To think it’s turning into genocide in real time

[Everythingnotsavedwillbelost73]

Just seen this on the news- how can this be right? It genuinely is starting to feel like genocide.

What Hamas did was beyond appalling. But this is also beyond appalling too. Its trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Over 500 kids have already died. Human rights watch have verified that Israel uses white phosphorus against Gaza, which is a war crime.

And everyone is just watching it happen.

“The Israeli army has just ordered the entire civilian population of Gaza to evacuate south within 24 hours. The UN says that amounts to 1.1 million people& applies to 100s of 1000s sheltered in UN buildings & their staff. This is impossible without “devastating human consequences”
Leaving aside the international law implications, I cannot emphasise enough how impossible this kind of movement of people would be. I have spent a lot of time in Gaza it is one of the most densely populated places on earth, there are pretty much only 2 roads south - along the coast and down the centre - they aren’t wide or well paved. I spoke to the gaza health ministry yesterday who said every hospital was overflowing. How would the wounded and elderly be transported? There is a massive fuel shortage how would vehicles drive? There would be no where for 1.1 million to go even if they got there. Rafah crossing to Egypt is not operational because of Israeli airstrikes.”

This is how Genocide is classified;
U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;

• 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"

The actions of both Israel & Hamas fit this description too. It’s just fucking beyond terrible. And it feels like some world leaders are just cheering from the sidelines 😪

@AgnesX my god the irony of your post!

Hamas are literally the government in Gaza

Not really free and fair elections though. And the children didn't vote, did they?

OP
Strangely enough you have made no such post about the 5-10m Ukrainians fleeing the bombings.
I wonder why.

So many people are so focused when the enemy is a specific one ...and so it has been for millennia.

It's not the point of the thread, but perhaps we could steer away from any insinuation that the British state has any moral high ground wrt the Troubles.

Hamas hasn't held an election since 2006 (44.45% of the vote), so it can't be argued that the people of Gaza have elected them, when they haven't been allowed to exercise a vote for almost two decades. Also, given the youth of the population, that's very few people living there now who would have voted for them then.

I think more have died in under a week than died through the whole of The Troubles.

Where have you been?! Ukraine has been discussed and discussed and discussed on MN.

@SeulementUneFois as I have already said, this discussion is specifically about this conflict. I don’t need to include every other conflict. Start a thread about Ukraine and I will happily discuss it with you but stop derailing this discussion.

I’m embarrassed that we’re sending military help to the Israeli’s. So they can do what? Kill as many Palestinians as possible as quickly as possible, before threats from another Arab country inevitably come and perhaps slow them down a little?

What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians seems worse. Keeping them locked in an open air prison and bombing them. And starving off the children slowly. I’ll say it again and again, Israel is a terrorist country.

I agree. But even they didn’t sink this low.

I do also get the distinction that the ira were not the Irish government in the same way you can say Hamas are the government of Palestinian. But firstly I agree there’s been no elections since 2006 so many cilvillans may not agree with Hamas.

but even so you can’t target civilians even if it is the government of that country. It’s literally a war crime. We are upset that Russia has targeted civilians in Ukraine and said such acts are war crime. Israel needs to be held accountable as well. Not having our PM say they stand with Israel as they rev up to do this. He’d have been better off saying he stands with the Jewish people. I’m horrified by what happened in Israel to those families.

Some people appear to be having a bumpy rude awakening to the fact that political realism is a thing around all of this.

The idea of international laws etc is kinda proven to be a bit hollow yet again given Israel is a powerful country with nuclear arms and backed by the US.
No one is getting tried, no one is coming to stop them, and no one is going to prevent it unless China wade in and have a slap fight with the Americans over it - which equivocally won't happen. It was established the moment Russia launched a mass invasion of Ukraine with the, unbelievably honest, goal of annexing parts of another country.

Very few people are bothering to step outside their cultural norms and viewpoints as a thought exercise to understand the motivations of palestine, hamas, israel and the netanyahu government and its opposition.

Both of them are making moves that make complete sense to them, internally, and they aren't necessarily concerned with the outside worlds opinion so long as they can achieve what they want to achieve.

Cutting electricity is not necessarily a war crime. Its legal as long as its for military advantage.

All State armies are reliant on electricity, including from civilian infrastructure. So is Hamas.

So, what is your solution when dealing with a destructive death cult like Hamas who not only use civilians as human shields but use children as soldiers who CAN murder you?

Suggest you look up the meaning of genocide and cut out the dramatics..

Israel are not massacring people in the same fashion.

Ask yourself why hamas was created. I wonder what the roof cause of the problem is.

@DownNative so why was it a war crime when it happened to Ukraine? What’s the difference?

And all this because of religious fanaticism

@sadmumuk the root cause of the problem is what happened 75 years ago. And the British have a lot to answer for for their part in that too.

@AgnesX did you read my original post, complete with definition of genocide? Am guessing not

I didn't mention elections! Only polls asking Palestinians if they support Hamas and various Palestinian terrorist groups.

Big difference.

The UN states Hamas AND the Palestinian Authority use children as soldiers.

"Both the PA and Hamas routinely indoctrinate Palestinian children to aspire to martyrdom through armed confrontations with Israel. According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), “the PA operates a systematic and institutionalized policy and program to recruit child soldiers/terrorists.”

