Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
As I already alluded to earlier, the principles and spirit are more important to me than the literal conventions and if somebody signed it. I will note that you brought up the Geneva Conventions not me.
> German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
I'm confused to what you refer to and why you brought it up?
> I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
This is not an example to what I asked for, this wouldn't have happened if Hamas wore uniform, IDF wore uniforms, the held hostages civilians didn't but because they were in combat they mistook them for Hamas. What I want is Israeli citizens mistaken for an enemy combatant in Israel in a non-active-combat environment or Palestinians citizens mistaken for an IDF soldier in Palestine in a non-active-combat environment.
Me: "Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons."
You: "When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict?"
This was in the Israel-Arab conflict, and as you acknowledge, "wouldn't have happened if Hamas wore uniform". It is a perfectly responsive example to your request, and clearly illustrates the potential harm to innocent civilians from violations of the rule.
I will explain one last time I'm not looking for examples of people being harmed from "general" perfidy but those analogous for what happened - a stealth raid infiltrating among an enemy's population, "people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators" as you said. The hostages weren't infiltrators, the context was that they were in enemy territory against their will and active combat. This is quite different from an hypothetical west bank combatant shooting his fellow men in non-active combat because he thought they were IDF.
P.S I'm still confused about the German Jews in the 1930s/1940s comment.
Is there another treaty which proscribes perfidy, which Israel has ratified?
As the article indicates, prohibitions against perfidy and other war crimes predate the Conventions.
(And I’d note that, as occupying power, Israel is subject to other requirements.)
(And if this is truly your argument, “Hamas doesn’t have to follow the rules either” is the logical conclusion. Which makes whining about their uniforms a bit odd; there is no scenario where "Hamas has to follow the Conventions, but Israel does not" is a coherent position.)
> In leaked recordings, Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva — then head of Israeli military intelligence — stated that for every person killed on Oct. 7, “50 Palestinians must die,” adding that “it doesn’t matter now if they are children.” He described mass Palestinian deaths as “necessary” to send a deterrent message.
> Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration of a “complete siege” on Gaza — cutting food, electricity, fuel, and water — was accompanied by explicitly dehumanizing language. Announcing the policy on Oct. 9, Gallant stated: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “an entire nation out there is responsible” further blurs the institutional line between civilian and combatant.
> Such statements do not determine individual targeting decisions, but they shape the environment in which those decisions are made: how civilian life is valued, how much civilian harm is expected to be scrutinized, and how much is implicitly excused.
Just look at the reaction of Iran's "leaders" to the USA's threat to attack them. They keep their narrative logic intact: we'll sink your ships, etc. These are fearless people who's power is derived from the appearance of power.
Besides the fact that it's a very poor genocide that after the war has ended has 100,000 palestinians leave (mostly on medical or humanitarian grounds) out of 2M Gazans and when Israel is constantly accused of blocking them in.
Bear in mind that Israel is a democracy with proportional representation resulting in a coalition government so you are essentially accusing a the majority of the population of supporting genocidal intent based on a few out-of-context and unclear quotes from some individuals. For example Smotrich - a right wing nut IMO - party won only 5 seats out of 120 in the last election.
The PM, and the official statements overwhelmingly and repeatedly state that they were not targetting civilians, whilst also adding as has been proven that the entire strip was criss-crossed with tunnels (longer and more extensive than the London metro) with exits under schools and hospitals and that their attacks met the proportionaility test which is that the miltary advantage must be proportional to risk of civilians harmed. They said no strikes were indiscrimate, they were all against verified presence of hamas. You and I might find that ugly, vicious and can question if there was another way to fight Hamas, but illegal it aint.
Herzog's comments were taken widly out of context. It takes a very particular and pre-dermined POV to discount the actual Q&Q where there quote ignored the entire paragraph which gives it a different meaning and the very next question asked him to clarify the statement anout responsible and he immediately replied (all this within a couple of minutes of the same presser) his intent. As (e.g.) HuffPost reported: when a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” Herzog said, “No, I didn’t say that.”
Here's a transcipt of the presser:
Journalist: "You spoke very passionately about you saying that Israel was not retaliating but
targeting with regards to the operations in Gaza. But even President Biden, who spoke so personally
and passionately with regard to what was happening in Israel, spoke about the importance of the laws
of war. So, with that in mind, what can Israel do to alleviate the impact of this conflict on two
million civilians, many of whom have nothing to do with Hamas?"
