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Comment by tkel | Hacker News Reader

If I were Israel, I would have not invaded Gaza, which would have resulted in far fewer civilian casualties, and also would have ended the strikes by Hezbollah.

Also, if you look at the data on attacks by Israel against Lebanon, they are disproportionate, Israel launching 10x more airstrikes, even going so far as to level entire city blocks of apartment buildings in Beirut. I remember just on the first day of attacks by Israel against Lebanon, over 1000 civilians were killed. Also Israel refuses to vacate southern Lebanon after a ceasefire agreement, and continues to violate the ceasefire. Just in the last 24h, Israel has bombarded 4 different locations in Central Lebanon with airstrikes. If I were Israel, I would simply stop acting as a fanatic aggressor with no regard for human life.

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The military dynamics of the Israel and Hezbollah conflict are an indictment of Israeli's Gaza campaign. When Israel is clear-eyed, strategic, and effective at confronting a serious military adversary, it looks like the Hezbollah conflict: ultra-targeted rapidly disabling strikes. That Israel instead systematically leveled an entire civilian metropolitan area to combat Hamas makes the the claims about the Hezbollah strike more damning, not less.

Actually it's Hezbollah that has been practicing very targeted, military only strikes against Israel. Israel on the other hand has killed thousands of Lebanese people and displaced over a million. That's just since the Oct 7th attacks. Prior to that Israel carpet bombed Lebanon on multiple occasions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...

This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.

I don't know how far off we are on our assessment of current Israeli governance, but I'd bet it's not as far as you think we are. But I'd also guess we're wildly far apart on Hezbollah, which, along with Ansar Allah in Yemen, are some of the most amoral and illegitimate military forces on the planet.

Unfortunately, Hezbollah was, up until 2024, waging a largely PR-based war on Israel (their "puppet" adversary; their true adversary was Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, where they spilled more blood and lost more men and materiel than in every conflict they've had with Israel over the last 20 years), and people have --- for understandable reasons --- antipathy towards Israeli leadership. So Hezbollah, like the Houthis, have a western cheering section, made up almost entirely of people who have chosen not to understand anything about what makes either organization tick.

You can come up with lots of military atrocities committed by Israel, because Israel has in the Gaza conflict committed many atrocities. None of it will legitimize the IRGC's Shia-supremacist totalitarian occupation of Lebanon or their genocidal occupation of Yemen. The civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the real military fronts in the last 2 decades) claimed an order of magnitude more lives than anything Israel did, which is truly saying something given the horrifying costs of Israel's botched, reckless, amoral handling of Gaza.

I've been following this very closely from the start. Hezbollah was targeting radio towers and IDF personnel. Hezbollah denied that it was their rocket that hit the Druze and they certainly didn't have any other attacks that matched that type of target. Again, it's well documented that Israel has caused orders of magnitude more civilian damage and casualties than Hezbollah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...

> On 4 December 2024, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported that since 7 October 2023, Israeli attacks killed 4,047 people, including 316 children and 790 women, and injured 16,638 others

You haven't responded to any claim I've made other than to advance a claim that Hezbollah, which fired tens of thousands of mostly unguided rockets into Israel, did not in fact kill 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights.

Our premises may be too far apart to usefully discuss this. The core of my argument (the comparative military and civilian body counts in Syria and Yemen) aren't going to be easy to refute by appeals to Hezbollah's PR. (You may also have responded to a by-2-minutes-or-so earlier version of my comment; we may be responding to each other in too-close succession and talking past each other.)

Unguided doesn't mean unaimed. Here's an example (of many) of the types of attacks Hezbollah had been executing: https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1710938611858780314

Edit: I'm now throttled from posting but I was able to go back and find more video of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel military facilities. I think people should watch these and judge for themselves:

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1752035071047926029

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1790471234867568905

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1756031325264318682

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1743565825771032895

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1810011590118305895

* https://x.com/ME_Observer_/status/1791216213785268522

You don't want to miss a step holding Israel to account. I'm not interested in pushing back on you about that. But to accomplish that, you're defending Hezbollah. Hezbollah is indefensible. If you want to keep hashing out why, I'm willing to keep talking about it, but I suspect this isn't a productive conversation.

You all will figure out it's all about the Jews eventually.

There's a reason why there are still crypto Jews in Iberia.

All you have to do is listen to actual Arab discourse from people in the area (or Arab protesters in Arabic in the West). Where they insist repeatedly that's it's about the Jews.

