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Notes -
High Civilian death tolls according to whom.
I have such a hard time determining anything accurate here b/c both sides have major pressure to lie. And very early on Hamas got caught in an apparently blatant lie about a Rocket hitting a hospital, leading to civilian casualties. Note that Gazan authorities ALSO misstated the number of injured and dead!
So now I have to take all their claims with a veritable pound of salt.
Whoops.
And of course the October 7 event was specifically a bunch of Hamas warriors attacking, massacring and kidnapping civilians. So I'm pretty inclined to say "A pox on both your houses" for the duration of the conflict. Yes, I am aware that U.S. tax dollars and weapons are streaming to the Israeli side of the fight.
Finally, the incidents I CAN generally verify include a dude in the U.S. Setting Jews on Fire and another shooting two unarmed Jewish Embassy staffers.
Don't know of any incidents in the U.S. going the other way.
So these Hamas rockets that have barely been able to kill anyone leveled an entire hospital during Israeli bombing. Seems like something AIPAC cooked up.
As for October 7 Israel was engaging in military operations against Gaza, they had murdered hundreds of civilians and taken thousands of hostages.
There war a roughly 50% civilian death rate on the Israeli side. Is 1 civilian death for every military death acceptable or not? Why isn't it terror when Israel kills more than one civilian for each military casualty?
According.
to.
Whom.
There were ample photographs of the rocket impact site
It didn't even hit the hospital proper. By most appearances, it landed in a parking lot and set a bunch of cars on fire. Even the trees in the immediate surrounding area are still intact.
It was the Gaza side that was alleging it was a mass casualty event at all.
So yes, this absolutely looks like a Hamas rocket flew off course, set things on fire, and Hamas decided to cast blame away from themselves since this would inevitably make them look like idiots.
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If you're suggesting that the war in Gaza is a genocide because half of all deaths in Gaza were civilians rather than combatants, that would imply that virtually every modern war was a genocide, as many wars had a vastly higher ratio of civilian to combatant deaths (as high as 9:1 in some cases). If you're happy to call the Korean war, the Gulf war and the 2003 invasion of Iraq genocides, all well and good, just as long as we're consistent.
There is also a point of comparing Gaza to other cases of dense urban warfighting where the millions-scale civilian population is stuck in the dense urban area. There aren't many other examples, but in the closest analogs (such as the fall of the ISIS caliphate), the casualties are pretty analogous when controlled for time.
Turns out, urban fighting is dangerous for attacker, defender, and bystander alike. Who would have guessed?
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