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.
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.
Israel 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.
Source
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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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.
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.
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?
Can you read your own wikipedia article?
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/
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.
Lmao cope.
This seems incoherent, I don’t follow. What are you trying to say?
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.
Thanks for the link, I will watch that when I get the chance.
“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:
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.
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.
I never wrote nor implied that, in fact I wrote the opposite; Israel is not willing to commit genocide, unlike Hamas. You do have terrible reading comprehension.
Riiight. Nice misdirection. I think we all know what you meant.
Israel is a theocracy, but it can’t be an ethnostate when other ethnicities have full citizen rights and live among the population.
The only party here out to commit genocide is Palestine, Hamas is very explicit about that. See my link above.
Your worldview is completely twisted when fighting back against genocidal terrorists slaughtering your civilians is genocide and the slaughterers are the sympathetic party.
I didn’t say out of no where, but according to my reading they did in fact start the war. There were other ways to respond to the UN partition plan than through violence. Palestine chose violence and continues to choose violence up to this day, and they are still suffering from that decision. Had they been willing to peacefully coexist history would have played out differently for them.
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.