Ignoring your emotive choice of words, I believe Israel is undertaking a military response to an act of war but isn’t committing a genocide. I’ve listened to calls organising the evacuation of civilians, I’ve seen the information given in advance of targeting terrorists, I’ve read about roof knocking (and seen Hamas etc deliberately gathering groups of children to the same roofs that Israel have just warned are about to be bombed). To me, none of that suggests a genocidal intention. Find me a situation where there has been a clear genocide and the aggressors have done similar things and I’ll look into, do some research, form an opinion and get back to you.
You need to define “all its actions” a bit better. All of its actions in this war? In general? In this war, do I agree with everything Israel has done? I do not. Do I think it’s justified? I don’t know. Was a massive response after Oct 7 justified? Absolutely. The equivalent would be Wales storming the border with England and killing roughly 15,000 people and kidnapping thousands more. What would you want the government to do? Not respond so we don’t play into the Welsh’s hands? Wars are horrific. The people not directly involved in them rarely know what horrors happen. I can’t imagine having to kill someone, never mind seeing the people I work with being blown up next to me. Thanks to the wonders of SM people are seeing images of these horrors but it seems like some of those people are only viewing images from one side (Like Ms Thunberg). How do you justify military aggression? What’s your metric? I think using a moral metric is trite as we all agree that killing is immoral. All killing, though? Is there ever a situation where killing someone is justified? I think the culture you grew up in will influence your answer. In the UK, we don’t have guns and it’s rare for someone to be killed so we have a very low threshold for killing. Cultures where killing is done publically and regularly are going to have a different threshold. If someone is coming for your children, are you going to do nothing because you don’t believe in killing? If killing the assailant is your only option, are you justified in taking their life?
The targeting of civilian infrastructure is permitted under IL when that infrastructure is used for military purposes. Have you seen the videos of Hamas/PIJ etc firing RPGs from houses & schools, weapons stores in mosques, tunnels entrances in children’s bedrooms or within hospital grounds? I have. I even saw the lovely Hamas chaps firing from inside a UN warehouse. They used the piles of undelivered aid as cover. When one side uses civilian infrastructure as part of their war campaign, they are the ones who have militarised that infrastructure. They have turned houses, mosques, hospitals into military targets. They use Israel’s actions against them. They know the power of having civilians between them and the IDF. Hamas basically forbid people from evacuating areas the IDF have warned they’re going into. Any consideration of the complete lack of military uniforms in all the footage of Gazans? Did you watch any of the hostage release fiascos? Wonder where all those soldiers mysteriously materialised from? They seem to be good at showing off how many soldiers they have when they know the IDF won’t fire at them.
Are all the journalists that have been killed actual journalists? I’ve seen many who have very close ties with Hamas and are effectively Hamas spokespeople. I’ve also seen plenty who took part in the Oct 7 attacks. Are you counting them in your numbers? I’ve seen (more!) videos of “journalists” firing rockets at IDF targets then running and grabbing a press vest off one of the people they were standing with and putting it on. He participated in military action and then popped on a vest to show his neutrality and stop himself being retaliated against. Also, how can we have an urgent need to get journalists into Gaza to do some proper reporting but there seems to be hundreds if not thousands of Gazan journalists currently reporting and being targeted by the IDF? They’re either reliable and telling the truth in which case we don’t need independent journalists or we can’t rely on what they say and they’re not really journalists. Going back to the hostage releases, there were plenty of Hamas guys filming and directing everything. Would you considered them legitimate targets? Oh I did see one Gazan journalist who post against Hamas post an apology for his anti-Hamas rhetoric & promise not to do it again. He’d apparently been taken away and tortured for his efforts.
Not getting into the numbers here as there’s little point. Are you going to bring up the Lancet 130k number?
Restricting aid I don’t agree with, but I know that goods are used to make weapons/further Hamas aims etc so I can see why it’s done. You’ll mention limiting formula and I’ll say there’s formula in Gaza and I’ve seen pallets of baby food sitting at UN sites. You expect a country to provide medical supplies to the people trying to kill them? Again, find me the war where one side is meant to provide everything to the other side and I’ll look into it. Hamas could get all of this aid into the country tomorrow by releasing the hostages and surrendering. Critically ill people have left Gaza for treatment. If you are in charge of a population and know your people are dying because of what you are doing, what would you do about that?
There is not starvation in Gaza, but there is enough food if it were equally distributed. Restaurants have been open throughout the war. Eid celebrations have been particularly eye opening but you may have missed them as I think they tended to be posted in different places to the normal pro-Palestine places. Is there suffering and horrific conditions and shortages of the basics people need to live? Absolutely. No-one should have to endure those conditions. If a people can’t do anything about it then the international community should jump in to sort it out. UNRWA has been in Gaza for decades. Gaza has more UN employees than the rest of the world has. The aid distribution systems should have been in place. Why are they not getting aid to where it needs to be. Surely their first priority should be getting aid out. I get they don’t’ agree with GHF but there is an immediate way to get aid out to those Gazans who are suffering. Why are they not doing it? The horrific pictures that have been released show individuals with underlying medical conditions but they’re being used to suggest that everyone in Gaza is malnourished to the same extent. That is helping no-one as it isn’t true. Why is that being done? Why are we being shown these pictures with the narrative that Israel is starving Gaza? The obvious response is “OMG! Israel are deliberately trying to kill those people”. It would take about 5 minutes of time to disprove that. Why don’t people do that? How many people think Gaza was an open-air prison/concentration camp and don’t know about the 5* hotels/luxury car dealership/gold quarter/phone shops/bridal boutiques/shopping malls/universities etc? What are we told and what do we see? What reason would someone have for telling a particular narrative? Hamas is deliberately starving its civilian population. How many obese fighters have you seen? Why are their pictures not plastered across the world’s press?
Instead of concentrating on Israel, how about all the world leaders started putting pressure on Qatar and get them to do something about Hamas? It can be done because the US mysteriously got a hostage released after a week chat with the Qataris. Get the UN to sort their house out and deliver the aid they have. Make the Arab countries in the area get more involved than publicly criticising Israel while privately thanking them for dealing with Iran et al. Make Egypt open their blooming border to women and children. Get them out of there and let Israel and Hamas sort it out without more civilians getting needlessly killed. If Israel won’t leave afterwards then make them. Leaving the solution to the current parties is useless. One side has sworn to destroy the other and the other side is trying not to get killed. They’re not going to sit down and thrash out a neat little plan.