Comment by Sam713 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sam713 | Hacker News Reader

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Not disputing general truthfulness of Israeli government, but specifically as to the latter two examples you listed: A) There is no direct evidence that Israeli government publicly stated that babies were beheaded. That claim came from a single journalist, spread like wildfire on social media (as did tons of videos and footage of the attacks), and was exacerbated by a statement Biden made.

B) there is very credible evidence that rape did occur as part of the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct. 7th attack. https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-sexual-violence-...

Just wanted to point that out, because regardless of the moral standing of either side, I think the facts do matter if there is ever going to be a resolution. Obviously the actions committed by Hamas do not absolve Israel from following ethical rules of war, and there are plenty of issues with how Israel is waging war in the current conflict as well; for example using machine learning algorithms to track targets with what appears to be a reckless disregard for non-combatants: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

The bigger problem is that these lies spread “like wildfire” via Western media outlets - with zero fact checking or confirmation. These images were then used to justify the rampage in Gaza.

As far as I am aware, not a single Western media rag has issued an apology for this. In many of our eyes, never again will they be able to claim credibility or professionalism in their reporting.

In addition, Western rags took Israeli statements as gospel, platformed way more guests from the Israeli side, and intensively questioned all pro-Palestine guests on their position on Oct 7 (while treating Israeli guests with more respect than necessary for a media interview).

It’s better now - but that’s easy to do after a year of atrocities and 100k+ deaths. In the US at least, there still is a clear bias against inviting Palestinians on primetime slots, or allowing Palestinians to operate freely within news organizations.

What do you think the Israeli response to Oct 7 should have been?

Feel free to share your objections to what I wrote.

Unfortunately, it is hard to discern legitimate interest vs. someone wanting to engage in a debate for the sake of it. And I am not interested in wasting my time figuring out which is the case.

I did not say or imply that I have objections to what you wrote.

Your comment strongly implied that you think that Israel overreacted to Oct 7. So I am curious what you think their response should have been.

> Unfortunately, it is hard to discern legitimate interest vs. someone wanting to engage in a debate for the sake of it. And I am not interested in wasting my time figuring out which is the case.

Is curiosity "legitimate interest"?

I would expect any response to (among other things):

a) adhere to international law (which we now know is a complete farce thanks UNSC veto)

b) not involve ethnic cleansing/forced displacement of Palestinians for a 3rd time in the last 75 years - the only reason it didn’t work this time is because the Egyptians strongly pushed back

c) not involve the deliberate targeting of civilians, the mass punishment of a civilian population, and the denial of access to aid to a civilian population (under occupation no less)

d) not result in the highest proportion of children fatalities and injuries of any modern war - and not involve redefining or rewriting the meaning of the word “child” to give themselves some wiggle room

e) not involve the deliberate targeting of journalists, academics, aid workers, and hospital staff - even if the Israelis claim to have “proof” of them being Hamas members (imagine immediately defunding a UN organization because the Israelis claim a few dozen employees were Hamas members)

f) adhere to Israel’s responsibilities under IHL as an occupying force

Fighting a war against guerillas in an urban context is challenging. Mass & targeted bombing of a densely populated occupied territory containing an enemy with no air force and no air defenses is not only genocidal, but also outright cowardly behavior.

Israel has not overreacted to Oct 7, they have just applied the same policy that they have used for many decades "at least ten of theirs for each one of ours".

This policy is an effective deterrent against enemies, but it should be obvious that with such a policy it will never be possible to end any conflict unless absolutely all enemies and all their relatives or friends are killed.

There have been times when the relations between the parties in this conflict had improved a lot and there was some hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Nevertheless on both sides, but especially in Israel, there are people who benefit a lot from the existence of the conflict, so any opponents have been removed by any means possible, including assassination, until the mutual relationships have become as bad as today, when no hope for any kind of peace remains.