In its reports to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on this issue, PMW accused the PA of indoctrinating Palestinian children to admire and emulate terrorists and noted that “The PA openly admits, that the child terrorists are not acting in a vacuum, but rather they consider them to be the PA’s soldiers who the PA has sent to carry out a mission.”
The United Nations below:

"PA television (TV) broadcast quizzes children on songs with “value and meanings” which PA considers expression of Palestinian “national identity.” One of the songs depicts Israel as the “enemy” and encourages armed attacks: “I'm coming with my rifle… I'm coming towards you, my enemy… with cleavers and knives.” (January 2021).

• Official PA TV children’s program commemorated cartoonist Naji al-Ala, by sharing several cartoons encouraging violence among children, including one where Fatima (Palestinian woman cartoon character) presents an AK47 to Handala (the Palestinian refugee cartoon character) and one of her handing rocks to children. (August 2020).

• Fatah Facebook page promotes child soldiers by sharing video of Jordanian boy in military uniform holding slingshot and rifle. He wants to “shoot Jews” who killed terrorist Omar Abu Laila (killed Israeli soldier, stole his weapon and shot to death Israeli father of 12). (February 2020).

• Hamas TV children’s program interviews young children dressed in military fatigues. One child says he wants to be an engineer when he grows up “so that I can blow up the Jews.” The child host responds “Keep waging Jihad…when you grow up you will wage resistance against the Jews…” (September 4, 2015).

More from the United Nations:

"In addition, PA and Hamas educational programs routinely portray terrorists as role models and incite children to violence. For example, every year Hamas runs summer camps in which it trains children in military tactics and weapons use.

Likewise, summer camps run by Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) teach children to venerate famous Palestinian martyrs like Abu Jihad, who was responsible for terror attacks in which 125 Israelis were killed.

Therefore, it is no surprise that Palestinian children perpetrate violent attacks against Israelis and participate in violent confrontations with the goal of harming Israeli soldiers and civilians."

There is absolutely NO doubt that Palestinian children ARE taught to hate Israelis. Even worse, they're TRAINED to murder Israelis!

@LaviniasBigBloomers I understand the temptation to draw parallels with Northern Ireland, and there are some for sure, but as someone born and raised in N Ireland I do think this is a false equivalence.

For a start as much as I am not a fan of the IRA and absolutely hated them growing up in N Ireland, I will say for the most part they did act with some limitations and generally did give warnings ahead of time about bombs etc. including in the Manchester bombing. Hamas here gave no warnings and the kidnap, torture, rape, and mutilation of corpses in this recent incursion into Israel to me is so much more evil than a bombing (not saying that isn’t evil). There were zero casualties as a result of this in the Manchester bombing (there were many injured). The Israeli death toll is around 1300 from the recent incursion at the last count. So the scale and brutality of it is wildly different. And I think this can be easily recognised if you just imagine for a second that instead of the Manchester bomb, the IRA had done exactly what Hamas did here, and what the reaction from the general public and British government was likely to be. I certainly don’t don’t delude myself that we’d have peace in N Ireland now (which I still regard as an absolute miracle that I never thought I’d see within my lifetime) if that had ever happened.

It’s also not fair to compare the impact of such an incursion on English soil to that on Israeli soil. English people don’t exactly have the same historical experiences of prejudice against them and attempted genocide in recent history as the Jewish people do. You can imagine that, as outraged as people here would have been if the IRA had done this back then, it might hit even harder if English people had that sort of background.

I do believe in universal human rights and I have concerns about how the Israeli government are responding to the situation, I would like to see humanitarianism prevail and cooler heads internationally urging some level of restraint and limitations put on the inevitable military response here. However I also recognise that Hamas are putting them in an almost impossible situation.

It's fairly simple if the principle reason cutting off electricity is to reduce the military capability of Hamas or Ukraine to wage war, even if this results in civilian casualties then this is not a war crime.

If the principle reason for cutting off electricity is to simply punish civilians then this is not allowed.

Of course every country will argue that it has been done for military reasons and therefore are not committing a war crime.

I think we all know what the end game is here and it is to the cost of the Palestinians always

Oh, just the British?

The following excerpts have been taken from the United Nations website:

www.un.org/unispal/history/

"Palestine was among former Ottoman territories placed under UK administration by the League of Nations in 1922. "

You can see in this link which countries were members of the League Of Nations in 1922 when Palestine was placed under UK administration.

www.britannica.com/topic/League-of-Nations/Members-of-the-League-of-Nations

"UK considered various formulas to bring independence to a land ravaged by violence. In 1947, the UK turned the Palestine problem over to the UN."

Under British administration, Palestine was NOT partitioned, but you will often hear people talking as though it was!
So, we move on to the actual partition itself:

"After looking at alternatives, the UN proposed terminating the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized (Resolution 181 (II) of 1947)."

As we can see, the partition of Palestine was not caused by the British Government alone.

The collective members of the United Nations made that decision.

"One of the two envisaged States proclaimed its independence as Israel and in the 1948 war involving neighbouring Arab States expanded to 77 percent of the territory of mandate Palestine, including the larger part of Jerusalem. "

The Office Of The Historian in the United States says the following:

"The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 broke out when five Arab nations invaded territory in the former Palestinian mandate immediately following the announcement of the independence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948."

history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war

Whether you believe it was Israel or the five Arab nations who started the conflict, it is clear that the United Kingdom is not to blame for the partition as it didn't enact that plan.

Partition was a United Nations collective plan.

Personally, I would argue it was the FIVE Arab States who kickstarted the Arab-Israeli aka Israeli-Palestinian conflict.