The Israeli rescue service Zaka says its paramedics removed more than 260 bodies from a music festival that came under attack by Hamas militants.
The total figure of bodies found is expected to be higher, as other paramedic teams were also working in the area and Zaka added that the bodies “haven’t all been collected yet”.
Early on Saturday morning, Hamas targeted Nova music festival, a techno rave in the desert near the border with Gaza.
Videos shared on social media and by Israeli news outlets showed dozens of festival-goers running through an open field as gunshots rang out. Many hid in nearby fruit orchards or were gunned down as they fled.
It’s always those pesky Palestinians doing the slaughtering! For 75 years!
That’s how they’ve been taking more and more land from Israel and they even build a gigantic illegal wall to box those poor Israelis in and stop them being able to leave freely! And with their military backing and funding from giant powerhouses in the west, those poor Israelis don’t stand a chance, it’s about time they fought back and stood up for themselves! They should defend their homes just like Ukraine!
Wait…
This is a chart that shows one thing only: Israel has the stronger military.
It doesn’t say a thing about who attempted to kill more civilians, and who took steps to avoid civilian deaths. It doesn’t say anything about who has made concessions for peace, and who has walked away from peace deals for almost a century.
If you think this chart shows that Israel is the bad guy, you would absolutely shit yourself if you saw a similar chart comparing the US and Nazi Germany.
If someone breaks into your house and says “give me this house and all your stuff or I’ll kill you and your family” and you refuse, so they kill you and take your house, are you in the wrong for not accepting their peace deal?
That’s a terrible analogy because it doesn’t fit the fact that for all kinds of reasons.
But for the sake of argument, let’s accept part of your basic premise.
Let’s assume that decades ago someone took over half of your grandma’s house (in which your large family lives). You’re super pissed that you have been relegated to half of what you still think of as your house.
The people in “your” house with you are much, much, much, much tougher than you, and you will never, ever, ever get them out by force.
The people in your house with you have tried time and again to come to a peaceful living situation with you, but you hate them so much that you have refused literally every single offer to live in harmony.
You constantly throw rocks at their children. Every once in a while you kill one of their children.
You do this while hiding behind your own children, so that if they fight back and shoot you, there’s a very good chance they’ll hit your children.
This is fine with you because you value the news story this will create more than you value the life of your own child.
The people in “your” house have the deed to the house, and have the might to do whatever they want with the house, and ask the neighbors recognize it is their house, even if they sometimes grumble about it.
The people in “your” house build a fence through the middle of the house to prevent you from killing their children, which you are still trying to do every single day.
The people in your house make sure you get food and water, but they are so sick of your violent behavior that they are choking you off from luxuries or prosperity of any kind.
You know your children could have a better life if you just accepted that you’ll never get the whole house back. Heck, if you asked nicely, you could probably still get a deed to the part of the house your live in. You could pass that on to your kids. They could rebuild. They could thrive by working with the people in “your” house.
But you hate the people in your house more than you love your own kids. So you keep this futile, hopeless, fighting going. And every day you wake up trying to kill their children.
Good analogy, but it conflates Palestinians and Hamas. The latter is like a security guard that’s shown up and claims to help you, but is only concerned with hurting the other family and hides behind your kids, putting them at risk.
It’s also noteworthy that the “someone” at the beginning isn’t actually Israel even! You lived in the house, but it technically owned by Britain. The British told you to make room for a new family to live there, and the British arbitrarily decided what things were yours and what was theirs. The other family were originally refugees, and the rest of their family has been slaughtered.
The root of all of this was Britain arbitrarily drawing lines and ignoring where people were living. The exact same thing happened with India and its partition. The British listened to a Muslim nationalist and the whole country burned because of the arbitrary lines they drew. Gandhi’s intercession helped part of the country return to peace and stop the violence – and he was ultimately killed by a Hindu nationalist.
I’ve made a huge digression, but my point is everyone keeps fucking the Palestinians, including Hamas.
That was a nice fantasy.
Meanwhile, the facts.
You think that’s bad?! You should see the chart of the evil United States low casualties versus the poor innocent Nazi casualties during WWII.
Everyone knows that body count tells the whole story!
Once again, was it the us invading a country and stealing it’s land? Or were they defending against someone trying to do that?
