+1. This does seem like an operation gone wrong, and I certanly condemn the killing of innocent civilians, but it's shocking how quick HN commenters are to throw America under the bus based on reporting from a leak. There's so much information about this operation that we simply don't have, including the risk/benefit analysis, the other operations that were successes that we don't know about, etc. I'm not saying America is all good, but this thread is surprisingly anti-American.
Maybe try and shake the propaganda you've been ingesting all your life and it be clearer - Easily done by reversing the situation:
North Korean special forces get ashore in the US to plant a listening device. They run into issues and are spotted by a boat. So they shoot the civilians, then puncture the lungs of the dead Americans so their bodies don't float, and escaped unharmed.
Is throwing North Korea under the bus for this shocking ? I'm not saying North Korea is all good......
I see your point about reversing the situation (what if North Korea did the same?) and I agree that's a reasonable way to look at things. However, I disagree with your conclusion. If North Korean special forces were to violate US sovereignty by attempting to plant a listening device on the shores of California, and in the process killed some innocent American civilians, I would certainly condemn it. The reason for this is that it's obvious their values (suppress freedom, make the world more repressive, despotic, totalitarian, communist, and dictatorial) do not justify the collateral damage, whereas with the United States, their values, while imperfect, are much better for civilization, and therefore some collateral damage can be tolerated.
To make this illustration even more stark, if Hitler sent some Nazis to the US to perform some sabotage and in the process killed some Americans, I would condemn it; but if Churchill sent some british forces to Germany to perform some sabotage, and in the process killed some innocent WW2-era Germans, I would be more understanding, for the simple reason that Churchill and Hitler were fighting for different things and had different values.
Finally, you began your post with some nonsense about "maybe try and shake the propaganda you've been ingesting all your life." In the same way I don't know what propaganda you've ingested that leads you to equate the US with North Korea--or make assumptions about me--you don't know what, if any, propaganda I've ingested here in the south pacific, where I live. So let's stick to the arguments, assume some good faith, and not accuse each other of forming our opinions based on propaganda.
"I certainly condemn the killing of innocent civilians". No you don't. That's BS you're telling yourself so you can feel unconflicted about what should be a simple moral calculus.
I am not sure what certifies your moral; God or logic or whatever that tells you that how you live your life is justified.
I do know that I have morals, though.
"Don't murder people" is pretty easy for me to justify categorically.
If you have to put a big [*] next to that which says "if my boss tells me to kill someone, it's okay", then you really don't have any morals.
That math is easy for most folks to do.
The thing that probably keeps you from being able to do that math is some relative certainty that you personally will never have to be on the "risk/benefit analysis" board for these kinds of murderers.
So if you kill someone in self defense you simply don’t have any morals? What these agents did was obviously wrong, but how does it help to simplify morality like that?
I have a rather limited imagination, so I am having a hard time imagining a world where I kill one of my fellow humans and it doesn't cause me to question the morality of my actions.
Being aware that people are of limited imagination, I often understand that folks want to make morailty more complicated because they can't imagine themselves receiving the violence of those complicated calculations.
So my answer is "yes, if you are killing people and not questioning your actions, you are likely not a moral person."
And your question begs another question: "how does it help to complicate those kinds of moral actions".
From where I stand, a US-led death squad went and murdered some folks. That seems pretty easy to to understand, and complicating that discussion by adding in hypotheticals about "information about this operation that we simply don't have" such as (for instance) other "successful" illegal operations sounds absurd to me.
Like, really, what do we gain in making the murder of fishermen into something complex: this is clearly and simply the murder of some people by professional killers hired by the US government, and it is yet another in several million discrete actions which makes me believe that the US government and the people who support it fundamentally have no morals.
I agree on the rather limited imagination part. It's so easy to imagine: a bad guy is for no reason trying to kill your innocent kid. you can save your kid, but to do so you must kill the bad guy. the obvious moral decision is to kill the bad guy and save your kid.
Neptune Spear was a culmination of intelligence failures that spanned decades, so while certainly possible, absent other evidence I don't think a press release is sufficient to say that bin Laden was successfully killed in Abbottabad, as opposed to say dying of kidney failure in the years before.
Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
Most of the cited sources come from the U.S. military, government, or intelligence community. These institutions have a long record of politically expedient deception - from WMD in Iraq, to the Gulf of Tonkin, to the bombing of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza - so their claims should not be taken at face value.
The Letters from Abbottabad also fall into this category. Their timing and content are unusually convenient for the U.S. narrative, and there is no independent verification of their authenticity beyond U.S. release.
The Abbottabad Commission’s findings were limited. It was unable to independently verify bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad except via U.S. assertions. What it did conclude was that Pakistani authorities had no prior knowledge of his presence or of the American raid.
It’s also worth noting that the claim bin Laden was “martyred” by U.S. forces was desirable for Al-Qaeda’s own propaganda purposes. It provided them with a rallying narrative regardless of the underlying facts.
So when you ask whether there is “stronger evidence he wasn’t killed,” the point is that there is no independent evidence either way. What we have are uncorroborated U.S. claims and propaganda statements from Al-Qaeda for whom his death at the hands of the US was a propaganda boon. Neither of which can be treated as reliable proof.
In fact, the level of evidence is comparable to other cases where U.S. authorities presented certainty that later collapsed - such as the claim that the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan produced VX nerve agent, or that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire. Both were asserted as fact by the U.S. military and government until contradictory evidence made the truth undeniable. It would be naïve to assume we are working with reliable sources here.
When French marsouins killed Droukel, one of the first thing they did was take a picture, then sent it to their friends in the navy, operational security be damned (and from what I've heard, that triggered a lot of jokes). The french troops there were more or less aware of the kill way before it was confirmed, which took days. It might be because Seals are tighter at opsec than Marsouins for sure, and that the Cia was ready to confirm the kill while Droukel was less prepared, but the timeline is for sure extremely tight. Still think it happened, I just think the whole story lacks information on insiders.
Yeah, agreed that on the balance of probabilities, it happened more or less as described. But I also think the strongest evidence for that is that Trump didn't use any discrepancy to attack the prior Obama administration in his first term.
"Major North Korean universities, such as the Kim Il-sung University and the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies, send a few dozen exchange students to Peking University and other top-ranked Chinese universities each year."[1][2]
"North Korean hackers are sent vocationally to Shenyang, China for special training. They are trained to deploy malware of all types onto computers, computer networks, and servers."[3][4]
The brightest students of most nations are often sent abroad to enrich their countries with knowledge from the great universities. NK is almost unique in its inability to do this at non-Chinese great universities, so that is the only viable route.
I would doubt it because North Korea has extremely strict controls on who exits the country for any reason, but especially for education. I know this has happened before (for example Kim Jung Un studied in Switzerland under a false name when he was a kid), but it's extremely rare, and runs contrary to the North Korean philosphy of Juche, self-reliance.
The population of Gaza has increased during the war. Roughly 60k deaths and roughly 103k births, using the UN statistics of 150 births per day in Gaza.
The statistics of 150 births/day in Gaza are from 2023- is it clear to you that the population now is undernourished, forced to flee from place to place, their homes demolished and their relatives dead or injured? Life expectancy in Gaza plummeted from 75 years to around 40.
And how do you even know that there have been 60k deaths in Gaza? That number is likely a vast underestimate.
No matter how you slice the data, births have exceeded deaths in Gaza during the war.
Elsewhere in the thread, I supplied data showing 130 births/day in April 2025, the most recent month for which data is available. No matter how you slice it, (100 births/day, 130 births/day, 150 births/day, or 180 births/day) there have been at least 70,000 births in Gaza since the war started, though likely many, many more. This exceeds the number of known deaths by any measure. Were you familiar with these figures previously? Can you supply alternative data showing a lower birth rate? No and no.
As for the deaths, you asked if I know there have been ~60k deaths. The truth is I don't know there have been 60k deaths in gaza, and neither do you - that figure comes from Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization and belligerent to the war, and it includes natural deaths, deaths reported in google forms,terrorist deaths, palestinian deaths caused by Hamas, and has had to be downward revised (including cutting the known number of female and child deaths by half) several times in the conflict - so for most of the conflict at least, people citing these figures would have been wrong. But I'm willing to use this figure here because I consider it an upper limit.
Source: "About 130 children are being born daily in Gaza as Israeli authorities' total siege on supplies enters its second month, putting mothers and newborns at risk as medical and food supplies run out and a lack of flour closes all bakeries"
https://www.savethechildren.net/news/about-130-children-born...
Source? Also, even if this is true, it doesn't actually negate claims of genocide. That is still a colossal number of deaths, and conditions in Gaza are rapidly worsening to the point that few of those born will survive.
No, I really can't find any documents like that. Could you post a URL to the document you're referring to? Additionally, your claim of 60,000 deaths is an extreme underestimate. The dataset provided by data.techforpalestine.org lists more than 60,000 deaths, despite only including people whose corpses could be identified and directly linked to an Israeli attack. In other words, this does not include deaths from starvation, exposure, or illness. It also does not include unconfirmed deaths, and, of course, cannot include unreported deaths.
You may think data.techforpalestine.org is a biased source, but their total identified death count roughly agrees with every other source I could find.
It's hard to get good data on current birth rates in Gaza, but the recently published preprint of a demographic study of the death toll in Gaza (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.19.25329797v...) provides some evidence that the death toll in Gaza is approximately balanced by births. Specifically, the project directed in-person interviews of Gazan citizens representing ~2k households and ~9k people in them, and recorded ~390 violent deaths and ~360 births in that cohort, both from 10/7 and until January 2025.
Thank you for providing a source! That data certainly contradicts @richardfeynman's claim, in that it suggests a shrinking population. Additionally, since total deaths will be greatly in excess of violent deaths, I would say it suggests a rapidly shrinking population. I would not call the birth and death rates "approximately balanced" in this case, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion.
