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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   29920 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #2

This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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A Gazan hospital has been hit, allegedly by a missile, allegedly by an Israeli missile: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/least-500-victims-israeli-air-strike-hospital-gaza-health-ministry-2023-10-17/

Here is why this seems incredibly unlikely to me:

  • Israel gains nothing from this.

  • Israel loses a lot from this.

  • Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc. whatever amalgamation of actors here are opposing Israel have demonstrated that they are willing to strike their own people.

  • Hamas etc. gain a lot from this (politically).

The narrative around this is already forming and I suspect that we will never be free of knowing that Israel for sure bombed a hospital (maybe they did).

This will be a major inflection point in this war. Causalities are approaching 1000 people (started at 500, now at 800)

Edit: here’s also why I’m so suspicious of this. If it’s true that Israel bombed this hospital, it basically evaporates any amount of good will I had for them. The 10/7 Hamas attacks were terrible. This is just as bad. Pull our aircraft carriers back, no aid, nothing. Still send in some bad hombres to get our citizens out, but other than that Israel is on its own, and I don’t want to hear any ridiculous moralizing from any us politician ever again.

Edit2: There are allegedly demonstrations happening in several countries now. Extremely dynamic news environment. Nobody knows wtf is going on. Israel is starting to get their narrative together about the cause of this, but it's way too late for them to get ahold of it.

Edit3: allegedly a video of both the initial rocket launch, as well as the explosion: https://twitter.com/TheInsiderPaper/status/1714379242983846126

This matches up with the very first video of the rocket hitting the hospital, and answers why the guy filming was filming (because there were a bunch of rockets going overhead)

It doesn’t look anything like the blast of a Palestinian missile. Israel gains the infliction of terror on a population seeking shelter that they want to displace as much and as fast as possible. Hamas has never shown an interest in bombing their own hospitals (in this scenario they want the population to stay in Gaza), but Israel has attacked hospitals before and recently attacked a border crossing.

The discourse coming out of Israel has been extremist lately, with Netanyahu calling this a battle between “the children of light and the children of darkness”.

You claim Hamas wants their population to stay in Gaza. I ask you why do they want that?

Because they are using them as human shields.

Bingo

Because if the population leaves then Israel will be able to increase their bombing and displace them permanently

Yep. Hamas wants human shields.

It doesn’t look anything like the blast of a Palestinian missile.

why?

So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters. Then they decide to throw a missile at a hospital and kill 1500+ civilians at the same time, because? If the response is to hasten civilian departure / ethnic cleansing, then there’s a whole escalation hierarchy that doesn’t involve that level of bad press.

So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters.

Considering the counterfactual...

Over 12,000 Hamas rockets have been fired in the past 15 years, killing a total of 33 Israelis. What are the chances that a single "malfunctioning" Hamas rocket killed 800+ people? It happened to fall on a weapons cache? What are the chances of that?

It seems more likely this is the case of a weapon working extremely effectively as it was engineered. That means the two most likely possibilities are a Hamas false flag or Israeli strike... Betting markets seem to buy into the Israeli story, I can't wrap my mind around the unlikelihood of a rocket with such a poor mortality track record malfunctioning and then hitting what was possibly the most vulnerable space in Northern Gaza...

Presumably a rocket just fired is still full of fuel. The aftermath pictures don't show much blast damage, instead it burned out.

What are the chances that a single "malfunctioning" Hamas rocket killed 800+ people?

what are the chances that Hamas is lying that 800+ people were killed by this strike?

Yeah, the blast zone doesn't look large enough for hundreds of casualties.

The only reason Israeli casualties are so low is the Iron Dome, which obviously doesn’t defend Gaza, though.

The “surgical” strikes have already killed journalists and innocent civilians. But also: are you sure there will be bad press? We will have to wait and see what kind of propaganda Israel cooks up. Already they posted on Twitter, then deleted, a video “proving” that it was Hamas who launched the attacks.

Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?

Track record.

I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?

There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.

I acknowledge that this is now the official narrative, but if it's true where did the corpses come from?

Edit to Add: If you as the "Jew Defender" want to argue that the Jews staged the whole thing make that argument, but make it properly.

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There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".

It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.

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I am not aware of that and still feel that some babies were beheaded, so idk, update accordingly.

At least one young child was beheaded.

I thought it was 40 children killed and it seems like at least one child was in fact beheaded? Have you seen the footage? I thought the kid burnt alive while still holding the teddy bear was pretty bad imho.

I guess this got removed from the news cycle once it became obviously absurd: https://theintercept.com/2023/10/11/israel-hamas-disinformation/

If you're going to claim that Hamas' strikes against Israel on Oct 7th are all "disinformation" I gotta ask, where did the corpses come from?

Did they actually produce the 40 beheaded baby corpses? Maybe they turned up since the above article was written and I missed it.

This is getting to be Alex Jones and Sandy Hooks level denial

Did they actually produce the 40 beheaded baby corpses? I may have missed it in which case I retract my comment.

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Islamic extremists absolutely would do that. These same ones shot up a whole music festival and murdered innocent children and took toddlers as hostages. But we are supposed to believe killing babies is too far? There is almost no amount of savagery by Islamic extremists that should shock you at this point, especially after ISIS, but here we are I guess.

It's fair to withhold judgment as I'm sure we'll get more information. But the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty shows they are capable of engaging in apparently insane behavior and then getting away with it with implausible and disproven denials.

Just a note for the "Israel wouldn't do something with so much political downside" perspective.

Israel gains the infliction of terror on a population seeking shelter that they want to displace as much and as fast as possible.

There are many ways Israel could do this that don't involve something quite so brazen, and without this much political downside.

Maybe they overestimated their mastery of the propaganda engine? https://twitter.com/Seamus_Malek/status/1714369464823857604

No propagandist thinks bombing hospitals is smart, whatever kool aid they’re drinking.

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