Hamas’s Qassam Brigades has threatened to execute Israeli captives if Israel continues to bombard and kill civilians in Gaza.
“Any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives in our custody, and we will be forced to broadcast this execution,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’ Qassam Brigades.
“We regret this decision but we hold the Zionist enemy and their leadership the responsibility for this,” he said.
It’s great both sides of this conflict have so much respect for protecting the lives of civilians. Ugh. I wish the leaders of Hamas and Bibi’s reactionary government were the ones that would actually suffer the consequences of this war.
This conflict benefits the most: Russia and China (by having US distracted) and Bibi (by having previously divided Israelis united behind him)
Iran too. I’m sure they weren’t too happy with the impending Israeli-Saudi rapprochement. This at a minimum will significantly complicate that.
Hamas has already said it was directly backed by Iran.
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Yes, I think Israel can handle Hamas on their own, but Hezbollah is looking if there is an opportunity for them. I think that’s why US Navy is there to discourage them.
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This is why I want a blank check for Ukraine.
So while the US is “distracted”, Russia and China do what? Steal the pie from the windowsill?
We stop backing Ukraine, we start backing Israel. Ukraine loses billions in funding, which helps Russia. The better off Russia is the larger ally China has.
Wouldn’t this whole thing just be a huge problem for him tho? After Israel is done, I would think that the government would start getting really uncomfortable questions from the people. Like wtf was the military and the intelligence doing.
A segment of the populace will definitely be feeling that, but remember what happened in the US after 9/11? There weren’t a lot of calls to figure out how intelligence failed so spectacularly because the sabre-rattling government came out in full force, and the country (almost) united against Islamic terrorism. Those who aren’t overtly political or who don’t follow politics too closely will only see that Bibi has reacted with as much force as possible, which plays into his strongman vibe and may even win his party an election in their own right, without having to coalesce with the other parties. After the clusterfuck of elections they’ve been through recently, this could be what seals another decade of Likud rule.
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That’s rich.
You just killed civilians, what evidence is there to conclude you wouldn’t kill those ppl anyway.
Both sides of this conflict have done so much horrific shit, you can’t trust any of them.
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It’s almost like most Arab countries don’t give a shit about Palastine
They give a shit about not being attacked by a country that’s got the nuclear bomb and the backing of most of the western world.
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Point here, it wasn’t Lebanon, it was Hezbollah. Hezbollah is tolerated within Lebanon because of a weak Lebanese central government, but they’re still a militia within Lebanon, not Lebanon itself. They more or less represent the Iranian-aligned portion of Lebanese Shiite Muslims, not Lebanese Christians or Sunni Muslims.
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Lebanon is a failed/failing state with a weak centralized government that can’t exercise total control over the nation, but it’s also a super diverse country. Just saying, it’s a minority of the population which supports Hezbollah, it’s just not a minority which can be suppressed since they receive extensive military support from Iran and Syria. If they tried, it’d be the Lebanese Civil War again
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There’s no good guys in this conflict.
This was true in WW2 also but there clearly were fewer bad guys on the other side.
You’re comparing shit covered apples to shit covered oranges. You might be right about the differences, but at the end of the day both are covered in shit.
FYI, Blinken just had a conference stating there is no hard, tangible evidence that Iran was involved. That may have been Hamas trying to stir up some more shit.
From what I can gather, there are no good guys between Israel and Palestine because they were set up to fight each other. The UK saw that the Jewish people were desperate following the Holocaust and told them that they can have land that was occupied by other groups with a strong religious identity. The Palestinians were like “WTF? We live here and are Muslim.” Now, the two groups are fighting each other for survival while being supported and encouraged by external powers for their own political gain. This whole thing is fucked up since the victims are both Israel and Palestine.
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Excellent comment. Thank you.
I tried to figure out who was really to blame for all this yesterday, and I stopped at the Russian revolution without an answer.
Nationalism and the desire for a Jewish state came from the pogroms of Jews in Russia – paraphrased, a Jewish scholar believed they would only have freedom and be respected if they had their own country.
Britain decades later wanted influence in an area that they had none in, and they wanted to grow a Jewish population to create that influence. Zionists happily accepted.
And from then on we’ve had the Arab/Palestine/Israeli enmity.
Everyone has been a victim. Everyone has been an aggressor. I suspect that if I were to follow the source of the Russian pogroms, I’d ultimately end up with the Romans in Israel.
