The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims can be taken at face value.

On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.

And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.

As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.

None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the wild claims that fly around.

> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly

And yet one side is committing genocide.

And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.

I don't think Hamas started it, but they definitely escalated it.

Oh, I didn’t know that the whole conflict started on October 6th.

One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.

When do you suppose the conflict started?

When the first Israeli settler stole the home of a Palestinian.

In the 1947 Palestinian civil war, and they have been attacking and trying to destroy Israel ever since?

Also look at what they did in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan.

Palestinians, Hamas and Hezbollah are not the good guys here. Not saying Israel is all good either, but let’s put it this way. Where would you want your wife or children to live if given the chance?

You can live as a Muslim in Israel, you can’t live as a Christian or Jew in Palestine.

This is so disingenuous, the poster clearly has no clue what he's talking about.

Local Christian communities have been living amongst Muslims there for centuries and continue to do so under Israeli occupation. About 25% of the population that calls themselves Palestinian are Christians, and are treated the same as Muslims by Israel, that is as second class citizens at best inside the Green Line and targets for ethnic cleansing outside of it.

Scores of foreign Christians and Jews go stay in Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank to provide some amount of protection to the Palestinian Muslims and Christians there. They are encouraged and welcome to come stay among them by Palestinians.

Right. Thats what happened in Jordan and Lebanon right? Damour massacre in Lebanon for example? Black September and Jordan civil war?

Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.

Parliament has 120 seats, 15 of which for Muslims, and Muslims have full rights.

Sorry, ya’ll are delusional if you think you have better life and more rights as a Christian in a Muslim country than a Muslim in Israel or a European country.

>Muslims have full rights.

No they don't. Israel is a state with discrimination against non-Jews baked into its laws, with a couple of clever facades that don't stand up to basic scrutiny.

https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is...

>Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.

And the decades of ethnic cleansing by Israel against Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, has nothing to do with this? How come those communities were there for millennia and started disappearing? What major event in the last 100 years in the region of Palestine led to the flight of Palestinian Christians?

>Christian Palestinians who are citizens of Israel suffer from the same widespread official and unofficial discrimination that other non-Jews do, in everything from land ownership and housing to employment and family reunification rights. [1]

[1] https://imeu.org/resources/resources/discrimination-hate-cri...

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/12/7/the-centuries-o...

https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/mike-huckabee-is-interfering-...

Muslim != Palestinian.

You might want to read up on why this is.

Holy misinformation.

1) Israel attacked Arab Palestine and the neighboring Arab states first, in plan Dalet.

2) Christians and Jews absolutely can live in Palestine. They were afforded that in the Ottoman empire (the Dhimmi) and they are afforded that now.

3) Muslims do not get to govern themselves in Israel. Every other religions can choose their own representatives in official matter, but Islam gets a token person selected by the Israeli state.

> 2) Christians and Jews absolutely can live in Palestine. They were afforded that in the Ottoman empire (the Dhimmi) and they are afforded that now.

Add to this, Amira Haas (Jewish, anti-Zionist Haaretz journalist) lives in Ramallah. There was also a Palestinian man who converted to Judaism living in the West Bank, but he was killed... by the IDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Ben_Avraham

About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.

Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?

The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.

Here I thought leaving reddit would provide a break of low quality bait, yet here we are.

Exactly! Wtf

Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.

What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?

Do you have a better authority that says otherwise?

That was about a month before the ceasefire. I'm sure we're all very happy that's it's no longer the case.

The genocide still continues. They are still killing people, and are not letting people return to Gaza.

They're still killing terrorists, is that what you mean by genocide?

You're correct, it was yet another genocide carried out by the Israeli state, as usual.

> In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza." At a Likud party conference in 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu said:

> “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” - Benjamin Netanyahu

> Gershon Hacohen, former commander of the 7th Armored Brigade and an associate of Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 2019 in an interview:

> “Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

Swiss Policy Research has excellent documentation on the promotion of Hamas in Gaza by Israel:

https://swprs.org/2023/10/20/israel-palestine-overview/

And the other side just. won’t. stop. attacking.

That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.

You could say that about Israel too you know. The other side just. Won’t. Stop. Attacking. Israelis can’t stop sniping children.

But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.

Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.

I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.

If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).

>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.

Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.

>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.

Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.

Can you link to those reports?

> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket,

This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!