I can post random images of “facts”, too:
See, look at my post! I posted an image! Look at meeeeeeeee!!!
It’s reality you numbnuts
Yes, all revolutions in the history of the world are famous for rising against evil teenagers who were oppressing them.
Let’s hope Russia doesn’t start holding music festivals in Bakhmut
And exactly how does your argument justify these atrocities? This is whataboutism pur sang. Don’t get me wrong, the atrocities Israel has carried out are equally appalling, but that doesn’t justify what happened at that festival. This will likely only weaken the support the Palestinians have in the west.
It doesn’t justify the atrocities, but to immediately drop your support of the Palestinian people due to the acts of a militant group (likely orchestrated by Iran) is just dumb.
It is what it is. The world needs some semblance of order and you can’t just go fucking killing this many civilians because somebody took your land. It doesn’t work and you can get fucked if this is how you think. Nobody’s saying Israel is the good guy here. Fact is, everyone here sucks, there’s no good guy just a bunch of innocent fucking civilians who don’t deserve any of this on either side.
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I just think people talking about killing civilians at a music festival being an atrocity (it is!) were probably really quiet about the regular civilian casualties caused by Israel year after year. In 12 years, the UN counted 5,590 deaths. That’s not 5,590 dead terrorists, but people are acting like the atrocities just started now. I’m very much willing to say “what about”, not because it should make people think this one isn’t horrible, but because they really should answer “what about the other ones you ignored”.
And one doesn’t even need to go backward. Israel’s already racking up civilian casualties, and you can bet there’s going to be some people who want to keep going until the Palestinian number is much higher than the Israeli number.
Plenty of people, within Israel and outside, care quite a lot about those deaths and also consider them tragedies. You’ll remember that Netanyahu isn’t exactly an uncontroversial figure within Israel.
That’s why this has been such an incredibly frustrating and disappointing series of events, because any possibility of peace has been thoroughly extinguished now, and Palestinian citizens are going to suffer even more. Hamas of course knew this going into it, and didn’t care because its aim has never been peace for Palestinians, but rather the extermination of all Jews within Israel (as explicitly stated in its founding charter).
Both Netanyahu and Hamas are probably riding a nice high right now. Both of their political positions improve the more people die on both sides.
There may be a real rally around the flag effect, but there’s a lot of anger at Netanyahu on the massive military and intelligence failures that made this possible. He may be able to stick around for this conflict, but he’s probably toast afterwards.
Likud’s entire thing has always been that they’re the ones that can be trusted to keep Israelis safe. That view is now completely shattered.
Do you think they are going to elect a more moderate government to keep them safe?
Perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope then. If a less conservative and radical party takes control, maybe we’ll see an independent Palestinian state that’s allied with Israel and jointly fights Hamas.
Unfortunately that’s very unrealistic :/. We’ll probably see an even more radical conservative group take power, and make us think Netanyahu was a saint in comparison. :/
That assumes that there is a sizable portion of Palestinians that want to fight Hamas, and there’s sadly no guarantee of that.
I know, but I’d like to be optimistic. I’d like to think that becoming an independent state in exchange for helping hunt Hamas would be more than agreeable to them.
It saves me from the moral quandary – what if you’re right? What if the people generally support the group :/? I would need evidence to believe it, but I don’t know then. It’s pretty difficult to be neutral about them and not have a thought either way.
Israel has never targeted civilians. Palestinians have always targeted civilians.
Hamas uses civilians as meat shields.
When people like you take INTENT out of the equation, your just doing Hamas’s bidding.
They literally shot a journalist in the head and then sent military thugs to rough up people at the funeral. Your perspective is severely lacking context on one side.
According to who?
You have to take these stories with a grain of salt.
Do you remember the Jenin massacre?
Do you remember all the awful things that the Israelis did? It was horrific.
… Except …
It never happened. The Palestinians lied about it.
You know you can look this up so you don’t come across as an ignorant partisan right?
Her name was Shireen Abu Akleh
From the article:
“Several independent investigations carried out by various bodies and organisations, including the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, concluded that Abu Akleh was most likely killed by seemingly well-targeted shots fired by Israeli forces, despite her wearing clear identification as a journalist. Internal investigations carried out by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) found “a high possibility” that Abu Akleh was “accidentally hit” by IDF gunfire. However, to date, Israeli authorities have not opened a criminal investigation into her death or held anyone accountable.”
