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Why shouldn't Hamas leadership be bombed wherever they may be? They're the leaders of a terrorist organization. The US takes out terrorists wherever they may be (or, works with local authorities to get them first). But, when local authorities are siding with the terrorists, we go in there and do it ourselves. October 7th was Israel's 9/11 - we went and got bin Laden in Pakistan, without dealing with the Pakistani government. Why shouldn't Israel do the same thing? I say - kill all the Hamas leadership, and leave the random Palestinian citizens alone.

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Let's imagine that a political opposition leader from Russia were to take refuge in the US. Now imagine that Russia performed a "surgical strike" bombing in the US to kill what they viewed as a terrorist leader. Can you imagine the outrage that would occur? That's exactly the situation that Qatar has just experienced.

It's an act of war. One country bombing another country means they are at war.

Now, the power dynamics in this region mean that they'll probably get away with it, and Qatar is more likely to let it slip than not, but it's still morally reprehensible.

But in your example, the unstated premise is that the opposition leader is not in fact a terrorist, so his killing is wrong.

In the case of Hamas, they are in fact terrorists. So the analogy fails.

No, that's not the point. Whether someone is a terrorist is subjective. Russia could (and likely would) define their opposition leader as a terrorist.

My point is that if Russia were to conduct a bombing on US soil, regardless of who it was targeting, the response would be severe and the reasonable onlookers would not blame the US for being "upset" about it. Yet that is exactly what Israel has done to Qatar.

There is in fact international consensus on what constitutes a terrorist organization. Hamas, ISIS, Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Houtis, Boko Haram and so on, very clearly quality.

Sure, China or Russia can and will label political opponents "terrorists" to justify persecution against them. Their goal is to destroy the international consensus, so that "terrorist" becomes a purely subjective label. By equating Israel's bombing of an actual terrorist group with Russia's persecution of a fake one, you are supporting Russia in this effort.

Instead, you should equate Israel killing Hamas leaders with the US killing Bin Laden, coalition forces bombing ISIS in Iraq, France bombing islamists in Mali, etc.

"Terrorist" is just this century's n-word. It has been applied wilfully by racists towards their chosen out-group victims in order to justify their atrocities.

There was only one bin Laden, and we didn't use missiles for that one.

Well because Israel asked them to come to Qatar for mediation. From Turkey.

Where they can't attack because it is a NATO member.

It was duplicitous move that not only put an end to any good faith negotiations, but also attacke a mediator in a negotiation. The hostages are dead and the Israeli military killed them.

> Why shouldn't Hamas leadership be bombed wherever they may be?

Israel wouldn't be nearly as criticised if they're restricted themselves to surgical strikes on Hamas. Hell, they could have done exactly what they did until hostages started being exchanged, and then switched to surgical strikes, and I suspect--while folks would grumble--leaders would have better things to focus on.

Surgical strikes is mostly a myth presented to make the war on terrorism look better than it is. The US military defined anyone killed above the age of 15 to be a terrorist regardless of situation, and thus by definition had almost zero civilian deaths. It was one of those things that got leaked through the war logs.

The war on terror is estimated to have killed 4,5 million people. Surgical strikes is not a good description for that, nor was the war on terror a good model for how to behave in a war.

> Surgical strikes is mostly a myth presented to make the war on terrorism look better than it is

Even if they are, which I don't grant, myths matter in the fog of war.

More pointedly, surgical strikes would mean serially decapitating Hamas and destroying its infrastructure from the sky. It would preclude messing with aid flows. (Even if Hamas steals all the food, you can't turn most food into weapons. And Hamas amassing fighters they have to feed isn't a strategic threat to Israel in the way their ports and tunnels are.)

> war on terror is estimated to have killed 4,5 million people

One, source? Two, the U.S. obviously didn't prosecute a surgical war on the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We invaded, occupied and attempted to rebuild two nation states.

> the U.S. obviously didn't prosecute a surgical war on the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We invaded, occupied and attempted to rebuild two nation states.

Which is why holding Israel to a higher standard than we hold ourselves is odd, to say the least.

the atlantic article from almost exactly year ago: https://archive.is/wKScw

Brett McGurk would push back against the complaints, invoking his stint overseeing the siege of Mosul during the Obama administration, as the U.S. attempted to drive ISIS from northern Iraq: We flattened the city. There’s nothing left. What standard are you holding these Israelis to?

It was an argument bolstered by a classified cable sent by the U.S. embassy in Israel in late fall. American officials had embedded in IDF operating centers, reviewing its procedures for ordering air strikes. The cable concluded that the Israeli standards for protecting civilians and calculating the risks of bombardment were not so different from those used by the U.S. military.

When State Department officials chastised them over the mounting civilian deaths, Israeli officials liked to make the very same point. Herzl Halevi, the IDF chief of staff, brought up his own education at an American war college. He recalled asking a U.S. general how many civilian deaths would be acceptable in pursuit of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist leader of the anti-American insurgency in Iraq. The general replied, I don’t even understand the question. As Halevi now explained to the U.S. diplomats, Everything we do, we learned at your colleges.