The seeds of the conflict stretch back further. Essentially, the UK promised both Arabs and Jews a state in Palestine in exchange for fighting the Ottoman Empire in World War I.
As part of the aftermath of that conflict, Great Britain was assigned a League of Nations mandate to administer Palestine starting in 1923. It wasn’t exactly always peaceful and essentially the UK decided to nope out after WW2. Basically as soon as it was announced they were leaving there was a Civil War which spiraled into the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 literally the day the mandate ended and Israel declared independence. But yes the whole thing is fucked.
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Neither Egypt nor Jordan want to deal with the kind of extremism rife within places like Gaza, and I can’t blame them
…will be met regretfully by executing one of the captives…
We regret this decision but…
Idk if the translation is just wrong, but they’re using the word “regret” weirdly here. Almost seems like a slip of the tongue, betraying their actual regret to have done something so stupid and easily condemnable to such a degree that the international community has a very easy time holding back and not applying much leverage at all in trying to hold Israel back from absolutely obliterating them.
But frankly, I think they’re too zealous to actually regret it at all. They’ll probably live out the rest of their shortened lives in ignorant blissful fervor.
I’m not sure why people wonder, “What is Hamas thinking?!”
They aren’t.
They are a far right fundamentalist extremist terrorist organisation. They are fucking delusional.
Palestinian people deserve so much better than Hamas, and they have to suffer now. That’s just terrible.
They voted Hamas, Support Hamas and sustain it. It was Palestinian civilians who spat onto naked raped bodies of women. Palestinians got what they chose and deserve it. They are no poor people but supporters of s criminal system.
Live 30-40 years in a place where an occupying nation walls your cities, treats you as prisoners, denies and steals resources, and we’ll see which kind of hate you will harbour against your aggressors. You will just see red. I’m not condoning what they are doing but I get why they do, they have been suffering for so long that they want the aggressors to feel the same, and at this point, for them, anyone in Israel is the aggressor. A cornered rabid dog bites anyone.
1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, 2008. These are the years on which the Arab side of Palestine was offered the choice of gaining statehood, but they said no.
Well, yeah, they take half your belongings and they then tell you to accept what you have, I don’t think they will accept it. I don’t believe for an instant that the statehood they were offered covers the land they should have. Is this one of the proposals? What is that divided country.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/UN_Palestine_Partition_Versions_1947.jpg
Now, this is the 2008 proposal? It looks hummilliating.
https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/f_auto,fl_lossy/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_407,w_690/448211 .I don’t know if the second image is correct, but given that it is known that israel has been taking land from palestine, what was offered in 2000, 2001 and 2008 would be even less than 1947, and that one looks super bad too, so I really get why they didn’t accept that mockery of a proposal.Edit: look at the 1995 map and tell me that excomunicating the country in such manner (water pipes, electricity, anything that requires having the country conencted simply doesn’t work) isn’t anything but horrible: https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/INTERACTIVE-Ethnic-cleansing.png?w=770&resize=770%2C770 .I have read more and it seems like this is some sort of propaganda, so although the progress of the control zones is kinda correct, the proposals were not those. Don’t check this map. I any case, this source seems more credible and the map is really, really fragmented, my point still stands: https://www.nzz.ch/english/israeli-palestinian-conflict-how-the-political-maps-have-changed-ld.1664125Again, not condoning their actions but… fuck, I really get why they are doing it.
Well, yeah, they take half your belongings and they then tell you to accept what you have, I don’t think they will accept it.
This statement might be valid for the peace plans of 2000s. I don’t think it can be applied to the original suggestions in 1930s and 1940s, since they were getting to own their land for the first time since Britain’s colonisation. That might have been the time to accept compromises, especially given the Palestinian Arabs’ relations with the Nazis during and before WW2.
And of course afterwards, it was the Arabs who launched the first war against Israel in 1948.
Since colonization, before colonization they were a country called Palestine.
Here’s a map from 1400 showing Palestine.
There’s gotta be some limit how far to the history we should be looking at when deciding who gets to live where.
LMFAO, we’ve beat you like dogs and taken 99% of your land, accept this peace offering… Or else.
Again, that’s not what 1937 and 1947 were about at all.
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Are you talking about elections held over 10 years ago? Hamas is an authoritarian militia, nobody would trust them to hold honest elections.
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I dunno, the internet has told me that Israel is just as bad. I definitely remember when the IDF took a bunch of civilian women and children as hostages and then announced that it was going to livestream their murder.
