I’ll guarantee that it’s the latter.
Quote: "I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
It’s embarrassing watching people give up on critical thought.
But why does it matter? Does historical barbarity justify present day barbarity? It doesn't, and we all know it doesn't.
It's not the case that Israel is held to a higher standard. Russia has been widely condemned, blocked from international finance, and faces severe sanctions. On top of that, western countries have given substantial military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. Russia had reasons for their invasion of Ukraine (just like Israel has its reasons), but so what? Russia being angry at Ukraine is not a justification for destroying the country.
I also take issue with your characterization that Gaza "started it". This is a 70+ year conflict with many chapters of violence in it, and innocent Palestinians make up the bulk of the casualties. Israel is not the victim here.
Finally, it's not accurate to talk about Israel/Gaza as two nations at war. Israel controls everything coming in and going out of Gaza, electricity, water, etc. Palestine is not an independent country or a state, it's part of Israel except its citizens have no rights.
Are you even serious? Genghis Khan? Read about literally any modern war fought. Read about WW2, about bombings of North Korea, that might open your eyes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea
Why look even that long ago? Look up "Battle of Mosul" (check images in Google) — its 2017, very recent. Look up Ukraine war. All looks the same. But no one cries genocide (because it isn't).
War always comes along with major destruction of cities, because the enemy uses buildings as a fortification.
> many instances of genocide
It's not a genocide, it's just a regular war. Stop abusing the term for god's sake.
Look up typical civilian-to-combatant death ratio in major wars, you'll be surprised.
Since we had a global war which almost destroyed civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#Internat...
We all should have worked harder at solving the problem, but a genocidal militant group launching a surprise attack after years of feigning peace made such a retaliation inevitable.
When people say you’re not “thinking critically”, they’re saying you’re trying to portray one of the modern conflicts with the lowest civilian deaths (versus combatants) as a crime against humanity while ignoring numerous others — eg, genocides in Niger or Myanmar, and forced expulsions in Armenia/Azerbaijan.
"inevitable" Yes, they made us do it. See what they made us do?
"Niger or Myanmar, Armenia/Azerbaijan." Hey everyone, look over there!
No one will take blind defenders seriously.
Yes, 'we all' should have worked harder when Benjamin Netanyahu actively funded Hamas and expended all possible efforts to prevent a viable Palestinian state. Genius thinking right there.
Why is it that this is always mentioned? As if ignorance of one crime against humanity makes us incapable of criticizing the other? And where exactly are the public spokespeople from our governments talking about how any of these genocides are justified as the killers have a "right to defend themselves"? Not to talk about how an attack that killed 4000 people justifies killing 25000 non-combatants.
> They’re not interested in a tit-for-tat retaliation: they’re intending to destroy the political and military structures that made the attack possible. A smaller country can’t cry “that isn’t fair!” when they start a fight and get beaten — this isn’t a scuffle between kids at school.
This is not even comparable to what is occurring when the world is condemning Israel's actions. If Israel was interested in removing the political structures that made Hamas's attack supported by Gaza then they could've stopped the settlement of the west bank, supported the stability of the Palestinian state, and countless of other actions which would have lowered the risk of creating terrorists in Gaza.
Israel still has settlements in the west bank and has annexed the Golan heights. No matter which border agreement you believe is the lawful one, Isreal hasn't honored any of them.
People have repeatedly pointed out how your facts have no bearing on reality.
So what Gazans did after the disengagement: 1. Electing Hamas into power 2. Ceasing having elections, instead opting for a Taliban style religious Islamist rule 3. Arming themselves to the teeth 4. Routinely shooting missiles, mortars and RPGs into Israeli civilians
They could have chosen to go on many paths.
> Small-scale industries in Gaza City include the production of plastics, construction materials, textiles, furniture, pottery, tiles, copperware, and carpets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Gaza_Strip#Manu...
Your claim that Gaza had more hospitals than Israel is absurd. Israel has 5x the population, for starters. A cursory Google search indicates Israel has 10x the number of hospitals.
I recognize your arguments because I've heard them all before. Repeated ad nauseam by people who grew up in Zionist households and got all their news from comically partisan sources. They sincerely believe what they say and fact checking their claims is completely pointless because evidence means nothing in face of a lifetime of indoctrination.
Like ultimately if there's no two state solution, then it's either a genocide or expulsion of the Palestinians or a one state solution. If it's one state it can either be Jewish or democratic, but almost certainly not both.
The entire point of human rights and rules of war is that there are certain rights the people of even small countries that started the fight are entitled to. You don't just get to excuse relentlessly bombing hospitals and aid workers. "We thought it was a military target, but we will not disclose why, nor will we disclose what we're doing to not make this mistake in the future" is not a get out of jail free card for genocides, especially when it never seems to come with any actual signs of improvement.
Campaigns to stop genocides in other places having been unsuccessful does not justify smaller genocides taking place elsewhere. That's not critical thinking, that's whataboutism.
