Hamas won 44% of the vote and then, as you noted, they murdered their political opposition. For this, everybody in Gaza should suffer both under a terrorist group running their lives and Israel bombing them?

I only wish that the Palestinians would view hamas the same way Germans view Hitler. Imagine if instead Germans cried about how the allies split their land instead of taking responsibility for allowing Hitler to rise.

I feel like there might, in fact, be other ways to do that.

Here's the thing, we don't have to answer that to allow more food into Gaza. There is a credible argument to be made that flooding Gaza with food actually reduces Hamas's ability to recruit by devaluing something they offer their fighters.

You're quite literally showing your ass there.

And while I don't support Hamas at all (from my safe, comfortable chair in the West), I can understand why desperate people, whose land is increasingly stolen, whose rights are increasingly abused, and who cannot see their lives improve would turn (or be turned) to an organisation who would ultimately commit such abhorrent acts.

I can't. It doesn't work and makes you the bad guy. Even if just temporarily, that's enough for the other side to exploit. It's always been enough for the other side to exploit. Terrorism has a terrible track record for a reason.

That said, I challenge the premise. Palestinians didn't vote for October 7th. They didn't vote to suspend elections. They voted to kick Fatah out.

There are a lot of examples of really bad stuff happening to groups of people over the centuries, very few of them have resorted to October 7 levels of horror.

I'm not Jewish, but the soviets did some really horrific shit to our family, and we actually lost all our land, our whole livelihoods and strangely, no one in our family killed women or children over it. We never resulted to terrorism to deal with the issue. We did get our land back in the 90s though.

I can guarantee you that if the Palestinians / Hamas didn't do October 7, they would be in a much better position than they are now. 99% of people lost the ability to feel sympathy for them after that. Which is why Israel can basically make the plans. Most of the world just gave up.

And you act as if Oct 7th is the be all and end all of the story of the Palestine/Israel. "Oct 7th levels of horror". I won't excuse Hamas for what they did, but worse levels of horror have been inflicted on the Palestinian people. It's odd you ignore those levels or are ignorant to them. Just saying.

And you say 99% of people lost the ability to feel sympathy. I'll dispute that because the sane among us don't blame civilians for the actions of a paramilitary organisation gone wild. But let's pretend you're right. Isn't it ironic then that the world has so strongly turned against Israel now? (at least in the UN and your average people).

I'll contend that Israel may have destroyed Gaza, but in so doing they have destroyed their reputation and brought ill and hatred to their people now for a generation.

I'll defend Jews always as many have stood side by side with those against what's happening in Israel. But Israel has made their lives harder. Israel's actions have now made it much, much easier for the crazy people among us to do crazy things (c.f. today's Manchester, UK synagogue terrorist attack).

Yeah the over thirty thousand dead kids really shouldn't have "done" october 7, a response done by completely different people to decades of violence, it was so stupid of them.

This is vile and incredibly dehumanising if not straight up violently racist.

Source? Even Hamas claims fewer than 70,000 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war

The only thing gaza didn't have under Israeli occupation was democratic election. And guess what, they didn't have that after the occupation stopped either. They don't have it in most Arabic countries either.