No, this data in fact suggests growing population, for the following three reasons:
- the survey recorded a surprisingly small excess of nonviolent deaths (in excess of what's demographically expected), this is discussed in the preprint. The much larger number of violent deaths is almost matched by births, so the total balance is somewhat towards shrinking, in that cohort
- however, it is well known that the violent deaths occurred overwhelmingly early in the war (so far) - according to the official Hamas statistics, something like 50% of all casualties are in the first 4 months of the war, out of 22 so far. Whether these statistics are over- or under-counted is not likely to make a dent in this huge imbalance. So as the war is ongoing - and it's already been another 8 months since the 14 covered by the survey - the death rate is still "collapsing" compared to average rate so far.
- at the same time, the birth rate has evidently not seen such a huge collapse since the first 4 months of the war; this can't be gleaned from the survey, but enough plausible reports (e.g. what @richardfeynman quoted) exist that point in that direction.
So if we consider the survey relatively representative of the entire population, the imbalance towards shrinking population after 14 months is already almost certainly repaired towards growing after another 8 months, because so few civilians are violently killed (again, compared to the first 4 months of the war) in 2025.
Once again: do you have sources for any of this? Yes, there were more violent deaths at the start of the war, but how much more? @richardfeynman did provide quotes for his birth rate claims, but as I already mentioned, those quotes appear to be estimates of birth rates for a single month. Extrapolating that data across all 22 months is nonsense.
Additionally, your argument hinges on a single preprint paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed.
And finally, we don't even need to play these games counting up death tolls in different, increasingly creative ways. There are already reports from the UN and others directly confirming that Gaza's population has decreased: <https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/dec/06/instagram-...>
The time-wise imbalance of deaths is a very basic fact about the ongoing war, I didn't realize you were ignorant of it and needed a verification. The Hamas-provided statistics are timestamped, you can look e.g. at https://data.techforpalestine.org/docs/casualties-daily/, download the CSV file, look in the cumulative deaths column, see that it's just over 60k for the entire period, and note that 30k occurs around 2024-03-01. So I was slightly off and it's a little less than 5 months (oct 07 to mar 01) out of a little less than 23 months (oct 07 to 2025-08-31) that account for 50% of the deaths.
There isn't any report that actually counts Gaza's population, the UN provided an "estimate" with no methodology, births are not mentioned, and it's built on figures including number of people who exited Gaza (irrelevant to the claimed decrease due to violent deaths). That's not serious.
There's no coherent notion of genocide that fails to reduce the population significantly. Yes, you can argue (and people have) that the legal definition, by using the "part of" wording, can conceivably apply to virtually any number of deaths, but again, that's not serious.
Thanks, but we still need better data on births for this argument to hold any water. Additionally, if you want to include the segment of the population that has fled, you will also need data on the birth/death rates for that segment.
I would also like to note that you found a study looking at birth/death rates, but after realizing it suggested a shrinking population, decided to combine information from that study with information from a separate dataset so that the population could be argued to be growing.
And none of this actually takes nonviolent deaths into account, however small you believe that number may be.
"On 18 January 2024, Natalia Kanem, the executive director of the UN Population Fund, spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, stating the situation was the "worst nightmare" the UNPF representative had ever witnessed, as there were 180 women giving birth daily, sometimes on the streets of Gaza, as the territory's health system collapsed"
The 60k death count is likely an overcount, not an undercount, but this one I won't google for you. However you cut the numbers, and even if you believe in nameless ghosts under the rubble, there's been no population collapse.
Thanks for providing sources! They estimate 180 giving birth every day, but over what time frame? Without a time frame, it's not really possible to estimate the total born.
As for the 60k count, every single source I have found suggests that 60k is a massive underestimate. You'll need to provide some very strong evidence to back up your claim to the contrary.
Regardless of the balance of birth and death rates, multiple sources have reported a significant decline in Gaza's population this year. So far, all evidence you have provided contradicts your own initial claim.
Excuse me, but my initial claim is that there is no genocide in gaza because there is no massive population collapse. During the holocaust, 66% of european jewry was murdered in a systematic effort -- all civilians, with no Jews attacking European cities. The figures during the rwandan and armenian genocide were similar: massive population collapses.
Whether you believe there have been 100 births a day or 140 or 150 or 180, I have demonstrated that there were tens of thousands of births during the war in gaza, using credible sources like the UNOCHA and WHO. But even if you assume ZERO births, the gazan population will have only collapsed by roughly 60k people. I may be wrong about this, but I think this is an OVERESTIMATE, not an underestimate. While you don't have to believe me, I at least can make this claim without appealing to nameless ghosts under the rubble and can provide credible sources.
- The hamas figures are not an independent registry. The numbers are produced by a Hamas-run Ministry of Health—i.e., a belligerent party—without external audit. The UN, etc. do not independently verify these numbers; they simply repeat them. Even sympathetic explainers acknowledge the ministry is governed by Hamas and its routine updates aren’t independently verified.
- The system accepts public self-reports (initially via Google Forms, later an MoH web portal). That alone invites duplicates, misclassification, and bad data. Washington Institute documents the Google Form; it also cites the current MoH “report a death/missing” portal.
- The public reporting portal explicitly allows “natural death” submissions. When the same pipeline feeds the headline tally, non-combat, non-IDF deaths can (and did) get swept in. The live MoH form literally offers “martyr,” “missing,” or “natural death.” Mainstream reporting later noted removals where entries turned out to be natural deaths.
- the gaza ministry of health uses opaque and unreliable methods to count deaths (“media reports” + family notifications) with weak validation. Beyond hospital records, the MoH has relied on poorly specified “media reports” and family submissions; AP also notes names often come via the Hamas government media office—not hospital documentation. That’s not a chain of custody you can audit. It included the known false figures from the al ahli hospital incident.
- Totals and demographics are unstable and there have big retroactive corrections. The UN/OCHA famously halved its women/children figures in May 2024, and months later the MoH removed thousands of previously listed “victims,” with officials conceding some were natural deaths or living detainees. That volatility is incompatible with “hard” totals.
- The overall figure doesn’t separate civilians from combatants or assign cause of death. By design it bundles Hamas fighters, civilians, misfire casualties, indirect war deaths, and (as above) even natural deaths—so it cannot answer the key question “how many Gazans were killed by Israel.”
Thank you for providing sources. I do find it interesting that the Washington Institute report concludes by saying that the Gaza Health Ministry's list of deaths is generally considered accurate, and that list currently includes more than 60,000 names.
But maybe you're right! Maybe the very sources you're relying on are wrong, and only 50,000 or so Gazans have died. That still doesn't mean this isn't a genocide.
The argument is that Gaza is currently undergoing a genocide, not that the genocide is already complete. If we were to have this argument about the Holocaust in 1942 or so, you could similarly say that only a small percentage of European Jews have died so far, therefore it can't be a genocide. In the case of Palestine, give Israel another decade of unchecked brutality and I'm sure they can attain your high standards for human extermination.
The sources I provided show that there are severe problems with the Gaza Health Ministry list. You may find particular sentences that show the top-line number is correct, and indeed that may be true. I provided those sources not to show that 60k is the wrong number of dead--a figure I myself used in my initial comment--but rather to show that the list itself has issues and that arguments can be made that it's an overestimate rather than an underestimate. I agree the actual figure is difficult to pin down. There's no need for snarkiness ("Maybe you're right and your sources are wrong.") in a discussion like this, where the goal is to discover truth on a complex, emotional issue.
The bottom line is that whether you believe 60k people died or 100k people died, and whether you believe 60k people were born or 100k people were born, there has been nothing close to a population collapse in Gaza. Indeed, the population appears to have risen. Therefore, if you're going to make the argument that there is an ongoing genocide, you're going to have to also admit (as it appears you now do) that Gaza's population has either risen during this alleged genocide, or decreased by a small amount.
There are additional hurdles for those claming a genocide: (1) why has Israel dropped millions of leaflets to warn of impending attacks?; (2) why has israel sent millions of text messages warning of impending attacks?; (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones; (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill; (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week; (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low; and I can go on forever. You may have respones to some of these questions, and we can debate these, but perhaps it's not necessary. The argument for genocide is one of those "emperor has no clothes" issues. People say it with such confidence, as though it's common knowledge (and indeed it is widely believed), but that doesn't mean it's true, or that the emperor has clothing.
Finally, by the end of 1942, the Nazis had killed 30% of european jewry, 3 million innocent civilians. There was already a clear genocide, which the world ignored. The inverse is true today: there is no clear genocide, but most of the world maintains it is.
> (1) why has Israel dropped millions of leaflets to warn of impending attacks?; (2) why has israel sent millions of text messages warning of impending attacks?;
"The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist. No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you. You have been left alone to face your inevitable fate. Iran cannot even protect itself, let alone protect you, and you have seen with your own eyes what has happened. Neither America nor Europe care about Gaza in any way. Even your Arab countries, which are now our allies, provide us with money and weapons while sending you only shrouds.
"There is little time left — the game is almost over."
So, to your question, the primary purpose of these leaflets is to terrorize and threaten the population. The secondary purpose is to have hasbarists like yourself pretend that they are evidence of humanitarian magnanimity.
> (3) why has israel ordered evacuations of combat zones prior to attacking; (4) why has israel set up refugee camps/ safe zones;
"[Forensic Architecture] has documented a pattern in which civilians have been directed to move to certain areas by official evacuation orders, only for the Israeli military to attack those same areas shortly afterwards, either on the same day as the evacuation order, or the day after.
> (5) why has Israel supplied so much aid to a civilian population you claim it's trying to kill;
Even rhetorically this question makes no sense, considering that it is very well-documented that Israel has been and is actively preventing real humanitarian aid. The Israeli-sanctioned "aid" via the GHF is a "killing field" of desperate Palestinians: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-ma...
> (6) why has its genocide been so incompetent and long-lasting if it could accomplish its alleged genocidal goal in a week;
Because then there would be even fewer of those alongside you willing to defend the indefensible.
> (7) what % of those killed are terrorists?; (8) why is the civilian:combatant death ratio so low;
The postulate required for this pair of questions to not be self-defeating is to expand the meaning of "terrorist" to encompass, at the least, every male in Gaza. In other words, "Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza." - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel...
>The leaflets read: “For your safety, you need to evacuate your places of residence immediately and head to known shelters … Anyone near terrorists or their facilities puts their life at risk, and every house used by terrorists will be targeted.”
