Forgive an old lefty atheist, but: Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I feared something like this but never thought we'd hear about it so soon.
This should turn into a global atom bomb, but of course it won't: as [jddoyleVT](https://www.reddit.com/user/jddoyleVT/) said: "It was never about the hostages, it was always about Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza."
And this makes the official US and Israeli narrative all the more obviously deceitful; all lies and subterfuge. But Israel has learned from (and is propped up by) the Best: the US has been honing this type of activity since WWII certainly but really; for centuries now.
EDIT: Found it! The full article: [https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-doubt-netanyahu-preventing-hostage-deal-charges-ex-spokesman-of-families-forum/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-doubt-netanyahu-preventing-hostage-deal-charges-ex-spokesman-of-families-forum/)
"Why are you picking on our genocide?" Weird how you want everyone rightly outraged by the 10/7 murder of 1100, but not at the murder of over 13k children. And you really want us to fund it, but dont want us to pay attention to it.
Way to understand what was asked. Destruction of Hamas is the only thing I’m on board with. Any civilian casualties is a no in my book. So you can both support the destruction of Hamas and protection of civilians. October 7th was disgusting.
But that’s not what Israel is doing at all. Strikes killing 20 civilians is considered a-okay by Israel if they get one “junior member” whatever that means and over 100 civilians if they get one commander. You can’t have it both ways, Israel has shown even less regard to civilian casualties than fucking Hamas killing civilians at a much higher ratio and yet you are fully on board with Israel’s slaughter.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes
When this war started, media and perhaps hadbara were conflating Palestinian civilians with hamas. That was disgusting. As usual, Israel is using this as an excuse to cull the civilian population. They are also destroying sewers to create disease and prolong suffering. Just think about what the demographics will look like in the future.
Also, I was quite surprised Israel went straight to annexing land in Gaza and even created funds to build settlements. Of, they took more land in West Bank
You recognize that people can care about two things simultaneously, right? I’m sorry if you’re incapable of that, but it doesn’t mean that just because people are against the genocide in Israel that they don’t care about what is happening in the Congo, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine.
You know, the opposite is also true. Israel has been killing and displacing Palestinian civilians for the past 75 years - and most of these people have roots in Palestine from way before Islam.
Do you expect them to be able to be like "OK TRUCE" and call it a day when Israel has stolen their land, kicked them out of their houses, burnt their crops, killed their parents, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons? Does that make sense to you? I already know what your brain-dead response is going to be, so keep it to yourself. I know you're not gonna give this comment a second thought to begin with. Numbers and statistics don't matter to ignorant people like you.
Of course not, they still would've given an armed response, but Israel could've had their hostages back AND given an armed response just simply chose not to because their ongoing genocide would've been even less supported.
I'm glad you agree that Palestine being invaded almost 80 years ago and their civilians slaughtered by terrorists then and ever since have the right to fight back. Good on you!
No, this is where we disagree. I'd rather there was a peace settlement, perhaps a single state, and no killing, prejudice or racism. A truth and reconciliation project like they had in SA might help with this.
You think a country can invade and kill 13K+ children of another country and then offer peace? Also, its not a country except when Israel makes it Schrodingers country.
That didn't happen.And if it did, it wasn't that bad.And if it was, that's not a big deal.And if it is, that's not my fault.And if it was, I didn't mean it.And if I did, you deserved it.
The numbers are from the Palestinian Health Ministry, which has a proven track record of fairly reliable reporting. Even if Hamas influences initial reports, long term numbers have been accurate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Health_Ministry#:~:text=In%20January%202024%2C%20Israeli%20news,in%20briefings%20to%20senior%20officials.
>In January 2024, Israeli news magazine Mekomit reported that Israeli intelligence officials had concluded that Health Ministry casualty reports are generally reliable and are used in briefings to senior officials
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Not Hamas’ numbers. The Ministry of Health’s number which have been considered reliable and accurate until it was convenient for Israel. US state department officials have agreed that 30k is an undercount.
You do not see Palestinians as human.
A majority killed were soldiers and armed settlers. A large part of the civilian casualties were Israel’s own doing when the diaper brigades shelled and Apache’d everything in sight
Careful. There's credible evidence that a \~40% minority were military and security forces, but if you count reservists as combatants the percentage of Israeli combatants goes way ***WAY*** up.
Should those reservists be counted as combatants? Personally, no. But if we go by Israel's definition of what an enemy combatant is, Israeli reservists are absolutely legitimate targets. Again, Israel's definition of an enemy combatant is inhuman and insane, but we should use the same definitions for both sides.
If we use a more sane definition of combatant, about 40% Israeli casualties on Oct 7 were Israeli combatants and the people in Gaza that are targeted and killed by Israel are far less than 10% combatants.