President Isaac Herzog: "First of all, we have to understand there's a state, there's a state, in a
way, that has built a machine of evil right at our doorstep. It's an entire nation out there that is
responsible. It's not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved—it's absolutely not
true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza
in a coup d'état, murdering their family members who were in Fatah."
Journalist: "I am sincerely sorry for what is happening in Israel right now, but I have been listening
to your answers for the last few minutes and I am a little confused. On the one hand, you say that
Israel follows international law in the Gaza Strip and that civilians are protected; you say you are
very careful to prevent casualties. But at the same time, you seem to hold the people of Gaza
responsible for not trying to remove Hamas, and therefore by implication, that makes them legitimate
targets."
President Isaac Herzog: "No, I did not say that. I did not say that and I want to make it clear. A
question was raised about the separation of Hamas and civilians. I said that in their homes, there are
missiles shooting at us. If you have a missile in your kitchen and you want to launch it at me, don't
I have the right to defend myself? We have to defend ourselves; we have the full right to do so. Hamas
carries full responsibility and accountability for the well-being of the hostages and for the
situation they have brought upon Gaza."
Journalist: "But my question is: Are civilians in Gaza held responsible for not destroying Hamas and
therefore become legitimate targets?"
President Isaac Herzog: "I repeat again: there is no excuse for murdering innocent civilians in any
way, in any context. And believe me, Israel will operate and always operates according to the
international rules."
Even in Halavi's case, he might be a right-wing nutter and meant what was reported but the head of army intelligence does not decide policy. And when you look at the original I don't think it would pass court of law. Israeli Channel 12 added the square brackets intent to "it doesn't matter now [if they] are children" but actually the original in hebrew was only "זה לא משנה עכשיו ילדים" [1] which could mean instead "it doesn't matter [to this argument the mention of] children" which is equally plausable in idiomatic Hebrew. Either way, his comments in full don't tick the boxes of genocidal intent.
You seem disappointed. Anywho...
A common misconception is that genocide must involve a very large number of deaths on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions. But this is false. The perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War were found guilty of genocide despite the massacre’s death toll being less than 9,000. Hence the fact that “only” 70,000–100,000+ people have died in Gaza in no way refutes the charge of genocide.
Genocidal feelings. Super normal.
> Even in Halavi's case, he might be a right-wing nutter
Nuts in highest military positions when warring with 4 or more states. Very normal, too.
> Bear in mind that Israel is a democracy with proportional representation resulting in a coalition government so you are essentially accusing a the majority of the population of supporting genocidal intent...
Perpetrating* a genocide, seems like.
Is the Gaza War a genocide? Two key features of the mortality data are consistent with that charge: first, unusually high mortality among women and children; second, the sudden and dramatic fall in life expectancy. In these respects, the war resembles the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides more closely than any other recent conflict involving the US or Israel.
To be fair, you'd also see this if your opponents were using human shields and hospitals for military operations, which Hamas has been documented as doing. This is not so clear cut.
It doesn't especially matter how different they are, since Israel's rather arbitrary definition includes both of those behaviours. Just like their definition of 'soldier', which, per their use of administrative detention, includes children as young as 12, and 'base', for which a dozen rifles spread out on a prayer mat often suffices.
“These would be war crimes… if we were a state! Muahahahaha!” is not a position I’d be comfy espousing as a positive thing.
I am glad Hamas leadership saw consequences for their war crimes. I wish I could say the same for Netanyahu and his Cabinet.
I'm so tired of this conflict. Both sides can eff off. The Israelis under Netanyahu are basically ever bad stereotype of Jewish people made real, and the Palestinians are the "woe is me we are innocents" while being controlled by murderous thugs and just siphoning the aid they beg for.
Nobody actually wants peace, well, those that would be at the negotiating table don't. The Israelis want the Palestinians dead, the Palestinians want the Israelis dead.
Arafat has the last shot at peace. He allegedly walked away because of access to some religious shrines. That should tell you everything you need to know about this region. Just a bunch of religious nutheads going at it, and the rest of the world gets suckered into spending billions on it, which ultimately just goes to the religious nut heads.
And all of it only appears in headlines because of oil.
Demonstrably not; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151031.
The key perpetrators of Oct 7 are dead, as is appropriate punishment for their war crimes. I don't think Netanyahu will see consequences for his.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
National Guard and HomeGuard in every allied country has a uniform.
The ones that don't are using what would be considered unlawful tactics these days.