That is an interesting statistic, but India is a subcontinent while Gaza is one marathon long. I would anticipate need to travel to vary inversely with area. Wouldn't it be queer if, at most, 6% of Manhattanites stepped foot off the island each year?
Two clarifications. First, I’m talking about exits, not unique people. Pre-war Gaza logged ~500k documented exits/year (via Israel and Egypt) out of ~2 M residents; India logged ~21.6 M departures out of ~1.4 B. Both are trip counts, so repeat travelers are included.
Second, area is a red herring. Cross-border mobility is driven by policy, permits, visas, income, and border agency capacity—not square kilometers. Manhattan is integrated into a national customs/transport network; Gaza isn’t. Despite severe restrictions, Gaza still had hundreds of thousands of recorded border crossings annually.
That’s why the literal “open-air prison” claim fails. Prisons don’t run departure counters. If the term is metaphorical for harsh movement controls, say that. But if it’s meant literally, the exit data contradicts it.
I think we disagree on a great many things and it probably will not be resolved through an accounting of facts or reasoned argument. I will mention that as far as 'red-herrings' go, the OP did not mention 10/7 when they called Gaza an open air prison.
Indeed, I can see facts won't sway you, or most people in the pro-Palestine camp.
Also, I didn't mention the 10/7 attack either. The narrative that gaza is an open-air prison has existed for years, and it has been manifestly wrong for years; that hasn't stopped anyone from claiming it.
Indeed, I wrote "prior to 10/7" in my completely accurate statement that prior to 10/7 Gaza was not an open-air prison. I pointed out that there were roughly 500,000 exits per year from Gaza to Egypt and Israel in this period. The reason I mentioned this is because people justify the 10/7 massacre as some sort of freedom fighting operation where people were breaking out of a prison.
Thanks for defining the word "mention," brother, knowing this definition really addresses the central issue and refutes my central point.
I think @chaps was quite justified in defining "mention", given that you just talked about 10/7 and then immediately insisted you never mentioned 10/7. That suggests that you either don't know what "mention" means, or you don't take any care with your words. And if you aren't being careful with your words, why should we trust them?
Yes, of course you think that, but it's also rather silly. I said "prior to 10/7", to point out that people claimed there was an open-air prison before that date. I wasn't talking about the attacks; I was talking about before the attacks. Do you want me to define "prior" for you?
Additionally, when Israel gave Gaza to the Gazans in 2005, it wasn't fenced in yet the Gazans still attacked Israel, demonstrating the attacks weren't being about fenced in, but rather a visceral hate towards the yahood. The fences were built after the second intifada.
This is an accusation without meaning. You don't know what information I see, so you don't know whether I see propaganda at all. The reverse is true as well; I don't know what information (or propaganda) you see. But no, I don't see how Israel giving Gaza to the Gazans (something Egypt never did) demonstrates "the entire issue," whatever you happen to mean by that.
You are not commenting in good faith. The author, a respected computer scientist with deep knowledge of this issue, is not a propagandist; you just don't like what he says. I have been on Hacker News for well over a decade, I'm not some fresh two year old account like yours. And I didn't say I don't consume any propaganda (I'm sure I do), it's you who said I'm "deep into propaganda" which is a false and evidence-free statement.
"In 2022, the Egyptian authorities allowed more exits of people through their border. The 144,899 exits recorded during the year are 44 per cent more than in 2021, representing the highest figure since 2014."
That's 6.6% of the gaza population travelling out of gaza per year, higher than the percent of Indians who travel abroad each year. This statistic also doesn't reflect the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year.
The "open air prison" is a lie. You can impute whatever motive you want to them leaving. I'm sure escaping Hamas persecution was a part of it for many of them. Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing and the "mowing the lawn" narrative is propaganda.
> In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’
That's an editorial sentence; I was quoting a fact. The same fact appears in numerous other sources and gives lie to the open-air prison idea. Sorry you don't like that fact.
You keep insisting on that 6.6% figure, but you have yet to provide a single source that supports it. You made that calculation yourself, based on a statistic that you already admitted doesn't mean what you thought it meant, and doesn't correspond to the relevant statistic for India. Given how many times I've raised this issue to your attention, I would say you are now intentionally misleading people.
"You keep insisting on that 6.6% figure"
This is simply false. I have acknowledged your correction twice. It's more accurate to say that there have been more than 500,000 exits from Gaza in 2022, which as a percent of the population is approximately 25%, though this surely includes people who exited multiple times. In the same year, India recorded 22.6 million exits from a population of 1.4 billion, which is less than 2%. Given that there were 500k recorded exits, it wasn't an open-air prison. QED.
The acknowledgments.
"Thanks for this comment. I'd like to acknowledge that as you point out the 6.6% figure refers to exits from Gaza via Egypt using documented means, and may include people who exited multiple times, so the actual people exiting would be slightly lower. Similarly, it'd be nice for you to acknowledge that this figure doesn't include undocumented exits via tunnels in Rafah, or the 424,000 documented exits from Gaza via Israel."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45084323
"My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times."
Also, this is data you appear to have been totally unaware of (as evidenced by your skepticism and repeated demand for sources), so it is you who should acknowledge you were wrong and stop spreading misinformation.
Yes, you acknowledged the correction elsewhere. However, when questioned about the 6.6% figure by another user, you literally just replied "I was quoting a fact". Perhaps you meant the fact about the number of exits to Egypt, but to me, that appears highly misleading, perhaps intentionally so.
I think oscaracso makes a very good point as well. In a country as vast as India, you can find almost anything you need without leaving its borders. Less so with Gaza.
So in other words you said I didn't acknowledge the correction, but I did acknowledge it, twice. I then modified it to point out that there were 500k exits from gaza out of a population of 2 million, something I'm glad you now don't dispute, because it gives lie to the whole "open-air prison" narrative.
No, that's not what I said. Once again, you are not being careful with your words, and as a result what you say has only a tenuous relationship to the truth. Yes, you acknowledged your mistake, yet you still insisted upon that incorrect figure later, to a different person in a different subthread.
As for the 500k figure, I'm not interested in disputing it since it's just as irrelevant as your 6.6% figure, for reasons I've already mentioned. But since you insist, I'll list them out again:
1. That figure is listing total exits, not distinct exiting individuals. Since most of those exits were made by workers and traders (who might cross very frequently, maybe daily), there is good reason to believe that the number of distinct exiting individuals is vastly lower. For example, if everyone crossing was a daily trader, the true number of exiting individuals would be smaller by a factor of 365. Of course, not everyone making the crossing is a worker or trader, only most of them, and we don't know how often they cross.
2. That figure does not distinguish exits by Palestinians, Israelis, or other citizens, so it has no bearing on whether Palestinians are trapped in Gaza or not. Many Israeli workers also cross into and out of Gaza constantly.
3. This figure is from before October 7, and movement is more restricted now. But, since you are focusing on the use of the term "open-air prison" before the massacre, I won't count that against you.
By the way, I certainly don't insist on calling Gaza an "open-air prison", that's far too imprecise for me. I simply object to the way that you misinterpret facts to support your argument.
> 2. That figure does not distinguish exits by Palestinians, Israelis, or other citizens, so it has no bearing on whether Palestinians are trapped in Gaza or not. Many Israeli workers also cross into and out of Gaza constantly.
I don't believe Israelis entered Gaza in 2022. In fact, cases where mentally ill Israelis entered Gaza ended in them being held as hostages by Hamas
Look, I can see we're straying from a discussion of facts to a discussion of what people said, which is not productive. I'm glad you now know that there were >500,000 exits per year from Gaza to Israel and Egypt in 2022, and don't dispute that figure. You're reduced now to accepting that figure, and trying to find a large and arbitrary number to divide it by. Fine by me. Whatever you divide it by, there were logged exits, so it wasn't a prison. In fact, many of the people who exited Gaza to Israel are known to have mapped the kibbutzim for Hamas's attack.
Similarly, I'm glad you now know that there are somewhere between 100 and 180 births per day in Gaza, depending on the month and source you trust. (I did provide 2025 data, you just overlooked it.) Whichever figure you choose--100 births/day or 180 births/day--you're now reduced to accepting that there were tens of thousands of births in Gaza, something you hadn't even considered before. And I know you didn't consider this before given how incredulous you were of this basic fact that you asked for sources multiple times. You also have no counter-proposal or alternative source on how many births there were. But it doesn't matter to me.
When it comes to the death count, you need this to remain higher than the official health ministry count (which includes natural deaths and has other problems), so you offer the widely debunked theory that there are thousands of nameless, faceless, odorless bodies under the rubble - something for which there is no primary evidence. Your skepticism goes in one direction. Exercise for you: try treating the pro-palestinian narrative with that attitude and see how far you get.
For my own part, I used to lead pro-palestine rallies, and at the beginning of the war I even paid to help smuggle a Gazan out through one of the Rafah crossings some commenters here say don't exist, but then I tried to... y'know... apply equal skepticism to both sides.
>For my own part, I used to lead pro-palestine rallies, and at the beginning of the war I even paid to help smuggle a Gazan out through one of the Rafah crossings
No you didn’t. Or you’re saying you cared enough to hold rallies but now you just so happened to have developed “skepticism” once Israel started the genocide. And now you parrot hasbara talking points. Yeah nah.
Israel started the genocide not later than 1968. Pretending that the genocide is a novel phenomenon starting after the Oct. 7 attacks is a propaganda point actively pushed by those under the sway of Iranian propaganda that is designed to align with and subtly reinforce, among those not already aligned with the Palestinian cause, Israeli propaganda that what is described as genocide is a response to the Oct. 7 attacks, because Iran's interest is not in ending the genocide, but in ensuring that it continues while leveraging it for propaganda cover for its own geopolitical interests in the region.
There is an old Jewish saying: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.
Whether or not I was part of the pro Palestine movement is completely irrelevant to the thread and I have no obligation to prove it to you. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter to me and iota. But tell you what, if we can put some stakes on this (e.g. $10k if I have the goods), I'll do it for money. I'll be happy to donate to your $ to the idf.
>There is an old Jewish saying: the antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.