Particularly considering that not only is America's supposedly democratic leadership not condemning the atrocities, they're actively offering the aid to continue it while claiming to want peace.
Being from India, I can relate to the troubles with islamic terrorism that Israel has faced, which is why I mentioned having initially been sympathetic. But if India engaged in this large scale indiscriminate slaughter of muslims, it'd have been rendered a pariah on a similar tier as Russia. As it stands it's already constantly accused of being undemocratic and violating the rights of Muslims, despite never having undertaken deliberate, remorseless government sanctioned slaughter of this scale.
It took far less for the current Indian prime minister to be banned from Western nations when he was chief minister of a state. All he had to do was fail to stop a much less deadly riot and get repeatedly exonerated from accusations of wrongdoing by several courts.
I was responding to the demand for “tit-for-tat” and claims this was unusually brutal; neither of those are true.
You’re now making different, non—specified claims in emotionally charged language. Be specific; think critically.
There's also targeting children, having no qualms about the collateral damage when they bomb houses to get at single targets and so on. Using systems like the one described in the article to offload further responsibility, such that if by some miracle Western nations do try to introduce the IDF to the concept of accountability, they can just blame the computer and promise to do better.
I'm using emotionally charged language because these are supposed to be emotional topics. "Critical thinking" on its own is just a pathway to justifying extreme inhumane cruelty.
Yes on aid workers. The hospitals, unfortunately, appear to have been used for military purposes by Hamas. That makes them valid targets.
We, Americans, are being forced to change our morality and humanity to suite an "indispensable ally". (Both of which are definitely open to question).
That said, how cute that they are blaming both the 10/7 event ("intelligence failure") and their daily killing (for our viewing pleasure) of civilians, on AI.
I think "intelligence failure" is accurate but not in the sense that was offered. It is an intelligence failure of a people to recognize that they are on the wrong side of humanity and history. You can't blame that on AI. I think it a cultural failing - an overly inflated and exaggerated sense of historic grievances, a conceit regarding God Almighty's affections, and a misread of the Global Room, and clear contempt for the "nations" watching.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/chef-jose-andres-s...
And we fire bombed multiple German cities, the British with an explicit policy of killing German civilians who lived near factories. Many things are horrible and either permitted explicitly by international law or, by convention and precedent, technically illegal but widely tolerated.
And your bring this up is a case in point of intelligence failure I alluded to. People may seem to "tolerate" mandated group think but we're still mostly Human beings and have empathy and can tell the difference between Nazi Germany and Palestine. At some point the silent consensus will be quite vocal.
Germans are still paying for their crimes in WW2 ... Something to keep in mind.
This is a myth. We didn’t fight Germany to stop the Holocaust. (That said, I agree on the moral unequivalence. Hamas aren’t the Nazis. But not every German was a Nazi, either. We ultimately draw lines on even collective punishment.)
If we don’t want to use Dresden, take Vietnam. Or Cambodia. Or Afghanistan or Ukraine or the Uyghurs or Kashmir. (Or Sudan, right now. Or Eritrea in ten minutes.) It sucks. But the international laws with relevance are the ones that aren’t being systematically violated by every regional power. We aren’t changing our standards to suite Israel, this is just the first conflict in a generation we’ve bothered to pay attention to.
Basically every single one. We will end much faster if you just read the laws.
And this is not "a belief" or a "lets debate for a year more if this is or not a genocide while sipping tea and killing faster". The ship of good faith has parted many months ago.
Shit That Should Land Israel's Government and Military Apparatus In The Hague, Abridged:
Per ICC Article 8: (https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/5nsf46....)
- (i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
- (ii) Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
- (iv) Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
- (v) Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;
World Bank report on destroyed civilian infrastructure: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/04/02/j...
- (iii) Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict;
The Israeli army has a storied history of bombing the shit out of aid workers that goes back decades, everything from shelling UN aid warehouses with white phosphorous munitions to calling in artillery strikes on aid convoys. This behavior is well-documented and certainly not limited to the current conflict.
- (xxv) Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions;
Do we really need to review the current state of play with relief aid in Gaza given it hasn't been 5 days since an Israeli patrol greased a convoy of aid workers? Shit's gotten so bad foreign governments have taken to air dropping aid.
Additionally as I'm sitting here combing through the Geneva Conventions there are a few things that stand out:
- Part I, Article 3, 2) seems to be in olay between shelling the fuck out of aid workers, bombing hospitals out of existence, and the several documented attacks on emergency response vehicles.
- Part II, Article 24 on child welfare also seems like an unambiguous faceplant given this: https://twitter.com/UNLazzarini/status/1767618985397272831?s...
I'm certain there's more here but you aren't getting more of my time than the initial hour I budgeted to the task of putting together this reply. Have fun with the supplemental reading...
For example: "The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians"
When a computer generates a target list of thousands, that's how tens of thousands of innocent people die.
Intended by who? You don't kill 13,000 children by accident.