You're an 'unlawful combatant' if you don't wear one: the Geneva Convention still technically applies to you, just not in any way you'd find comforting.
Geneva convention is just a piece of paper, sometimes adhered to by some parties, and thats about it. And thats something coming from a person living and working in Geneva lol. russians keep breaking those rules every day for years on ukraine and not much is happening, is it.
And yes, Russia breaks the rules constantly in Ukraine. The response to that is not 'therefore rules are worthless,' it's 'therefore we need better enforcement.' A legal system with imperfect enforcement is not the same thing as no legal system; by that logic you'd abolish murder laws because people still get murdered.
'Any tactic is a good tactic' is also, incidentally, exactly what the oppressor says.
If they refuse to abide by the "foreign book" that dictate the rules of conflict, then I'm not sure how they could legitimately use the foreign book's classification of genocide. Those rules are what dictate how to classify a genocide.
Why can't they just use their own? Seems silly. Not sure this makes sense.
Remaining the "good guys"?
The only difference is that Israel is capable of genocide militarily, and is levelling Palestinian cities.
There are no good guys here.
The British Army was very upset that ragtag riflemen in the American colonies kept running into the woods and shooting from behind cover instead of standing in a Proper Formation and exchanging volleys of fire. No true gentlemen does that!
> the British military and government frequently accused American colonial soldiers of violating the established "rules of war" (or the "laws of nations") during the Revolutionary War, largely because they viewed the conflict not as a war between sovereign nations, but as a rebellion. The British often regarded the Americans as unlawful combatants, or rebels, who used irregular tactics that disregarded traditional 18th-century European military etiquette.
didn't skirmishers always do that though?
The European war tradition was open fields and men standing in lines firing volleys from 50-100m, roughly. Americans fought in the French/Indian wars alongside Native Americans and picked up their hit-and-run tactics. They were also using rifled barrel Kentucky Longrifles that could hit a man-sized target at 250m (roughly). The Americans also would directly target officers, which was seen as cowardly/ungentlemanly.
Of course, that does mean the bigger side has to get dirty too, sometimes. Just not to the extent that Israel is, who clearly just want to cleanse the land in order to own it. I mean, this is Boer war territory, not (e.g.) Algerian war where torture was used but civilians were mostly left intact.
And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.
And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?
And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??
And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
From the article we're discussing:
"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."
I would describe that as a walk-back.
I guess we're in agreement that Reuters isn't engaging with the topic neutrally.
Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.
This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.
But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.
---
(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.
(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
I get what you're trying to say, but ...
> playing devil advocate
One look at my comment history on this topic should help dispel the notion.
I think sometimes people are so certain about their beliefs that they perceive any argument that challenges them to be evil, bad faith trickery. But I think the best way to respond to these arguments is simply to give compelling reasons why they are wrong (and not why the person giving them is bad).
Otherwise, some people will be mislead by these bad arguments and you will have done nothing to help but say “don’t listen to him he’s evil”, which is not very convincing really.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.
It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.
And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"
It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
No.
This is asymmetrical warfare
The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
What makes you think Israel cares about a label more than conquest via genocide? Did the Nazis care about being called genocidal? If you want to stop IL you need to do it via force.
Anyone who listens for a bit to israeli mass media will soon be convinced that anything but the extermination of the palestinians is not enough. This is why they bulldoze everything archeological that does not play into zionist myth making. This is also why apartheid is common in local politics in Israel, and why the zionist guerillas and later IDF systematically destroyed the homes and property of the people they displaced, long before the appearance of Hamas.
As I usually do, I'd also like to remind that the zionist movement is mainly a movement of christians.
Certainly no one's donating Patriot batteries and F-16s to Gaza.
(I'm also not sure I'd consider the Russia/Ukraine war to be… undercovered in the press.)
https://www.ajc.org/news/what-every-american-should-know-abo...
Will those decolonial movements then accept complicity, even if reluctantly, for all the peoples the Soviets oppressed and even genocided?
The Soviets starved millions of people to death, in order to secure their control. All that help was then built on the backs and blood of those victims. At least let's be honest about that much.
Just because you haven't heard of Russia colonizing doesn't mean it didn't happen just as much. It just wasn't where the other imperial empires were. How else would one city come to a rule a continent-sized territory? A big difference is, they didn't keep records of such things. People picture Siberia as an empty wilderness and have no idea that rich societies once lived there.
If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.
Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.
By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:
Yes. But.
