers about how Israel utilise social media to take their fight online (great one by Oxford University). Given its wide use by Israeli media I am not sure why people calling it that offends you? Or are you just getting offended and resorting to calling people anti semitic to distract the conversation again from the thousands of children the IDF shot, dismembered, burned alive “by accident” or “because they were child soldiers” depending on what the day’s argument is!

Interesting article in the Washington Post -

“ “Social media is a terrain of warfare, not just for cyber troops, but also for citizen battalions armed with AI-enhanced bots and the ability to generate endless unique posts that evade current content moderation tools,” she said. “It is incumbent on tech companies to defend against such abuses.”
“This level of organization only exists on one side of the conflict,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a former cyber policy adviser to the Defense Department who studies disinformation and propaganda campaigns as a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It exists for pro-Israel voices, and it exists because there are government ministries in Israel that support these tools and encourage their use.”

At least one of these apps is directly tied to Israel. The app, called Moovers, encourages users to “Advocate for Israel, One Click at a Time.” It pulls in allegedly pro-Palestinian content from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X in a never-ending feed, allowing users easily to take action on that content, reporting it for review or commenting on it. It also provides pre-written pro-Israel scripts to respond to such posts.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-israel-activism-online/

That’s powerful evidence.

Yes the doctor is a mum like us. I feel very sorry for her and her husband and the poor son who has lost all his siblings.

That is one thing. But making things up is something else. It's unnecessary and it's wrong to put words into people's mouths that they didn't say during debates.

Let's keep the posts as factual as possible. There are bad enough things happening that no one has to exaggerate anything.

And from the same article:

Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish American orthopedic hand surgeon from North Carolina and president of the World Surgical Association, told CNN that he decided to go to Gaza after receiving photographs of an X-ray of a poorly performed surgery in the battered enclave.
The photos were sent to him by a first-year medical resident who had been forced to perform the surgery and requested Perlmutter’s expertise. When Perlmutter asked why senior surgeons hadn’t done the operation, the resident explained that they had been killed in a bombing.
Perlmutter told CNN that during his trip, he saw significant violence inflicted on children, who accounted for around 90% of those attending the emergency room while he was working at the European Gaza Hospital.
Describing a hospital overrun, Perlmutter said after every bombing, he would find injured children laid across the floor, their loved ones panicking.
“Some are dead, some will die in front of you, and some you can save. You try to save the ones you can save,” Perlmutter said.

He recalled two patients aged around six years old, who had suffered gunshots to their heads and chests – wounds which suggested they had been deliberately targeted, he said.
“No kid gets shot twice by a sniper by mistake,” Perlmutter said, adding that the shots were “dead center” to their chests.

@Biscuitsformeandyou
The problem is that there is no-one independent enough witness for you to accept that this has happened. Unfortunately- we do not have independent journalists, so we have to look at what evidence we do have.

Prof Nick Maynard is a highly respected cancer surgeon in Oxford. I would trust what he says

m.youtube.com/watch?v=-b0EA_XCfvI

Yes, it is absolutely egregious.

Like this open letter from US medics:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/world/open-letter-45-us-physicians-gaza

“Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” they wrote.
“We wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget.”

I can obviously confirm that children are being killed but the accusations of targeting are so egregious that it requires a very high bar of proof which hasn't been demonstrated

@Biscuitsformeandyou

I actually agree with some of what you're saying, but I'm still waiting for any pro-Israeli poster to acknowledge that actually the testimony from medical professionals on the ground - not Palestinians, not Hamas - is that children are being cruelly targeted.

I've repeatedly quoted Nizam Mamode and will do so again here:* *
"This was day after day after day, operating on children who would say, I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped, and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me. And that's clearly a deliberate act, and it was a persistent act, persistent targeting of civilians."

There's no ifs or buts about whether this is a war crime. It's not one or two accidents, it's a pattern. Maybe you would like to respond to that, since @AIBUHere ignored my previous post.

@ Twiglets What is the title of this thread?
Why is there any mention of child soldiers at all?
This doctor is a mum like us. Caring for sick children at work. Committed to serving the poor and sick. Her home was targeted by the IDF. Her children burned alive. Her surviving son and husband left with life changing injuries.
Her brother comes on an Irish national radio station and says he does not want revenge on the Jewish people and calls for a peaceful negotiated solution and peaceful coexistence . Two of the kids are still not buried. It is like listening to Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. The country virtually grinds to a halt as people pause their daily chores and lets the tears flow for these lovely children
@Biscuitsformeandyou They made us do it is not a defence for war crimes. There’s been no apology from Israel to this family. What evidence can you provide that there has not been targetting of the children of the ethnic group? All evidence seen so far points in the opposite direction.These children were high potential young people and future potential leaders of their nation and they now have been wiped out in this most barbaric attack