Well, one huge difference is that the UN was allowed to set up camps for refugees during the Mosul offensive.

In Gaza, people are just herded from one kill box to another, back and forth.

i believe official un position about setting any refugee camps in gaza it's that it will be forced displacement of population. or something like this. going back to days when Israel setup camps for evacuation of population from Rafah.

I don't remember UN asking to setup refugee camps or helping them to evacuate out of war zone

and you ignored the middle, which says that IDF using same procedures like USA (and in other words entire NATO)

whose fault is that though? It's not the Israeli's fault the surrounding countries are blocking refugees and it's certainly not their fault that the terrorist's strategy depends on a large civilian population acting as a shield. It's a rock and a hard place situation because the whole area pretty clearly needs to be pacified from anyone sane living in Israel's perspective, as the raping, pillaging and murder orchestrated against israel that started this latest campaign can not be allowed to happen again and from the Hamas position their whole goal is to exist and cause atrocities against the Israelis until they leave. This all seems like a very measured response given the reality of the situation.

Do you accept Washington post as source? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terro...

That is the Post reporting on a report. Do you know who wrote the report?

To be clear, the estimate doesn’t sound incredulous. I’m just curious to see how they are estimating.

hamas sits in estimated 350-450 miles of tunnels below cities. deepest known tunnels are ~230ft deep. entrances to tunnels are in buildings

how do you see surgical strikes on this ? and what kind of munition ?

or what is surgical strike when you have hamas team with rpg in the window of the building ?

If the US-led coalition had limited themselves to surgical strikes against ISIS, Iraq would still be a terrorist islamist state.

If the US hadn't funded and armed ISIS and Al'Qaeda, we wouldn't have terrorists to deal with in the first place.

Funny, elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45315574) you argue that "'terrorist' is the new n-word", basically an illegitimate term used as cover for racism. Yet here you are, using that term yourself, to score points in a debate.

So which is? Is terrorism a made-up word used by racists? Or is terrorism a legitimate word to designate bad people, and the US is to blame for these bad people existing?

You think the US isn't capable of creating and supporting its own new slave classes for its own nefarious purposes?

The duplicitous ruling elite of the nation with the world's largest prison slavery population definitely has the means to create lesser classes to fight for them.

Hilarious. 9/11 was used as a false pretense for invading Iraq, killing millions, for geopolitics and oil.

Never let a good crisis go to waste they say

We have bombed their leadership. This is an entirely different war. Hamas was/is the government of Gaza. They're part of the people there, not outside it.

You're trying to fight an organization that is part of the civilian population, not above it or outside of it. And that organization is deliberately using human shields to blur the lines even further.

It's not easy to figure out who's a random Palestinian or who's going to fire a rocket into Israel five years from now. If we want to keep bombing our way to victory, that's going to continue down the road of genocide.

Humanity needs to be better than this. We need to be better than this.

I can turn anyone, including you, into "someone who will fire a rocket in 5 years". Give me US backing and I can do it in 4

Out of curiosity, how would you plan to do that?

You know nothing about me.

>I can turn anyone, including you, into "someone who will fire a rocket in 5 years". Give me US backing and I can do it in 4

Echoing OP's point, I can turn you into a person who'll fire a rocket in a year, even. Go read through B'Tselem's reports of Israel's torture camps [0] where tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians are systematically raped, murdered, and abused as a matter of state policy. By the time you undergo that from youth, with half the people in your family gone for years, imprisoned in such camps, while half the kids you grew up with have died in senseless state-sanctioned murder, you'll be ready to do something worse that firing rockets.

Of course, you'll argue, from a sheltered perspective that you wouldn't ever do something like that. So, what will you do instead of fighting back? Sue? LMAO. Protest? You'll get shot. Just focus on building a family? Your home will get demolished or bombed just because.

[0]: https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell

Turn your electricity off for days on end when someone in your country does something that other country disagrees with.

Hell, turn your fresh water off too.

Bomb your only airport into non-functioning rubble, and tell you that if you try to rebuild it, the same thing will happen. Keep that up for 20 years.

Park destroyers in your harbors to ensure nothing gets in or out of the country without their say so. Keep that up for a few decades as well.

Keep your land border effectively locked down so you can't even leave that way.

Bulldoze your neighborhood and childhood home because a rocket was suspected to be launched from nearby.

When the other kids in your neighborhood throw rocks at the armored bulldozers, watch as they have rubber bullets shot at them by an army. When they throw rocks at the army, watch as those soldiers return fire with live ammunition.

No, I know nothing about you. But don't pretend that having that as the only existence you've known is not going to make you increasingly angry and willing to fight back in any way, shape, or form, against the boot on your throat.

You left out a lot of things. You are trying to make a point. I don’t expect you to put in all the things that go against your point, but you left out so many that maybe your point is not worth making.

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