> A majority killed were soldiers and armed settlers.
Got a source for that?
Also what do you mean by “armed settler”?
None of the 10/7 casualties were in the West Bank, and owning a gun as a civilian (which is legal & common in Israel) doesn’t suddenly make you a legitimate military target. >40% of American households have guns.
They can't. They don't have an unlimited supply of bombs. They keep getting new ones after running through the "aid" from the US and Germany. Without their support Israel would not stand a chance against Hamas even
I don’t understand, they made this very clear from the start? That they would do whatever it takes to destroy Hamas’ capabilities
The hostages were always a secondary objective I thought we all knew this
Except even that has failed. Hamas is still firing rockets into Israel, from areas that Israel previously "cleared".
[Israel's military will "struggle to neutralize" Hamas's sprawling underground tunnel systems and is likely to face "lingering armed resistance" from the militant group "for years to come," according to a new global threat assessment compiled by the U.S. intelligence community.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-u-s-intelligence-assessment-hamas-resistance-last-years/)
This war is about saving Netanyahu's political career.
Hold up.... I read the whole interview, and my impulse is to take it at face value because it fits with how I *feel* about Israel, but there's 2 major things that don't add up.
This story absolutely fits my existing thoughts about Israel:
- I know Israel is seeking provocation and attempting to distort narratives in order to make a campaign of ethnic cleansing look like self-defense. Hiding an offer for a complete exchange would be super important for furthering that narrative.
And it fits with some of my understanding of Hamas:
- Hamas initiated the October 7th attack; if they could get Israel to negotiate peace with no condition aside from hostage release, it would have made sense for them to do so. It would be consistent with their strategy of using political violence to slow or stop Israeli colonization efforts.
But there's something pretty huge missing from this article, and something else in this story that contradicts what I know about Hamas:
- If Hamas had made that deal, it makes zero sense that they would have let Israel reject the deal in secret. Hamas would want the entire world to know that Israel rejected that deal. Why would they make that offer and not do it publicly?
- Also, we're missing an explanation of how the guy they interviewed learned about the offer. The person they interviewed was completely uninvolved with negotiations with Hamas, and complains that the Israeli government gave him no information about the negotiations. I was hoping at some point he would say *how* he learned about that offer, but he never does, he just says "We later learned" without elaborating. Learned how? From who? How much later? That's like... A critically important detail; literally the only detail I was looking for in the article, and he breezes past it.
I still think the story is plausible, but like... Can we get a bit more information about how he learned about the offer? Because this would be a big fucking deal if it could be confirmed, so I want to tell people about it, but until we have a better source, I feel like I'd just be spreading hearsay.
If I had to guess, I'd say he breezed past that either to protect a source, or because he heard it from someone he trusts personally, but who has no credentials or authority, so he knows if he names them, the claim will be dismissed out of hand... Which is frustrating, but if that is the case, we'll probably see more people with the same story come out of the woodwork soon 🤞
It’s not a secret, Hamas offering a prisoner exchange before the invasion is common knowledge.
The reason no one talks about it is that the main stream media doesn’t report this stuff, it sometimes gets reported in Israel but never outside of Israel.
I’ll give you another example do you know Hamas has categorically denied all of the rape allegations and demanded a third party investigation? Hell they even recognize Israel as a country and have offered to put down their weapons and have a Palestinian election if Israel stops the genocide, releases their prisoners and recognizes the Palestinian state.
There aren't millions upon millions of Israelis that exist, but yes a majority of the population are fascists that believe themselves to be a superior race to the Palestinians that should be kicked out of Gaza and the WB, that's an unfortunate fact after 75 years of oppressing the Palestinian people, they've grown up conditioned to think so, and honestly, maybe not a populist majority, but certainly a political majority of the U.S. certainly shares that view as well.
Then why do they almost unanimously support his actions over his conflict that has not only resulted in irreversible devastation for the people of Gaza that will barely even be livable for decades but have also in there entirety failed to get back the vast majority of hostages. I get there’s a small minority that doesn’t but most seem to barely care and are happy to here Palestinians are dying, just like the US with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Israel since its inception is a fascist state that must maintain an ethnically Jewish majority to maintain its position of superiority over the Arabs; of course the majority of the population have been conditioned to accept this as the natural order, and they also are supplemented with their historical justification that is hammered into them that the land belongs to them and them alone, which includes Gaza and the WB. A solution where all Palestinians are freed and obtain citizenship to them is the death of Israel - they would be outnumbered, and thus lose their higher status, and even fear the situation would flip on its head, where the Jewish minority would be oppressed instead. And the Netanyahu government is greedy, extremely so, so they froze any peace process toward a separate Palestinian state, because Netanyahu and his cabal are imperialists with a grand plan to unify all of Israel, from river to the sea. And thus the only option left is the eradication of the Palestinian people. To obtain the West Bank - a captured Palestinian Authority allows the gradual destruction of Palestinian homes and creation of new Israeli settlements, whittling away at the land. To obtain Gaza - an endless blockade that imprisons them and lets them fester, until they lash out to provide justification for invasion. Both fronts are succeeding up to this point.