Whether or not I was part of the pro Palestine movement is completely irrelevant to the thread and I have no obligation to prove it to you. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter to me and iota. But tell you what, if we can put some stakes on this (e.g. $10k if I have the goods), I'll do it for money. I'll be happy to donate to your $ to the idf.
If it is irrelevant, why did you bring it up? It is obvious you are lying, like you have been in every other post in this thread.
And you had to fall back to the usual baseless accusations of antisemitism. Typical hasbara troll.
Nice one, but will you put your money where your mouth is?
The fact that I led pro Palestine rallies is irrelevant to the central point we're discussing, which is whether Gaza was an open air prison and whether the was a genocide. It's relevant to my own personal journey from the pro Palestine movement, which I left because of people like you.
It's interesting that the article directly contradicts your own takeaway:
"In 2022, more people were let out of Gaza; however, their movement remained the exception rather than the rule, with the vast majority of residents, over 2 million people, virtually ‘locked in.’"
Additionally, that's 144,899 exits, not 144,899 distinct people exiting, nor is it even 144,899 exits made by Palestinians. So your interpretation is multiply incorrect.
Would you like to clarify what you mean by "Israeli prosecution wasn't really a thing"?
Presumably, up to a few minutes ago you were unfamiliar with the accurate statistic I quoted. Noting your reaction to this new information: to double down and cast shade. Sorry you dont like it. And yes, with roughly 6.6 percent of gazans population traveling abroad each year, it's the exceptional gazans that travels abroad, much like it's the exceptional rural alabaman that travels abroad each year.
(The statistic I quoted also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year, or the undocumented exits through tunnels under rafah, so the exits were indeed much higher, not lower, than the official ocha figures.)
What I mean when I say that Israel persecution wasn't really a thing is that the men with guns in Gaza were Hamas, not the idf. If you were shot in the knee or thrown off a building for being queer, it was Hamas that was persecuting you, not the idf.
I'm not trying to cast shade, just trying to critically analyze information.
Again, could you provide a source for that figure of 6.6% of Gazans "travelling abroad" each year? As I previously mentioned, that article does not actually support that figure at all, so I'm not sure why you insist upon it. We could obtain a better estimate for the number of distinct exiting Gazans by counting the number of exit permits issued, since those are ostensibly required to leave. The article does say 18,000 permits were issued to workers and traders in 2022, but since it doesn't include permits to other civilians, nor does it mention the expiration period for these permits, I won't commit the intellectually dishonest act of trying to turn that into a percentage.
As for your claim about Israeli persecution, that's trivially false. There are too many instances of Palestinians being shot by IDF forces to list here, but there are casualty databases freely available online. Yes, Hamas persecutes Palestinians as well, I'm not defending them.
Thanks for this comment. I'd like to acknowledge that as you point out the 6.6% figure refers to exits from Gaza via Egypt using documented means, and may include people who exited multiple times, so the actual people exiting would be slightly lower. Similarly, it'd be nice for you to acknowledge that this figure doesn't include undocumented exits via tunnels in Rafah, or the 424,000 documented exits from Gaza via Israel.
In those conditions, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but whatever the precise figure is--5%, 6.6%, 10%--it's clearly higher than zero, which is what one would expect in an "open air prison," the central point I was arguing against.
Aside from the exit rate, the "open air prison" claim is a lie for many other reasons, not least of which is that the guards patrolling the so-called prison (Hamas) are also the people who were claimed to be inmates, something one doesn't see in prisons.
The claim for Israeli persecution is not false (or "trivially false" as you put it). The odds of a gazan dying from an israeli weapon in 2022 was essentially zero: hamas claims 49 were killed that year, of which 22 are verifiable. The odds of a gazan dying from Hamas on the other hand was appreciable, in the thousands. After hamas's genocidal massacre on october 7, obviously this changed.
Yes, it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but you have provided no evidence with which to obtain even a ballpark estimate. I don't think the real figure would be "slightly lower" than 6.6%, I think it would be much lower, since many of those exiting Gaza would be e.g. truck drivers who make the trip constantly. As for the "secret Gazan escape tunnels", while some Hamas tunnels may exist connecting Rafah and Egypt, I can find no evidence that these are trafficked by civilians. Of course, I don't know how much lower than 6.6% the real figure is, and neither do you, that's the point. The real problem here is that you presented that figure as an absolute certainty, without any evidence to back it up.
Secondly, when people refer to Gaza as an "open air prison" they are employing metaphor. I have never understood it to mean that literally no one leaves, and I don't think any reasonable person understands it that way.
Finally, you have provided more figures about Gazan deaths. Would you care to provide a source for those figures? Even if they are accurate (and so far, none of your figures have been accurate) they still contradict your previous post, that the "only men with guns in Gaza are Hamas". The point of my questioning was to arrive upon a common definition for the word "persecution". Your offered definition was indeed trivially false, since you just admitted that the IDF shot innocent civilians in that time frame. Perhaps you would like to amend your statement and pick a definition more suitable for your arguments, such as Amnesty International's definition. In that case, I offer this report detailing the many ways Palestinians were persecuted under Israel's rule prior to October 7: <https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/>
We were debating whether Gaza was an open-air prison. My claim is that it wasn't because people could get in and out. I have already acknowledged that the 6.6% figure refers to documented exits via the official Rafah crossing rather than indivudual people, and that this includes people who cross multiple times. You have not yet acknowledged the >400,000 crossings from Gaza to Israel, and you put in scare quotes the "secret Gazan escape tunnels."
But these tunnels weren't secret and they did exist.
"To mitigate the impact of the blockade on Gaza, a tunnel economy evolved and
peaked between 2007 and 2013, with more than 1,532 underground tunnels running under the 12 km border between Gaza and Egypt. "
That's just one source and likely an underestimate on the number of tunnels. You claim you were unable to find the easily-findable stats on the birth-rate in Gaza; this should be an easy one for you as there are multiple documentaries about these tunnels you can find freely on youtube, and you can see video evidence of the tunnels.
I am glad you now say that when people refer to Gaza as an open-air prison, they don't actually mean what they say, but are instead referring to a situation where there were hundreds of thousands (indeed more than half a million) documented exits each year between Egypt and Israel; to a place where the men with guns patrolling the prison were Hamas, not the IDF; to a place where if you were going to get killed, your killers were most likely to be Hamas, not the IDF.
Likewise, I appreciate you acknowledging that this is a special kind of genocide where the population hasn't really been reduced much.
And I also appreciate your deep skepticism of everything I say, despite the many credible sources I provide, and your complete failure to provide any primary evidence for your claims of tons of nameless, faceless, odorless corpses under rubble; your evidence-free claims that people born in Gaza today have a low chance of living; and your prediction that if you give Israel 10 more years, it will eradicate the population of Gaza. I look at population charts; this will be an interesting one to watch - care to make a bet on polymarket with me?
You forgot the rest of the quote:
“ While the tunnels prevented the complete collapse of Gaza's economy, they were unsustainable, informal, uncontrolled and unregulated by governments on either side of the border. They were closed by mid-2013.”
I did not forget the rest of the quote; I omitted it because it turns out that was wrong. Tunnels existed from Rafah to Egypt right up to 10/7. There are videos of Egyptian and israeli authorities destroying them post 10/7.
You deliberately left it out because it invalidated your point. Even if Israel wasn’t lying about tunnels, they weren’t moving the amount of people you claimed. So your point was bogus.
What do you mean? There is photographic and video evidence of Israel destroying the tunnels after it established the Philadelphia corridor. CGI?
Also, let's pretend the tunnels didn't exist (they did). How in the world would that invalidate my point that Gaza wasn't an open air prison because there were more than 500k documented exits in 2022?
> (The statistic I quoted also doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of exits from Gaza to Israel each year, or the undocumented exits through tunnels under rafah, so the exits were indeed much higher, not lower, than the official ocha figures.)
That is what you said. That report didn't support that claim. Which was obvious if you read the part you omitted. Which is why you didn't bother to quote it. It is the second article you linked where you deliberately misrepresented the data. Like your claim of 500k people exiting, when that article said 83% are laborers who go to Israel and back. You realize prisons allow work release too, right?
> There is photographic and video evidence of Israel destroying
There is plenty of video evidence of Israel destroying pretty much everything in Gaza. They have claimed many things, most of them not true. Like those supposedly hidden Hamas C&C facilities in the basements of hospitals (they weren't there, Israel just wanted to destroy the health system).
I went through a program like this (hf0) and it really did help us get more done. But that was in the heart of sf. So interested to see if the concept can cross cultures. I bet it can.
i really like the saying "talent is uniformly distributed; opportunity is not"
this is def an experiment and our first time doing anything like this in SE asia, but i'm personally really excited to see who this attracts, and i just hope it ends up as a semi-organized non-shitshow ;)
@paras - I worked at Optimizely in the early days and led online marketing there from 2012 - 2016. I remember seeing your team copy our SEM strategy, so I added Hindu gods (shiva, vishnu, et al) to the UTM query params in our ads for your guys to dissect / get a laugh from.
Most importantly, you can often find out WHY a campaign exists with stuff like utm=small-biz.
If they’re a competitor, congrats, you just found a potential niche you may have overlooked. If you look at what events they send to their analytics, you can uncover what they know and don’t know about app usage or ad performance.
How does one copy SEM strategy? How do you reverse engineer based on ads and utm_tags? How do I even know that you are doing it right so it's worth copying?
I good with API docs and weird bugs but this is beyond me.
Friendly heads up that some thumbnail in your landing page are not loading. Specifically the ones that link to the sample resumes for a given title. The one for CTO and the one for compliance coordinator failed to load.
great question. we're an AI storytelling tool rather than a text-to-video tool like stable video diffusion or SORA.
we use a a combo of technologies including Stable video diffusion as part of our our generation stack. we love SORA and will add it to our stack once it's been red-teamed
It was certainly interesting to see Paul Graham, famous for his skepticism of China's COVID numbers, immediately embrace the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll, without understanding how they themselves generate it.
