IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites

I'll provide context too - I'm a Jewish Israeli. I'd probably be considered left (or even far-left) by Israeli standards, but I'm in the "pro-Israeli" camp as conventionally understood online.

This Haaretz article is very troubling. To the extent it's accurate, there's not much question that it reflects war crimes.

A few thoughts:

1. The article itself says there is an ongoing investigation into some of these accusations. I hope that, to whatever extent this is happening, it's not widespread, and anyone committing war crimes is very visibly and publicly tried in court.

2. There is clearly something broken with the GHF and the new aid delivery - dozens dead every day for weeks. We really need some answers on what's going on.

3. From Haaretz today:

> The U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Saturday urged Israel to investigate reports that soldiers opened fire towards unarmed Palestinians near aid distribution sites, detailed in a Haaretz expose, calling the allegations "too grave to ignore," while denying that any such incidents occurred within its facilities.

> GHF Interim Director John Acree stated, "There have been no incidents or fatalities at or in the immediate vicinity of any of our distribution sites."

Hamas are not Shia, they're Sunni. And Shia is not some some inherently violent ideology as your usage of the word there implies. And, while I'm at it, you should know the human crimes in the Gaza strip long predate Oct 7. Chemical weapons, starvation, terror bombing, these are tactics that the IDF's deployed in short time I've been alive (21st century).

They absolutely should face something similar to the Nuremberg trials. This is planned extermination of a group of people.

Unfortunately the Israeli lobby has so much money and power they would silence anyone who says that publicly by accusing them of being antisemitic.

It’s bizarre that one can use an accusation of „leftism” to deflect attention from literal atrocities.

At this point people should really take a look in the mirror.

> Some context first so my opinion isn't misconstrued

too late, m8

anybody with unfavorable opinions against Israeli government is a "leftist stereotype"

any unfavorable opinions and facts against Israeli government gets you pinned as a "anti-semite" these days

I love the Jewish community, so I don’t say this lightly, but I view Netanyahu actions as somewhat resembling Nazi Germany in one respect (though certainly not others). He may not believe Israeli Jews have a birthright to the whole world (rather they are trying to strengthen one nation’s borders), but there is no doubt in my mind they are indiscriminately cleansing a people out of existence. That is their aim, beyond simple deterrence or defense.

The October terror attack is not to be defended, but the response is disgusting behavior by the state of Israel. There’s nothing proportionate about this. Rather Israel sees this as an opportunity to strengthen its position and wipe out its enemies - and innocent men, women, and children.

In the United States, we talk about Israel as if it must be protected because it’s the Middle East’s only democracy. It is not a liberal democracy. It exists only to protect the rights of one type of people with one particular type of ethnicity. In America, we wouldn’t recognize this as a democracy.

For our part, it’s important to protect our own interests in the region and so yes, strange bedfellows. But given Netanyahu’s comfort with war crime, given Israel’s weak and distorted democratic institution, and given what nationalism can do to a country, we should be very careful to balance and diversify our interests.

Israel in another 10 years might not be recognizable. It’s cause for alarm.

Another POV is that when you distill everyone’s experiences, not just yours, into legitimate votes, people, on both sides of this conflict, choose violence. Does the discourse you participate in achieve your goals? No, it achieves the opposite.

What is this discourse? “Sharpen the fractal of demographics and opinions until you get some rare alignment between them, and you find a supposedly irrefutable and most valid position.” Can you see why winning Internet arguments and getting upvotes doesn’t translate to your goals?

Of course you should share these thoughts and forums like these should publish them. But as much as I hate the Intellectual Dark Web and its philosophies, which are as ridiculous as, “you can gain power by thinking about things differently,” I think they are right that popularity contests are not the end all be all of conflict resolution.

No need for weird acronyms, it has been looking like a clear cut genocide for months now and Trump comments about displacement more than show he is aware and doesn’t care.

It’s not even about being shameful about Israel support at that point. It’s going to be a black stain on both countries forever.