Those are weasel words. The correct, honest word, is genocide
The wikipedia article suggests that I'm not alone in this belief: "Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group,[6][7] or calling it a euphemism for genocide or cultural genocide.[8][9]"
You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.
The Nazis were evil. But all people have the capacity for it.
Answering with "all people have the capacity for evil" is once again a subtle misdirection which seems like a recurring theme in your comments. This wasn't what you implied.
Put simply, Israel and nazis are night and day, you are villifying a country and its people with extreme and factually wrong accusations.
Depends on who you ask. People are allowed to see similarities, like Lebensraum & Occupation, as two examples. They don't need anyone's certification or permission. And intimidation, I believe, has stopped working. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_between_Israel_and...
I mean, "Judeo-Nazi" was a term coined by an Israeli polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz & has been part of the Revisionist discourse for quite some time; ex: Better a Living Judeo-Nazi Than a Dead Saint (1983), https://www.jstor.org/stable/2536162 / https://archive.vn/uX42N
Well, looks like Leibowitz did not coin the term (much to his chagrin perhaps?), but I guess he was one of the more prominent Israelis to never apologize for using it.
May be Leibowitz spoke truth to power; may be he was a Soviet asset.
> quite stunning how similar all this is
Hm.
Michael S: Aren't you exaggerating when you use the term "Judeo- Nazi?" Do you truly believe that we are liable to decline to the level of the Nazis?
Yeshayahu L: When the nation (or in Nazi terminology, the race) and the power of its state become supreme values, human action is no longer inhibited. This mentality is also widespread among us. In the territories under our occupation in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, we are already behaving as the Nazis behaved in the territories under their occupation in Czechoslovakia and the west.
If your idea of the Nazis is their occupation in the west, then you are missing most of the picture. Their atrocities in the east are far beyond anything that has ever taken place on this Earth before or since. There is no comparison whatsoever.
You'd be correcting Mr. Leibowitz, not me.
> no comparison whatsoever
It is not up for debate that there isn't any comparison to be made. That said, we can choose to live in our bubbles, yeah; but on the flip side, interactions with the outside world might come as a rude shock.
Something is very wrong with education on WW2 if anyone thinks this is a reasonable thing to say. A bubble, I suppose.
Pretty sure Leibowitz knew his WW2.
But this isn't about Leibowitz, who isn't here to try to explain himself. This is about the idea that a falsity is "not up for debate".
Your assertion that there's "no comparison whatsoever" is of course not, when there's ample.
> who isn't here to try to explain himself
Lets just say that social norms & experiences drive much of what people believe in. One of Leibowitz's student goes:
"I hated the notion of occupation since the very beginning. My first memories from after the 67 war are traveling with my children in the occupied territories. There were awnings over groceries stores with Hebrew lettering advertising Osem noodles. I couldn't bear it. I thought that was dreadful because I remembered German lettering in France. I have very strong feelings about Israel as an occupier."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/18/daniel-kahnema...
I think you really need to learn more about the eastern front, if you're going to keep making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge. There is no comparison between the experiences in France and the experiences in Ukraine during WW2. There is a reason why historian Timothy Snyder titled one of his books "Bloodlands".
Gaza is no Leningrad or Stalingrad.
Comparisons needn't be limited to one event or one atrocity.
> Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?
All? I doubt that. Even then, unfortunately for you, like Leibowitz, Kahneman (perhaps world's foremost & finest thinker) isn't alive either to explain himself.
You can't openly call a group Nazis and then claim you only meant in terms of their behavior on the western front. It misses the whole point, not to mention it makes people forget what the Nazis did.
> All? I doubt that.
Yes, at times all.
Me? As before, in this context, your argument is with Kanheman & Leibowitz. And possibly other prominent Israelis (present or past) who may hold such views.
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
They're hardly the only ones reporting this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g...
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
2. Links to a news report that has literally no source on its claims. Just says "IDF accepted" and that's it.
3. Links to another news report which does nothing but report on the previous news report as if this makes it credible.
4. Says IDF isn't contesting the report.
5. Proceeds to provide the only official, verifiable, sourced IDF quote about the report, contesting it.
The logical fallacies you're willing to accept in order to feed your hatred is impressive.
2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"
(That's a state-owned news outlet, to be clear; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan_11)
3. See above.
4. Accurate.
5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.
The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data". If you see it as "no contest" we're gonna have to chalk it up to cultural differences in parsing language.