From my understanding their numbers have been fairly accurate throughout the years, do you have any specific examples of prior extreme discrepancies? (Because from what I followed, even the US believes those numbers to be accurate, but I would be happy to be corrected)
I'll answer your question, but first I'll ask you a question: Do you know how the Gaza Health Ministry generates their death toll? What do you think of their methods? My guess is you don't know but you trust it because you see these numbers repeated in the media (just like China's COVID death toll).
If you ask me how Israel calculates its death toll the answer is pretty simple: they use archaeologists, forensic medical teams, and more
One of the most obvious examples of a prior discrepancy was the Health Ministry claiming that ~500 innocent civilians died when Israel bombed al Ahli hospital. Of course, we later discovered the hospital wasn't bombed, the parking lot was, the bomb wasn't dropped by Israel but was rather an errant rocket from Hamas, and that far fewer people died. In other words, a series of lies. The Health Ministry never corrected the death toll and kept adding from that.
You can google around for dozens more. As I said to the prior commenter, I'd rather not have a debate here about whether the numbers are accurate (not because I'm not confident but rather because of the famous XKCD) and I simply mean to point out that Paul Graham has one standard for China's COVID death toll and a completely different standard for Hamas's Health ministry figures.
I still this still ignores important points, and ill make some comments and questions, some of which might be pedantic so feel free to ignore them
1. Regardless of the method, it was fairly accurate for years, and matched closely to Israeli estimates of casualties in prior conflicts.
2. The US, Israeli's largest ally, is not doubting those numbers. This alone says alot given that the US from a strategic perspective would want to present Israel in the best possible light they can given the majority of the globe is heading towards leaving Israel in isolation.
3. The Israeli claim against Almamadani hospital incident is placing the blame on Islamic Jihad (not Hamas) (pedantic point)
4. The issue of Almamadani hospital incident is still not settled, especially as the Israeli claimes have been debunked by multiple entities most notably the New York times. [1]
5. Ignoring the questionable numbers of this specific incident, because you might be right, but its interesting that the US's admission that the death toll coming from Gaza is accurate came at a date way after the Al mamadani hospital incident (my claim would be that this incident has been taken into consideration by the US officials when they admitted the accuracy of the death toll coming from Gaza). This paired with the US's strategic support of Israel makes their admission that the death toll is accurate is way more trust worthy than possibly exaggerated COVID death tolls, as in one case its an admission playing against the admitter, whereas the other case the admission is in favor of the admitter.
But thank you for sharing the Twitter thread, I'll investigate it and look into other sources as well
Hi keefle, thanks for taking the time to write this in such a reasonable, friendly way. I appreciate that. I notice you still didn't answer the question of how the Gaza Health Ministry gets their data. Do you have confidence in their methods? Are they going into North Gaza (now controlled by Israel) and looking at dead bodies?
2. The American government's position has shifted over time from outright denial of the Health Ministry numbers to "we don't know, but we do know there are too many deaths." Let's see how it continues to shift as the conflict evolves.
4. Remember the context. You asked for an instance of the Gaza Health Ministry lying and I provided one. Are you now saying the 500 dead figure was accurate? Because if so, you're wrong that the matter is unsettled. While the exact estimates vary from as few as a dozen KIA to ~300 KIA, the entire open source intelligence community, all western intelligence agencies, and most publications agree the initial death toll was wrong. Also--not to be pedantic--but the NYT retracted their early coverage of the al Ahli hospital incident; the piece you link to was widely panned by open source intelligence experts; and it doesn't actually question the incident -- it just calls into question one particular piece of evidence.
5. I don't think you're following the narrative. Israel has said that the total death toll may be roughly 30% lower than what the Gaza Health Ministry asserts, but they also argue the list is NOT accurate. The list says almost everyone dead are women and kids, whereas Israel claims that roughly 8,000 militants have been killed and 1,000 captured.
First, Israel has been carpet bombing Gaza for weeks on end. They have destroyed everything & bombed housing, schools, mosques, churches, universities, kids schools, restaurants, bakeries & every aspect of civilization there.
How many Palestinian journalists have been murdered or had their families targeted and extended family bombed by the IOF?
The IDF have targeted & murdered more journalists in 2 months than in any other conflict.
The IDF is the only military on the planet that has a military court for juveniles and imprisons them by the thousands. You can search this all out on YouTube & see footage of it. They were holding boys in open air cages in the winter. Their parents not even knowing which military prison their kids were in.
We see the US bombs falling 24/7 on all of Gaza. We see what is going on every single day.
We know the Israeli policy of “mowing the lawn” every few months.
We SEE it. You should own it and be revulsed by it, just as you should by the Israeli Apache gunships emptying their machine guns at Israelis at the concert or the tank rounds. Or shooting unarmed Israeli civilians hostages waving a white flag.
What policy is that called by the IDF again? Oh yeah, The Hannibal Directive. Only now they target their own.
- Israel has not carpet bombed gaza. They've used a higher portion of smart bombs than any other military in history and use F16s to guide their dumb bombs. Israel has dropped more than 25,000 bombs, and according to the high estimates fewer than 25,000 palestinians have been killed, meaning each bomb kills less than one person. Israel also establishes humanitarian corridors, drops leaflets, sends evacuation warnings, allows in aid, establishes safe zones, and much more.
- You're upset that Israel imprisons minors like these guys? https://www.wionews.com/world/are-hamas-resorted-to-training... Save some of your outrage for Hamas using child soldiers. Also, plenty of other countries, including the United States, imprison minors.
- I can see you've been listening to lots of Norman Finkelstein? Israel does not just wake up one day and say "let's mow the lawn" - each time they bomb gaza it's been in response to something like a suicide bomb or stabbing, which has happened for decades in Israel.
- I see you think you're familiar with the Hannibal directive. Can you link me to the text of this directive? The principles are tactical rather than strategic and followed by many other militaries, including the US.
This is a bold claim to make considering the evidence. We have satellite photos of Gaza and many estimates are that over 60% of the housing stock in the entire Gaza strip are damaged or destroyed[1] (some estimates up to 70% [2]; the lowest I could find was 45.3% [3]). Entire neighborhoods have been leveled in all parts of the Gaza strip. At least 29,000 bombs dropped on the strip have targeted residential areas. Over 65% of the population is displaced. More than 200 heritage and archaeological sites have been destroyed in the Israeli bombardment[2].
The bombings are not uniformly distributed, so if we focus on the most destroyed areas, which is norther Gaza and Gaza city, the numbers are much worse. Looking at this map[4] published by the BBC you can see that every part of Gaza city, Jabalia and Beit Hanoun have been targeted. Between 70% and 90% of all housing stock in these areas are damaged or destroyed[5]. Khan Younis south of the evacuation line has also had most of its areas targeted in Israeli bombardment and with an estimate 50% of all housing stock damaged or destroyed[5].
Here is what wikipedia has to say about carpet bombing[6]:
> Carpet bombing, also known as saturation bombing, is a large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land.
You have to be extremely selective in you consideration of reports on the evidence to deny that Gaza has been—and is currently in to process of being—carpet bombed. So selective in fact, that you would not just be wrong, but obviously wrong.
Carpet bombing is what the allies did to Dresden. Carpet bombing is indiscriminate. For every bomb that israel drops there is a lawyer approving it. There is lots of damage, particularly in the north (which Israel did its best to evacuate before bombing), because Hamas had built military infrastructure virtually everywhere: under schools, UN buildings, under residential houses, hospitals, etc.
I'm not trying to say there has been little damage to Gaza. There's been lots. But that doesn't mean it's been carpet bombed. There's lots of damage because there was lots of military infrastructure.
You are arguing semantics, and I’m taking the bait. You can do the same with genocide (it is what the Ottomans did to the Armenians) or terrorism (it is what the Irish republicans did in England). But just like genocide, terrorism and apartheid the meaning has broadened outside of the initial conception and prototypical example.
In every explanation and definition of carpet bombing I find online the focus is on the destruction, not the method. Yes, historical examples of carpet bombing has used unguided bombs, and the targets have been indiscriminate. However what is important is the damage and the time period. That is, the damage has to be massive, involve every part of a large area, and it has to happen progressively (as opposed to all at once; this excludes the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima). The bombing of Gaza checks every one of this criteria.
What doesn’t matter is the bureaucratic process before a target is selected, whether the bomb is guided. If a military specifically targets over half of all residential building, many historic and cultural sites, civilian infrastructure, etc. runs this through lawyers, who approve the bombing, then uses precession guided bombs to destroy these targets, and does so over every area, than that is carpet bombing.
And just to hammer the point home. Hamas still to this day retains the ability to fire rockets over to Israel, despite this vast damage of civilian area. However Israel is picking their target, if they indeed intend on destroying military targets, than they are certainly doing a lousy job.
Of course target selection matters, as does the existence of checks and balances associated with each strike. There is lots of destruction because Hamas built its military infrastructure in and under urban environments.
Maybe this is semantics to you, but to me carpet bombing implies indiscriminate bombing, which is the opposite of what Israel has done, despite its having dropped many bombs.
The amount of residential areas being bombed seems to suggest that the bombing is indeed indiscriminate. It is hard to believe that 70-90% of all buildings in Gaza City are valid military targets.
Bombings can still be indiscriminate even when you carefully select and hit each and every target. The indiscriminateness is just moved from an imprecise bomb to a non-discriminatory target selection method.
But fine, don’t call this carpet bombing. Call it something else. The level of destruction is on the maps, and has been documented to be extremely severe. More severe than in any other bombing campaigns since World War 2. Perhaps this amount of destruction warrants a new name that accurately depicts the horrors of something worse than carpet bombings.
"the Earth goes around the sun, so this is not what you see with your own eyes" is not an argument. The declared aim is to make Gaza unlivable, the actions match it. Including just turning off water, talking about human animals. And the destruction is not "regrettable", it's a despicable atrocity.
And then there is the IDF just going into civilian buildings, villages, rigging them up and blowing them up, singing about moving into Gaza and all that. The idea that it's only about military targets does not hold a drop of water.
The declared aim is to make Gaza unlivable? Really? Israel has stated hundreds if not thousands of times that he declared aim is to (1) destroy hamas's ability to wage war; (2) return the hostages; and (3) prevent such an attack from recurring.
