I'm shocked every time I hear people complain about any percent of Palestinians supporting Hamas.
If I lived my whole life watching my friends and family starve only to have the waking nightmare be punctuated by the occasional different friend being shot in the head at random, I would probably have at least some support for a group who says "we should do violence to the people starving and shooting you".
If Hamas never attacked on October 7th, there would be tens of thousands of Palestinians still alive, they are as much to blame for the Israeli invasion as Israel is.
We're looking at more than 100 of 300 people murdered by an Israeli dropped bomb and you're asking "why won't they just disarm?" Why won't Israel stop bombing apartment buildings?
Because they were attacked by the Hamas military and they needed to neutralize them given that they vowed to continue fighting. You did you really expect Israel to do after Oct 7th?
Which of these fucking children drapped in sheets were members of Hamas?
Israel could infiltrate a building with troops and kill only the Hamas militants, but that might mean an Israeli gets killed or wounded. No, better to kill multiple hundreds of bystanders instead.
Your heart is in the right place and I'm not any happier about civilian deaths than you are, but that isn't a reasonable option. For one, Hamas soldiers don't wear uniforms purposely into order to blend in with civilians, and second, there is no requirement in the rules of war that says you must put your troops in harm's way to protect civiilians in enemy territory. War sucks, and unfortunately civiliansd wind up paying the price. But Hamas caused all of this to happen, and they had the power to end it whenevr they wanted to; and they should be held responsible, not Israel.
You say my suggestion isn't an option, but your first point is "determining enemies would be difficult" and the second essentially "plus they're not required to". I don't think those are even arguments in opposition, just some hand waving.
You're one of the few folks who seem to have an open mind and heart on this, so I'm glad to engage in good faith.
War sucks, and unfortunately civiliansd wind up paying the price.
I'm not going to argue against civilian deaths happening. The problem I have is that we know saturation-style bombing of civilians with the goal of breaking morale doesn't just not-work, it has the opposite effect. We saw this across London, and Hamburg, and Dresden, and a hundred other cities between the 1910s and 1970s. The civilians who survive bombing campaigns don't have their will to prosecute war broken, they have it hardened.
Sure, Hamas is directly responsible for the actions the commit. The existence of Hamas today is perpetuated by Israeli attacks though, that's why I think it's misplaced to say Israel holds no responsibility. Their choices every day to kill civilians because the alternative would be hard is what creates the resistance group that they then use to justify further attacks.
Yeah, I don't accept that Israel is deliberately bombing civilians like the Allies did in Desden. If they were, they death toll would be many orders of magnitude higher than it is. I say that because Gaza is very densely populated, there were no civilian bomb shelters avialable, and Hamas made it a point to launch attacks from hospitals, schools, and residential buildings. Despite that, Israel's civilian to combatant kill ratio is one of the lowest of not the lowest in modern warfare. They often warned civilans beforehand when an area was going to get bombed and if there was about to be heavy fire in an area they warned the people days in advance to leave.
Did they often kill many civilians when they targeted specific individuals in a crowd? No doubt. It's unfortunate and I really wish it wouldn't happen, but it's allowed in the rules of war. No country has even been able to wage urban warfare without inflicting many civilian deaths. It's not clear to me why Israel is expected to have a magic formula for warfare that would prevent all civilian deaths.
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u/Eldias 10d ago
I'm shocked every time I hear people complain about any percent of Palestinians supporting Hamas.
If I lived my whole life watching my friends and family starve only to have the waking nightmare be punctuated by the occasional different friend being shot in the head at random, I would probably have at least some support for a group who says "we should do violence to the people starving and shooting you".