RIght this isn't Israel as a whole, it's the crazed right wing Netanyahu government. I can understand taking out Hamas but their tactics have far superceded what is considered "not a war crime"

I'm really surprised to hear another Jewish person speak about this in language that evokes the Nuremberg trials.

The article generally describes the IDF being asked to do crowd control with lethal weapons. For the most part it also described casualties (number unclear/unknown) as unintentional consequences.

I agree this does not look good but it's also not a matter of fact either. We don't know the facts, we don't know the scale, we don't know the intentions, we don't know who is making the allegations, we don't know the details.

War crimes in this war should be dealt with. Nuremberg trials is really not the right analogy.

I just want to point out something important about that article - it's not just talking about children, it's specifically talking about pre-teen children. Hamas recruits many "children" in the sense of under-18s to fight, but that's not true of pre-teen children.

(Btw, I don't necessarily agree that that article proves the IDF is firing on children, there's actually no evidence of that presented in the article. But I want to forestall a common "pro-Israeli" objection that is not true in this case.)

Most people do understand, there are many sites dedicated to citing and maintaining lists of the atrocities for easy access through google. I think it's okay just to refer to the incident in the article and immediate opinions and emotions it evokes.

I do not believe it is unintentional.

Why would the government hold someone accountable for its own actions? Let’s not pretend that this is just some random soldiers doing this, this is exactly what the Israeli government wants.

Even ignoring primary crimes, under Israeli law, even incitement to genocide is punishable by death. But so many members of the political and media elite have made inciting statements, that the rubicon is crossed; the political class cannot allow any serious, independent consideration of war crimes to ever occur, because that would risk them all facing the firing squad. This in turn signals to individual soldiers that there will be no accountability, even in the absence of directives.

You mean the government whose leader is facing a corruption trial?

They were just following orders.

For anyone else, who for some reason, feels compelled to comment without reading the article:

> Haaretz has learned that the Military Advocate General has instructed the IDF General Staff's Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism – a body tasked with reviewing incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war – to investigate suspected war crimes at these sites.

Now what will come from this (a proper investigation, etc.), who knows.

Or maybe because this isn't happening at all could be the reason why because there is actually no one to hold accountable because this is just some hysterical anti semitic conspiracy theory.

It's even worse: Awful lot of people die for the careers of politicians and it's not limited to Israel. If someone needs political tension for weathering a scandal or economic turmoil, it can be created artificially by killing certain people and they do it all the time.

I have distaste for Trump but something I appreciate about him is his abilities to stage a theatre with his "fake" bombings. The more mainstream politicians have much more sociopathic tendencies.

If you think about it, %100 of modern wars are about who is going to be the administrator and doesn't feel like can win an election. We live in a world of abundance, there's no reason for a group of people to kill other group for their resources. If it wasn't for the careers of some people with huge egos all this can be sorted out through civil matters. After the wars it gets sorted out anyway, we don't see mass exterminations anymore.

I'm German and I really see a lot of the blame for this on our states as well - the US and the EU states (especially Germany, sadly).

As horrible as the Israeli mindset is, their subjective viewpoint is at least somewhat relatable: An ordinary Israeli citizen is born in that land, knows nothing else, just learns that the entirety of the surrounding populations want them dead - and will with very high likelihood experience terror attacks themselves. That this upbringing doesn't exactly make you want to engage with the other side is psychologically understandable.

(I'm imaging this as the universal experience of all Jewish Israelis, religious or secular, left or right. I'm excluding the religious and Zionist-ideological angles here, because those are a whole different matter once again)

What I absolutely cannot understand is the behavior of our states. We're pretending to be neutral mediators who want nothing more than to end the conflict, yet in reality, we're doing everything to keep the conflict going. We're fully subscribed to Zionist narrative of an exclusive Israeli right to the land (the justifications ranging from ostensibly antifascist to openly religious) and we're even throwing our own values about universal human rights and national sovereignty under the bus to follow the narrative.

If the messianic and dehumanizing tendencies of Israelis are answered by nothing else than full support and encouragement of their allies, I don't find it exactly surprising that they will grow.