Officially, Israel has no nuclear weapons. (lol)
The IDF is most welcome to publish a claim and have it dissected. I would remind you we're on a thread where their "official data" fell apart because of direct video evidence of their war crimes obtained from their dead victims' phones.
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
I don't think "sense" is the issue.
1) Are you sure you were talking to actual people and not fake personas or even bots?
2) Keep in mind that there is A LOT of money to be made working for Israeli PR. Some people will take that money regardless of what they know is the actual truth. Some examples:
- Certain social media influencers being paid up to $7000 per post [1]
- Israel boosts propaganda funding by $150m to sway global opinion against genocide [2] [3]
- "[...] a firm called Bridges Partners LLC has been hired to manage an influencer network under a project code-named the “Esther Project.” " [4]
[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-influencers-netanya...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...
[3] https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/israel-has-spent-m...
[4] https://www.jta.org/2025/09/30/united-states/israels-secret-...
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
In the PNW there is also plenty of discussion in public school about the shame of Japanese internment camps in the US.
As others have pointed out "The War on Terror" has been nearly constantly criticized by Americans since it's inception. Mocking it on the Daily Show was a fairly common theme even 20 years ago.
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
So yeah, I'm sure many people in Israel have a complicated view of the events that happened post October 7 too. Yet people will mostly ignore all of that and go completely out of their way to criticize basically everything Israel has done.
I'm quite partial to it all, I just hate the hypocrisy.
I don't disagree.
There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)
> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”
I don't think you were listening very hard.
> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.
I saw Israel using very precision weapons too. Warning people to leave areas etc. I even saw "live leak" style videos where people in Gaza were filming buildings because they knew precisely when they'd be demolished.
None of that was good enough though, clearly...war sucks, best to avoid starting one in the first place if you care about the welfare of others...people can say the IDF did all the wrong things, and you could also say it was stupidly reckless of Hamas.
For those people who are really unhappy with the IDF, also need to be eqaually unhappy with Hamas, else nothing will improve for the innocent people of the region.
I would suggest that fairly indiscriminate use of precision weapons isn't quite what I'm referring to.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
Can we not politicize historical events? This is not historically controversial. The Czechoslovak President literally called it the "final solution" to their German problem. Or do you just want more examples? There are plenty.
*not really everybody, obviously
Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.
You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.
Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".
I'm suggesting that many of us are disgusted now by Israel's genocide, land theft, and murder ... just as millions of us were disgusted by the Iraq war.
The US response was deadlier in both total number of people killed and in proportion to the inciting terrorist attacks. Both countries also committed clear war crimes along the way.
The primary distinguishing factor between the two is the label of "genocide" only consistently being applied to Israel's actions, but that is mostly due to practical reasons, namely the relative small size of Gaza in terms of both geography and population. If Afghanistan and Iraq had the population density of Gaza, not only would that have likely made the US response even more deadly due to the mechanics of warfare, but it certainly would have led to more people describing the US's actions as genocide.
Once again, this is not a defense of Israel. If this reads to you like I'm downplaying the actions of Israel, then you are underestimating the death and destruction caused by the US. Some estimates have the US responsible for as many as a million deaths.
While I recall many at the time calling it being called a genocide by some due to the sanctions, the thrust of the military action was an illegal war.
Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians, journalists, starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent, and ... the list is tragically too long. Size and numbers have nothing to do with it.
Israels actions were ruled a genocide in the ICJ, the UN, among many other genocide experts (including Jewish experts).
The Israeli's had/have actual genocidal intent. Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.
Sure, you mention you're not defending Israel, but the implication that there is some double standard here (perhaps "antisemitic" given your focus on labelling) is in itself a defense of Israel.
The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews (not my words, but the words of Jewish scholars).
>Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians,
I'm not willing to ignore the US's propensity for bombing weddings.[1][2][3][4][5]
>journalists
Or the notorious Collateral Murder strikes.[6]
> starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent
I already hit on this with the mentioning of Gaza's population density and the mechanics of war. Gaza is much smaller and denser which means that the same bomb dropped there will kill more people and destroy more infrastructure than in Iraq or Afghanistan. That has caused a larger percentage of the arable land in Gaza to be destroyed and they already had less of it to begin with. This had made them more reliant on Israel. The US simply didn't have the opportunity to control the food supply in the same way and I'm not willing to categorize a lack of opportunity as evidence of a lack of intent. And despite that all, the long tail of the US's actions still has led to a food crisis.[7]
>Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.... The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews
If we're talking "reprehensible words" and dehumanization, it hasn't even been two weeks since a US congressperson said that Muslims were below dogs. The US has the benefit of two extra decades of hindsight and many still haven't learned the lesson you're discussing.[8].