So are you willing to amend your previous claim? Or do you just want to cast doubt on anything that shows the Israeli government in a bad light?
Edit: I almost forgot, here’s proof that Israeli military went to the funeral to beat pallbearers and others: https://apnews.com/article/shireen-abu-akleh-journalist-funeral-west-bank-bb71e2ec64dd034066bc6df4a9aa2fb3
And you know what, have some more quotes from the original article:
“The experts also decried the record-high number of killings of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in recent months in the context of raids by Israeli forces, often targeting refugee camps. In 2022, out of 9000 Israeli operations, 702 targeted refugee camps in the occupied West Bank. In 2023, already more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the context of such operations, including in Jenin, Nablus and Jericho. Since 2001, at least 18 Palestinian journalists have been reportedly killed by the IDF in the occupied Palestinian territory and no one has been held accountable for those deaths.”
Again, the sources are suspect. The UN has been widely, absurdly anti-Israel to an absolutely comical extent.
“anything that says something I don’t support is suspect” get your head out of your ass.
Do you think that’s because every other nation has it out for israel? Or because Israel has been doing war crimes for decades?
Then it sure is strange how they keep doing things that kill civilians. They’re not blowing up buildings because that particular building was especially good for launching rockets. It’s collective punishment optimistically aimed at some sort of regime change, but more likely just to feed domestic bloodlust. It’s certainly not degrading military capabilities. They’re gone well before the missile hits.
And this is just the direct deadly violence. They knock down houses and light their fields on fire. Those are civilian targets in service of ethnic cleansing, either performed directly by the state or by agents supported and defended by it.
Hamas sets up military operations in a civilian building by force - the civilians have no say in this and get killed if they protest Hamas then uses that building to launch rockets, store ammunition, communication stations How the fuck should Israel proceed to neutralize those sites? Because what they do is:
“Roof knocking”: Hitting the building’s roof with a small explosive to announce that it will fall in 15 minutes (see video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teevWpXlRZY example from yesterday) Automatic SMS and phone calls impacted areas warning and urging to evacuate Precision strikes that make the building fall vertically with minimal damage to the areas As a result, civilians (and potentially military personnel) are given a chance to evacuate while ammunition stashes, rocket launching stations etc stay in the building and are destroyed.
To be honest, I’m shocked those protocols are still used after Hamas’s attack. I would absolutely not be surprised of these measures stopped.
The anti-Israel don’t care that Israel is bending over backwards to minimize human suffering while fighting a decades long war against people who are deliberately trying to kill their children.
Remember how upset they are when Israel does something 100 percent defensive, like build a security fence to keep out an endless stream of suicide bombers?
This isn’t good-faith criticism.
These people hate Israel for this that they works be applauding other countries for. And we all know why
Says you.
Is that all you could come up with?
A take I read earlier today is that Hamas tries to kill as many Jews as possible, Israel tries to kill as few Palestinian citizens as possible, and neither side is very successful.
Sounds about right really.
A grim but accurate observation it seems
I don’t think that’s a great assessment. Israel is much better at avoiding civilian casualties than even the United States.
If they are the best in the world at minimizing civilian casualties during military operations, your definition of “very successful” might need some reexamination.
Is that right?
This is a chart that shows one thing only: Israel has the stronger military.
It doesn’t say a thing about who attempted to kill more civilians, and who took steps to avoid civilian deaths. It doesn’t say anything about who has made concessions for peace, and who has walked away from peace deals for almost a century.
If you think this chart shows that Israel is the bad guy, you would absolutely shit yourself if you saw a similar chart comparing the US and Nazi Germany.
This chart illustrates that Israel has disproportionately killed more Palestinians.
Similarly, here is a chart illustrating that the Axis killed allied people (incl. Civilians) at a disproportionate amount.
Does the graph you just dismissed not make it clear they are absolutely not “equally appalling?”
Seems to me by the numbers they are far more appalling.
Edited to add: It does not justify the most recent attack, but it seems bizarre to pretend this is “both sides bad” when it’s “both sides bad, but one side objectively does a lot more bad”
It’s because the media is super biased in the UK and US, I assume. The reporting on the BBC has been all about how bad Palestine have been acting but nothing about what Israel is doing to them.