Almost half of Jewish Israelis polled said they supported killing everyone in Gaza. https://archive.is/nNzq4 About 80 percent supported ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

I don't think it's just propaganda. These folks know they'll materially benefit from Palestinians being dispossessed of their remaining land.

From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the vast majority of Israelis haven’t shown any concern about the suffering in Gaza. Those who campaign for an end to the war do so purely as a means to secure the release of the hostages.

I’m becoming very skeptical of the “bad government, good people” idea. Governments need popular support. This goes even for horrible dictatorships. There are degrees, of course. An oppressive state can survive with less popular support than a democracy. But it still needs a decent amount. The machinery of dictatorship is as much about keeping popular support as it is about forcing people to suppress their opposition.

What are you actually expecting an average Israeli who does not agree with this to do? This comment strikes me as wild considering the exact same thing is playing out in America right now, and a bunch of people are making up their minds about "Americans" and what they stand for.

The same has been true for Iran, only up until now (and probably still) we have always had a more nuanced discussion - its the Iranian government, not the people of Iran.

Come on, the government of many countries does not necessarily represent the people.

I upvoted this article because it reminds me that there are Israelis who are opposed to what is going on. And newspapers that take risk to report on it. And maybe even military investigators trying to stop it.

It’s no different with the American military.

Brainwashing by the government, religion, the media, schools, etc is what I suspect based on documentaries I watched. It’s heartbreaking what people can be made to think and say. I feel bad for the citizens of Israel to have become detached so much from humanity.

By now Gaza has been so destroyed that it has become a nation of children. About 40% of people there are age 14.

I would put myself in the timeframe of the Holocaust era. Germans were next to the concentration camps and they did nothing. Germans were conditioned to support nationalism. And they trusted the nationalist party (known as nazionale Party). The Germans had convinced themselves that the Jews were different people. (And the Jews had earned much infamy during the time when Germany was suffering economically.)

Today, we see Israelis who are taught to perceive Palestinians as enemies. They see the Palestinian flag during birthrights and are taught by the IDF to hate it. And they are also taught that the west bank is dangerous and they are not to go there. Then we see IDF operations in West Bank and we see silence. We know Gaza is in a plight caused by Israel and we see silence and ignorance. Israel is bad. Israelis are bad too. And the polls have shown that 80% wish for Gaza to be cleansed, 56% support the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, 47% want the IDF to act according to the Biblical war against Jericho. That is effectively 47% want murder while 33% want expulsion (equivalent of the ghettos+concentration camps). The benefit of doubt is disappearing rapidly fast.

And the west has been supporting Israel for decades in this campaign. This is the second millenial crusade of Europe (aka the west).

There is strong support within Israel for the genocide of Palestinians.

Unfortunately religious zionism isn't limited to Jews. Christian evangelicals also support it, and they make up a huge percentage of voting americans (and even worse, elected officials).

https://theconversation.com/in-israel-calls-for-genocide-hav...

https://theconversation.com/christian-zionism-hasnt-always-b...

> if the Israeli people really wanted anything different, it was their human duty and utmost responsibility to stop this by now

It’s wrong to single out Israel. The US is funding this mass murder of children and blocking attempts to stop it. It should correctly be called the US-Israeli genocide of Gaza.

For my part, as an American and a nobody, I feel helpless to stop the atrocities my government is participating in.

But I’ve found, for myself, the reason to fight the genocide - however I can - isn’t because I expect to stop it. I am powerless to do that. For me it’s to maintain a sense of human dignity in the face of evil.

Knowing my country’s role in the mass murder of children, shrugging my shoulders would feel like I’m surrendering something precious.

>it was their human duty and utmost responsibility to stop this

Do you apply the same standard to Palestinians for not overthrowing Hamas, to Americans for the US being the key enabler of Israel's military operations, to the citizens of any Western country for not adding Israel next to Russia in all their sanction laws? If not, why?

Or maybe we should be careful with assigning collective guilt and not throw stones in glass house?

And you can think the same way about russians. They support all horrors russian people do to Ukrainian cities. And many are trying to earn some extra cash out of it.