I genuinely think you should read through some of this[9]. It sounds like it might open your eyes to the US's actual record of behavior.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massa...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruzgan_wedding_bombing
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Radda_airstrike
[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_hunger_crisi...
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Fine#Muslims
[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#War_o...
Some estimate that these were even bigger than the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. These put the total number of people going out in demonstrations world wide at 30M+. This war was massively protested against, any which way you count.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040904214302/http://www.guinne...
Also, I'm not clear on whether there was a precursor to 9/11 comparable to Israel's response to Gaza's 2018 non-violent protest, the Great March of Return.
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.
Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
* https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...
This recent genetic based view replaces the "gut feeling" view akin to yours that was long pushed by Quadrant et al.
Read article, chase up the papers, evidence says "no".
The Tasmanians and the Noongars (Southern most to east, southern most to west) have genetically been in place a long time and had no one to replace.
The article mentions "genetic diversity" between east, west, centre, north, south, etc - that comes from not mixing.
"But surely..." <-- gut feelings? You should joinn Quadrant.
> If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe
Do you have any evidence of that?
> who gets the land now?
There's a wealth of material on Mabo, Land rights, Native title, et al that address all that - if you're generally curious it's there to read.
eg: starting with, say https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case
Sorry for shifting the goalposts now, but we still need a method to determine what to do with the rest of the earth, right? Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?
Your "assertion" (weakly stated) was
> I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
which is _false_.
A single counter example suffices, the Māori people of New Zealand are still in a shared treaty with European settlers and no prior humans were displaced by the Māori people when they first arrived circe 1320 or so.
Australia and that region offer up many many other examples.
> Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?
I cannot see how this is related to your global assertion nor can I see how I'm responsible to answer it.
Even when my original assertion that every single tribe replaced another tribe at some point is wrong, there still needs to be some mechanism do determine what to do with the rest of the world where my claim applies.
Otherwise, how would you decide who gets which part of the world?
US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.
Indeed, it is ethnic cleansing. This situation isn't unique at all. Actually, it's quite common in History. The same happened to Algeria with the French colonization.
Why did it quickly grow?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.
Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.
Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.
Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.
> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.
The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.
Terrorizing aid workers, which reduces how much aid reaches the Palestinian population?
There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.
Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.
There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.
I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.
Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
you still refuse to call it a crime against humanity? shame on you.
Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?
Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking.
There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
And let's look at the numbers. Hamas numbers are fantasy but let's pretend they're accurate. ~70k. I have not seen anyone contesting the Israeli database being combatants. ~9k. Note that even granting the most extreme claims this is still better than what western powers typically do--and it's in an unevacuated urban environment which is the worst case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
> And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes.
A lie.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
This is an outright lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
Why do you say it's a lie that they lose their protected status? Read what Geneva actually says.
And I note yet another reference to "proportionality" as if it's some magic spell. Such usages imply the actions are not proportionate--but that is never actually addressed. Underwear gnome logic.
Citing chapters in Geneva is not a rebuttal. "Geneva" is yet another magic spell. I'm reminded of the repeated denials by Hamas of bunkers under the main hospital. And Israel came out and said there's no question they exist as we built them. Israel is very big on civil defense.
Night, not illuminated. And note that your summary of Israel's conclusions does not say whether the people actually were non-combatants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_blockade_of_the_Gaza_S...
> Night, not illuminated.
The red/blue emergency lights (and headlights) are visibly illuminated in the video.
That the Geneva Conventions cover more than civilians is... not tough to back up. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949
Again, the claim upthread: "All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things..."
Accurate, or not?
There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...
The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.
> That’s Hezbollah, Hamas…
Sleight of hand happening here.
Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.
You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas.
You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.
This sounds like: "You make sure to avoid mentioning that the Nazis are not just a genocidal army of aggression, intent on genociding Jews and taking over Europe. They are also an administrative body that bla bla bla"
I wasn't simply saying that there was broad support for Hamas among gazan civilians, I was saying there was broad support for the destruction of Israel and the crimes against humanity that Hamas, along with a broad contingent of Gazan civilians, perpetrated on civilians on October 7.
What Israel government and IDF has been doing is an insult to the shoah victims. Any half decent jew should condemn the likoud.
My grandmother is a living Auschwitz survivor (one of the last, she's nearly 100). I'll let her decide what she thinks is an insult to Shoah victims.