Yes, there have been particular government officials who've said they want to make Gaza unlivable, just as there are crazies in the US congress and senate who say things like we should nuke the middle east.
In terms of the earth going around the sun, the point I was trying to make is that at first glance it does look like the sun goes around the earth, just as at first glance it looks like Israel is trying to reduce Gaza to rubble, but after careful observation and adherence to scientific thinking we learn that the earth goes around the sun -- and that Israel is not carpet bombing gaza.
Under the Genocide convention, Israel is obliged to prohibit and prosecute such speech. US senators aren't the standard, just like Hamas is not the standard. Besides one US senators hardly being the equivalent of hundreds of public figures, from the head of state to security and education minister, to army generals and so on. They're crazies alright, but they're not fringe, they're in charge. Those who call it out get viciously attacked, such as Ofer Cassif or Israel Frey ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMKyH4jCnTE )
And the rhetoric matches the actions of the IDF. It's not "just" the bombing, it's also just blowing up whole villages demolition style, before/after making selfies and TikToks making fun of it. Just turning off water, plowing up the asphalts of streets, etc. etc.
It is absolutely 100% mainstream, repeated in almost every speech by Israeli politicians at a ratio of maybe 100:1 that the war goals are what I stated versus what you concocted. I understand it's tough for you to know this since you don't speak hebrew and may not follow Israeli media, but I can assure you--assure you as someone who has followed this topic for 20 years, criticized the Israeli government for 20 years, marched with free palestine-- that you're dead wrong in your assessment.
Also, not sure how much of an expert you are in the Genocide convention, but Israel allows free speech and like the United States it does not prosecute legislators for saying wild things.
There is a massive gulf between your confidence and knowledge.
(1) Hamas retains the ability fire rockets over to Israel despite 70% of Gaza city being destroyed or damaged.
(2) The USA consistently vetoes UN resolutions which would bring back the hostages. So (3) is obviously valued higher then the lives of the hostages.
(3) Do you honestly believe this is achievable via militaristic means?
Israels stated goals—if we ignore those who say the goal is genocide—seem rather vague and/or unachievable. And in the case of (2) Israel (or rather the USA) is self sabotaging.
No, I choose to believe the officials who claim ethnic cleansing is the goal. The reality from the ground seems to support their narrative.
1. This is true, and it's unfortunate that Hamas is firing rockets from safe zones. This makes Israel's job substantially more difficult. But what you're ignoring is that Hamas's military abilities have been substantially reduced, the number of rockets being fired has dwindled, and they are being fired from fewer places. Hamas has all but been displaced from Northern Gaza and Khan Younis will fall probably by the end of the month.
2. Israel will not accept a future in which Hamas, which has vowed to repeat October 7, remains in power. So any resolution that calls for a ceasefire (meaning Israel puts down its weapons but Hamas doesn't) without a return of hostages will not pass muster.
3. Yes, I do believe it is possible to achieve with military means, and moreover I believe it's impossible to achieve without military means. And I believe it already has been achieved in Northern Gaza. I'm not saying Hamas will go away completely, just as Nazism didn't go away completely, but just as the allies crushed the Nazis, Israel can crush Hamas. I think it's unlikely for Israel to get many more hostages back, but I'm glad it's trying.
Interesting to me that you believe the officials who claim ethnic cleansing is the goal rather than the 100x more numerous officials, including the head of the IDF and Netanyahu, who say the three goals are what I stated. Also, there is no ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the ground. The net reduction in the Palestinian population since the start of the war has been roughly 6k people if you believe Hamas's death toll claims (22k deaths, 16k births).
85% of the population of Gaza has been displaced. Officials have from the start constantly stated goals of evacuating people to live in tent cities on the Sinai peninsula. This includes lower or retired officials, leaked documents, and Netanyahu himself to foreign leaders. Make no mistake, this goal is ethnic cleansing. Just because they haven’t been successful, that doesn’t mean this isn’t their goal or that they haven’t been trying. It is my inclination to believe those official given that the reality very much matches their rhetoric.
That you invoke the historical example of the Nazis seems interesting to me. World War 2 is the most devastating war in human history. About 3% of the global population died in that war. You may think Hamas is that frightening but I think this level of destruction is not proportionate to the actual threat imposed by Hamas.
Instead I would like to invoke the historic example of the IRA. Another resistance group that did horrible acts of terrorism, causing countless civilian civilian casualties. IRA was not defeated militarily, instead the Catholic population of Northern Ireland were granted equal rights, and the system of oppression was dismantled.
Israel seem very reluctant to even consider a peaceful solution as an option. So far in the current conflict peaceful solutions has save over a 100 hostages, military options has saved a single hostage (and killed at least 3).
The point with these three goals you—and Israeli officials—claim, is that they are vague or unachievable. Genocide is hardly ever stated as a goal, instead it is hidden by a rhetoric such as these. Particularly the promise of security.
1. If Israel didn't evacuate people from the north, there would be more dead Gazans.
2. Gazans have been begging to go to Egypt; the idea is to allow them to; Egypt refuses.
3. I'm not comparing this war to WW2, I'm comparing the principle that "you can't kill terrorism because it's an ideology" to the comparable principle of "you can't kill nazism because it's an ideology."
4. Of course Hamas was an existential threat to Israel. It literally killed ~1,000 Israeli civilians in a brutal, premeditated mass slaughter, a crime against humanity. If Hamas were stronger, or if Israel were weaker, they'd have killed more.
5. There can be no peace while Hamas is in power, retains hostages, and vows to repeat their atrocities.
6. Not only are Israel's three war aims achievable, but I'd argue they are just months away from achieving the first war aim (neutering Hamas). Time will tell.
7. You started off this thread by saying Israel's stated war aim is to ethnically cleanse Gaza. When I pointed out this is wrong, you changed your argument to some Israeli officials have said that. So you're arguing your interpretation of Israel's war aims supersede the official documentary record.
> You started off this thread by saying Israel's stated war aim is to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
I started off this thread by disputing the claim you made that Gaza is not being carped bombed. To circle back to that point here is an interesting article by the Washington Post Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza[1]. Of particular interest is the comparison to the bombing campaign of Aleppo and Raqqa.
ISIS is without a doubt one of the worse terrorist organizations we have ever seen. What makes ISIS particularly bad is that—unlike Hamas, IRA, Mau Mau or the Viet Cong—they are not resisting oppression of an occupying state but for their fight—like the Nazis—are for their own fascistic ideology and dominance. Their strength and brutality was also far worse then Hamas has ever been. And yet, they were defeated in Syria with far less damage and destruction then what the IDF has already imposed (without success) in Gaza.
I want to be absolutely clear though that the people suffering both the ISIS rule and then later the bombing campaigns which successfully deposed them, were indeed horrendous.
Another point of argument here is that there was no peaceful solution to ISIS. There is one for Hamas. ISIS wasn’t resisting oppression, Hamas is—just like IRA, FLN, etc. before them.
no space to reply. even though we disagree, i thank you for the lack of ad hominems in this discussion, and I appreciate you taking the time for dialogue. a positive step.
When someone flashes a knife and mentions $racist_slur -- or in the case of Israel, actually just arbitrarily kills people, turns off their water, blows up civilian buildings after posing for selfies, making all these sick videos playing with the children's toys of displaced or killed Palestinian families, attacks refugee camps even in the West Bank, just rips up roads, tears down shops with bulldozers, hands out weapons to utterly deranged settlers -- and then talks 5 hours about how they're a fan of African Americans or whoever they slurred, how much they like rap... you don't weigh these things against these other.
What could be weighed against it could be protest against and prosecution of the genocidal statements and actions. Nothing else, not ever.
There still are Israelis with conscience who are against this. But they're in the minority, as shown by Israelis demonstrating in front of the house of Ofer Cassir, tearing up a Palestinian flag with a scissor, grinning from ear to ear -- the first member of the Knesset they want to expel for supporting having this brought before the ICJ.
And there is the translate button. We can translate audio, too. Everybody speaks Hebrew. And whatever change in tune from here on out, while not changing the actions, will not change what Israel showed the world. Just like cutting off Internet access to Gaza will not make the world forget about Gaza.
But since we will simply not agree on this anyway, I want to ask, did you march with "Free Palestine", or with Palestinians? As in, in those 20 years, did you make Palestinian friends? If so, what are they saying?
1) Israel does not arbitrarily kill people. The ratio of dead combatants to dead civilians is roughly 1:2, which is better than the US or other Western powers achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's obviously also significantly better than Russia achieved in Mariupol alone (75k dead civilians, about 5k dead combatants).
2) I repeat: The IDF, Netanyahu, and other leaders have said a zillion times that the goals are to neuter Hamas, bring back the hostages, and provide a Hamas-free future for Gaza. These goals are consistent with their actions, which include dropping leaflets, sending text messages, doing roof-knock warnings, establishing humanitarian corridors, safe zones, allowing in aid, and more.
3) Yes, I have many Palestinian friends, and while I would never march with the current #freepalestine movement, which I think is highly antisemitic, I did march with the movement for years. Most of my Palestinian friends are afraid to speak up for fear of career damage. I encourage them to speak up and tell their side! I can guarantee you I've donated more to Palestinian causes than you or almost anyone on the thread has.
4) Do you think when Israel goes into a West Bank town they just do so for fun or malice? I mean, seriously! What a weird conception of the world. They go in and risk their soldiers to get terrorists, of which there are many.
5) I encourage you to browse Israeli media and hit the translate button! Based on your limited knowledge, I would guess you're not doing this at present. If you were, you would never claim Israel's goals are to make Gaza unlivable.
6) Yes, there are bad apples in the Israeli military who destroy stores and worse, but that is illegal in Israel and those soldiers get punished and face the military justice system. The same thing happens in every war, including US wars. Remember Abu Ghraib? That was far worse.
I mean, they've been calling for genocide since ever: When Genocide is Permissible, Times of Israel (opinion, 2014), https://archive.is/EuUdc
> The same thing happens in every war, including US wars. Remember Abu Ghraib?
One crime doesn't excuse another. Genocide has also happened, as has ethnic cleansing. Those are not the Pandora's Box the World wants to open again, and rightly so.