This point of view whitewashes a lot of the history. Israel has been doing horrible things since its founding to Palestinians, starting with the Nakba in 1948 which was an ethnic cleaning campaign to create an ethno state. Many massacres occurred like in Deir Yassin in 1948 and continued with other massacres like in Kahn Younis in 1956 where they lined up more than 200 men over 15 and executed them against the wall.

With the continued persecution of Palestinians, whether its the illegal occupation of the west bank or the siege of Gaza which was essentially a concentration camp, that was "mowed" like grass every few years in terrorist bombing campaigns by Israel, its no surprise that organisations like Hamas, originally a humanitarian charity, exist.

Israelis want peace through domination, just like the French in Algeria. Be aware that Jews are not native to Palestine, except those that had been living there before the state was founded. They are living as colonialists on stolen land, and are continually denying the native Palestinians the right to return, which is part of the definition ethnic cleansing.

I say this as Jewish person originally born in Palestine (or Israel) and who had grandparents that survivide the Holocaust. Once I read about what really happened in 1948, that it was zionist terrorist militias that started the conflict and that Palestinians did not "simply leave", I became an anti zionist. I don't think Israel has the right to exist. People have the right to exist and they have the right to fight back against jewish supremacism.

It's a state founded on ethnic cleansing. People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.

In late 1947, their militias begun a campaign of massacring and expelling Palestinians from mostly defenseless villages. These refuges pouring into neighboring Arab countries is what prompted the 1948 war. When the war ended, they murdered any civilians trying to return to their homes.

Gaza was originally a refugee camp created for receiving these expelled people.

The ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since. The current Gaza war is not when the crimes against humanity started. Israel has been commiting crimes against humanity throughout its entire existence.

> ...the new US-Israeli monopolized "aid" organization was running the Hunger Games, with dozens killed by Israelis (+ US contractors) every time there was a distribution day ... the genocidaires are controlling the aid.

It was apparently 2 VCs and not the military that came up with GHF (and if I recall, there even was a brief flare up between the ruling Cabinet and the Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, who did not want the IDF to be responsible for aid).

  Even though the early planning was led by the Israeli military, two Israeli technology investors played an influential role in shaping discussions as they progressed, according to six Israeli and American individuals familiar with the GHF’s origins. One was Liran Tancman, an entrepreneur and reservist in the IDF’s 8200 signals intelligence unit, who called for using biometric identification systems outside the distribution hubs to vet Palestinian civilians. Another was Michael Eisenberg, an American Israeli venture capitalist who argued that existing U.N. aid distribution networks were sustaining Hamas and needed to be overhauled.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/24/gaza-humanit... / https://archive.vn/TugwR

THe USA is currently run by a convicted felon, so it doesn't really surprise me.

The UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories has concluded in a pretty comprehensive report that there is a genocide occurring in Gaza. https://reliefweb.int/attachments/f78b0a28-c3af-44ed-a010-9b...

Green light : They send out notifications to people telling them aid is available at a certain location.

Red light: 10 minutes later they send out another notification saying no aid is being distributed there today and start shooting anyone in the area

I hear you and I agree that there are topics which conventional politeness cannot respond to adequately, and that this is one of those topics.

If you take those words "kind" and "curious" in a large sense—larger than usual—I think there's enough room there to talk about even this topic without breaking the guidelines.

How to do this? That is something we have to work out together. You're right that it's difficult.

From a moderation point of view, I can tell you that just avoiding garden-variety flamewar and internet tropes already gets us a lot of the way there. You'd be surprised at how many users who think they're taking a grand moral stand against conventional politeness are simply repeating those. Conventional impoliteness isn't any answer either.

Thank you Dang!

A lot of world leaders are helping speed it up.

Like with most genocides in history.

The vast majority barely make the global news.

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

It's because realistically hn is an oasis of educated people that has been overlooked by astroturfers and foreign interests (very strongly including the government in this piece), and hasn't expanded its core demographic for profit. This is what the rest of the internet would be like without manipulation. Imagine how much better things would be

This is at t= 3 hours, and large swathes of people asleep on a weekend.