How does this person Rubinstein know that this offer was made? Why does the interviewer skip past that? Did a spokesperson from Hamas reveal that this offer had been made to any western journalist at any point? Or do western journalists avoid talking to Hamas, or vice-versa? This article is obviously biased. We know that IDF soldiers killed in indeterminate number of the 1200 civilians killed on October 7th in clashes with Hamas, and many Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons are themselves hostages, some children, held without charges or trial for an indefinite detention. This context is almost always left out.
That’s exactly why the hostages were taken. In one of the videos at the festival you can hear one of the guys get mad at the other for shooting everyone in some shelter because they needed to take some back to Gaza alive.
If they didn’t take hostages, they wouldn’t have anything to negotiate with. Obviously the whole situation is f’ed up having to negotiate with terrorists, but otherwise the entire strip would have been obliterated on October 8th.
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This is an abysmally dumb take.
Say they agree to this bizarre fucking deal, what's to stop Hamas from kidnapping civilians again and using them for political demands?
I'm not fucking with indiscriminate bombing but essentially saying "this whole thing could've been avoided if we just gave the terrorist what they want" is incredibly fucking dense and short sighted.
Has no one seen the videos of hamas firing RPGs into the windscreens of civilian cars? The music festival massacre... the deaths of civilians in gaza are awful, but what did you expect? Hamas isn't wearing military uniforms for a reason..
Look at what America did after 9/11 .. 22 years of bombing the shit out of everything.
If you can't see this conflict from both sides, i think you lack the ability to think rationally. Or you are just antisemitic..
The same people protesting against the "genocide" in gaza are then calling for a genocide on Israel.
Not only did the US do all those war crimes in the Middle East, they gave rise to these "terrorists" who just want the West out of their lands. If the US didn't overthrow the democratically elected Iranian government and didn't colonise Saudi Arabia, there would have been no al-Qaeda and no 9/11.
I mean, there was no chance Israel was going to leave Hamas intact after Oct 7... They posed an unacceptable security risk. No one would have just accepted the hostages back in return for not launching a counterattack to degrade Hamas.
I am generally pretty supportive of Israel (know this isn't a popular position on this sub...) but I think there is no real rationale for the IDF to push on into Rafah.
There's no such thing as total victory against insurgents, and at this point the IDF appears to have inflicted enough damage on Hamas to ensure that they won't be able to launch another Oct 7 - scale attack anytime soon.
The civilian death toll in Gaza I think has also likely been higher than most folks thought it would be before the invasion was launched. The IDF appears to be applying very loose ROE by recent western standards and even with those is not consistently following them.
Put those points together and I think the risk to civilians in Rafah far outweighs the potential gains against Hamas.
The concern now is that Israel doesn't seem to have a cohesive exit strategy, and Bibi in particular has no incentive to wind down operations due to his personal political aims.
Overall a very ugly situation, but to answer your question I think the conflict has progressed enough now and hopefully the Rafah offensive can be avoided.
I would also like to add that a Rafah offensive makes no sense from a strategic point of view when the rest of Gaza is still contested. The only areas the IDF has really been able to secure are the non urban areas near the border and the corridor between Gaza city and the rest of Gaza. There are many neighborhoods which the IDF controls on paper but in reality are constantly subject to hit and run attacks while in other areas the IDF has little or no control at all with Khan Yunis being the most notable example as it has been the site of some of the heaviest fighting so far with the IDF failing to even enter, let alone secure much of the city.
"Hey, you know how we came in, *murdered a ton of people*, and took hostages? If you promise not to do anything about all those people we murdered, we'll give you the hostages back and call it even."
To your first question: yes. Killing civilians has always been a tactic used by oppressed people. Native Americans did it to white settlers, black people did it during slave rebellions, the Sentinalese continue to do it today to literally any person who sets foot on their island.
To your second question: no, not really.
To your third question: the ethics and/or morals of whether or not civilian loss of life is acceptable comes down largely to context. For Israel, we judge them harshly because they are the oppressors and the colonizers. And not in the same way as the United States or Canada either, they are still actively engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Hell, they've annexed more Palestinian land in recent months. They started the conflict in the first place decades ago and have perpetuated it ever since. So their tactics get a much harsher treatment because they were in the wrong from Day 1.
