Israeli airstrikes across Gaza killed scores of people overnight, as fears grow of the military campaign intensifying in the southern city of Rafah, a tiny pocket of the territory where more than a million people are sheltering.
Amid intensifying divisions in Israel’s government over the war, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was expected to arrive in the region on Sunday, his fifth trip since the militant group attacked Israel on 7 October, killing at least 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostage.
Blinken is expected to spend the week visiting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and the West Bank to discuss a deal to secure the freedom of at least 136 remaining hostages in Gaza and a ceasefire intended to calm regional tensions, particularly in the Red Sea.
They’re just going to go in and murder everyone that refuses or is unable to flee. We all know it’s going to happen.
Moreover: There will be no political consequences for any European or American policy-maker that is helping this massacre happen.
This is the end of the “Rules based order.” It wasn’t a very good system, but it provided a modicum of protection and humanity in a very brutal world.
Sorry. But you’re naive.
War has always been like this. It’s just been masked by newspeak. Collateral damage, precision or surgical strikes, insurgent, non-combatants, etc.
IRC the initial bombings of Iraq in 2003, labeled ‘Shock and Awe’ and portrayed as surgical and precise by plenty of media, likely cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. The US bombed hospitals, they killed journalists, there were literal concentration camps, systematic torture, summary executions, etc. etc. People have simply watched too many American war movies (not a good war movie like Come and See, link to the full movie with subs on an official channel), don’t know much about international law, and seem to think a bomb blast stops at the window of a building. The sad reality is that you can bomb a building with one terrorist in it, and if it happens to be next to a children’s hospital, that’s invariably not considered a war crime.
IRC the UK Department of Defense even has absurdly low civilian casualty figures, because anyone in a combat zone is no longer considered a civilian. Here’s a relevant article:
And let’s not get started on countries like Russia where officers pimped out their own soldiers. If that’s how they treat their own, you don’t want to know how they treat the enemy. I mean, they decided to pardon child rapists and murders after setting them loose on the Ukrainian front. And don’t get me started on wars with child soldiers and rape camps. Hell, IRC in Syria the red cross/crescent gave Assad the location of hospitals, so they could avoid bombing them. They stopped doing that when they realised the regime was almost certainly using the locations they provided as targeting data and hit multiple hospitals in a day.
Want to know the sad reality? Israel will likely get away with all this, because what they’re doing isn’t that especially out of the ordinary when it comes to war. It’s no coincidence that the ICJ stopped short of calling for an immediate ceasefire.
wrong. the number of casualties in this war is already disgustingly high compared to other wars. the amount of bombs dropped indiscriminately on highly populous areas in a few months has out paced that of other wars that had lasted years.
this is exceptional and you are being disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Israel is committing genocide. this will be remembered.
I am not being disingenious. I am being realistic.
Any bomb dropped on Gaza is a bomb dropped on a high populous area.
Some estimate that as many as ten million people died in the Congo Free State. Historians generally agree that what happened doesn’t meet the 1948 UN definition of genocide, because it requires intent and intent is hard to prove.
Another example: the Dasht-i-Leili Massacre. A US allied war lord stuffed thousands Taliban prisoners into metal containers, up to 250 per container. American troops were present when it happened. Oopsie doodle. It got a bit hot in the metal containers. It is likely that up to 2000 of them died from heat exhaustion and/or suffocation (and the occasional bullet). No one was ever convicted.
Remember former defense secretary Colin Powell? His meteoric rise started after he helped white wash the My Lai massacre.
Remember that time US soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists and laughed about it? Good news: they convicted someone for that. Bad news: they convicted the person who leaked the footage, Chelsea Manning.
This is how the world works. This is the standard of behaviour you can expect from militaries.
Which is probably why the Israelis will eventually get away with their crimes, just as other countries have before them. They can simply claim they were attempting to bomb Hamas, and that all those who have died are collateral damage. Don’t get your hopes up about the ICJ case. The fact that they didn’t push for an immediate cease fire should be enough to convince you of that. The world isn’t fair.
On a related note: the police are less nice than their portrayal in Brooklyn 99 would lead you to believe.
The point of the rules based order is that it was a change from “war has always been like this.” History condemns Israel.
Be better.
Have you ever considered that if people were less naive about the true nature of war, and didn’t lie to themselves about the reality for civilians, and that war inevitably devolves into rape, torture, and infanticide, the world would be a better place?
You be better.
Not if it leads to your excuses and justifications of “war was always like this. No need to change it.”
Absolutely disgusting, down to the very core of my being. I want nothing to do with your beliefs.