By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
Everytime I read an article like this, my immediate reaction is posting a comment expressing my disgust with the Israeli State’s actions and everytime I hesitate because I don’t want to suffer the inevitable wave of people defending the Israeli State’s actions as somehow justifiable because Hamas did something vile first.
It’s a continuing cycle of violence and the Israeli State holds a humongous power advantage. They don’t use that power disparity to deescalate and integrate the Palestinian people to prevent Hamas from having support. Instead they do shit like this where they drive Palestinians straight into Hamas’ hands, because the Palestinian people are given no other option to turn to.
Imagine trying to justify thousands of murdered children because some people decided to attack a festival.
An attack, I might add, the government had been informed of and bafflingly did the opposite of adding protection to heavy traffic areas…
That’s because Netanyahu has a long history of supporting Hamas for his own political gains.
For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces, Times of Israel, 8 October 2023
The symbiotic relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas, The Hill, October 22, 2023
Why Netanyahu helped fund Hamas and how that backfired for Israel, India Today, November 1, 2023
Video: Ex-Saudi intel chief accuses Israel of ‘funnelling’ Qatari money to Hamas, India Today, October 31, 2023
How Netanyahu’s Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel, CBC News, October 28, 2023
Liberman: Netanyahu sent Mossad head, general to Qatar, ‘begged’ it to pay Hamas, Times of Israel, February 20, 2022
Netanyahu: Money to Hamas part of strategy to keep Palestinians divided, Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2019
I think that wave has broken. They were a very vocal minority and some of them have been banned already.
I posted this article even though I nominally support what Israel is doing here. This war has a legitimate human cost and there’s no reason to belive that reasonable people will never view that cost as too high.
I think the story painted here shows both the horrid cost on civilian life that these bombings have and the extensive efforts to avoid civilian casualties that the IDF takes.
Short of an Jeff Bezos takeover of Gaza to turn it into the world’s biggest Amazon warehouse, I literally don’t know what could possibly solve the situation. It’s clear from the cheering crowds praising raped corpses that there’s too much hatred to reasonably integrate Gaza into greater Israel. And it’s clear from the massive terror the Muslim Brotherhood caused in Egypt, that they could never integrate into an Egyptian society . And is clear from the 4-6x Marshall Plan per person they’ve received in aid that aid to Gaza is a black hole that will never lead to a thriving society. After 2004 I remember this optimism and a belief that this Israel/Palestine thing was really back on pace for a 2 state solution. And now I just don’t see it.
Some solution has to be found. If Israel just empties Palestine of Palestinians and claims it all as Israel, that won’t give them the safety they want from attacks by nutters. The crazy thing that is, there are right wing nutters in Israel wanting to exactly that. Ethnic cleansing is no way to peace. Even the US won’t support them doing that. Even doing it salami slicing with nutty settlers isn’t going unnoticed.
There needs to be a justice system to deal with nutters. You can’t deal with harsh collective punishment. It’s a nutters response that just creates more nutters on the other side. Which nutters of the side partly want to justify their own nuttiness and to create more of them on their own side.
I don’t think that goal this time is to evict Palestinians from Gaza. I think the goal is simply to try to get a “new deal.” Most terrorist organizations aren’t as evil, incompetent and aren’t as ridiculous as Hamas is. I mean imagine how much better Gaza would be with a Taliban-esque leadership group in charge. Or even just a leadership group physically located in Gaza.
Like how many jihadists can really be left in Gaza? At some point, they’ve got to run out of these idiots.
There are some who are calling for it to be the end of Palestinians. Nuking them and other means of clearing the land.
You never run out of idiots. They will be coming to Palestinian to fight. Young men are prone to look for causes to fight for and there is a real injustice happening to Palestine.
Israel can’t just kill it’s way to peace. No justice, no peace.
Hamas aren’t helping the Palestinian cause either because they are clearly terrorist nutters.
Oh I’m sure there are some people at that point on the Israeli political spectrum. I just don’t think the ruling coalition is there.
It doesn’t take much sanity to see nuking would be a terrible idea.
It doesn’t take much sanity to see that attacking your much larger and stronger neighbor and indiscriminately murdering their elderly and children and parading raped corpses through your streets would be a terrible idea. But we have idiots on both sides.
They are religious nutters, they don’t care about their own death, or the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. If anything, they want Israel to attack Palestine and kill thousands, and create rage that creates more Hamas. Hamas isn’t only fed by Palestinians. It can’t be defeated by military might. That’s like “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.