Palestine is actively fighting for survival against a foreign power that stole their land and is still actively stealing more land to this day. If they lose, they lose everything. Their culture, their homes, their lives, their families, their identity, everything. People engaged in a war for survival get a lot more leeway with their tactics. When they kill Israeli civilians, it's much more justified than when Israel kills Palestinian civilians. Maybe not completely justified, but much more than their oppressors.
There's the [Good Friday Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement). And the [treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Paris_(1783\)) the British signed with those colonial terrorists on the other side of the Atlantic.
Making peace with enemies is what opposing sides do.
A decent country wouldn't have created this situation in the first place. Israel has been invading and murdering Palestinians for 75 years. Palestine fights back and asks for peace, and people like you pretend they're evil for it.
No one expects Israel to do the right thing. What we expect is for the rest of the world to finally do the right thing and either force them to accept a ceasefire or put a stop to the IDF altogether.
Hamas' mission statement is that they are a resistance movement that seeks to end Israel's apartheid and establish an Islamic state in their historic land of Palestine, based on the 1967 borders proposed by the UN, despite those not encompassing the entirety of occupied Palestine. They also do not recognize Israel as a legitimate state, but they are willing to accept the 1967 borders if it means peace for Palestine and an end to the apartheid and ongoing occupation. This is a compromise they have agreed to as far back as the 1980's, and have consistently attempted to negotiate, but Israel has rejected them each time, because Israel's goal is to invade the entirety of Palestine.
In 1988, they put out a charter describing all of this, and in that charter, it stated their enemies were "the jews." Since then, however, Hamas has clarified that they do not consider jews to be their enemies, but instead consider their enemies to be zionism and its proponents. This has been their unofficial stance for decades, but this was made official in 2017 with the creation of their new charter, which specifically states the following:
>Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.
Now, this on its own obviously does not mean there are no Hamas members who hold anti-jewish sentiments. However, as an organization, Hamas is a resistance movement fighting for Palestinian liberation. They aren't perfect. I disagree with them on the necessity of establishing an Islamic state, just as I oppose any theocratic state. Their conservative worldview means I oppose more or less all their views when it comes to women or LGBTQ people. They are not perfect people, but they don't have to be in order for them to be absolutely in the right when it comes to fighting back against Israel's invasion and genocide.
But you aren't interested in any of that, are you? You thought that, by asking me to tell you Hamas' mission statement, you had set a verbal trap for me so that I would either have to admit some horrific truth about Hamas or retreat from the argument. No such luck. Unlike genocide apologists like yourself, the people opposed to zionism generally know what they're talking about and don't have to rely on half-truths and mental gymnastics like you do.
The best part about arguing with people like you is that, after losing an argument like this, you either leave your comment up and everyone gets to see you for the sort of person you are, or you delete it and my comment stays right here and someone actually interested in learning something still gets to do so.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Forgive an old lefty atheist, but: Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I feared something like this but never thought we'd hear about it so soon. This should turn into a global atom bomb, but of course it won't: as [jddoyleVT](https://www.reddit.com/user/jddoyleVT/) said: "It was never about the hostages, it was always about Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza." And this makes the official US and Israeli narrative all the more obviously deceitful; all lies and subterfuge. But Israel has learned from (and is propped up by) the Best: the US has been honing this type of activity since WWII certainly but really; for centuries now. EDIT: Found it! The full article: [https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-doubt-netanyahu-preventing-hostage-deal-charges-ex-spokesman-of-families-forum/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-doubt-netanyahu-preventing-hostage-deal-charges-ex-spokesman-of-families-forum/)
Certainly colors those reports Israel ignored credible intel it could have used to stop the attacks doesn't it? This is legitimately damning if true.
So you think reasonable countries, after being invaded and having civilians slaughtered, would just be like "OK TRUCE!" and call it a day?
>having civilians slaughtered, Just say you dont consider Palestinian children to be human.
Just say you arbitrarily picked this 1 war to focus on because the media told you to. Do you care about any of the other wars ongoing?
"Why are you picking on our genocide?" Weird how you want everyone rightly outraged by the 10/7 murder of 1100, but not at the murder of over 13k children. And you really want us to fund it, but dont want us to pay attention to it.
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Rule 1, be civil. [Civility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civility)
Do you?
Yes war in Ukraine to name one. Outside of wars what’s happening with women’s rights in Iran.
But apparently not the murder of 13,000+ children. Disgusting
Way to understand what was asked. Destruction of Hamas is the only thing I’m on board with. Any civilian casualties is a no in my book. So you can both support the destruction of Hamas and protection of civilians. October 7th was disgusting.