These types of topics pull themselves apart VERY fast, as the homogenity of discussion norms / definitions, shared by users decreases.

I don't really see much debate. The top comments and votes are pretty clearly pro-human.

It seems civilized because comments that call out Iranian propaganda get flagged. Only one opinion is allowed on the internet. Israel is demonized beyond belief. No one talks about US aid to Egypt, a literal dictatorship, or Saudi Arabia, or the genocide in Yemen. Nope. Just Israel.

I thought Israel was a parliamentary democracy?

Ironically, Israel's government would be less theocratic-conservative if it weren't so hard to form governing coalitions in the Knesset.

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

After moderate partners abandoned Netanyahu, his only source of support was more right-wing partners, which steadily pushed government policy to the ultra-right.

Historically it's the pre-eminent center-left paper in Israel, with the Jerusalem Post being the center-right flagship.

So nice that pro-Israeli comments get flagged and moderators do nothing about that. Talking about bias and censorship, I guess some contradictory thoughts are not very welcomed for some who think about themselves as standing in the frontlines of democracy. Also disappointed about @dang, there seems very little objective admin work done here.

It is a credible source with a left-wing focus.

Indeed, the leading countries of so-called "free world" are willing to commit and support war crimes and break the intl law as well as DPRK or Iran when it serves their intrests, all while signaling virtue and progressiveness.

If you're still wondering if you're the good guys, you haven't been paying attention. I don't think there are any "good guys" when it comes to nations, but for the US it's not even close.

Watching Blinken say "rules based international order" on camera about Ukraine was one of the few times I felt good about American foreign policy, then watching Blinken talk about Israel made it clear that it's rules for our enemies only, and loyalty for our "friends" which is the precise opposite of a rules based international order.

Hearing democrats decry Russian foreign influence was also something I was on board with, but much like Nancy Pelosi saying it's not corrupt when she trades on stock with private information, apparently it's not corrupt when the democratic party accepts foreign aid in the form of AIPAC donations, or just as likely threats of the use of Pegasus against them.

It is quite sad to be an American of good conscience right now. It's hard to respect our country in any way when it shows such little moral fiber and such little backbone.

War crimes and genocide are not the same thing.

Given how small and boundaried the areas of land are where they are forcing migration to under penalty of mass death, it’s not overly dissimilar to the concept of rounding people up into camps

Imagine you're the leader of Israel. October 7 happens. And there's a multiple declarations from hamas, that they will repeat it forever, given a chance.

What do you do?

This scenario already played out before in history; some people may believe those groups to have been heroes, but most can recognize that fighting in the name of independence did not make those groups any less guilty of committing atrocities against civilians. At the same time, that doesn't take away today from the people fighting for freedom legitimately. If anything, those groups hurt their cause in the long-run, as they gave Russia ammunition for propaganda for the next 80+ years.

Yes, it's a very similar situation.

Both Russia and Gaza are ruled by criminal autocracy. In russia it's mafia style autocracy, in Gaza - terrorism and religious fanaticism.

Both Russia and Gaza have their population under control, influence and brainrot.

Both Israel and Ukraine where there long before Gaza and Russia even existed.

Both Russia and Hamas invaded and tried to commit genocide on Ukraine and Israel respectively.

Both Russia and Hamas failed their goals spectacularly and now are playing the victims (for the same target audience, albeit split on political axis).

...justifying what, exactly? Increased suffering? Another Hannibal Directive?

No. Many times the oppressed simply cease to exist (by assimilation, assassination, or other means).

Neanderthals aren’t going to become oppressors.

I'd say it's very hard for a powerful nation to not suppress somebody in the long run.

Just think of any powerful nation (or group of people, or whatever), and try to think of somebody they have oppressed, or are still oppressing. It's typically not hard to come up with examples.

I don't know if it's always the case, but it's true if given the opportunity. In the end all people are the same. Cultures may be different, but our lizard brains are the same. Us vs them, and dehumanizing others into something less than humans, whose suffering does not concern us.

Mostly, yes.

Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, then became conquerors of the world.