[0] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
You're assuming the children are evenly distributed and buildings are attacked randomly and evenly. None of which is true.
Many buildings have been demolished with explosives or bulldozers while empty. Many buildings were damaged during combat with walls being breached to provide access.
In many cases buildings were attacked in areas that have been ordered to evacuate. (yes not all cases).
There's no doubt many children have been killed. We've all seen terrible photos of individual children dead. I don't think it's "tens of thousands" and I'm not sure we'll have accurate numbers. Other than that as you note there's a large number of children and so they've definitely and unfortunately impacted.
“Impacted” is definitely one word for it. Murdered another.
Words are important. And you're right those are different words. The word murdered has a specific meaning, e.g. "to kill (a person) unlawfully and unjustifiably with premeditated malice". The word impacted means: "strongly or directly affected by something especially in a negative way." The word "child" also has a definition. In this context it usually refers to people under the age of 18.
I'll turn the question back at you, what are you trying to get out of claiming "tens of thousands" or "murdered"?
I think the word murdered is IMO more appropriate to the children Hamas killed in Israel on Oct 7th and civilians it has killed in Israel over the years and less appropriate for the children killed in Gaza by IDF action during a war. That said my heart breaks for every single child, whoever they are, that lost their lives. It's not their fault. This war didn't need to happen. We should try our best to protect children, here and everywhere, and I do recognize that at some level you're trying to do so, thanks for that.
The article also questions your claim that the IDF was careful to protect civilians by eg destroying empty building. On the contrary, the IDF accepted extremely high civilian deaths to kill even one suspected minor militant.
I'm claiming many of the destroyed buildings have been empty. This really has nothing to do with the article. I'm addressing the parent's logic/argument. There have been many examples of buildings destroyed while empty, for example to make up the new boundary area Israel has created from the border. The attempt to calculate casualties via the number of destroyed buildings is a very poor methodology. Your statement and mine are not mutually exclusive- it's possible the IDF targeted buildings that had many civilians in them to get at one target. I don't know the demographics of those civilians. I don't know whether what happened in the early days of the war continued throughout the war. I would agree that early in the war Israel very likely accepted a larger number of civilian casualties to get at Hamas targets. I think the new thing potentially in this article is questioning the degree to which the targets were valid military targets.
Do you have a link to the officially published name, sex, age, ID, of all the victims so far, by date, in the conflict?
When large buildings are demolished by bombs and can't be excavated because of active violence what's the process for figuring out who potentially was or wasn't in that building? with all the refugees moving around the chaos how do you know if someone who used to live there is dead or sheltering somewhere else out of contact?
Hamas reports everyone as civilians (or doesn't make a distinction).
EDIT: While trying to find this from another source I found this: https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-health-system-co...
"Of the 21,703 identified fatalities whose details have been shared by the Hamas-run health ministry, 13,207 were women, children or elderly (61%)."
"Until recently, however, the ministry had been reporting a figure of 72%."
"Mr al Wahaidi told Sky News that this was a "media estimate". He was not able to explain the basis for this estimate or who had produced it."
"Since speaking to Sky News, he has stopped using this figure in his reports for the health ministry. It continues to be used by the government media office, a separate branch of Gaza's government."
...
"media estimate". Another by the way is that I think we should assume that given the significant bombing campaigns are more or less over the more recent casualties likely include less randomness and more targeted. I would guess that the ratio of women/children/elderly is much lower in more recent stages of the war.
Not included are a large number of missing people, and all the people who die of secondary causes like maltutrition, disease outbreaks, and poor access to proper medical care.
Nobody really knows what the real casualty figures are, but I'm inclined to take the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers seriously -- as do Israel and the US, as you already mentioned.
This link being wrong however doesn't negate the fact that the only numbers we have come from Hamas that is 1) in most western countries is considered a terrorist organization 2) is one of the sides in this war 3) clearly benefits from distorting the numbers 4) shouldn't be considered a reliable source for anything.
The numbers discussion seems to always come back to in previous rounds of violence those same numbers seemed more or less in the ballpark though there have been major revisions in the past re: the ratio of combatants. (I don't have the link handy but I can find it if you dispute this last bit).
The Guardian article makes it clear prior to those denials that those higher-up appear to not to care how accurate it is and appear to be making a conscious choice to accept the fact it is highly flawed on the basis that it might kill some of whom they would legitimately claim as valid targets.
It's clear from the operational details discussed in the article the critical target number is largely number of kills, regardless of whether they are any actual material threat, or not.
Cull predominantly the male population and their family members, not assassinate active threats is the overall impression I got of the Israeli strategy.
I must add that anyone claiming the use of AI and inference models in this way is in anyway justifiable needs to seek help. The claim of 90% accuracy is almost certainly over claiming by over 100%.
In the Guardian article, an IDF spokesperson says it exists and is only used as the former, and I'm sure that's what was intended and maybe even what the higher-ups think, but I suspect it's become the latter.