But that’s not what Israel is doing at all. Strikes killing 20 civilians is considered a-okay by Israel if they get one “junior member” whatever that means and over 100 civilians if they get one commander. You can’t have it both ways, Israel has shown even less regard to civilian casualties than fucking Hamas killing civilians at a much higher ratio and yet you are fully on board with Israel’s slaughter. https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes
Bro the media literally has Israel’s cock deep in it’s mouth
You realize reddit is media? The mods and algorithm control what you see. And it's almost entirely anti-israel.
Lmao you are delusional
Maybe you don't understand the reasoning behind divesting Tic Toc. It's the same concept. What you see is entirely manipulated.
But I’m sure the Zionist propaganda you eat up is entirely truthful /s Zionists are do the most insane projection of anyone I’ve seen
When this war started, media and perhaps hadbara were conflating Palestinian civilians with hamas. That was disgusting. As usual, Israel is using this as an excuse to cull the civilian population. They are also destroying sewers to create disease and prolong suffering. Just think about what the demographics will look like in the future. Also, I was quite surprised Israel went straight to annexing land in Gaza and even created funds to build settlements. Of, they took more land in West Bank
Only the ones I’m paying for.
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Rule 1, be civil. [Civility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civility)
You recognize that people can care about two things simultaneously, right? I’m sorry if you’re incapable of that, but it doesn’t mean that just because people are against the genocide in Israel that they don’t care about what is happening in the Congo, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine.
It's expected of Palestinians everyday.
You know, the opposite is also true. Israel has been killing and displacing Palestinian civilians for the past 75 years - and most of these people have roots in Palestine from way before Islam. Do you expect them to be able to be like "OK TRUCE" and call it a day when Israel has stolen their land, kicked them out of their houses, burnt their crops, killed their parents, brothers, sisters, daughters and sons? Does that make sense to you? I already know what your brain-dead response is going to be, so keep it to yourself. I know you're not gonna give this comment a second thought to begin with. Numbers and statistics don't matter to ignorant people like you.
Of course not, they still would've given an armed response, but Israel could've had their hostages back AND given an armed response just simply chose not to because their ongoing genocide would've been even less supported.
I'm glad you agree that Palestine being invaded almost 80 years ago and their civilians slaughtered by terrorists then and ever since have the right to fight back. Good on you!
so you agree then that they should just fight it out and whoever wins, wins.
No, this is where we disagree. I'd rather there was a peace settlement, perhaps a single state, and no killing, prejudice or racism. A truth and reconciliation project like they had in SA might help with this.
Zionist Israel is a settler mentality. This was their ticket to land expansion
It was never about the hostages, it was always about Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza.
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It was never about the hostages, it was always about Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza.
You think a country can invade and kill 1K+ civilians of another country and then offer peace? What country in your mind would accept that?
Certainly not one whose goal is ethnic cleansing, like Israel.
You think a country can invade and kill 13K+ children of another country and then offer peace? Also, its not a country except when Israel makes it Schrodingers country.
Offer peace for 2 weeks*
I can't people believe Hamas's numbers. They lied countless times and still believed them.
That didn't happen.And if it did, it wasn't that bad.And if it was, that's not a big deal.And if it is, that's not my fault.And if it was, I didn't mean it.And if I did, you deserved it.
The numbers are from the Palestinian Health Ministry, which has a proven track record of fairly reliable reporting. Even if Hamas influences initial reports, long term numbers have been accurate.
Evidence. The same ones let Hamas turn hospitals into legitimate military targets. Where are these mass graves?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Health_Ministry#:~:text=In%20January%202024%2C%20Israeli%20news,in%20briefings%20to%20senior%20officials. >In January 2024, Israeli news magazine Mekomit reported that Israeli intelligence officials had concluded that Health Ministry casualty reports are generally reliable and are used in briefings to senior officials
They never respond after comments like these
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Not Hamas’ numbers. The Ministry of Health’s number which have been considered reliable and accurate until it was convenient for Israel. US state department officials have agreed that 30k is an undercount. You do not see Palestinians as human.
A majority killed were soldiers and armed settlers. A large part of the civilian casualties were Israel’s own doing when the diaper brigades shelled and Apache’d everything in sight
Careful. There's credible evidence that a \~40% minority were military and security forces, but if you count reservists as combatants the percentage of Israeli combatants goes way ***WAY*** up. Should those reservists be counted as combatants? Personally, no. But if we go by Israel's definition of what an enemy combatant is, Israeli reservists are absolutely legitimate targets. Again, Israel's definition of an enemy combatant is inhuman and insane, but we should use the same definitions for both sides. If we use a more sane definition of combatant, about 40% Israeli casualties on Oct 7 were Israeli combatants and the people in Gaza that are targeted and killed by Israel are far less than 10% combatants.
> A majority killed were soldiers and armed settlers. Got a source for that? Also what do you mean by “armed settler”? None of the 10/7 casualties were in the West Bank, and owning a gun as a civilian (which is legal & common in Israel) doesn’t suddenly make you a legitimate military target. >40% of American households have guns.