Aizenberg55 seems like a disinfo propagandist shill. No different than any other shill, Gazan or Russian or German.
For instance, Aizenberg55 discounts the fact that over 10,000 bombs were dropped in the first 10 days, which resulted in higher casualties than in the later stages of the war, with fragile lives that of infants and young kids dying of shock and fear. It is also easier to count the fatalities when an entire building is reduced to rubble and everyone in it is either buried or dead. You don't need archaeologists and nuclear scientists to count.
> What do you think of their methods?
Their methods have been known to be robust. IDF, in the past wars, have arrived at similar numbers to those presented by the Gazans.
> One of the most obvious examples of a prior discrepancy.
- First, people are allowed to be wrong and change their minds when presented with facts. There is no need to hold them to prior beliefs and beat them for it forever.
- Second, if you don't personally know Paul Graham, I doubt you're in a position to judge whether he's willfully accepting ordinary claims just because he's a closet anti-semite, when the fact is, a wide number of independent institutions also accept those claims.
For example, Hamas claimed that an Israeli bomb struck a Gazan hospital and killed 500. Later the consensus viewpoint is that (1) it was a failed Gazan rocket launched at Israel that malfunctioned, and (2) it struck in a parking lot and the death toll is likely much, much lower. Hamas, a terrorist organization that repeatedly launches rockets at Israeli civilians, does not have a ton of credibility.
Yes, of course there is reason to suspect Hamas is untrustworthy. I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press. This doesn't mean they always tell the truth, but there is no equivalence between them and Hamas.
In terms of specific reasons to doubt the Gaza Health Ministry numbers specifically, I could go on forever about that, but I don't see the point of doing so on HN. It's not a tech-related question.
> Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press
Israeli law allows news censorship by the IDF. Currently, if you are a news outlet working in Israel, you have to pass your war coverage by them [1,2] even the CNN is forced to do this [3]. I don't know, but you seem to have a strange definition of free press. Should I list some of the series of scandals of IDF caught laying in the past to complete the picture? Just remember that they tried to convince people that the words [Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday] in Arabic are Hamas members names [4].
Can you name a country that doesn't allow news censorship by their military during combat? The same exact thing happens with US journalists embedded with the US military. It's obvious operational security. I'm guessing you don't speak hebrew, but Israeli journalists are even more critical of their government than American journalists.
I believe there is very little reason to assume the numbers are not accurate. Not only have their numbers been fairly accurate in previous conflicts, but also many US officials believe them to be accurate if not underreported.
It feels more like an Israeli attempt at using fog of war and the masses ignorance on the matter to soften the reaction and spread doubt about the real numbers. As this talking point was continously used by Israeli spokespersons even after US officials believed these numbers to be fairly accurate. I would be happy to be corrected, I wish the numbers are actually less, and would want this to be the reality.
Not the OP, but does it matter if I specifically know how the numbers are generated? I'll absolutely appeal to authority and accept that the United States, various United Nations agencies, MSF, etc accept these numbers as reasonably accurate and acknowledge that they're in a far better position to understand the provenance of the data than I'll ever be.
Great - I'll rely on scientific thinking -- nullius in verba -- and ask questions I'd ask anyone else about how they gather their data, how they know what they claim to know, etc. You believe in the church when it says the sun revolves around the earth.
I don't have the arrogance to assume I can become a domain expert in everything that happens. At the end of the day these people are dead. Killed by Israel. And the world's experts agree. One UN official explained how after previous conflicts they've engaged in post-hoc investigations to ascertain the accuracy of the Gaza health ministry numbers and found them accurate. It's unfortunate for Israel that the numbers make it appear that they're committing a genocide. There are any number of strategies Israel could employ other than indiscriminate mass slaughter. They'd rather deny the numbers than stop incrementing them.
Nobody is asking you to be a domain expert. When it comes to almost any other issue, people ask how and demand evidence. But when it comes to Hamas's claims of a certain number of dead, nobody seems to ask "How do they calculate it? Are they looking at morgue data? Are they doing photographs of mass burial sites, as Ukraine did? What is their method?"
So people are asking you to be scientific and critical rather than to uncritically repeat the claims of a belligerent in combat.
Finally, I'm not sure if you're saying this facetiously or if you genuinely don't know what Israel is capable of, or the lengths its gone to to reduce civilian harm but Israel is not doing indiscriminate mass slaughter. That's what Hamas did on October 7.
Ok, fair. My curiosity about methodology was satisfied when I saw an interview with a UN relief director who explained the retrospective examination of past casualty reporting that had happened.
I mean completely seriously that Israeli occupation forces are engaging in deliberate mass slaughter, including widely reported upon declarations of certain zones as safe for civilians followed by the bombing of those zones (https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-03-2024-...).
The UN is unfortunately not a credible source when it comes to this issue. Hostages have been held at UN employees' houses; the UN failed to condemn the October 7 attack for months; and they denied that rape occurred for months.
While you rely on authorities, I'll do what enlightenment thinkers do. Ask questions like "how" and "what is their method."
Israel has a vested interest in discrediting the UN, this does not mean that the UN is in fact not a credible source. I'll glaze over their non-condemnation (since nobody required to condemn the IDF to participate in this discourse) and I'll say that independent investigations have yet to substantiate the accusations of sexual violence and infant beheadings that the Israeli state makes. So at least on that accord, the facts are on the side of the UN denials.
It may well be the case that Israel has a vested interest in discrediting the UN, but it's also pretty clear that the UN doesn't have much of an interest in establishing its own credibility. The Human Rights Council includes military dictatorships and countries responsible for unquestioned genocides. It has had a standing agenda item ("Item 7") regarding Palestine and the "occupied Arab territories"; Israel is the only country to receive such attention. The Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesa Albanese, has accused the US and Europe of being "subjugated by the Jewish lobby". The UN itself sponsors several organizations dedicated to the Israel/Palestine conflict, despite drastically more severe human rights issues elsewhere on the globe.
None of this is to defend any of the Netanyahu administrations actions in Gaza. I think these discussions on HN are largely cursed, and nobody is going to persuade anybody to "switch sides". You don't have to agree that the UN is, as Israel's supporters would say, so clearly biased against Israel as to be fatal to their credibility. But I don't think you can dismiss the charge easily. If you dig in, you're going to read some uncomfortable stuff.
Probably not, plus as a former UN brat (DISCLOSURE!), this stuff tends to get my goat a little.
Since the org is huge, multipurpose and multifaceted (and often less than the sum of its parts), I'd say it's best to stay as specific as possible both when using some UN thing to buttress an argument or to critique the thing - so, what is the thing, by what org, person, representative, etc.
In this case, the specific thing is
an interview with a UN relief director who explained the retrospective examination of past casualty reporting that had happened
Which doesn't seem to be linked? From there the whole thing swerves into a discussion of 'The UN' which turns to vague generalities that are mostly (I think often unintentionally) recycled talking points. 'Israel seeks to discredit the UN' is a recycled talking point itself, of course. But I think 'HRC has bad members' is too - the UN is full of bad members. The Security Council has an aggressor state on it with veto power and everything! UN has a lot of orgs and items dedicated to the conflict? Sure, but Israel and the UN were almost born together and the conflict is one of the closest things the UN has to a foundational, OG issue - state formation, genocide, wars of aggression, right to defense, refugees, it's all there. Special Rapporteurs are kind of unserious (and why is there no Special Raconteur)? A real thing but doesn't seem clearly related to whatever interview the poster read.
Anyway, sorry for the grumptone, I just think substantive UN critique is such a fecund orchard of low hanging fruit there's not much point in settling for the frozen trope concentrate stuff.
These are all points well taken, and my general approach of dipping into fever threads only when there's something concrete I think can be added to the thread does in this case seem to be contributing to veering. It's just memorable to me because I got my ass handed to me in a conversation with a friend about how credible the anti-Israel bias argument was. But I don't pretend this is dispositive of anything; my only claim is that there's a colorable argument here, it's not just some random made-up thing.
Hey Paul, I just want to clarify that you are an idol of mine and I hugely respect your thinking. I've read your essays for decades. I think there may be an imbalance between your knowledge and confidence when it comes to these matters, but I still highly respect you and I know you're more philosemite than antisemite. Thanks for inspiring me for decades.
Hey, I'm sorry I didn't link the specific interview! I believe it was PBS, and I'm highly confident the individual from the UN in the interview was Martin Griffiths.
With regard to the evidence for sexual violence, can I ask you what would be an acceptable form of evidence for you that doesn't include watching a video of a girl getting raped?
Also, with regard to the beheadings, I know this is uncomfortable, but it's worth looking into a bit more than you have. There is lots of evidence that would pass muster in any court.
> With regard to the evidence for sexual violence, can I ask you what would be an acceptable form of evidence for you that doesn't include watching a video of a girl getting raped?
> “She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast. “One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.”
If people accept that at face value from a party that calls people "human animals" and turns off water for civilians and all that, while prepping to take over occupied territory it doesn't even consider occupied but theirs, well.
> Also, with regard to the beheadings, I know this is uncomfortable, but it's worth looking into a bit more than you have. There is lots of evidence that would pass muster in any court.
If it would pass in court, you can link to it here. Because, again, so far it's been claims accepted at face value, then attacking those who ask for evidence (it's in the OP article even, someone asking for evidence being flagged as "terrorist/fake"), then still no evidence.
I'm kind of tired of showing people evidence of rape, but yes, all the evidence does exist, and at some point you will see it. You can even find it today if you search around carefully.
And the refrain gets old when used as a cover for Israels terrible actions, but it actively makes me ill nowadays, maybe not as ill as "IDF is the most moral army in the world" when I think about the tens of thousands of kids they have blown up (killed and injured) I suppose.
The blame for kids dying lies on Hamas for (1) recruiting child soldiers; (2) building weapons factories in children's bedrooms; (3) building terror tunnels under schools; (4) preventing civilians from evacuating from the north... I could go on.
Not sure if you're a Hebrew reader, but you don't know what you're talking about with regard to journalism in Israel. Have you ever read Gideon Levy? There is tons of criticism of the government and its conduct in this war in Israeli media.
