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Comment by Ma8ee | Hacker News Reader

Missing from your narrative is the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli settlers. The settlers are harassing and seizing land from Palestinians. Those settlers are protected by the Israeli Defense Forces. All of this is well documented and are repeatedly criticised by many well reputable human rights organisations.

So, no, it's not restrain that is rewarded by these savage attacks.

And while I condemn the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians by Hamas, we should not pretend they came out of a vacuum, or that the state of Israel is a pure peace loving innocent victim in all this.

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> we should not pretend they came out of a vacuum

And we shouldn't pretend that organized terrorism is justified by the things you've mentioned.

No, exactly. That is why I wrote "I condemn the terrorist attacks on innocent civilians by Hamas". But my comment was an answer praise of Israel's constraint, like Israel was completely innocent in this conflict.

And the following two paragraphs seems to be incomprehensible to many:

Israel is an apartheid state. Palestines have the right to resist that oppression. Hamas (or any Palestine organisation) has no right to attack innocent civilians.

Hamas is a terror organisation. Israel has the right to defend itself. Israel has no right to attack innocent civilians.

How exactly is Israel an apartheid state?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel

I agree that death of any innocent civilian is regrettable but I question that all Palestinian citizens are innocent. Some of them fully support Hamas and worked with Hamas and for Hamas and would like to see all Jews dead just as much as Hamas and do everything in their power so that nobody can tell apart innocent civilian from a guilty one or from Hamas. I also question who's fault is it that these innocent civilians die. If a murderer is hiding between regular people shooting at cops who hunt him and at the people as well and cops try to stop him and accidentally shoot some of other people as well in the messy situation the blame is heavily on the murderer himself and very slightly on the police who undoubtedly did the right thing, were just a bit bad on technical implementation, though as good as they could be, given the circumstances.

This is how:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_apartheid

I don't think all Palestinians are innocent. I know there are Israelis that are war criminals. None of those facts are excuses to kill Palestinians or Israeli indiscriminately. Letting people die just because they happen to belong to a certain ethnical group is plain racism.

Israel has long passed a scale of the killing that could be explained as "collateral damage".

"the civilian death toll as of 20 November is 16,413, with nearly 34,000 injured. This would mean one in every 142 Palestinian civilians killed in a month and a half."

"With an estimated 70% of the dead being women and children – and many of the slain men unlikely to have been combatants "

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/22/gaza-c...

There's surely a lot of evil being done, but I'm not entirely convinced by the article about civilian losses. 42% are children (compared to 6% in Ukraine, 8.6% in Iraq and 10% in Syria). How could an attacker ever achieve that even they tried?

If those atypical numbers are true it shows that defenders are not protecting their children like any sane population would but rather place them in obvious military targets to turn them into martyrs.

Personally I believe that those numbers should be treated as indication that they are not accurate. Author of the article prefers to take them as a proof of unique evilness of Israel.

Gaza’s population is very young, so these numbers reflect the demographics. If anything, it shows that Israel is indiscriminate in its killing in Gaza. Bombs tend to be that way.

But of course, we don’t know what and who to trust. Maybe we should ask why Israel is suppressing any reporting from the strip if they are interested in that the world gets to know the truth about what is happening there.

Population of Syria is nearly just as young. I don't see anything to justify 4 times as high children death percentage there.

I think reporters are there, after all they are getting killed too. Again I can't blame Israel for trying to keep repoters away since their deaths are very impactful and also since Palestinians have a huge history of faking deaths and injuries for reporting purposes. Maybe history is the wrong word because there are cases of this even as recent as last hostage-prisoner exchange.

So the fighters in Syria are more discriminatory when they kill than the IDF.

It’s a well known fact that Israel is limiting information coming out from Gaza. If all the reports about their indiscriminate killings were false, wouldn’t it be in their interest if more independent reporters were there, not fewer?

You have already made up your mind, and no evidence will ever make you change your mind. You are trying to explain away all the evidence, and when you can’t, you’ll just say it is lies created by Hamas.

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