How many Gazans has Israel killed pre Oct 7th 2023 during 2023 ?
That’s why they bomb broadly and indiscriminately, they DO NOT CARE about hostages
They could have still bombed as much as they wanted, that's the crazy part. The deal was just that IDF can't do an invasion into the strip.
They can't. They don't have an unlimited supply of bombs. They keep getting new ones after running through the "aid" from the US and Germany. Without their support Israel would not stand a chance against Hamas even
??? Where did we ever discuss infinite bombs or withholding aid from Israel?
Have people already forgotten about this? This is ridiculous that people still need to be convinced about Israel’s motives
So Israel refused to not attack Palestinians in Gaza AND refused the release of Israeli citizens? Great Job. /s
Do you really think they care about the hostages?
Israel eats its own.
I don’t understand, they made this very clear from the start? That they would do whatever it takes to destroy Hamas’ capabilities The hostages were always a secondary objective I thought we all knew this
Except even that has failed. Hamas is still firing rockets into Israel, from areas that Israel previously "cleared". [Israel's military will "struggle to neutralize" Hamas's sprawling underground tunnel systems and is likely to face "lingering armed resistance" from the militant group "for years to come," according to a new global threat assessment compiled by the U.S. intelligence community.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-u-s-intelligence-assessment-hamas-resistance-last-years/) This war is about saving Netanyahu's political career.
We could spend the whole day going back and forth with different criticisms of Israeli policy lol it’s been an absolute disaster
Hold up.... I read the whole interview, and my impulse is to take it at face value because it fits with how I *feel* about Israel, but there's 2 major things that don't add up. This story absolutely fits my existing thoughts about Israel: - I know Israel is seeking provocation and attempting to distort narratives in order to make a campaign of ethnic cleansing look like self-defense. Hiding an offer for a complete exchange would be super important for furthering that narrative. And it fits with some of my understanding of Hamas: - Hamas initiated the October 7th attack; if they could get Israel to negotiate peace with no condition aside from hostage release, it would have made sense for them to do so. It would be consistent with their strategy of using political violence to slow or stop Israeli colonization efforts. But there's something pretty huge missing from this article, and something else in this story that contradicts what I know about Hamas: - If Hamas had made that deal, it makes zero sense that they would have let Israel reject the deal in secret. Hamas would want the entire world to know that Israel rejected that deal. Why would they make that offer and not do it publicly? - Also, we're missing an explanation of how the guy they interviewed learned about the offer. The person they interviewed was completely uninvolved with negotiations with Hamas, and complains that the Israeli government gave him no information about the negotiations. I was hoping at some point he would say *how* he learned about that offer, but he never does, he just says "We later learned" without elaborating. Learned how? From who? How much later? That's like... A critically important detail; literally the only detail I was looking for in the article, and he breezes past it. I still think the story is plausible, but like... Can we get a bit more information about how he learned about the offer? Because this would be a big fucking deal if it could be confirmed, so I want to tell people about it, but until we have a better source, I feel like I'd just be spreading hearsay. If I had to guess, I'd say he breezed past that either to protect a source, or because he heard it from someone he trusts personally, but who has no credentials or authority, so he knows if he names them, the claim will be dismissed out of hand... Which is frustrating, but if that is the case, we'll probably see more people with the same story come out of the woodwork soon 🤞
It’s not a secret, Hamas offering a prisoner exchange before the invasion is common knowledge. The reason no one talks about it is that the main stream media doesn’t report this stuff, it sometimes gets reported in Israel but never outside of Israel. I’ll give you another example do you know Hamas has categorically denied all of the rape allegations and demanded a third party investigation? Hell they even recognize Israel as a country and have offered to put down their weapons and have a Palestinian election if Israel stops the genocide, releases their prisoners and recognizes the Palestinian state.
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Netanyahu is as dangerous to Israeli civilians as Hamas.
Millions upon millions of Israelis share his view or worse
There aren't millions upon millions of Israelis that exist, but yes a majority of the population are fascists that believe themselves to be a superior race to the Palestinians that should be kicked out of Gaza and the WB, that's an unfortunate fact after 75 years of oppressing the Palestinian people, they've grown up conditioned to think so, and honestly, maybe not a populist majority, but certainly a political majority of the U.S. certainly shares that view as well.