You keep comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis, which is utterly shameless, especially given that you support the side that has committed mass murder of tens of thousands of defenseless civilians and that holds millions of people under an apartheid regime.
I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?
It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.
Hamas and friends understand this and rely on western morality to protect them from complete annihilation. They may have miscalculated how often you could kick the dog before it bit back.
This, of course, cuts both ways.
An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.
I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
> I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
I don't blame you for making these mistakes, as the information space is poisoned, but if you're interested in being correct rather than ideological you owe it to yourself to (at bare minimum) show me (and yourself) which Gaza hospital has been reduced to rubble.
In terms of "sappers" it is true that Israel has sent special forces into hospitals with confirmed Hamas presence, but that is very different from "bombing and leveling hospitals," an alluring but ultimately false claim.
This is all occurring against a backdrop in which Hamas has weaponized hospitals. For example, they brought Israeli hostages to Gaza hospitals. They have killed an Israeli hostage in a Gaza hospital (and sent video to the family of the slain hostage). They have built tunnels under hospitals. They shoot from hospitals. They meet in hospitals. etc.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/%D9%85%D...
And this is one example out of the many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
1) UNICEF (Feb 5, 2026) reports restoration of pediatric intensive care services at Al-Shifa, including 7 PICU beds equipped with ventilators, monitors, and oxygen. https://www.unicef.org/sop/media/6131/file/Humanitarian%20Si...
2) OCHA (Dec 1, 2025) explicitly lists current service lines at Al-Shifa: 7-bed PICU, pediatric post-op inpatient care, hemodialysis, and emergency care. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/gaza-humanitarian-response-s...
3) WHO (UN Geneva briefing, Dec 12, 2025) states Al-Shifa was working again as a partially functional tertiary care hospital with many services functional. https://www.unognewsroom.org/story/en/2946/un-geneva-press-b...
4) ACAPS (Feb 5, 2026) says that by Jan 19 Al-Shifa was receiving around 500 patients daily. https://www.acaps.org/fileadmin/Data_Product/Main_media/2026...
Operational does not mean intact or well-supplied. It means treating patients and running services. The above sources show it is.
Besides, whether the facility is (partially!) operational today is besides the point. Your original post insisted that "Israel has destroyed no hospitals", while it clearly has. The picture I linked is from 2024. The fact that Al-Shifa was brought back to a partially operating state in late 2025, after months of partial ceasefire, doesn't disprove that it was destroyed in 2024. Sources like https://en.yenisafak.com/world/al-shifa-hospital-begins-reco... show that the situation is far from positive.
And, again, this is just one example of the many.
I stand by my claim that Israel has not bombed any hospital buildings. If you think this is false, find me a hospital building that Israel has bombed, tell me when it's been bombed, the munition used, etc.
Palestinians have been under this assault by Israel and Zionists in general for nearly a century. Defending anything Israel does at this point is indefensible. Their context has ALWAYS been wrong and they've been caught lying so many times it's more accurate to believe exactly the opposite of anything the IDF says.
Which isn't to say that Israel hasn't done some seriously unethical things, but this notion that the Palestinians are poor innocent victims that have never hurt a soul and carry no blame for their situation going back a century is absurd and ahistorical.
It's a conflict between the native population of Palestine and people who came in from the outside with the goal of making Palestine their own. The outsiders won for a number of reasons (British backing, superior political organization, etc.). They now rule over the native population, most of whom they deny any rights to. They justify this by saying the native population deserves it because it hates them and resists them.
Please read some history:
The Palestinians just care that foreigners came in and took over their land.
By casting this as the Palestinians hating "the Jews," you're trying to frame the conflict as just another example of antisemitism. The Palestinians get cast in the role of the Nazis, and the Israelis get to pretend they're the victims of antisemitism.
The actual situation is completely flipped. The Israelis exercise military rule over the Palestinians and subject them to an apartheid system, not the other way around.
If you make claims, you should be able to back them up.
Stop defending the murder of children in hospitals.
Stop denying a genocide.
You wish there were an actual genocide, because you care more about portraying Israel as evil than you do the lives of Palestinian civilians. This is why you make one up. But good news for you: you've been infected by a curable mind virus, what the physicist David Deutsch calls "The Pattern."