Russians were oppressed by the Mongols, then became conquerors of Eurasia.

Communists were oppressed by Tsarists, then became ruthless oppressors themselves.

Protestants were oppressed in Europe, so they set sail to America and became oppressors of the natives.

I disagree that there are two driving ideologies here that are diametrically opposed.

Hamas's ideology is certainly opposed to Israel existing, but they are not the only Palestinians, and other ideologies can take hold and be supported by the populace (I hope). The Palestinian Authority has been working together with Israel since its founding, after all, and with all the problems it has, it still represents a model that could work, in theory, and they pursue largely diplomatic ways to gain recognition.

> two ideologies which are so diametrically opposed to each other that they cannot coexist

Ideologies aren't platonic solids. They must be constantly refurbished in the minds of the avowed. Every moment of every day informs them—reinforces or depletes them. Changes their character.

It's guaranteed that these minds will, eventually, change. Who survives to bare this change remains to be seen.

Keep in mind, also, that Israel vs. Gaza is in some ways just a proxy war between US/Europe and Iran/Russia who support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Ideological differences, frankly, are only a surface patina on the same old economic games.

Lastly, consider a third framing: that Israel/Gaza is only the hottest segment of a conflict that encircles the globe: the border between imperial powers and colonized peoples, like US/Mexico etc. Borders, passports, and citizenship are a worldwide system of privileges and protections that Westphalian Nationstates collude to maintain.

I'm not sure what ideologies you refer to. Islam and Judaism? Not really relevant to the discussion, I don't think.

> One must destroy the other for peace to exist - this is the nature of war.

Wars generally don't end with genocide.

Conquered people don't cease to exist. Worst case they are subjugated, but these days they just assimilated/absorbed.

The alternative is perpetual war, or some sort of compromise.

If Hamas surrendered unconditionally tomorrow, what would Israel do?

From Israel's perspective, Palestinians are a problem. Long term, they have a few options:

1) Give them their own state. This is difficult for quite many reasons, and Israel (by which I mean the current government) doesn't want that

2) Give them full citizenship rights equal to Israel's citizens, make sure they have a proper minority representation, and let them participate in the regular political processes. The current government certainly doesn't want that, and I have no idea what part of the Palestinians would want that.

3) Continue to treat them as sub-human, and deal with the consequences of the hatred that fosters. That seems to have been the "strategy" before October last year.

4) Try to exterminate or exile them, or at least decimating them to such an extend that the problem becomes smaller.

Since 1) and 2) are (again, from the perspective of Isreal's government) undesirable, and 3) has stopped working, 4) seems to be their current strategy.

You can't kill 2.1 million people by bombing them.

That's why Israel has systematically taken out every hospital in Gaza: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdd25d9vp2qo

Has blocked and sabotaged aid at every turn, including bombing UN food trucks: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158746

And when allied countries got too uneasy about them just blocking all aid trucks at the border, they set up their own aid organization to trickle out nominal amounts of food while they take pot shots at people desperate enough to show up: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74ne108e4vo

They didn't just make this up as they go, presumably the plans have been sitting around for a long time waiting for a suitable moment.

Netanyahu has privately expressed preference for terrorist Hamas over political Fatah, and Israel has propped up those terrorist groups in the past (this is well documented not a conspiracy theory).

Why? Because Netanyahu and a good chunk of the Israeli population want the Palestinians to cease to exist and its territory to be part of Israel. An opponent that wants to achieve its goals through political action and appeals to the international community meant that there was a risk of Israel being dragged into a two-state commitment. A terrorist group attacking civilians gives those hardliners a perpetual excuse to go to war.

In short: the answer is yes, that appears to be precisely the point: to prevent any possibility of peaceful reconciliation and drive the Palestinians to eventual expulsion or eradication.

The perpetual fight is mutually beneficial to all. The extremist right would not have been able to claim large swaths of land had they not had the air cover to raze Gaza. Now there is serious talk of going back into Gaza. And talk by Trump to turn it into a seaside resort has the settler movement giddy.