Oh wait.
There are no good guys in that conflict.
Only bad guys and victims.
Hamas being terrorists doesn’t make it OK for Israel to be committed to genocide any more than Israel’s existence as an ethnofascist apartheid state makes in OK for Hamas to be bombing proms.
Both organizations are making it impossible for Palestinians to live peacefully.
If Israel were committed to genocide there would be no Palestine. It is their historical sensitivity to genocide and limitations placed on them by international law and foreign pressures that imposes on them very different standards of behavior in this war. If they operated by the same set of rules that Hamas does, this conflict would have been over long ago.
Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience … Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”
Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.
One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/israel-music-festival-massacre-eyewitness-accountIsrael does not perform atrocities like this. This wasn’t collateral damage, this wasn’t an attack on a valid military target, it was intentionally kidnapping, raping, and murdering civilians. This sort of behavior makes it very hard for me to swallow the, “both sides are equally bad,” narrative. I had a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian situation before, it is quickly evaporating.
I’m not denying that some of this is factual reporting, but that particular source can be very biased with respect to Israel.
Overall, we rate Tablet Magazine as right-center biased based on an editorial bias that moderately favors the pro-Israel nationalist right. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to the promotion of conspiracy theories despite a clean third-party fact check record.
If Israel were committed to genocide there would be no Palestine.
Hate to point out the irony, especially in this context… but at the rate things are going, in another 5 years there probably won’t be a Palestine.
“Israel are the good guys because the international community has stopped them from completing the genocide at a quick pace”
God I really hope a ethno state claims your own land as theirs, puts you in an open air prison as it gradually steals pieces of it for its owns settlers year after year, denies you food and medicines. Shoots women, children, medics and reporters in your community.
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“Israel are the good guys because the international community has stopped them from completing the genocide at a quick pace”
Work on your reading comprehension, because you conveniently ignored much of what I wrote. The Jews were genocided. They don’t want to genocide others, unlike their opponents.
20% of the state of Israel is Palestinian/arab, with full citizenship and rights. It seems their behaviors are motivated by self-defense, not destroying an ethnic group.
God I really hope a ethno state claims your own land as theirs, puts you in an open air prison as it gradually steals pieces of it for its owns settlers year after year, denies you food and medicines. Shoots women, children, medics and reporters in your community.
If I my country theoretically started a losing war with our neighbor and then refused to make peace when we lost, I’d expect to be occupied by hostile soldiers and be denied autonomy until my country did. When a hostile army is occupying and guerilla attacks or riots/uprisings happen, people get shot. It’s almost like there are consequences for endless violence and open warfare against one’s neighbor. No side has a monopoly on victimhood here.
The fact that you would wish such ills on others for recognizing this, that you look at this conflict in such a reductive way, is telling of your character.
The Jews were genocided. They don’t want to genocide others
And muslims were killed on mass as part of that same genocide, so that means they physical cant be involved in a genocide of their own right?
20% of the state of Israel is Palestinian/arab, with full citizenship and rights.
Can you read your own wikipedia article?
While most Arabs remaining in Israel were granted citizenship, they were subject to martial law in the early years of the state.[32][33] Zionism had given little serious thought as to how to integrate Arabs, and according to Ian Lustick subsequent policies were 'implemented by a rigorous regime of military rule that dominated what remained of the Arab population in territory ruled by Israel, enabling the state to expropriate most Arab-owned land, severely limit its access to investment capital and employment opportunity, and eliminate virtually all opportunities to use citizenship as a vehicle for gaining political influence.
Or can we talk about how whats going on in Israel is recognised as apartheid?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/
If I my country theoretically started a losing war with our neighbor and then refused to make peace when we lost,
You people are physically incapable of having a good faith thought on this issue. The Palestinians didnt “start a war with their neighbour” They had their land taken from them by the west so they could replace their Jewish populations.
The fact that you would wish such ills on others for recognizing this, that you look at this conflict in such a reductive way, is telling of your character.
Lmao cope.
And muslims were killed on mass as part of that same genocide, so that means they physical cant be involved in a genocide of their own right?
This seems incoherent, I don’t follow. What are you trying to say?
Can you read your own wikipedia article?
I did read the article, you seem to have difficulty with verb tenses. That was in the past. At present Arab Israelis have the same legal citizen rights as Jewish Israelis.
