To be horrified re the 2000+ children killed in Gaza.

[SoShallINever]

The news tonight was unbearable.
I am sickened that the West is not calling for a ceasefire or some restraint.
I found out today that Gaza is almost exactly the same size as the small Hebridean island of Jura. But whereas Jura has a few hundred residents, Gaza has 2.4 million packed in. You couldn't throw a stone into Gaza without it hitting someone, never mind a missile.
The children of Gaza are not terrorists and I wish Israel would stop.

Of course. It's absolutely hideous and heartbreaking.

But calling them collateral damage in Israel's right to self-defence rather dehumanises these poor little children so people who spout that nonsense (including on mumsnet threads) should see the reality of what they support.

It’s awful to see the part you quote resurfacing again by a few.

I wonder if those posters have read what happened on October 7th

I don't know. Between "IDF lies" and Hamas being compared to an abused woman, I'm in disbelief. The attacks on October 7th are the worst thing I have seen within my lifetime. I suppose it could be compared to the Rwandan genocide and others. The scale and cruelty is something I'm still processing, and I'm not Jewish myself but I am just in absolute shock at the way it's being brushed away. And to have that on your doorstep..?! Unthinkable.

Same here

The cruelty and scale are undeniable.

The scale (in terms of numbers affected) has well and truly been surpassed by the Israeli response however. And it’s a scale which is enlarging as we speak.

That is true. But there is a legitimate military objective (actually an imperative) to destroy Hamas' capabilities. It's vital for the civilian population to evacuate to the south to prevent more casualties. But I'm sadly convinced Hamas leadership won't allow that, any more than they will release their hostages.

The South is being bombed too. So evacuating one million people to sleep on the streets with no food, water or medicine is futile.

A law which says it’s ok to bomb thousands of innocent children would be a very flawed law indeed. However Israel’s actions are not legitimate. The UN, amongst many others, have pointed out that they are operating outside the law.

@ProvincialLady1

Civilians are going South as instructed - and being bombed there!!

It wasn't Israeli government propaganda FFS. Babies WERE beheaded, nobody said all 40 were.

Erm, what? Many news channels and papers had reported “40 beheaded babies” after being told this by the IDF. I’ve attached the Metro front page, which would have been shown to every Londoner that day. The Sun had the same heading that day.

All reports of beheaded babies have since been retracted, with countless news websites reporting on this:
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/10/12/white-house-walks-back-bidens-claim-he-saw-children-beheaded-by-hamas

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/cnn-reporter-apologizes-for-defending-israeli-claims-that-hamas-beheaded-babies-/3019286

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/10/12/middleeast/israel-hamas-beheading-claims-intl/index.html

I’m not trying to debate with you on this, but you tried to smear me as sharing racist, anti-Semitic propaganda, which is an extremely heavy accusation, which I take very seriously, so I have every right to defend myself and my post and explain the context behind what was written.

Palestinian suffering has absolutely been covered up and diluted, all I have to do is turn on the radio and I hear “Israeli elderly and children massacred by savages” and “The Palestinian side has been bombed, people have died as collateral damage, but don’t forget it’s Hamas’ fault, not Israel, they have a right to defend themselves.” Big differences between “massacred” and “died”, between “a country defending itself” and “savages”. The routine underplaying of Palestinian suffering and humanising of Israeli suffering is commonplace on much of the media, but especially right-wing US media. Good article on the matter:

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2023/10/25/western-media-failures-say-more-about-the-west-than-gaza

You can also look up British journalist Harry Fear speaking on the matter.

I don’t know why you’re trying to create equivalency between Hamas and the IDF, but if we must, both have published propaganda that they’ve been caught out with as lies.

The Israeli government’s propaganda against its own citizens has been well documented, and they’re actually quite open about it. Here is an article from Israeli newspaper, Haaretz:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-03-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israeli-army-conducted-online-psy-op-against-israeli-public-during-gaza-war/00000186-f972-df90-a19e-f9fff22a0000

Plenty more where that came from if you look into it.

I believe it is safer in the south, but bombing there as well is a terrible thing to do. I'm in despair about it all.

Lets just take a breath a minute, and consider that if you believe that the IDF produces lies and propaganda, do you not also have to consider that Hamas are doing the same. How do we really know how many civilians and how many of those were children, and have been killed in Gaza? The truth will lie somewhere in between the reported and the reality. It doesn't make it any more palatable, but we have to be cautious.

We can’t know the real number
However,
hospitals are being bombed
ambulance workers are being bombed when they’re on their way to rescue someone from an air strike
journalists are banned from going in
no electricity or internet.
un has been banned
urnwa buildings are being bombed

I mean how are we going to know what is really happening In Palestine if Israel is banning people from going in that could report what really is happening.

That’s a disgusting thing to say and totally unfounded. Where have they been proven to have lied about the death toll?

If I said that the IDF/Israeli government were cooking the books with how many dead civilians and children there were in the 7/10 attacks, everyone on this thread would have my head. And rightly so.

This is utterly vile conjecture.

@ProvincialLady1 this was reported by sky 45 minutes ago
This is in the south. There are no safe spaces there. They have nowhere to go that is safe.

Gaza school sheltering thousands of people damaged in 'close proximity strike'A school run by a relief organisation in Gaza has been damaged in a "close proximity strike", the UN Palestinian refugee agency has said.
The facility in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza near the border with Egyptm has been sheltering 4,600 people, the UNRWA added.
In a post on X, it said it had "sustained severe collateral damage".
One person was killed and 44 were injured, including nine children, it said.

