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‘Entire family gone’: Israel kills 250 Palestinians in 24 hours
(www.aljazeera.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I don't think I remember hearing about Russians bombing Ukrainian refugee camps (though I could have missed it).
Seems like Putin sees civilians as an inconvenience that get in the way of his goals. For Netanyahu, it seems as though killing the civilians is the goal. I would say that the latter is objectively worse (though they are both pieces of shit).
Russia intentionally bombed a ton of civilian targets with zero military value. It's weird that you don't remember this. There's even a lengthy Wikipedia article specifically about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_civilians_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
Yeah, I seem to remember a lot of cruise missiles hitting apartments and schools.
That's exactly what came immediately to mind for me as well.
Now that you mention the apartments bombings, I do remember seeing footage of that. You guys are right
Yeah I wish Bill Clinton wouldn't have done that
Not to mention eradicating close to the entirety of the military-aged male population in Donetsk and Luhansk by forced conscription.
I might grant Putin though that he's only doing a cultural genocide, that is, the attacks on civilian infrastructure have the actual military goal of breaking resistance -- which is known to generally not work, hence why it's a war crime. He's perfectly fine with people staying alive as long as they bend the knee and become Russian.
I think it’d be a war crime even if it generally worked.
That's the pacifist answer but no that's not how war crimes work: The rules of war aren't about avoiding bloodshed, they're about avoiding pointless bloodshed, pointless from the point of winning an armed conflict, that is. If you can shorten a conflict and spare millions of lives by killing a couple thousands of civilians, well, a couple thousand is less than millions. War is erm dispassionate like that, a hard-nosed calculus.
Hence why you also get rules like the ban on hollow-point bullets: They're more likely to kill than to disable. Killing combatants, however, is less effective at binding up enemy resources and thus not a sound military strategy, using them means that you care more about killing people than winning the engagement. If, OTOH, the enemy started killing all their wounded soldiers instead of expending medical resources that reasoning would cease to apply and you'd be justified using hollow points. (Which are btw in ample use by police forces because they ricochet much less, leading to less injured bystanders, but you generally don't have bystanders on the battlefield. Similarly tear gas is allowed for police use but outlawed for war because it could get confused with a nasty chemical attack very easily, possibly leading to a very nasty escalation when the attacked force responds in kind. Also for the record there's plenty of legitimate uses of white phosphorous, tracer rounds and smoke screens all use it, the banned use is as an incendiary weapon anywhere close to civilians but that's not special to white phosphorous, that's a general thing about incendiary weapons).
Russia is bombing no less indiscriminately than Israel, it's just a much larger theater of war, their aiming capabilities suck and their shit gets shot down a lot before ever reaching anything.
They do the exact same thing day in day out. Taking out a cluster of civilians is probably worth an extra ration of vodka or even worse, a promotion, at this point.
Two wars of terror, if you want. Irony is stone cold dead at this point.
[citation needed]
Do you really need citations over russian war crimes in Ukraine?
Okay.
Wikipedia has a nice summary, feel free to browse the sources yourself.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
..and just because I'm nice, here's a little something about the booze, which really was just me joking a bit, but sadly there's some truth there too. From The Hill:
"..The British Ministry of Defense identified heavy drinking as “particularly detrimental to combat effectiveness” of Russian troops, significantly contributing to the high death rates.
The use of non-alcoholic drugs by combatants, such as opium, heroin, cannabis and amphetamine, has historically been equally widespread, and the Russian military today is no exception."
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4088951-russia-is-losing-in-ukraine-because-of-its-army-of-addicts/
Yes exactly, that was basically my point, that Israel is actively attacking civilians almost exclusively (it feels like to me anyway).
If that were actually true, deaths would be several orders of magnitude higher. They have the munitions and capability to kill significantly more people.
Bottom line is that anytime you conduct war in a dense urban area, or conduct a ground assault in a populated area, civilian casualties will be high.
Bombing refugee camps, hospitals, schools and just plain carpet bombing districts does not seem like the IDF gives a shit about trying to minimize civilian casualties.
We have tons of footage of Russians and Ukrainians engaging each other in battle. There's no such footage from IDF, and whatever we got from Hamas looks like guerrilla fighters doing hit and run strikes on mostly armor. You know why? Because Israel is not engaged with "Palestine" in a war. Nor with Hamas. Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in their own ethnostate.
You can say that - but seemingly also can’t explain why the death count isn’t stratospherically higher if that was their goal.
Asymmetric warfare always sucks for civilians. The whole point is knowing who a civilian and who’s a combatant is intentionally difficult.
Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms, because they’re terrorists and not a government or regular army.
You also can't prove how much higher the death toll would actually be, because we're all just speculating fools. You are using an argumentative fallacy, which is "you can't explain why this hypothetical thing isn't occurring" when it doesn't really have to be occurring. Can't remember which that is. Red herring? Straw man? Ah, I can't remember.
Anyway, we're going by what we're seeing, which is the bombing of innocent civilians. Terrible, terrible state of the world right now.
I can’t say exactly how many people they could kill if they were targeting civilians, but I can with certainty say it would be significantly more than have currently died.
They could drop many more bombs and shell the entire strip for weeks. These aren’t hypotheticals - we know they have the armament to do that.