No. This is about a specific claim. Hamas claimed that Israel killed 500 people in a hospital bombing, and that was indisputably a lie. Videos show that it was a Hamas rocket, not a bomb. Pictures show that the damage was limited to a few burned cars and broken windows and a pothole sized dent in the asphalt. There were no mass casualties and every credible news outlet that initially reported that there were, walked it back when evidence proved otherwise.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1207173798/fake-accounts-old-...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/media/gaza-hospital-coverage-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/10/26/gaz...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/gaza-hospi...\

(Correction: a PIJ rocket, not a Hamas rocket.)

Even the famously pro-Israel New York Times did an analysis and didn't find this rocket story convincing. https://archive.is/1GSOt

> The death toll, initially put at 500 by Hamas and then lowered to 471, is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be considerably lower — but no number has been verified. The hospital itself was not directly struck; whatever caused the explosion actually hit the hospital courtyard, where people had gathered for safety, and a handful of parked cars.

> Moreover, the crater left from the impact was relatively small, a fact that Israel has cited in arguing that none of its munitions caused the blast, and could be consistent with a number of different munitions. Hamas has not produced a remnant of an Israeli munition or any physical evidence to back up its claim that Israel is responsible.

...

> In addition, the videos show that the projectile in the Al Jazeera footage was launched after the barrage of Palestinian rockets Israeli officials assessed was responsible for the hospital explosion.

> From 6:59 p.m. on Oct. 17, barrages of Palestinian rockets are fired from two positions southwest and northwest of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the videos show. Flames from the Palestinian rockets are visible in the nighttime sky as their engines propel them northeast toward Israel. More than 25 seconds elapse between the final Palestinian rocket and the hospital explosion.

The Al Jazeera footage does show an interception, not the rocket that hit the courtyard. This has been known for years, indeed. But there were like 5 different videos of the event, which were frequently confused for each other, and that's not the one I'm referring to. The AJ footage went the most "viral" even though it was pretty obvious that it wasn't the right event if you knew what you were looking at. I don't know why the Times didn't mention any of the others.

In any case literally all of the context around it remains a lie, and would still be a lie even if it ended up being a failed Iron Dome missile launched during the rocket barrage as the Times implied

None of those are credible news outlets. Israel bombed every hospital in Gaza, starting with this one. There were mass casualties.

> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket...

Forensic-architecture published a report on that too: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disi...

It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.

It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.

If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.

Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.

Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.

It's a ridiculous argument. The Nazis went through a LOT of effort and resources to gather Jews from all the corners of Europe, and even more effort into exterminating them as fast as they could, within the logistical and economic constraints of fighting a 3 front war.

There's no comparison at all to the ease with which Israel could just drop a couple of bombs on Gaza, had it decided to do so.

The fact that I just spent five minutes thinking about it proves that it's not ridiculous at all. The scale is different (so far), but I’m not convinced there’s a qualitative difference.

Most people spend more than five minutes a day thinking about things that are ridiculous.

Do you? I don't think I do. Unproductive, sure, but not ridiculous.

You literally just did.

So I guess your point is that other people think about things that you consider ridiculous. I don't dispute that.

It's because you're deeply ignorant about the subject. Anyone can think ridiculous thoughts in complete ignorance.

Try reading a history book about the holocaust, or even just WW2, and you'll see just how ridiculous you sound.

The only thing stopping Israel from doing that is international outrage. Israel is entirely dependent on its benefactor states like the US and, while it pushes the limits to the extreme, must at least contend with world opinion.

That's like me saying you're a murderer, but you just haven't killed anyone yet because you're afraid of going to jail. Maybe it's true, but it's a bit of a silly argument, isn't it? In western society, we judge people based on their actions.

Israel has murdered tens of thousands of people. Your argument doesn't hold.

That’s not what murder means. They were attacked by a government and went to war.

They've murdered tens of thousands of civilians. Israelis literally killed an entire NICU of infants.

You seem to be ignoring the retaliation that would be enacted at a drop of a couple of those bombs.

Huh? If the Nazis could have killed all the Jews faster, they would have. They sought to eliminate Jews all throughout Europe. I’ve never heard this argument, but it’s unintelligent and I am not making it.

The existence of camps where jews and other "undesirables" were kept for long periods of time disproves this entirely. The Nazi's were not trying to speed run the process. They were systematically eliminating people. That's why it's a genocide and not a series of massacres. I would suggest sticking with the definition of genocide instead of coming up with your own convenient version.

You're just showing your ignorance. The Nazis killed the majority of their victims as soon as they arrived in the camp. They kept 20%-30%, mostly men who could work, to be used as slaves for their military industry, and they eliminated everyone else. They developed gassing especially in order to speed up the killing and make it more economical.