But PP's were saying exactly that. Which is my point.

I don’t doubt the atrocities on October 7th as there is footage to show it

People suffered those barbaric acts

Are you really telling me there is no footage of atrocities about what is happening in Palestine ? You must be ignoring it as Twitter and ig is full of it

You’re writing your own posts here.

I said what I meant. Your words are your own.

I do not doubt the October 7th atrocities.

You could do your own calculations.
No clean water - 2/3 days life left
Drinking dirty water - couple of weeks left? Not sure how long it takes to die from cholera
No medical supplies - variable, depending on injury
Bombs - well, instantaneous death, or possibly 2 weeks
No food - death within 4 weeks ish
No electricity - instant death for babies in incubators and those on life support

By my calculations the entire population will be dead in the next 3-4 weeks if something doesn't change. I probably missed some factors, but I'm sure you can reach a rough estimate of how many are dead/will die yourself.

When the war first started all the retrieved bodies were taken to the hospital morgue where they were counted by the Hamas Public Health official before the relatives took them away for burial, Fairly quickly this system became overwhelmed because relatives weren't collecting the bodies because they were either injured or dead themselves and more and more bodies were arriving. At one point babies and small children's bodies were being kept in ice-cream vans because there wasn't room in the morgue - don't know how this working out now with the lack of diesel. The morgues are full several bodies deep to over-flowing outside and 1 in 5 hospitals are no longer functioning

There are an unknown number of bodies still in the ruins - Hamas have been saying 1000 for sometime And the smell is understandably appalling throughout Gaza

So yeah not a well functioning set-up to record fatalities accurately and if you think Hamas is cynically inflating the figures for sympathy well who knows

20 years after it happened the final no of deaths in Rwandan genocide isn't known
500000-800000 is such a huge range - it's not an exact science. And that was over 100 days not 20

Some further facts attested by others incl Hamas

Gaza ran out of body bags in the first week
Cemeteries in Gaza were full by the end of the week
Mass graves of un-identified people

The difference between 4000 [Oxtam] and 6000 [Hamas] is in line with the range above

In 6 months time quibbling about whose right will look very different tho' doubtless for some will be still a source of dispute

How are people coping with seeing images of dead children and babies and sat lonely on a hospital bed. I have had to delete my Instagram. I am haunted by what I'm seeing so much so that I've become really gloomy. I'm trying to pull myself out of it but ultimately I think the human brain isn't built to witness such atrocities and then revert back to normal and go about their day. At least, I am feeling quite down (could be linked to my PNA and only recently having a baby)

if anyone has any good psychotherapy hacks on how to deal with what's going on, I would be very grateful for it.

It is possible. I have IG but unrelated topics. No TV news reports. No Twitter

Of course it’s possible to read just words or hear radio analysis if being up to date is wanted.

Or avoid those if not. If you’ve just had a baby take care of your mh

Not a psychotherapist but here's some ideas which might help

Total break from all SM and news in any form

Limit time thinking about it all to a specific half hour/day - not at bed-time

Choose a thought eg Enough to quickly insert into your thinking to bat away distressing thoughts/images

Do nice things to distract yourself eg walk on a stormy beach/woodland/bath

Keep busy

Give to aid peace/charity if you can afford it

Pray

It's all awful beyond words

Someone will probably have better advice

I'm appalled by some of what I've read here.

Feeling horror, and compassion for the dead and the grieving, both Israeli and Palestinian, really doesn't equate to being anti-semitic or an apologist for terrorism as seems to be being suggested.

Lord Neuberger and 7 other leading and highly respected Jewish lawyers said it well in their open letter last week:

"Just as international law provides the means for categorising and criminalising the barbaric acts of Hamas, so too does it provide a framework for governing how Israel must respond. Any nation, conducting any armed conflict, no matter what the provocation, is bound in law to comply with all the “laws of war”. The laws of war are not pacifist. Rather, they are the opposite — they are an admission that there are occasions when war is necessary. They are designed to ensure that when war must be conducted, there are limits on what harm can be done to other human beings.

These laws apply irrespective of the level of outrageous conduct of an enemy and no
exceptions to those rules can be derived from the level of suffering caused by Hamas’s actions.

There are some aspects of Israel’s response that already cause significant concern. International law forbids sieges of civilian populations. Gaza is home to some 2mn fellow human beings (almost half of whom are children) and it would be a grave violation of international law to hold them under siege and while doing so deprive them of basic necessiƟes such as food and water. To be clear, collective punishment is prohibited by the laws of war. Equally, international law requires combatants to ensure minimum destruction to civilian life and infrastructure. An intent to cause indiscriminate damage, rather than behaving in a precise manner to minimise damage would, if established, constitute a grave violation of international law. In the conduct of any military campaign, politicians and commanders alike must be careful to ensure that their words do not imply to their troops that the laws of war can be disregarded, nor employ language whose effect is to dehumanise a civilian population.

In these early days when emotions are so understandably raw, many might be reluctant to remind Israel of its international law obligations, considering to do so insensitive or inappropriate. However, we disagree. In these times of pain and terror the notion that there are laws that we must all live by is challenging but essential. Jewish history teaches us that we cannot give up on them."