> Israel's intended end game seem to be to make Gaza completely uninhabitable, so that the Palestinians are forced to leave

In a context where hamas declared (multiple times) that they will repeat October 7 forever, how is this a bad outcome for Israel? Why it doesn't make sense to you that Western states are supporting Israel? It would be baffling (for me at least) if any state in the world would deal with terrorists by capitulating to them.

Considering the discourse of the past two years and personal experience, I am afraid to say that yes, those are most likely very real people who very openly ignore 50% of the context and generalize their hate towards a whole population of a single country. In addition (and that's from, sadly, day to day experience) those are the same people who extrapolate their hate on one particular ethnical group.

I would have expected HN readers at least check on some context before starting beating their drums. Haaretz is a propaganda outlet that has been stocking the fire under everything related to Israel, for decades now.

> I don't know if they're state actors, or if they're real people with those beliefs

Both. And also trolls, and these days GenAI.

Some say "Never again means now", with the flag of Israel, and no sense of irony or hypocrisy. I wonder if any say the same words with the flag of Palestine? Hamas is still also genocidal, with their leaders giving similar comments about all Jews as the current Israel coalition members give about Palestinians.

When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. The IDF and Hamas are the elephants, and there are many innocent civilians (metaphorically grass) suffering because of it. The supremely dominant power of the IDF means the suffering grass is overwhelmingly on one side of a border that Israel doesn't recognise, but there are innocents everywhere.

I don't have any answers. I have learned to recognise this kind of mindset, but I cannot find words to act as levers to change those minds.

The accusations of genocide were brought by South Africa, not the ICJ which hasn't made any finding on the matter yet.

I doubt you will believe even if you see a video. You will probably think it is fake.

Spoken by the Athenians and resulting in a war that, as Thucydides's audience knew quite well, Athens lost big-time.

Which actually holds up quite well for everybody who loves to bring up that quote: realism aka "we shouldn't face the consequences of our actions" is the obvious rallying cry for people facing the consequences of their actions.

It is descriptive, but not prescriptive.

If neither side can agree on peace, if neither side has objectives which the other will accept, if neither side is willing to compromise; What other outcome is possible in terms of realpolitik?

It is upsetting to observe. We all want better for humanity.

When power, not justice, guides actions and policies, yes.

To be honest, I do prefer drug dealers over Hamas islamists in general. And where exactly is the proof the gangs are connected to ISIS?

"The basis for Lieberman’s allegation of ties to IS was unclear."

It is easy to throw dirt and hope something sticks, but the main thing speaking against his group seems Netanjahu's support in my opinion. But otherwise I don't see the scandal so much here. Especially not compared to the scandal of intentionally targeting civilian population and indiscriminate killing of starving people like the article states.

Edit: But I just read

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

And well, that is indeed better to show who we are dealing with, ruthless criminals who loot and shoot a UN aid convoy for profit.

Sourced articles like these are good and further proof that Israel is a psychopathic state and society. But what's odd is to depict is as "surprising" or even shocking when the same state has been carpet bombing civilian, including women and children for 16 months straight, causing what is estimated at 300 000 deaths, committing every single atrocity or infringement to the international law possible, including targeting medics, journalists, using starvation as a weapon of war, bragging on it on social media, having politicians incite to eradicate the remaining part of the Gaza population, and I could go on and on with nameless atrocities. So just to put things in perspective, this article depicts a horrible incident, but it is entirely in line with the rest of the Israeli policy, and unfortunately pales in comparison with the ongoing large-scale massacre.

Israel can't even sustain a hot war with Iran, with US backing, despite assassinating dozens of Iranian top brass. China represents 10-20 Irans.

China (and Turkey, Arab states) is more or less content to sit and watch USA destroy itself domestically and internationally over the failed Zionist project. "Do nothing, win."

One could make the argument that it's happening right now. Russia+North Korea, Iran, Hamas, they are all intertwined. And then on the other side you could say Ukraine, US, Israel.

Thought experiment: if the Israel/Gaza conflict didn't pop off, would the US presidency be the same right now? How did that change affect the Russia/Ukraine conflict? Etc.