All the talk about White Supremacy (Guess who calls black people Abeed?), Settler colonialism, genocide etc are just earworms for Western ears

>This is obviously false. Hezbollah was indiscriminately firing artillery into Israel and managed to kill, among other people, 12 Druze soccer players in the Golan Heights.

That is very indiscriminate. They targeted Israel but the rockets landed in Syria. But some how managed to hurt Israelis.

Israel has killed at least 83 people since the ceasefire agreement in Lebanon. They are terrorists.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/28/how-many-people-has...

I'm not interested in litigating this claim because it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it helps, you can be as angry at Israel as you'd like without getting much flak from me (I'm angry too), just as long as we don't get to the "enemy-of-my-enemy" stuff that legitimizes Hezbollah.

I don't think "terrorist" is a useful label for either side. It wasn't "terrorism" when Hezbollah besieged Madaya; they did that as a military force.

As a US citizen I have absolutely no problem with Hezbollah. Why would I? They're no threat to me and indeed, are fighting people who are a threat to me.

> If I were Israel, I would have not invaded Gaza

During the war Israel was attacked from the territories of Gaza, Lebanon, the west bank, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen. All of these were unprovoked, except maybe Iran. All by parties openly calling for Israel's destruction.

Gaza had invaded Israel, killing 1200 and kidnapping 250.

What do you think the above attackers would do if Israel showed there was effectively no retaliation for doing something like that? You are asking Israel to commit suicide.

> If I were Israel, I would simply stop acting as a fanatic aggressor

Israel was attacked first by each and every party above (except maybe Iran), beginning with the Hamas attack.

> with no regard for human life.

In nearly every bombing in Lebanon, and most bombings in Gaza, Israel preceded the attacks with leaflet, social media posts, and phone calls calling people to leave the area. It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history. How does that show no regard for human life?

Israel has been attacking Palestinians and its neighbors since its inception. They are the aggressors and always have been.

> It has achieved the best civilian-combatant death ratio of any urban war in modern history.

False.

The Yom Kippur and Six Day war were instigated by Israel?

Yes. Those are downstream from The Balfour Agreement and Nakba.

That's nonsense, do you know what Nakba means?

And I don't mean it's modern reinterpretation

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

I didn't ask you for a link.

I'm talking about what you think it is

I think it’s exactly what is stated in Wikipedia. A brutal crime of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, land theft and genocide.

The Intifada has come to Bondi beach

Roughly 4x more civilians were killed every day in Gaza.

Like it's going to stop there.

It's not about the numbers of people killed anywhere.

The issue with people like you is Jews exist.

And a big tell is the attacking Jews everywhere.

It's always been about finishing what Hitler started. Doesn't matter if you're an anti-Zionist secular Jew. Your time will eventually come if this isn't stopped. Israel isn't the matter, dead Palestinians aren't the matter. It's the fact Yahud exist

No, it's about genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Again orders of magnitude more Palestinians have been killed by Jewish supremacists. Really strange when the aggressor pretends to be the victim.

> It's not about the numbers of people killed anywhere.

Palestinians are human and it's disgraceful to discount their lives like that. Jewish lives are not worth more than Palestinian lives.

That's some bullshit.

>genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid

This is Western nonsense. The locals have problems, just like you do with Jews. They say "Yahud" not whatever you learnt in your cesspool of hate.

I've seen people like you. Support for people like Assad, Putin and Khamenei is never far from you and your friends.

Palestinians are mostly Muslim Arabs, And Isreal is surrounded by them.

The difference in lives lost is the value Israelis place on theirs and the disparity in technology the Israelis have. The Jews prevented the attempted genocide that you call Nabka by killing more than they were killed. Not standing passive like you'd like them to be. Sheep brought before the slaughter slab. The lucky ones left alive paying Jizya.

I'll give thier lives as much value as they give thiers and others.

From the news today:

75% of comments on a popular Palestinian Facebook news site denounce Ahmed Al Ahmed as a traitor for stopping the Bondi terrorists.

The aggressors are the racists who don't want other ethnic groups to stand. Maronites, Yazidis, Copts, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, Druze.

Grinded into one homogeneous paste by force.

Jew hatred is in your heart.

And that's all there is to it.

The Jew hater doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence

> Israel has been attacking Palestinians and its neighbors since its inception. They are the aggressors and always have been.

False.

See? I can play that trick too.

I have sources, do you?

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

I just skimmed through your comment history. I'm going to take a cue from tptacek and say that this isn't going to be productive. Good day.

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