"Presence" is an incredibly vague claim. In order to attack a hospital, you have to prove that the enemy is actively shooting at you from it, and your attack has to be proportionate. Vaguely asserting that some enemy might have set foot in the hospital at some point does not give you carte blanche to blow up a hospital full of civilians. Yet that's exactly what Israel has done over and over again.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, Israel has not blown up any hospital buildings. This is a myth. If you think I'm wrong, point to which hospital building Israel blew up. Show me standard OSINT stuff: when it occurred, pictures of the rubble, the munitions used, who died.
Israel has attacked every hospital in Israel with the blanket claim that some Hamas person was there at some point. Not that there was active fighting at the hospital. Not that Hamas was barricaded inside and firing out of it. Just that someone however loosely related to Hamas might have been near the hospital at some point. By that same argument, virtually every building in Israel would be a legitimate target.
No such claim was made.
Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
> Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian.
Yes, this is not allowed.
The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.
So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?
Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?
And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?
Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-direc...
Report: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-a-hrc-56-26-2...
> The Commission also verified information indicating that, in at least two other cases, ISF had likely applied the Hannibal Directive, resulting in the killing of up to 14 Israeli civilians. One woman was killed by ISF helicopter fire while being abducted from Nir Oz to Gaza by militants. In another case the Commission found that Israeli tank fire killed some or all of the 13 civilian hostages held in a house in Be’eri.
> The Commission found that Israeli authorities prioritised identifying victims, notifying families and allowing for burial rather than forensic investigation, leading to evidence of crimes, especially sexual crimes, not being collected and preserved. The Commission also notes the loss of potential evidence due to inadequately trained first responders.
(That I'm completely fine with. But it presents challenges for verifying incidents, which probably means it's an undercount.)
> Mostly firing on vehicles carrying hostages.
That is the Hannibal Directive; "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
Or the massacre that this thread is about for that matter?
But there's definitely been a large reduction in violence since the hostages were returned. Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.
Honest question. Why should they surrender?
> Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.
A complete and utter inversion of reality.
First page of Google results for: Israel ceasefire violations
“How many times has Israel violated the Gaza ceasefire? Here are the numbers: Since the ceasefire took effect, Israeli attacks have killed at least 615 Palestinians and injured 1,658.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/11/how-many-times-has...
“UN experts urge States to act as Israeli violations threaten fragile Gaza ceasefire” https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/11/un-experts-u...
“Israel has violated ceasefire 47 times and killed 38 Palestinians” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/israel-has-vio...
“Fact Sheet: Israel’s History of Breaking Ceasefires” https://imeu.org/resources/resources/fact-sheet-israels-hist...
The full statement is something like "to end the war, Hamas only need to return the hostages and surrender".
Surrendering is typically what the losing side needs to do to end a war.
Oh, no. Really?
Come on. Prompt it differently ("Have there been ceasefire violations in Gaza by the Israelis?") and you get this:
> As of February 24, 2026, there have been numerous and well-documented reports of ceasefire violations by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza. While a ceasefire framework has been in place since October 2025, it remains extremely fragile, with both sides frequently accusing the other of breaching the terms.
> Israel has been accused of failing to allow the agreed-upon volume of aid. Reports suggest only 43% of the 600 promised daily aid trucks and about 15% of the required fuel are entering the Strip.
> In December 2025, the US reportedly rebuked Israel for a missile strike that assassinated a high-level Hamas commander, deeming it a violation of the "Comprehensive Plan" framework.
etc.
Don't forget moving the Yellow Line: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-moved-i... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgxl6zkenqo
What was your prompt?
To save the people they claim to protect. Just like in WW2, had the Germans and the Japanese surrendered earlier, the Allies wouldn't have had to kill so many of them.
If the Allies surrendered to the Axis, it would have also saved lives.
Did the ceasefire not coincide with the return of the hostages? What am I missing?
Assuming he kills several, how many hospital workers trying to help them and journalists documenting his rampage does he kill?
I would feel sorry for all of those people.
What you're not supposed to feel however, is that he should have went "Oh well..." and let his daughter be sold into sexual slavery.
The truth is that out of the 36 hospitals operating before the conflict 19 are still operational. That's a pretty far cry from 95%. There used to be 3000 hospital beds available and now there are 2000. There are also an additional 13 field hospitals.
That's a very different story (keeping in mind that Israel has taken control of large areas and any hospital that used to be there wouldn't be in use either).
Given the scale of the war and the documented use of hospitals for military purposes we have to expect there will be some impact:
- https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....
- https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/
- https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-bord...
Sorry, you're right. Some have partially resumed operations with the (sorta) ceasefire. My bad.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...