1. Hamas control the casualty numbers and Hamas lies. There is no verification regarding the number of people dying and whether they are men, women or children.
2. References to the Hasbara apps and the treating of what people have been saying in bad faith, as if they are part of a conspiracy rather than actually believe in what they say, is bordering into antisemitic thinking. An updated version of the Jewish worldwide conspiracy with Jews working against their host societies and doing evil things to their women and children.
3. @RandomWordsThrownTogether keeps claiming that the deaths are systematic but there is no evidence of this. So stop making stuff up.
4. Hamas knowingly started this war knowing that people would die in Gaza and knowing that people in the West would be unable to resist the itch of antisemitic thinking if it went on for long enough, and here we are.
5. It can be true that ONE Israel (as well as Hamas) is committing war crimes - if it is - and TWO people here and more generally are lapsing into antisemitic world thinking in the amount of attention they give it when they don't care about Palestinians dying in Syria for example, how they understand it and what they are wanting to believe and how they assume that people supportive of Israel, if not necessarily the war, are acting in a duplicitous manner with nefarious intent.

@Kindatired no one has implied the babies deserved to die.

No one was trying to create the impression that the doctor’s young children were soldiers or terrorists.

Anyone else want to make accusations about things no one said?

These particular children were the nieces and nephews of Irish Palestinian doctor, Dr Ali Al Najjar, Sligo University Hospital for years, a man of peace and integrity .
The names of the children who died in the air strike were Yahya, Rakan, Eve, Jubran, Ruslan, Revan, Sayden, Luqman and Sidra. Sidra’s twin Sidar died aged three months due to an infection and lack of medication thanks to the blockade. They were definitely not soldiers- the oldest was 12.
Their mum, Alaa, a paediatrician was working 2-3 shifts a week, expressing breast milk for the youngest during her work breaks. They had papers that could have helped them evacuate to Egypt, family in Ireland and Saudi, but the war had impacted so badly on Gaza, they opted to stay , in the basis that that someone had to provide medical care to those who couldn’t leave. Being out of school the older kids were able to help out with the younger ones , getting them washed and dressed and the 12 year old would give the baby a bottle. They were a little tribe, with their own little friend groups and alliances within the siblings just as I see with my own little tribe . Real people with real lives and hopes and dreams. The house was a “ house of joy, a house full of life” This house had 4 stories and the dad, Hamdi, who was also a doctor had a surgery downstairs and a pharmacy , a basic lab on another floor. They thought the basement was the safest part of the house but that where the 9 kids were made burn to death, mum at work looking after sick children and dad upstairs. Imagine being at work when your child dies in agony without being able to hold their little hand, the screams, of pain and fear!s I see with my own little tribe . Real people with real lives and hopes and dreams. The house was a “ house of joy, a house full of life” This house had 4 stories and the dad, Hamdi, who was also a doctor had a surgery downstairs and a pharmacy , a basic lab on another floor. They thought the basement was the safest part of the house but that where the 9 kids were made burn to death, mum at work looking after sick children and dad upstairs. Imagine being at work when your child dies in agony without being able to hold their little hand, the screams, of pain and fear!
The surviving child, Adam has multiple open fractures and needs nerve grafts as well as his head injury.The father has a lost part of a hand and part of a lung as well as a fractured skull and is still in danger. The bodies of the children were virtually unrecognisable and two bodies are still under the rubble.

It is really awful to be reading that some posters are worried that this will make Israel will look bad and others implying that they deserved to die because …… well I’m not sure why child soldiers are would be mentioned in a thread with this title except with the intention of creating the impression that these very young children were soldiers or terrorists.
Even if you pranged your neighbours car by accident you would apologise pay to have it fixed, instead we are hearing “not our fault, they made us do it

The rhetoric used was that children have died because Hamas use child soldiers. This rhetoric was used to explain why there are 20x more child deaths in Gaza as opposed to the Ukraine which heavily implies that thousands of children are dead because they are terrorists. So I ask you to clarify - is it just 90% of the kids that are terrorists, 80% of the kids? How many of the little toddlers that were shot in the head by snipers and quadcopters were terrorists exactly. Amazing how kids too young to walk are already terrorists.

I have shared links from the mainstream media which verify that children are systematically being murdered, Israel is currently being investigated for war crimes - genocide to be precise. A large number of international aid agencies have reported about children being murdered too but the people denying it on the thread are truthful and I am a liar? What do you think about the international Doctors testimonials? Several Israeli government officials have said the aim is to clear Gaza of Palestinians - this is all on public record.

It's a public thread I can respond if I want dm them if you want a private discussion. Anyway you were interjecting on someone else's comment too.
I felt your comment was petty when there has been very offensive claims made about dead children.

They aren’t talking about all the children who have died, that is obvious to everyone.

I’ve made my point about @RandomWordsThrownTogether making stuff up. No idea why you’re getting involved in a comment not addressed to you but I’m done talking about it with you.

It is heartbreaking but that’s probably because Ukrainians don’t use children as pawns for their cause, for human shields and as child soldiers after they have been indoctrinated in terrorist training camps.

They didn't clarify did they? They said "children" what children? whose children? how many children? what aged children? How many of the dead children? none of that is explained or evidence provided

So in your opinion how many children are they talking about?