It was a genocide because they tried to eliminate a specific ethnic group, for no other reason than its ethnicity.

You should go learn more about the subject, if it interests you so much.

It doesn’t interest them. People who think what Israel is doing is anything like what the Nazis did have had their brain washed clean by anti-Semitic propaganda. It’s smooth as a volleyball in there, facts don’t matter.

How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?

Ethnic cleansing is the attempt to remove a people from the area. It can be accomplished by methods other than killing.

Genocide is an attempt to kill them all.

The Venn diagram has a lot of overlap for sure but they are not the same.

“Your honor and members of the jury: my client could have easily committed way worse crimes!”

> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.

You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.

Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.

Why does israel use expensive precise munitions wherever possible rather than their stockpiles of much more deadly "dumb" ones?

maybe because they are trying to act ethically toward a murderous neighbor that is conducting asymmetric warfare and those are the best tools to accomplish that.

or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.

i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.

I didn’t say they were driven by morality, though I’m sure they are more so than Hamas. I just think what they’re doing is ethnic cleansing (which is not a compliment) rather than genocide. I’m actually pretty sure that most of the people who call it by “genocide” don’t know the difference between the two.

because it would be admitting to the world that it has said weapons.

Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.

The argument conveniently always goes such that Israel is the baddie.

Curious how that goes, especially since Israels ulterior motives are always implied, they're not taken by their word.

And Islamists, who share their motives openly with anyone willing to listen are ignored.

Genocide was literally in Hamas’s charter and yet somehow they’re the good guys because modern leftists can’t think past “colonialism bad”.

I never said they were the good guys. Fuck Hamas.

But let's not equate an inexperienced group of starved and impoverished guerilla fighters with a first-world, nuclear-armed genocidal ethnostate.

by dumb munitions I mean older bombs vs JDAM and alike.

Anyone who seriously speaks words 'nuclear weapon' and 'gaza' together is basically admitting he has 0 clue about the situation and is uninformed larper for either side.

Expensive for whom? US taxpayers?

They have remotely guided bulldozers and enough non-nuclear weapons to do the job several times over conventionally too though.

Yes, there is a long term effort by the State of Israel to remove Palestinian life from Palestinian land.

The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.

> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.

Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.

See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).

Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.

So by your logic if you slowly exterminate a people its not genocide?

You cannot exterminate a people too slowly because they can (and do) move. Ethnic cleansing can happen over centuries (see the last 500 years of our hemisphere for examples). Israel has let tens of thousands of them out of the country. Nazis did not let injured Jews go to hospitals in other countries.

Which, again, is not dismissing war crimes, or denying that any have occurred. Just pointing out, this is not genocide but ethnic cleansing. Israel has a vocal right wing faction that advocates for ethnic cleansing, and a vocal left wing that is against it.

That definition of genocide is so narrow that it would also exclude the Armenian genocide, since many were allowed to flee.

I can't find any evidence that they were allowed to flee. They organize "mass deportations" that were really just dumping them into the desert without food or water to die. Some did flee, just as some Jews fled Germany and occupied countries during WW2. If you've got a source for that I'd love to see it, neither Google nor ChatGPT seem to agree.

Please first tell me what kind of evidence you would consider sufficient, otherwise you’ll just dismiss whatever I present.

I don’t know why I’d dismiss it, I’m not a shill for the Ottoman Empire and am interested in history. Any documentation from a historical record? Contemporary news articles?

I couldn't easily find evidence that Armenians were explicitly allowed to escape, however it’s widely acknowledged that many were spared, especially those in Constantinople. Even the genocide deniers use this to argue against genocidal intent: "... certain groups of Armenians were spared, which proponents argue proves there was no systematic effort to exterminate the Armenian people." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide_denial)

>If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.

And the retaliation from the rest of the world in those circumstances would be swift and measured in hours, and there would be a smoking pile of rubble in that particular part of the world that would be uninhabitable for centuries.

So instead, Israel is cooking the frog.

This is one of the worst pro-Israel arguments; I can't believe people still make it. Israel isn't going to drop a nuke on the "holy land", where they want to start building Jewish settlements, a few dozen miles from Tel Aviv. No matter how much they hate Palestinians, people don't want to live in an irradiated wasteland.

By nuclear-armed I’m pointing out that they’re a well-funded, first class military, not that they’re going to nuke the place. They’re arguably the second strongest military in the world.

They could have achieved genocide very quickly with conventional weapons and boots on the ground too.

And which country will welcome the 8 million people living there?

The ones featured in their secondary passports.

The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.