Hacker News Reader

Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how people can think Israel mass bombed gaza. Israel has one of the largest militaries in the world. If they decided to mass bomb somewhere, it wouldn't be a place anymore. Its not the 1800s. A mass bombing is not something anyone walks away from in the modern world.

View on HN

Israel launched over 900 attacks on Gaza in May, killed hundreds of Palestinians, and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians. The UN estimate is 461 housing and commercial units were destroyed by Israel's bombing of Gaza.

I don't dispute even more could have been killed by Israel and more destroyed by Israel if the United Nations Security Council did not call for an ending to it and that if that did not happen "it wouldn't be a place anymore...not something anyone walks away from". People can go and look at the videotaped news reports from Gaza after the bombings and judge for themselves.

I'm not saying there wasn't an armed conflict or that people didn't die. Just when people say something was mass bombed it implies something very different.

A quick google search reveals that the US launched 2800000 ground attack missions during the Vietnam war, dropping 15000000000 pounds of bombs. That works out to an average of several hundred attacks per day for two decades.

I also encourage you to look at Wikipedia's List of ongoing armed conflicts [1], which lists the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a "Minor Conflict" given its scale in comparison to the other entries.

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

Seems a bit over the top to use the Vietnam War as a benchmark for the size of any bombing campaign, unless the benchmark is going for "largest ever by quite a margin".

You're indulging in the fallacy of relative privation and trying to change the subject for some reason.

there were fewer people killed than bombs dropped - it was a highly pinpointed affair beyond any sort of 'mass bombing' terminology, while at the same time the government of gaza WAS mass launching artillery rockets at israeli cities.

Truly upside-down world.

Gaza City has a higher density than NYC (34k per sq mi vs. 29k). Now imagine trying to run an anti-mafia campaign using only air power.

Maybe don't do that then? If someone knowingly bombs areas densely packed with civilians, then they are committing war crimes at best, terrorism at worst.

It's incredibly difficult to have sympathy with Israel when their politicians and military behave with such little regard for human rights and human life - I really wish they'd take the moral high ground and just fucking stop the evictions, abductions, torture, beatings and killing.

No, Hamas is committing war crimes by deliberately launching rockets from an area packed with civilians, knowing that some of them will be killed by the return fire. And doubly so if you consider that the rockets Hamas is launching are targeting densely packed cities (without military targets nearby)

But they do walk away from mass bombings. I mean, heck, folks walked away from nukes (most later died of cancer, but not all). More folks survived the hindenberg than died in the crash. And so on.

Mass bombings tend to kill folks in the blast areas, but there are a lot of places that aren't directly in the blast. If you destroy one house with a bomb, the surrounding houses will likely have damage but still stand - and the residents will know.

way fewer people died than bombs dropped. There was no 'mass bombing' - it was all highly pinpointed with roof knocking and warning of people in the area.

The mass launches of artillery rockets against israeli cities was mass bombing, just less effective.

So perhaps the obvious conclusion should be that your definition of "mass bombing" is not what people mean when they use that term?

I was under the impression it was a synonym for area bombing - e.g. throwing a bunch of bombs at a place to inflict damage in a general way. As opposed to having a very specific target.

What's your definition?

Tens of thousands of people being displaced seems pretty general to me.

How does that compare to other conflicts? Tossing around numbers without any context doesn't do anyone any good. There are four ongoing "Major Wars" with 10,000+ fatalities in the last year, which undoubtedly displaced orders of magnitude more people

"people" are not one group. when a group uses some specific words, you can ask what those people mean. General 'people' have different definitions, and sometimes use words as weapons.

Many people have no idea what they're talking about when speaking outside of their areas of expertise. So, yes, it's very possible that those people have something very different from mass bombing in mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com