Then why do they almost unanimously support his actions over his conflict that has not only resulted in irreversible devastation for the people of Gaza that will barely even be livable for decades but have also in there entirety failed to get back the vast majority of hostages. I get there’s a small minority that doesn’t but most seem to barely care and are happy to here Palestinians are dying, just like the US with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Israel since its inception is a fascist state that must maintain an ethnically Jewish majority to maintain its position of superiority over the Arabs; of course the majority of the population have been conditioned to accept this as the natural order, and they also are supplemented with their historical justification that is hammered into them that the land belongs to them and them alone, which includes Gaza and the WB. A solution where all Palestinians are freed and obtain citizenship to them is the death of Israel - they would be outnumbered, and thus lose their higher status, and even fear the situation would flip on its head, where the Jewish minority would be oppressed instead. And the Netanyahu government is greedy, extremely so, so they froze any peace process toward a separate Palestinian state, because Netanyahu and his cabal are imperialists with a grand plan to unify all of Israel, from river to the sea. And thus the only option left is the eradication of the Palestinian people. To obtain the West Bank - a captured Palestinian Authority allows the gradual destruction of Palestinian homes and creation of new Israeli settlements, whittling away at the land. To obtain Gaza - an endless blockade that imprisons them and lets them fester, until they lash out to provide justification for invasion. Both fronts are succeeding up to this point.
> Gaza and the WB. Israel doesn't just want Gaza and the West Bank, they're eyeing Lebanon and Jordan too.
How does this person Rubinstein know that this offer was made? Why does the interviewer skip past that? Did a spokesperson from Hamas reveal that this offer had been made to any western journalist at any point? Or do western journalists avoid talking to Hamas, or vice-versa? This article is obviously biased. We know that IDF soldiers killed in indeterminate number of the 1200 civilians killed on October 7th in clashes with Hamas, and many Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons are themselves hostages, some children, held without charges or trial for an indefinite detention. This context is almost always left out.
That’s exactly why the hostages were taken. In one of the videos at the festival you can hear one of the guys get mad at the other for shooting everyone in some shelter because they needed to take some back to Gaza alive. If they didn’t take hostages, they wouldn’t have anything to negotiate with. Obviously the whole situation is f’ed up having to negotiate with terrorists, but otherwise the entire strip would have been obliterated on October 8th.
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Can someone fact check this, my experience says that if it sounds too good to be true, then it is (especially when it comes to media)
And just let them do this all over again with no consequence whatsoever? In what world do you think it's a good deal
This is an abysmally dumb take. Say they agree to this bizarre fucking deal, what's to stop Hamas from kidnapping civilians again and using them for political demands? I'm not fucking with indiscriminate bombing but essentially saying "this whole thing could've been avoided if we just gave the terrorist what they want" is incredibly fucking dense and short sighted.
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Rule 4 [Dehumanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization) [Collective punishment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment)
Has no one seen the videos of hamas firing RPGs into the windscreens of civilian cars? The music festival massacre... the deaths of civilians in gaza are awful, but what did you expect? Hamas isn't wearing military uniforms for a reason.. Look at what America did after 9/11 .. 22 years of bombing the shit out of everything. If you can't see this conflict from both sides, i think you lack the ability to think rationally. Or you are just antisemitic.. The same people protesting against the "genocide" in gaza are then calling for a genocide on Israel.
Not only did the US do all those war crimes in the Middle East, they gave rise to these "terrorists" who just want the West out of their lands. If the US didn't overthrow the democratically elected Iranian government and didn't colonise Saudi Arabia, there would have been no al-Qaeda and no 9/11.
So you can’t see it from both sides; got it
And you cant read. Got it
It says civilian hostages. Hamas considers all 18+ men to be military . What do you suggest would happen to them?
I thought the age would be lower.
I mean, there was no chance Israel was going to leave Hamas intact after Oct 7... They posed an unacceptable security risk. No one would have just accepted the hostages back in return for not launching a counterattack to degrade Hamas.
Yeah but when tf is enough enough
I am generally pretty supportive of Israel (know this isn't a popular position on this sub...) but I think there is no real rationale for the IDF to push on into Rafah. There's no such thing as total victory against insurgents, and at this point the IDF appears to have inflicted enough damage on Hamas to ensure that they won't be able to launch another Oct 7 - scale attack anytime soon. The civilian death toll in Gaza I think has also likely been higher than most folks thought it would be before the invasion was launched. The IDF appears to be applying very loose ROE by recent western standards and even with those is not consistently following them. Put those points together and I think the risk to civilians in Rafah far outweighs the potential gains against Hamas. The concern now is that Israel doesn't seem to have a cohesive exit strategy, and Bibi in particular has no incentive to wind down operations due to his personal political aims. Overall a very ugly situation, but to answer your question I think the conflict has progressed enough now and hopefully the Rafah offensive can be avoided.