There are around 20,000 people dead - out of almost 800,000 in Gaza. If their goal was a maximizing death, they could have killed significantly more. They certainly have the ammunition and means to do it - and that’s not a hypothetical.
You're phrasing it too black-and-white. If the "goal was maximizing death" they'd just nuke the site, right? But doing so has other consequences. It's probably much more complex than that. You can't just go all in even if you have the means, even if it accomplishes one of your goals. It's obviously the goal of both sides to exterminate the other, as they openly say so, but there's a process if you want to accomplish your other goals, whatever they might be. Or not cause unnecessary unrelated problems to the land itself if they want to conquer it, etc.
Sure - but I’m saying they can do it without nukes. They could have easily ratcheted up to 30,000 or 50,000 with conventional weapons - they could actually carpet bomb the strip.
My point is if they were trying to maximize death they could have kill many more people indiscriminately.
Assymetrical warfare in a densely populated area always is going to have a lot of civilian casualties.
Please, would you explain to me what your analysis would be of their actual point of the war, then? Both sides have explicitly claimed that they want the other side exterminated. That's what I see as the point of the war from both sides at face value. But if you know more, please educate me!
If you otherwise agree with that, then surely you could agree that there's a lot of strategy going into warfare, and that maximizing death doesn't have to mean that it has to happen as quickly as possible, because that might not be as efficient, or it might damage things that they value as spoils. Infrastructure, buildings, fertile land... "Maximizing death" doesn't have to be the same as "having one of the goals be to exterminate the people". Because they might have other goals beside that one, e.g. taking over the land, as they have been doing already.
Their stated goals are to rescue hostages and regime change by eliminating Hamas. If the goal is to kill maximum civilians they’re doing a really poor job.
If you just want the land, you just need to move people forcibly or buy it (it’s not like they’re particularly wealthy) and a plan to keep it. If your goal is genocide which so many people suggest, you kinda have to kill them no?
This is part of my problem with all the reactionary takes here - they aren’t consistent with what we’re actually seeing behavior wise.
Again, you're focusing on it having to be executed in minimum time, and on that being a single goal, but as you say, there are more goals, and some of the goals may need to be accomplished before the others (like rescuing hostages), hence it not happening immediately or... as fast as you personally expect, or something. I also think some goals could be political bullshit, no offense. Just going by how racist both sides are towards each other, and hearing them both say the other side needs to be exterminated... 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Fair enough. There’s a lot of animosity there. But it feels like all of the reactions here are focused on calling it and framing it as a genocide at all costs.
Your downvotes remind me of the Reddit hive mind. But you are obviously 100% correct and anyone over the age of about 25 knows it.
It has been almost 3 months since the Hamas terrorist attack. If Israel was trying to kill as many civilians as possible, as you said, the death toll would be orders of magnitude higher.
So many people commenting here have no sense of historical perspective at all. I see people using words like "astounding" and "world record" and "genocide" to describe the death toll in this conflict. It's hard to know where to start with that level of historical ignorance.
I should know better than to get sucked into this. But you’re right. I’ve been repeatedly told the most complex and longest lasting conflict in history is “simple”. Should stick to Israel bad / Palestine good, communists good / capitalists bad, no one likes nuance or shades of gray here.
They’re wildly different wars from a population density per square mile perspective.
So maybe 2,000 pound bombs weren't the right weapon?
There are no good weapons for densely populated areas. Civilian casualties will always be high in populated urban areas unfortunately.
There are better weapons though. Also, shooting people who are trying to evacuate through your lines is generally considered bad. Compressing the population into a smaller area that you're using 2,000 pound bombs in is also bad.
Nobody is expecting zero civilian causalities, but this is obviously the most inept army or a professional army conducting a genocide.
But if it were a professional army conducting a genocide as you allege, wouldn't they be much better at it? This is where I keep coming back to.
I would agree with "professional army that is ranking military value significantly higher than minimizing civilian casualties" but that isn't genocide.
They don't have to be doing it systematically to be doing it. And participation would still likely vary between units. It's an extremely difficult thing to do psychologically. So some units are pulling all the military age men out to shoot and others are just shooting whoever they happen to see that's not in an IDF uniform. Both are genocidal acts.
OK.... so any war crime is genocide now? It really feels like we're broadening the definition substantially. And don't get me wrong - war crimes are awful and should be prosecuted. But calling them all genocide feels.... dilutive to systematic extermination of a people.
Taken alone, no. But those are just two examples, of many to choose from, to show how genocide doesn't necessarily mean trains and ovens.
Especially when you've cornered that population in an open air prison before bombing them.
Egypt could open their gates if they wanted to.
So Israel can displace the whole population of Palestine? That's genocide. You're pro genocide.
First, I’m not pro anything. I didn’t say anyone should do something. I said there are other parties who could do something.
Second, displacement isn’t genocide by any definition I’ve heard. And again, to be extra explicit, I’m not saying they should be displaced, or that it would be right to displace anyone.
But you can’t call it an open air prison and then call me a genocide supporter when I point out there’s another door to the “prison”?
Oh, okay. The displacement part is just a crime against humanity according to UN definition, the rest of the genocide is covered by "Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"
fr Israel is worse than Russia