Most people in Israel are quite nice, but they are deeply scared by the thought that that at any time someone coming from the neighbors of Israel could come and cut their throats, so they work continuously very hard at their jobs, believing that they must provide thus their individual contributions so that Israel will maintain its military and economic dominance over their enemies, in order to ensure their safety. The workers of Israel have worked all the time since WWII pretty much as hard as those of USA during its short participation to WWII.

Workers from other countries would be very unlikely to work willingly so hard as those of Israel. This is very profitable for the upper class of Israel, for whom an end of the conflict would have caused serious losses, when the workers could not have been motivated any more by patriotic slogans.

>This policy is an effective deterrent against enemies, but

Why do you consider this an effective strategy, when the same strategy has been used for decades yet the violence keeps getting worse?

> Israel has not overreacted to Oct 7, they have just applied the same policy that they have used for many decades "at least ten of theirs for each one of ours".

The interesting thing is that Hamas seems to share Israel's view that Israelis are more valuable than Palestinians. Whenever there is a prisoner exchange Hamas tends to demand an order of magnitude or more Palestinians be released for each Israeli released.

For example in 2011 Hamas got over 1000 in exchange for a single Israeli.

Or could it also have something to do with Israel having an order of magnitude more Palestinian prisoners (thousands of whom have yet to be charged for years) than Hamas has Israeli soldiers ? If Hamas has 10 Israeli hostages and while Israel holds 10,000, does asking for thousands in return mean you value your people less? Or is that just common sense? And I don't even know what the point of bringing this up is.

>Your comment strongly implied that you think that Israel overreacted to Oct 7. So I am curious what you think their response should have been.

How about a reaction that wouldn't lead the ICC issuing arrest warrants for the government officials leading the response for crimes against humanity ?

I'm not sure what people act so daft, pretending the Israeli response of the last year was just a totally normal and standard military operation and not a clinical live streamed genocide.

I think they could start with not destroying hospitals and schools and doing better than “at least 1/3 of the 40k people killed were militants.” Israel , the most moral army in the world /s, thinks that two citizens killed for every militant killed is an acceptable ratio, it’s not.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-m...

What's the acceptable ratio? I'm not claiming this reality isn't horrific I'm just not seeing many examples of wars fought better. Did the U.S do it better in Vietnam or Iraq? The U.S wasn't even fighting for its survival, it was fighting to "defeat communism" or to keep oil prices low because of the invasion of Kuweit or 9-11 etc etc. None of these reasons were as strong as what happened to Israel.

Vietnam and Iraq are two nation states and had populations between 25-30m at the time US waged war in those countries. Gaza is a narrow strip of 139 square miles of land with 2mn people packed together like sardines, who have no sovereignty, have been under an economic blockade since 2007, and whose rulers Hamas have no conventional military to speak of. These two are not comparable, I don't know why people keep pointing to the destruction of Nazi Germany and Japan as the benchmark of whats acceptable in Gaza, its quite insane tbh.

Why does the land area matter? Israel is also a tiny and crowded country and is threatened from all fronts. What was the threat against the U.S again , was Vietnam about to invade? was Iraq?

Hamas had enough weapons to kill 1200 Israelis in one day so it's not some helpless entity. It was armed to its teeth. It's only after almost 800 additional dead Israeli soldiers and a very bloody war that Hamas lost most of its power.

I think many people also forget the second intifada suicide bombings, and numerous rocket barrages over the proceeding decades after, to which Hamas was a major belligerent. Despite the more primitive designs of these rockets, without modern defense systems there would likely be more Israeli civilian deaths. I see this context missing from a lot of the discussions of the current iteration of this conflict. Israeli civilians have faced decades of risk (which I think also benefits the right wing of Israeli politics), and this is not a new conflict. October 7th comes on the heels of many other direct and indirect attacks on Israeli civilians. I cant help but think that the current military response might fall under a “never let a crisis go to waste” strategy by Netanyahu’s coalition, which had recently been receiving less support.

> there is very credible evidence that rape did occur

> FIRST ACCOUNT PANTS PULLED DOWN

>But it turns out that what Otmazgin thought had occurred in the home at the kibbutz hadn’t happened.

