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Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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