OF COURSE attacking a music festival is bad. But in context, I’m not fucking surprised they’re lashing out, and with more context, I think most people would feel pretty extremist if they were being killed and pushed out of their homes constantly for almost 100 years.
But hey the UK/US has to pretend nothing ireal does is wrong because they created this mess.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I completely agree with you.
This is only true because Israel is good at stopping attacks, not because Hamas isn’t trying.
Graph intentional attacks targeted at civilians and you’ll get a very different picture. Personally, if someone tried to murder my family but failed, I wouldn’t find them blameless just because they didn’t succeed.
Also missing from the picture is that for decades Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields, building bombs and rockets in the houses where children live, shooting rockets from inside schools and hospitals.
Hamas gave Israel the choice of letting it’s own children die, and not shooting back, or shooting back and Knowing that no matter how hard they tried (and they try pretty fucking hard) that they wouldn’t be able to avoid civilian deaths.
And ALL of this was because Hamas was banking on people in the west doing exactly what this gullible sap is doing: assuming that Israel is the monster.
Hmm well maybe, but is there a part of this (taken from another comment) that you reject as untrue?
I don’t disagree with any of that.
The important context is that the war in which Israel captured all that territory was a war where all of Israel’s neighbors were the aggressors.
And Israel quickly traded back land for peace, as was the case with Egypt.
And the neighboring Arab states DELIBERATELY created the Palestinian refugee crisis by refusing to take in all their former countrymen, believing that the humanitarian crisis was good politics for them, and would be a nightmare for Israel. (Correct on both counts).
I also agree that the settlements are a dick move, and purely antagonistic.
I also think Israel is using them as a bargaining chip.
I think in the Oslo Accords, Israel offered literally everything it could, and when that wasn’t enough, they leaned hard into creating settlements, a new bargaining chip, which someday they could add to future negotiations.
I also think that over time the Palestinians’ bargaining position has weakened.
Now that Israel has a security fence, the iron dome, and one of the most powerful militaries in the world, the daily threat of terrorism has been reduced to an unfortunate but livable state of existence. (This week excluded obviously)
Frankly at this point Israelis can wait out the Palestinians indefinitely, and I’m betting that when this current state of War is over, Israel is going to be in the business of securing themselves even more tightly.
I doubt if they’ll be inclined to ever offer Palestinians a peace deal as generous is the one they offered during the Oslo Accords.
So if we agree that the settlements are (today) antagonistic and generally viewed as illegal, and if our goal is to remove the motivation for people to kill each other - maybe we should couch this in terms of whether the settlements belong there instead of in terms of who has a stronger “bargaining position” like we’re haggling over a horse or something.
Because it certainly looks to me like the stronger party provoking the weaker party so they have a reason they can point to for smashing them under their heel.
Like when a cop provokes someone’s fight or flight response so they can justify using more force and/or a “resisting arrest” charge.
Maybe they should try letting the Palestinians live in peace sometime, and see how that does at stopping the attacks.
Israel had occupied Gaza like it does the West Bank until 2005 when it withdrew, in hopes that it would lead to peace.
It was very shortly followed by a barrage of rocket attacks and the current blockade was enacted.
So, that has been tried. It wasn’t very effective.
Honest question because maybe what I think is the answer is not actually the answer.
How much land does Israel currently occupy that is outside the bounds of what was originally agreed as belonging to them?
The 1967 borders are the most recent broadly recognized boundaries. After the Six Days War, Israel gained control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza.
As of today, East Jerusalem is a diverse but uneasy mix of Jews and Palestinians. Israel maintains that a unified Jerusalem is its capital, and this is the de facto situation. According to general peace plans, an eventual Palestinian state is meant to have East Jerusalem as its capital, so this is an obvious conflict point.
The West Bank is divided into three areas: A - administered by the Palestinian Authority, B - jointly administered by the PA and Israel, and C - administered by Israel. Israel has been increasingly building more and more settlements within Area C, which are widely recognized as illegal and being incredibly counter-productive towards peace. The Israelis who move there are often extremely nationalistic and often commit violence against the Palestinians. The IDF routinely conducts operations throughout all areas in order to ostensibly maintain security, though they’ll always prioritize Israeli lives over Palestinians.