> SECOND ACCOUNT: EVERYTHING WAS CHARRED

> Yossi Landau, a longtime ZAKA volunteer, was also working in Be’eri when he entered a home that would produce the second debunked story

I urge people to read the article rather than take the parents claim that it presents evidence of rape on October 7th at face value. It presents no evidence for such a claim through the entire article. It covers debunked claims of sexual violence on October 7th, it does contain a reference to one hostage who was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping who was since thankfully successfully released

From the article:

“The United Nations and other organizations have presented credible evidence that Hamas militants committed sexual assault during their rampage. The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, said Monday he had reason to believe that three key Hamas leaders bore responsibility for “rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity.”

I’m not going to dig up and post links to videos showing Hamas parading female captives with blood on their pants, or partially disrobed bodies. Videos which were filmed by Hamas members themselves I might add. Here is an article instead from BBC with testimony from survivors: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67629181.amp

I don’t want to assume that you are arguing in bad faith, but there are numerous reputable sources showing that other atrocities occurred beyond the murder of civilians. It’s bad enough that Hamas directly targeted and killed over 700 civilians.

https://www.oct7factcheck.com/index

That article you linked does not support your claims at all. The UN was pressured by Israel to send a delegation, but they would not cooperate fully and refused a full investigation.

From the UN report [1]:

>In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified.

>The mission team examined several allegations of sexual violence. It must be noted that witnesses and sources with whom the mission team engaged adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously. Some also stated to the mission team that they no longer felt confident in their recollections of other assertions that had appeared in the media.

>It was determined by the mission team that the crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad and the bodies moved, explaining the separation of the body of the girl from the rest of her family. Allegations of objects found inserted in female genital organs also could not be verified by the mission team due in large part to the limited availability and low quality of imagery.

How does any of this information from the report lead you to believe that the allegations of mass rape are 'very credible'?

See this interview from Pramila Patten who is the special representative that wrote this report [2]

>“May I just ask, why not put the responsibility and blame the atrocities quite simply on the perpetrators and say, ‘it was Hamas who did it?’” the host demanded.

>Patten replied that the mission of her visit to Israel was “only for the purpose of gathering and analyzing information,” not for attributing alleged crimes to any perpetrator.

>“It is pretty clear who did it, after talking to survivors who returned – it wasn’t the Belgians who did it,” chortled the host.

>“I think it’s up to your government to give access, and that was one of my first recommendations,” Patten responded.

I would suggest you stop peddling these baseless allegations as these lies are being used to justify civilian massacres to this day.

[1] https://tinyurl.com/2px6tp6v

[2] https://tinyurl.com/bddbu29s

You are cherry picking text out of the report, and removing it from the overall context. The UN investigators visited multiple locations, some of which did not contain evidence, and some of which did. See sections 58/60/61/66/68.

The conclusion of the report itself reads: “Overall, based on the totality of information gathered from multiple and independent sources at the different locations, there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred at several locations across the Gaza periphery, including in the form of rape and gang rape, during the 7 October 2023 attacks. Credible circumstantial information, which may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including genital mutilation, sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, was also gathered.”

At this point I don’t see any further point in discussing this subject. I’m only replying in case someone reads these comments, and doesn’t dig deeper into the report. I find it concerning that you glossed over those sections and the conclusion of the report, while only presenting text that supports your viewpoint. It’s bad enough that ~700-800 civilians were murdered in the first place, and it’s horrible that civilians continue to die in Gaza through the present. Please have a good day.

Of course you don't want to talk about it, when you have zero evidence to back up any of your claims. You wrote all that but you could not produce a single piece of evidence besides a few sentences to indicate unproven rapes might have occurred based on very selective information given to them by the Israelis during guided propaganda tours. The claims are "mass rapes" have occurred (not that there were no instances of SA), not a single piece of evidence has been produced, every testimony that came out was proven to be fabricated and here you are trying to peddle your unsubstantiated propaganda as if its something already proven beyond reasonable doubt.

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