Or can we talk about how whats going on in Israel is recognised as apartheid?
www.amnesty.org/…/israels-system-of-apartheid/Thanks for the link, I will watch that when I get the chance.
You people are physically incapable of having a good faith thought on this issue. The Palestinians didnt “start a war with their neighbour” They had their land taken from them by the west so they could replace their Jewish populations.
“You people,” classy. What people are you including me among in order to dismiss my opinion? Spell it out for me.
This conflict is a long and winding road, but based on my understanding that’s exactly what happened. Palestinians didn’t like the UN partition plan so they resorted to violence and attacked their Jewish neighbors, triggering the Arab-Israeli War of 1948:
The United Nations resolution sparked conflict between Jewish and Arab groups within Palestine. Fighting began with attacks by irregular bands of Palestinian Arabs attached to local units of the Arab Liberation Army composed of volunteers from Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. These groups launched their attacks against Jewish cities, settlements, and armed forces. The Jewish forces were composed of the Haganah, the underground militia of the Jewish community in Palestine, and two small irregular groups, the Irgun, and LEHI. The goal of the Arabs was initially to block the Partition Resolution and to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state. The Jews, on the other hand, hoped to gain control over the territory allotted to them under the Partition Plan.
Lmao cope.
Grow up.
You’re arguing Jewish people would perpetrate genocide simply because Jewish people on the past were victims (despite all the evidence that they are currently commiting a genocide) so I took that same logic and applied it to the Muslims of palestine.
It’s in the past
Jfc. I’m guessing you’re also one those people that says “why do we have lgbt/womens/black rights? You already have all your rights?”
You people as in people who go out of their way to disregard reality to simp for a religious apartheid ethno state that is commiting genocide.
Again, you’re phrasing it as if Israel and palestine had coexistence as neighbours then palestine decided to attack out of no where. The UN (or more specifically the British) decided they were just going to take the Palestinians land to make a country of their own in an act of blatant colonialism. So they were responding to being invaded.
Snark aside, I do completely agree, and there’s a lot that I would criticize Israel for. That list does not, however, include mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of random civilians.
It does include apartheid, genocide, belief in racial superiority and murdering journalists though. We can’t equate what one side has done with the other as one side has generally held all the power while one side has been persistently oppressed. Also, it’s pretty hard to say whether mass murder, rape and kidnapping civilians is as bad as, worse than, or better than genocide.
The Israeli government regularly commits atrocities and crimes against humanity. Hamas regularly commits atrocities and crimes against humanity. There are no good guys here, just bad guys in charge being funded and goaded by other bad guys and innocent civilians being needlessly murdered.
Rape and kidnapping maybe not but did you just say that Israel hasn’t been murdering Palestinians? Or are you saying they’ve never murdered more than 200 at once
You know as well as I do that the IDF does not go around Palestinian villages slaughtering everyone they see.
Israel’s hands are not remotely perfectly clean, and there have absolutely been actions that are reprehensible, but the operations of the IDF and Hamas are not remotely equivalent, as you’re perfectly aware.
The equivalency discussions are all BS.
Terrorist attacks targeting civilians are bad.
Also, indiscriminate bombing killing civilians is bad.
A civilized world really shouldn’t condone either. And one doesn’t justify the other.
Flying planes into civilian buildings killing thousands wasn’t an appropriate response to their government supporting tyrants who tortured and killed dissidents. (Also, probably not a good idea to support tyrants.)
The hundreds of thousands of civilians who died in the middle east in response to those attacks shouldn’t have had to pay the price on such an attack even if their country had had anything to do with it in the first place.
The only appropriate “both sides” in these kinds of situations is the capacity to have empathy and regret over the suffering that occurs to normal people trying to live their lives on both sides of the conflicts.
Unfortunately a lot of what I’m seeing online these days is the logical equivalent of “Bin Laden was justified in 9/11 because the US’s foreign policy caused the suffering of many in the middle east.” Logic I happen to think is pretty disgusting personally, just as I’ve also always found dismissal of civilian suffering in broader military responses reprehensible.
Not a lot of countries have clean hands to be pointing fingers with, but the only way we move towards a world with less blood on our collective hands is by unequivocally pointing to human rights abuses where they occur and saying “this is not okay.”
Not “this is okay because so and so bombed a city block first and wasn’t touching black while saying I’m rubber and you’re glue.”
No - targeting or indiscriminately killing civilians is not okay - full stop.