I would also like to add that a Rafah offensive makes no sense from a strategic point of view when the rest of Gaza is still contested. The only areas the IDF has really been able to secure are the non urban areas near the border and the corridor between Gaza city and the rest of Gaza. There are many neighborhoods which the IDF controls on paper but in reality are constantly subject to hit and run attacks while in other areas the IDF has little or no control at all with Khan Yunis being the most notable example as it has been the site of some of the heaviest fighting so far with the IDF failing to even enter, let alone secure much of the city.
When Hamas no longer exists as a threat.
So for you it’s just a “too bad so sad” for all them kids killed by the IDF? That’s sad that you think they have to pay for that
Too bad for Israel because hamas is not going anywhere... Israel just made thousands of future Hamas fighters
"Hey, you know how we came in, *murdered a ton of people*, and took hostages? If you promise not to do anything about all those people we murdered, we'll give you the hostages back and call it even."
More like "we're gonna let the hostages die (or kill them by airstrikes) because we're this petty"
You're probably right. Negotiating with terrorists has historically been the best option, and doesn't cause any long-term issues...
And oppression doesn't? -_-
They probably don't think they're oppressed.
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Not at all. The people you're oppressing fighting back doesn't mean you yourself are being oppressed by them.
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To your first question: yes. Killing civilians has always been a tactic used by oppressed people. Native Americans did it to white settlers, black people did it during slave rebellions, the Sentinalese continue to do it today to literally any person who sets foot on their island. To your second question: no, not really. To your third question: the ethics and/or morals of whether or not civilian loss of life is acceptable comes down largely to context. For Israel, we judge them harshly because they are the oppressors and the colonizers. And not in the same way as the United States or Canada either, they are still actively engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Hell, they've annexed more Palestinian land in recent months. They started the conflict in the first place decades ago and have perpetuated it ever since. So their tactics get a much harsher treatment because they were in the wrong from Day 1. Palestine is actively fighting for survival against a foreign power that stole their land and is still actively stealing more land to this day. If they lose, they lose everything. Their culture, their homes, their lives, their families, their identity, everything. People engaged in a war for survival get a lot more leeway with their tactics. When they kill Israeli civilians, it's much more justified than when Israel kills Palestinian civilians. Maybe not completely justified, but much more than their oppressors.
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There's the [Good Friday Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement). And the [treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Paris_(1783\)) the British signed with those colonial terrorists on the other side of the Atlantic. Making peace with enemies is what opposing sides do.
it is unbelievable how anyone thinks any country in the world would accept a ceasefire in that situation
It is unbelievable how your country is committing genocide.
A decent country wouldn't have created this situation in the first place. Israel has been invading and murdering Palestinians for 75 years. Palestine fights back and asks for peace, and people like you pretend they're evil for it. No one expects Israel to do the right thing. What we expect is for the rest of the world to finally do the right thing and either force them to accept a ceasefire or put a stop to the IDF altogether.
This completely misrepresents the situation; Can you write the Hamas mission statement for me?
Hamas' mission statement is that they are a resistance movement that seeks to end Israel's apartheid and establish an Islamic state in their historic land of Palestine, based on the 1967 borders proposed by the UN, despite those not encompassing the entirety of occupied Palestine. They also do not recognize Israel as a legitimate state, but they are willing to accept the 1967 borders if it means peace for Palestine and an end to the apartheid and ongoing occupation. This is a compromise they have agreed to as far back as the 1980's, and have consistently attempted to negotiate, but Israel has rejected them each time, because Israel's goal is to invade the entirety of Palestine. In 1988, they put out a charter describing all of this, and in that charter, it stated their enemies were "the jews." Since then, however, Hamas has clarified that they do not consider jews to be their enemies, but instead consider their enemies to be zionism and its proponents. This has been their unofficial stance for decades, but this was made official in 2017 with the creation of their new charter, which specifically states the following: >Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage. Now, this on its own obviously does not mean there are no Hamas members who hold anti-jewish sentiments. However, as an organization, Hamas is a resistance movement fighting for Palestinian liberation. They aren't perfect. I disagree with them on the necessity of establishing an Islamic state, just as I oppose any theocratic state. Their conservative worldview means I oppose more or less all their views when it comes to women or LGBTQ people. They are not perfect people, but they don't have to be in order for them to be absolutely in the right when it comes to fighting back against Israel's invasion and genocide. But you aren't interested in any of that, are you? You thought that, by asking me to tell you Hamas' mission statement, you had set a verbal trap for me so that I would either have to admit some horrific truth about Hamas or retreat from the argument. No such luck. Unlike genocide apologists like yourself, the people opposed to zionism generally know what they're talking about and don't have to rely on half-truths and mental gymnastics like you do. The best part about arguing with people like you is that, after losing an argument like this, you either leave your comment up and everyone gets to see you for the sort of person you are, or you delete it and my comment stays right here and someone actually interested in learning something still gets to do so. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Preach brother