The blame for the kids dying lies firmly with the IDF/Israeli government. They have agency and they have made a choice to seal borders, cut off food, water and electricity, and bomb the living shit out of a captive population. Hamas have their own crimes they can answer for. I wouldn't mind if the leadership of Israel, IDF and Hamas were dragged before the ICC war crimes. Lock them all up, tbh.
Reporters Without Borders are a widely recognised and reputable organisation. Here's the direct link to the entry on Israel:
At the beginning of 1945 the allies had most of germany occupied. The nazis didn't surrender, and the allies killed countless german civilians until they did. Who was responsible for their deaths? The allies or the nazis?
That's like saying America isn't a liberal democratic state because of Trump and the republican party. Israel is a liberal democracy, far more liberal than America, and there were hundreds of thousands of people who marched against Netanyahu.
Israel has a parliamentary system, no? It seems appropriate to blame the parties that forms the coalition for the behavior of the state, and there's certainly no shortage of illiberal actions Israel has done against their own citizens in the last three months to point to.
Regardless, our (USA) parties are in fact the biggest blockers to our functioning correctly as a liberal democracy. One is desperate for votes from anyone, the other party is terrified to pass anything or imagine any kind of future that isn't a slightly less grim version of what the republicans offer. Just by our ability to come to a consensus and do things as a country, we seem to have ground to a complete halt. So yea, people should be a lot more critical of whether or not we're actually espousing the democratic ideals we claim.
Friend, Israel has a shitty party in power and a shitty prime minister in power, but that doesn't mean it's not a liberal democratic state. It's pretty obvious that you don't know much about Israel. Do you know that the kibbutzim that were attacked on october 7 were full of people who used to go to Gaza to drive gazans to Israeli hospitals? I myself have donated to gazans and marched with palestinians for decades. I will not stand silent as people who know much less than they think they do make overconfident statements maligning Israel.
I agree that having Likud in power is not in and of it self a reason to cast doubt over democracy in Israel. However I do think that the occupation over the West Bank, the Blockade of Gaza, the double judicial system for Palestinians vs. Israeli, the apartheid, the unequal paths to citizenship, etc. together makes Israel no more democratic then Apartheid era South Africa or pre-civil rights era USA. Neither of which constitute a liberal democracy be modern standards.
2 million Palestinians live in Israel as equal citizens. They're called Israeli arabs. They disagree with you that Israel is an apartheid state. There are arab supreme court justices in Israel. Those Palestinians love Israel. There is no separate judicial system for them. There is no apartheid. There is a separate judicial system for foreigners, like people living in Gaza, just as there is in the United States.
I do not agree with Israel's policies on the West Bank, but the issue is more complicated than I suspect you think and I encourage you to read Israeli perspectives on it.
Gaza is not part of Israel. They have their own government (Hamas), their own military (Hamas) and their own administrative functions. Israel withdrew in 2005, forcibly pulling out every Jewish person that lived there (and Jewish people have lived there for thousands of years).
Gaza is and has been effectively occupied by Israel since 1967. It's independent from Israel in the same way that Xinjiang is independent from China. Sovereignty and autonomy in Gaza have been aspirational ideas since Sharon's 2005 disengagement. Meanwhile: only a small fraction of the population of Gaza has ever voted (they're too young to have, in the last election, wherein Hamas threw supporters of the PA off rooftops), so it's deeply misleading to describe Hamas as "their own government".
Pro-Palestinian rhetoric on this site goes off the rails in so many directions, and because it seems to be the majority opinion on the site, there are many more examples of off-the-rails comments from that side. But this assertion of Gaza's independence from Israel is one of the reliable off-the-rails pro-Israel sentiments I see here.
To me "occupied" means there is control enforced by troops on the ground. Israel didn't have any control of what went on inside Gaza.
Gaza was blockaded. Israel tried to control who and what goes in and out of Gaza (to try to limit the weapons Hamas has). But Israel had no control over what the Hamas Gaza government did in Gaza, how they spent their budget, what they built, what they taught in schools, what their military was planning.
A common pattern for state autonomous zones seems to be devolved local governance, but no foreign policy or inter-state security, which seems to describe Gaza pretty well.
The national / federal government is able to send agents and enforce its will on states / provinces. Israel was not able to send anyone into Gaza.
It would be a "breakaway province" situation, except that:
a. Israel intentionally got all its citizens out of that place and
b. Israel had no intention of taking control and forcing Gaza to join back into Israel.
Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.
Gaza was mostly an independent country at war with Israel and not even a little bit an autonomous province of Israel. The war could not be resolved and so it was stuck in a state where Israel thought it prevented Hamas from bringing in heavy weapons but did not want to commit to conquering a city.
I think some people thought that after Israel pulled out in 2005, and Gaza became autonomous, it would become a normal independent country, and people still treat Gaza of 2023 as if it's the Gaza of 2005.
By dint of Gaza's small size, dependence on Israel for resources, lack of control of its own borders (or, for that matter, it's own seafront), mandated lack of control of its airspace and complete inability to land an airplane, total inability to conduct international trade or international relations of any sort, political interdependence on the discontiguous territory of the occupied West Bank, and repeated IDF and IAF military incursions over the last 15 years, it seems facially unreasonable to suggest that Gaza is an independent country just because Ariel Sharon withdrew settlements just under 20 years ago.
I think if someone is going to raise the "Gaza isn't Israel it's an independent country" argument, the facts lining up against an natural reading of that kind of statement make it incumbent on the speaker to lay out the qualifications and contingencies, rather than counting on other speakers on the thread to do it for them. It's not a thing you can just say and pretend is clear; it's more or less an extraordinary claim.
I'd entertain the argument if someone wanted to explore it in a curious fashion. But, like, it's not true. Gaza is occupied territory in the intuitive meaning of the term.
This paints a very rosy picture of the actual situation. Hardly any international organization would call Gaza an independent nation, not even Israel does that. Most (all?) international organization describe Gaza as an occupied territory of Israel.
Having control over a territory is what makes it occupied. And Israel very much has control over Gaza. The government and the legislator is one of few things which Gazans them self control, almost everything else is controlled by Israel, including the population registry, what goes in and out, etc.
> Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.
They never thought such thing. There were regular bombing campaigns which Israelis described as “mowing the lawn” (talk about dehumanization) where the Israeli military went into Gaza—sometimes with groundtroups—including in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. In 2018 the Israeli military indiscriminately shot at unarmed protestors inside Gaza. Israel always assumed Hamas to be a terrorist organization first, and an illegitimate government of Gaza second.
Speaking as someone very familiar with the situation in Xianjiang (my best friend is a world authority on it), there are countless differences. The most obvious difference is that Xianjiang became a part of China in 1949, whereas Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Gaza has also been a part of Egypt. Moreover, China's control is focused on assimilation, a crackdown on religious practices, and re-education, whereas Israel is concerned with none of those things. I could go on forever.
B) Apartheid South Africa used the same excuse. That black people lived in independent bantustans who were self governing and therefor not apart of South Africa.
C) You are ignoring the fact that Israel very much controls Gaza, including every border crossing, the airspace and sea access, imposes a blockade, controls the registry, etc. Unlike apartheid South Africa, Israel does not recognize independent Palestine, let alone independent Gaza.
A) I thought we were talking about Gaza? The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank, so obviously there is a different legal system there. I don't like Israel's west bank policies either, but unless you consider palestinians living there to be Israelis (something I think they'd object to) then of course they have different ways of life and different administrative functions.
B) The apartheid in South Africa was based on race. By contrast the different policies in the West Bank reflect the historical and cultural context there: that it used to be part of Jordan, that the people there want to be separate from Israel, etc.
C) Israel does not control Gaza's border crossing any more than the US controls Canada's border crossing. Israel is an independent, sovereign country, so of course they get to control who goes in from Gaza. The other border gaza has is with Egypt, and Egypt has the same policies.
Your point C is bad. Israel has a border with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Israel tries to control its side of those borders. But Israel doesn't try to control whether those countries have sea and air ports. Israel very much tried to ensure Hamas in Gaza didn't have a sea and airport, to limit the weapons Hamas has. There was (and is) a blockade. Gaza was reliant on Israel and/or Egypt for bringing in food, fuel and electricity. If it was a regular independent country (albeit a small one), it would have control of its own sea and air port, and would be able to bring in heavy weapons from Iran.
Israel controls its borders with Gaza, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan. That's what a state does; it's what a state is supposed to do. I too don't like the fact that Israel limits Gaza's maritime access (though it's worth noting Hamas developed a surprisingly sophisticated Navy indicating some degree of control of its maritime access). Hamas has not tried to build an airport in Gaza, though Qatar has proposed one, and proposed managing it. I can surely understand why Israel wouldn't want that.
Gaza was reliant on Israel for water because Hamas not only didn't invest in infrastructure, but literally dug up water pipes to make rockets. Why the heck should Israel be responsible for providing Gaza with water, food, fuel, or electricity? Do you also believe Ukraine should provide this stuff to Russia?
We are debating whether Israel can count as a liberal democracy. And I am using the occupied territories to dispute that, because modern democracies have equal rights for its subjects, and imposing an apartheid system discredits any argument in favor of calling Israel a modern liberal democracy.
Palestinians in the occupied territories may not be Israeli citizens, but neither were the South African residents of the bantustans, so which passports the subjects of Israel holds doesn’t matter. What matters is that Israel controls most aspect of their lives and imposes different rules and condition depending on whether you are Israeli or Palestinian. However you separate the population doesn’t matter either, the fact that Israel does is all that counts.
There is a different legal system on the West Bank, true, however the Israeli settlers living there get charged in Israeli courts, and so do Palestinians, except that Palestinians get charged in a different court system, namely military court. This is a double justice system, and there is no other way of describing it. Modern liberal democracies don’t have those, only apartheid states do.
> I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press.
None of this has any bearing on whether or not Israel's word is actually worth anything (...or Hamas's word, for that matter).
Yes it does. When the Hamas government lies in Gaza (say about a death toll) there is no one to question them or dispute their narrative. By contrast, in Israel, when the government lies it's a national pasttime to criticize and dispute them. For this reason, it's easier to tell when the Israeli government is lying than when Hamas lies.