The naive and now utterly hopeless idealistic peace plan is the creation of a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem, with the city being managed by a bi-national coalition of both governments. Israeli settlements within the West Bank would be either abandoned or annexed into Israel with an equal amount of land being swapped from Israel to Palestine. Some kind of stable passage would be created to connect Gaza and the West Bank.
One issue is that a not-small portion of Israelis believe themselves to be entitled to the entire land by virtue of religion, and see continued settlement of the West Bank as furthering this goal. These people suck and aren’t that much better than Hamas, though they’re not quite as barbaric. The much harder issue is that no Israeli will never allow this solution to happen unless Israel’s security is guaranteed, and there is simply zero trust in that, especially now. Israel will not allow itself to sit next to a state run by terrorists that are hell-bent on killing every Jew in the country.
On the matter of international law, Israel justifies its actions by accurately stating that no internationally recognized state lays claim to the West Bank - Jordan withdrew all claims in 1967 - and as such they have a right to settle it. Essentially no other countries have recognized that claim, and there has always been a general agreement that the West Bank will form the basis of a future Palestinian state. Israel certainly hasn’t acted in a way that furthers this, but as I said before, its red line is that it will not tolerate security threats to its existence. Militant Palestinian groups attacking Israel only makes peace more and more impossible.
So long as many Palestinians see the mere existence every Jew in Israel as a crime and a target, Israel will see every Palestinian as a potential threat, and the fact of the matter is that Israel holds the guns.
Kbin refuses to let me expand your comment to see anything after the sentence beginning with “the naive and now utterly…”
But this isn’t doing much to make me more sympathetic to the Israeli plight, and is more or less what I thought. I assumed I must have been wrong or misinformed, but you seem to have confirmed I really shouldn’t have much sympathy for Israel overall, even if I agree this attack on a music festival seems hard to specifically defend.
The chart shows military might. It doesn’t show intent. It doesn’t show who tried to avoid bloodshed. It doesn’t show who ignited conflict after conflict.
A similar chart showing civilian deaths in WWII would show the US killed way more Nazi civilians than vice versa. Would you be arguing that the US was the bad guy in that war?
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Depends, Which one was invading another country and claiming land?
Nah man you can’t be really doing a Nazi apology. Fucking incredible
LOL I’m doing the opposite 🤣
Interesting you say that. In the Israel Palestine conflict, Israel was set up with the blessing of the international community and the sovereign powers that controlled the land at the time.
It was the surrounding Arab Nations that tried to invade and destroy Israel.
It was Israel’s COUNTER attack that created the occupied territories.
But the Palestinian refugee crisis would not have happened but for the aggression of Israel’s neighbors.
Set up with the blessing 😂
They got plonked into Palestine and told they could have it, by countries who weren’t anywhere near
That’s a stretch
Extremists of both religions were fighting to take the territory, the jewish ones coming out on top and a lot of innocents caught in between
Let’s see a chart of the number of attempted murders of civilians from each side. That’ll paint a pretty different picture.
Tell me, because we both know that the Israeli casualty number is only low because Israel is good at protecting its citizens and not because Hamas isn’t trying to kill as many Israelis as it can, do you really think the situation would be better if Hamas was more successful at killing Israelis?
Of course not, I think they’re both fucking ridiculous fighting over a place named in their own personal fairytale.
One side being stronger doesn’t make the things they do right.
And to the exact same point, one side being less successful at killing citizens doesn’t make them right either.
Just because our military is in your country, stealing land, and keep killing you REALLY WELL, doesn’t mean you can retaliate to stop us.
You should tell Ukraine.
I don’t think your justification of “they’re just really good at killing Palestinians” really helps
Is the concept of civilians vs military targets difficult for you to understand?
If Hamas didn’t conduct military operations out of civilian buildings specifically so that the retaliation will kill civilians, that number would be a lot lower.
Ultimately, you either think that rape and murder of civilians for absolutely no reason is something that can be justified, or you don’t.
Keep those downvotes coming, Zionists. No matter how much you sweaty virtue signalers try to ‘own’ people on the internet, it doesn’t change the fact that Israel caged an animal, tortured it, and are now trying to put it down because it bit back.
You and I both know that equating the entire population of Palestine to an Iraq/Qatar-funded extremist group is entirely wrong, but whatever justifies the wholesale slaughter of thousands over the years I guess. Stop pretending to care about Israeli citizens so you can feel good about watching Palestinians die.