And if one’s attitude about the civilian deaths of one group of people is anything less than that, they might just be a bit racist towards that group of people, and may want to reexamine how they look at fellow humans and the degree to which minor differences in skin color or religion or ancestral identity outweighs the commonality of the human experience of pain, suffering, and loss.
TL;DR: It’s perfectly appropriate to recognize that the Palestinian people have suffered injustice and mistreatment while also recognizing that a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians is repugnant. The mental gymnastics to recognize the former and not the latter is pretty gross though, and honestly every time I see it (and frequently these days) I can’t help but think it probably really does boil down to racist assholes using false equivalency to justify their bigotry.
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Rest assured, I understand the mess fairly well. I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Middle East and know several Palestinians and Israelis.
There’s quite a lot that I’d strongly criticize Israel for, but intentional murder and rape of civilians is something that can never be justified, no matter how much critical theory you read.
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1 are you arguing that young Israeli soldiers would be raping away in the same manner?
2 maybe argue against livestreaming killing hostages?
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I love this take because it implies that Palestinians, on their own, are incapable of self-determination and self-governance without degenerating into raping, slaving, barbarians, thereby justifying the existence of Gaza and Israel’s actions; yet, this is presented earnestly, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, and with the veil of being in some way pro-palestinian.
You don’t think cutting off food, water, and power to millions isn’t an are we the baddies moment too?
Both sides are acting like petulant children while their people suffer
Just your typical 80 yr occupation with no real options to even become a state, I mean how bad could that be right?
Except that Oslo accord that they walked out on, and that fact that this is happening in the Gaza strip, a section of Palestinian controlled land with the 1967 borders, a foreign and maritime border and had all Jewish residents (including those that predated the 1948 beginning of hostilities) evicted, often an gunpoint and has had autonomy for nearly two decades now right? Besides that option.
So the USN is going to park the newest CVN in the fleet off the coast in a couple days. If they don’t end up participating in some sort of massive hostage rescue operation with a bunch of SEALs (and, perhaps, other regional/NATO specops branches), I’m honestly going to be kinda surprised.
This is very much “fuck around and find out” territory. I don’t think Hamas realizes how much the rules have changed in reaction to what they did this weekend. Israel isn’t going to stop until they’ve killed or captured every last militant they can get their hands on in Gaza.
Obligatory disclaimer: Both the IDF and various incarnations of Arab alliances/rebels/terrorist groups have been unequivocally heinous towards each other (and their respective affiliated civilian populations) since Israel became a country. We’re not here to debate that. This is about an attack on civilians in Israel that, proportional to their national population, had five times the casualties that 9/11 inflicted.
Every country who is an ally of Isreal will be sending in their special ops teams to assist, we can be sure of that. I expect the Canadian teams to be involved. I am sure there is a national kidnapped or killed from almost all developed countries by the sound of it.
Haha I love it how you guys watched enough GI Joe movies to think you can just helicopter some guys with night goggles into Gaza to surprise Hamas and free a few hundred hostages before they know what’s up
Here’s what’ll happen in the real world: either they decide to surrender thousands of prisoners and admit defeat (highly unlikely) or they’ll decide it’s time to drop as many bombs as they can spare on Gaza as quickly as possible (unlikely) or they’ll keep dropping bombs on confirmed positions for a few weeks and transition back to the status quo when support starts to wane (rather likely).
I’m sure Hamas will start offing Israeli and US hostages first while other governments can buy their citizens back for a couple mill a pop in the background
Quietly returning to the status quo is radically different from what happened after the Munich Olympics. What is it that makes you think the mossad and their political leaders are so much quicker to drop a grudge now?
I consider Mossad doing Mossad things and Hamas doing Hamas things as the status quo. As opposed to large scale incursions
Always remember, if you plan on doing some stupid crime or barbaric thing, just make sure you say the other guy is responsible first. Prosecutors HATE this one trick!
Why would they negotiate with Terrorists?
Because, despite what Hollywood told you, everyone does
Palistine, don’t you know you’re just supposed to let yourself be genocided quietly? You weren’t supposed to fight back! The status quo! The more I see this shit the more I have to laugh. Is what Hamas doing good? No, not even remotely. Is it what you expect from people who have been nearly totally eradicated by the opressors that completely surround them? Yes, definitely.
It’s time to free Palestine from this planet.
This is the Hannibal Directive in action. The Zionist regime does not and has not ever cared about civilian casualties.
